All eyes on what Asia does best: Basic nutrition, says Mintel

FoodNavigator-Asia spoke to David Jago, director of Food Innovation Research at Mintel, on the trends across the Asia Pacific nutritional ingredients market and he revealed that in the current EFSA climate, EU companies can learn from Asia’s functional ingredients sector.

Jago detailed that Asia is vast by nature and therefore markets differ in maturity, but, “basic nutrition is still an underlying trend in all parts of Asia.”​

In particular he noted that there is increased activity in ingredients designed to deliver enhanced performance in children is a strong segment in Asian markets.

“It’s always been a fairly strong area in Asia, but it’s seemed to have an uplift recently,”​ he said.

“With the EFSA ruling on vitamins and minerals being fairly safe in terms of claims usage, I think we’re likely to see a real explosion of activity around Europe around vitamins and minerals; some of those basic nutritional ingredients,”​ he said.

Jago suggested that EU companies would benefit from looking at how Asia uses such ingredients, and learn from the applications used.

Asia will still produce affordable ingredients to EU markets but it could be the case that they will be more targeted as a reaction to the increased interest in basic nutrition, he said.