India Focus: Beam Suntory travel retail focus, Dole juice innovation, fresh produce shelf life booster and more feature in our round-up
‘Elevate experiences’: Beam Suntory on the importance of travel retail for India business success
Premium spirits MNC Beam Suntory believes that the revival of travel retail is especially important for its India business to thrive, with the firm outlining how it plans to achieve growth in the category.
Beam Suntory owns multiple premium liquor brands in India, from the award-winning Teacher’s whiskey to Jim Beam bourbon, and its focus in this area has meant that it has had to face multiple challenges from alcohol taxes to travel bans in the past two years.
Beating the ‘baddies’: Dole to focus on clean label and fortification for juice product innovation in APAC
Fruit product heavyweight Dole has revealed plans to focus on developing more clean label and fortified juice products for the Asia Pacific market, citing rising consumer interest in the region as a major motivation.
Although Dole, formally the Dole Sunshine Company, is already a well-known name in the region when it comes to fruit products and juices, the firm believes that it is important for it to push forward even further when it comes to developing products with a health and wellness focus given rising consumer awareness in the region.
Slashing spoilage: Indian bioactive sachet innovation could boost fresh produce shelf life
Chennai-based start-up Greenpod Labs has invented bioactive sachets that claim to reduce the spoilage of fresh fruits and vegetables.
The bioactive ingredients contained in the sachets could uniform ripening and minimise microbial growth, thereby extending the shelf life of produce, explained Greenpod Labs CEO Deepak Rajmohan.
“The economic loss of food waste costs India USD$12b. Despite India being the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, 40% of it is lost before it even reaches the consumer. We have to solve this. If you can solve it for India, you’ll solve it for all developing countries,” he said.
Double trouble: Asian women bearing the brunt of double burden of malnutrition – The Lancet
Women in seven South and South East Asian countries urgently need nutritional intervention and monitoring to battle the double burden of malnutrition (DBM).
“An understanding of the country-specific DBM geographical and socioeconomic distribution in South and Southeast Asian countries will enable targeting of DBM interventions towards high-risk populations in the region,” said the researchers.
To conduct their investigation, the team utilised a population-representative cross-sectional data from the Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2000 and 2017 for seven South and South East Asian countries – Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Timor-Leste – and the estimated national and subnational prevalence of women who were underweight and overweight.
Making friends: Do cultivated protein firms ‘have advantage’ over plant-based due to big food links?
The cultivated protein sector holds a distinct advantage over its plant-based counterparts by having better relationships with existing big meat and food industry brands, but more work still needs to be done in terms of boosting government partnerships in order to make real change, say industry experts.
Within the alternative protein sector, plant-based protein and cell-cultivated protein are two of the main options attracting investor and regulator interest in hopes of developing a food system with better food security and sustainability credentials – but experts believe that cultivated protein currently holds an advantage by having positioned itself as ‘symbiotic’ and not ‘at war with’ the meat industry.
“In several markets, plant-based protein alternatives have really become positioned as an enemy of the meat sector and basically gone to war with this large traditional sector,” Aleph Farms Director of Market & Corporate Development Gary Brenner told the floor at the recent Cellular Agriculture: Asia Summit 2022.
