Kerry Launches Great Culinary Taste to Help Meet Changing Consumer Needs in Prepared Meals
Consumers want to enjoy authentic, delicious restaurant quality prepared meals made from ingredients they know and trust. Taste, convenience, nutrition and traceability need to coexist; and while all four are intrinsically linked to consumer demand, delivering it all at scale and for a profit, is not easy.
Kerry, the Taste & Nutrition company, understands these challenges, as it strives to manage the complexity inherent in prepared-meal innovation, development and manufacture. To help address these needs Kerry has just launched Great Culinary Taste; a simple approach to help bridge the gap between the great authentic taste that consumers are looking for and what Kerry’s customers can produce at scale, helping create dishes that are inspired by the market, fast-track innovation and reduce complexity.
Great Culinary Taste is a simple approach to working with customers to create simple dishes that are inspired by the market, as well as delivering on the taste and innovation agenda. It aims to take the ingredients prepared meal manufacturers already have available, add a little bit of culinary magic and know-how, to enable them to enhance the taste of existing consumer favourites or add to their range by creating other product variants including more authentic and ethnic dishes.
Great Culinary Taste, brings together key elements of the Kerry Taste & Nutrition portfolio of natural, authentic solutions to deliver innovative, clean label foods that are filled with real ingredients. The Great Culinary Taste range includes; plant proteins, natural stocks, infused oils, natural flavours, DairySource-Cream Replacer, natural extracts and marinades, pastes and glazes.
Being able to introduce this variety, authenticity and ethnicity to your range, using clean-label ingredients is critical to the success of prepared meal reformulation. The latest research Kerry has undertaken, reveals that over 70% of European consumers now check the back of pack labelling when shopping for groceries, with 73% of consumers looking for more natural ingredients in their prepared meals[1]. 42% say they are highly influenced by products that claim to be authentic, homemade or made with real ingredients[2].
Commenting on the changes in consumer demands and subsequent challenges, Grace Keenan, Kerry Marketing Manager, Savoury, says: “Informed consumers are demanding more from the foods they eat, but taste remains a key driver of consumer choice. They want simple, transparent ingredients and reassurances that what they are buying is good for them and their families. This creates complexity for the developers of prepared meals, who need to create taste experiences, at scale and without compromising on labelling or nutritionals.”
Thomas Duffin, Development Chef, Kerry Taste & Nutrition, says: “Food is my passion. Going to work every day brings new and exciting taste adventures and culinary challenges to be solved. What really gets me up in the morning is working with other chefs to create delicious dishes that consumers will enjoy from the first taste to the last. But what really brings that extra buzz is partnering with our customers to push the envelope, to deliver products that meet consumer demands such as; clean label, more natural ingredients or authentic taste, yet continue to deliver pure deliciousness and most importantly, repeat purchase.”
Thomas Duffin continues: “To really bring great Great Culinary Taste to life, our chefs from around Europe, have develop a toolkit that can stretch the ingredients already available in a development kitchen, to produce other prepared meal variants and drive costs even lower, by maximising what is already in the larder. This approach can help manufacturers introduce a new prepared meal to the market, reinvigorate an existing consumer favourite, or create a richer, more premium taste experience.”
[1] Kerry Discovery Research (2016)
[2] GlobalData 2016
