Florida Food Products expands past its properly-set up herbal meat ingredients enterprise, which includes curing agents, accelerators, and stabilizers, with a new line of fermented vegetable juices released at IFT in New Orleans this week that offers herbal flavors & hues and faucets into purchasers’ increasing call for purposeful health benefits.
“We have fermented beet, carrot and mushroom, and are running on onion,” all of which are fermented with lactic acid much like how dairy merchandise is cultured. However, the use of bacterial lines which have been decided on in particular to paintings with the vegetable bases to beautify their fruitiness and round out sharper flavors, Shellie Kramer, senior market development supervisor for Florida Food Products, informed FoodNavigator-USA at IFT.
Available as juices and powders, the line focuses on creating bold hues and provides a brand new layer of flavor to finished merchandise. For example, at the show, the team used the beet juice to make a colorful purple hummus and lessen the earthiness associated with beetroots – as a substitute highlighting a barely sweeter, fruitier flavor profile. Similarly, in a vegetable posole featured on display, the fermented beet juice improved the herbal, vegetal tones of the alternative substances, creating a greater flavorful experience.
A natural extension to the enterprise’s present clean label commercial enterprise
The new line is a natural extension of the company’s existing fermenting process used to transform the nitrates determined evidently in celery to create nitrites as a natural source of curing within the meat enterprise, explained Chris Name, chairman of commercial enterprise development at Florida Food Products.
“We have been doing that for the ultimate decade, and it’s far a perfect business, but we had this infrastructure in the region, and we had all this stunning raw material that we had been sourcing, and we notion, ‘What else are we able to do with this infrastructure?’ And we realized by way of the usage of a lactic acid fermentation, which is a slightly exceptional shape of fermentation than we do for celery, that we ought to truely faucet into these macro traits of wanting flavors for meals stuffs that had been real. From recognizable substances, as opposed to ‘natural flavors’ that are compound flavors from unknown assets,” he said.
Kramer explained that unspecified ‘herbal flavors’ have fallen out of fashion with many customers, who’re increasingly sophisticated and want to recognize specifically what they are consuming. In addition, for some purchasers with allergies or folks that are following a strict diet, seeing unspecified ‘herbal colorations’ on an element deck is a red flag with a purpose to prevent them from shopping the product, she introduced.
Florida Food Products’ new fermented vegetable juices keep away from this hassle by listing the precise base element from which the flavor or color is derived, she noted.
While the line currently isn’t standardized for colors, the organization considers this a subsequent step so that purchasers who want the juices for each taste and color can simplify their label decks by dropping redundant colorants, Niese said.
Health benefits
Beyond changing unspecified herbal colors, the line also taps into the growing client demand for purposeful health advantages, along with sugar reduction, heart health, and sustained stamina, according to the organization.
A white paper recently published by the organization Florida Food explains that fermenting the juices may lessen sugar and calories without sacrificing sweetness. For example, the bacterial traces used to make the beet juice metabolize the herbal sugar content within the vegetable, decreasing the general sugar quantity using 10% to 20%.
In addition, the beet juice ought to guide the addition of coronary heart fitness claims to products due to the fact its miles high in nitrates that metabolize into nitric oxide in the frame, which medical literature has shown can assist dilate blood vessels, lower blood strain and improve normal blood glide, in step with the white paper.
Finally, the fermented beet juice ought to provide health advantages to athletes, consisting of stepped forward respiratory characteristics and anti-inflammatory residences from the betalain pigments in the vegetable, according to the organization.
