The Health and Wellness umbrella is huge. Looked at as a whole, the Global Wellness Institute estimated it to be at $3.7 trillion in 2015. This incorporates everything from alternative medicine, the spa industry, fitness and mind-body, wellness tourism, and even wellness lifestyle real estate, whatever that is! However, the biggest chunk of the pie? That would be healthy eating, nutrition, and weight loss, coming in at an estimated $648 billion.*
Naturally, we’ve seen a sea change in healthy flavor solutions across all facets of the food and restaurant industries. With all this competition, it’s important for a restaurant, franchise, and food manufacturer to stay ahead of the game. For many, that means partnering with McCormick.
Everything we do to improve the health and wellness of our customer’s brand flavors is because of consumer demand. The food industry must meet consumer expectations, and we’re here to help you deliver on your health and wellness promises.
Some of the things we do for our customers include reducing sodium from seasoning, cleaning up labels, using natural ingredients and flavors, and making things allergen-free.
One of the largest growing food areas are gluten-free options, and we provide a number of solutions to keep gluten-free just as flavorful. With our flavor modulation technology, we can help you eliminate any flavor off-notes when formulating with whole grains or gluten-free solutions by incorporating bitterness maskers into broader flavor systems.
Sodium is another big consumer worry. However, this flavor can often be covered with natural spices. They provide so much flavor, from simple to complex, depending on how you combine them, that we can create low-sodium solutions without sacrificing the much-loved flavor of salt.
At McCormick, we also take out artificial flavors and replace them with natural ones. A lot of our customers are getting away from using MSG, which we replace with natural flavor enhancers. One of our solutions is to create flavors using spice extracts. The extracts are stronger, so a little goes a long way.
I’ve recently got to play around in this area with salty snack seasonings for a customer. I was working on reducing the sodium – cutting back on salt and incorporating natural flavors as the solution. The challenge is that since salt itself is a flavor enhancer, when you reduce the salt, you reduce the flavor. So I get to find solutions that put back in all the flavor that their consumers know and love in a natural healthy way. It’s a lot of fun.
I love the challenge of applying natural flavor solutions to savory snacks, like crackers and nuts. Natural seasonings are so flexible, and there is a variety of ways to use them.
With rapidly evolving consumer & flavor trends, there’s new a dull moment—and that’s wonderful! I love… to play with food and food solutions, and the spice world has so much opportunity to create so many flavor profiles. You can use so many different ingredients. You can blend them and come up with one seasoning that’s entirely unique to that customer’s specific needs, or develop a completely original, unique product. There is so much variety to play with!
