Taste, Nutrition & Health

“Offering deep consumer understanding alongside great taste is our key to unlocking crave-ability in tomorrow’s snacks”

Liam Pickup, Vice President, EAME, BU Savory, Food & Beverage
 

The changing role of snacks in our diet

Today, snacks are being elevated from stopgap to main event. We are finding new snacking opportunities to target and creating the tools to help your snack products rise to the occasion.

Whether you want to add great taste, health benefits, naturalness or sophistication to your snack products – we have the solution!

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The changing role of snacks in our diet

What we do

Blending taste and technology to deliver consumer-driven differentiation in every seasoning

As an augmented flavor house, we combine extensive data-driven insights with proprietary technology, flavor creation and a unique raw material palette. We develop differentiated seasonings that exceed consumer expectations for tasty, natural and healthy snacking experiences.

Our solutions

Taste will always be the king of consumer purchasing decisions, but when it comes to today’s seasonings, consumers expect more. We’ve developed leading solutions for the biggest challenges facing the industry.

Our Solutions
Iconic taste
Iconic taste

Extensive insights into beloved, local, ‘iconic tastes’ and the tools to understand and replicate them.

Authentic experience
Authentic experience

We provide experiences that offer crucial points of differentiation while meeting modern health and naturalness trends.

Improved efficiency
Improved efficiency

Evaluate the entire value chain to optimize performance and maximize efficiency with our continuous improvement program, Symchronise™.

Sourcing best-fit raw materials
Sourcing best-fit raw materials

A high-performing palette of raw materials providing greater value for consumers and reduced risk thanks to the backwardly integrated supply chains of some of our key product lines.

Regulatory expertise
Regulatory expertise

Navigate the complex regulatory landscape of pack labelling. Whether on the front or the back, our highly regarded team can support.

Supported by sensory
Supported by sensory

Leading local sensory teams, backed by central category expert support, add value and ensure our winning taste solutions meet local taste preferences.

Applications

As the snack market broadens, innovation in snack base production has caused a swell in new options, while the popularity of core materials has yet to wane. A deep understanding of each base, its taste characteristics and the challenges it presents is critical to ensure long-term success in the market.

Our internal Extruded Excellence program ensures we offer optimum seasoning performance in traditional corn extrudes and new alternative protein formulas, as well as in-base solutions that offer functional benefits such as masking or mouthfeel.

Potato chips

Potato chips (flat, hand cooked, ridged, popped, baked, stackers)

Potato chips are widely available in an increasingly diverse array of formats. Functionality is a key challenge in stackers, while succulence is a particular issue in ‘healthier’ processed formats such as popped and baked chips.

Popcorn

Popcorn

Often associated with fun and guilt-free indulgence, popcorn is seeing greater activity and innovation in new product launches likely driven by industry-wide health trends. Our popcorn solutions focus on taste and experience while meeting stringent health guidelines.

Pelleted and extruded

Pelleted and extruded (potato, corn, alternative protein blends)

New formats and applications are emerging to serve modern health trends. These come with challenges such as bitterness and succulence.

Savory biscuits and crackers

Savory biscuits and crackers

An emerging category driven by modern trends, savory biscuits and crackers are a platform for In-Dough innovation, providing ample opportunity for multi-level taste experiences.

Tortilla chips

Tortilla chips

Centered around sharing occasions and fun, tortilla chips can vary from chip to chip. Delivering top performance requires a deep understanding of taste and base. Our corn masking solutions can provide further support.

Nuts and seeds

Nuts and seeds

In the wake of emerging health trends, nuts and seeds have seen a rapid rise in new flavor launches. Optimum seasoning performance can be difficult to establish due to the diversity in bases, preparation methods and profiles. With our extensive expertise, we can meet these and other challenges head on to ensure winning taste delivery in every nut.

Get in touch

Get in touch

You have a question regarding our solutions for your applications, or how we can support you in your product development? Please reach out via our contact form.
 

Contact us

Our core competencies

Intrinsically linked to pleasure and indulgence, traditional snacking is rooted in core, universally loved flavor keys. Meanwhile, modern snacking is increasingly influenced by both the health and naturalness megatrends. With our strong industry and consumer insight and expertise, proprietary technology and high flavor creation, Symrise is well placed to serve these trends and more via our many core competencies.

spicy creams

Healthy snacking

An increase in diet-related chronic disease has prompted governments to introduce measures to improve the health of consumers, while consumers themselves become more aware of the implications of unhealthy eating.

An association with ‘bad’ nutritional content has forced manufacturers to reposition savory snacks in the market. Today, consumers expect snack products to be healthier. Innovation depends on the ability to add, remove, increase and reduce the factors that typify a healthy snack. That means adding new ingredients and labelling scenarios to holistically improve the consumer view of your product, removing undesirable ingredients that can be off-putting to consumers while finding ways to retain the benefits they provide, increasing protein and fiber levels and reducing the amount of fat, sugar and salt while maintaining taste impact.

Our toolbox is built on technology to support new and existing product developments that adhere to government regulations and meet consumer demand for healthier snacks, without compromising on great taste. This includes symlife™, with market-leading IP for taste-balancing solutions, as well as our ProtiScan™ approach, which uses analytical chemistry to understand the challenges in, and solutions for, creating new ‘healthier’ bases. Examples include masking off-notes and bitterness as well as ensuring succulence and mouthfeel.

Core flavor – dairy

Core flavor – dairy

Consumers love dairy flavors in snacks. Dairy profiles make up over 20% of new-flavor snack launches. Cheese tonalities alone make up 70% of launches in the dairy space.

Traditional dairy ingredients are being challenged by price volatility in the market and the risk of increasing consumer backlash in the face of growing plant-based and healthy-eating trends.

Our offer in dairy is built on extensive sensory and consumer insights that explore tonalities and consumer preferences to accurately benchmark, countertype and identify the best opportunities that exist in the competitive landscape. Our dairy toolbox serves to preserve the integrity of dairy tastes and textures in snacks while reducing reliance on real dairy.

Solutions include our cheese-powder replacer, and mouthfeel enhancers that show how we continue to innovate and differentiate within the full spectrum of trending dairy profiles, from named-cheese varieties to sour cream, yogurt and butter.

Core flavor – spicy

Core flavor – spicy

Spicy snacks offer the excitement, exploration and authenticity that consumers love. But as more sophisticated snacking options become the norm, the spicy claim no longer suffices. Consumers want more detail, more variety and more of an experience from their spicy snacks.

We deliver authentic tastes alongside memorable experiences – developed with named chili varieties, a broad palette of raw materials that support depiction and back-of-pack labelling, technologies that offer sensorial qualities associated with spice, such as warming, burning and numbing, and controlled heat delivery – that continue to excite consumers every day.

Core flavor – herbs and vegetables

Core flavor – herbs and vegetables

Herb and vegetable profiles form the foundation of great savory taste and are fundamental ingredients in seasoning development.

Our strong heritage and proprietary technology in core vegetable profiles for snacks, particularly in onion, allow us to offer numerous benefits in these directions.

Our portfolio includes inspiring onion™ and Clean & Intense which deliver culinary cues and authentic tastes in onion and garlic. This is further supported by the natural and culinary cues offered by the diana food™ portfolio, including garden-picked freshness tastes that are strongly associated with these ingredients.

Since many food powders, such as onion and garlic, are typically commodified, our range of replacer technologies can be used to support efficiencies in the formula where possible.

Core flavor – meat and grill

Core flavor – meat and grill

Traditionally strong due to the universally loved but complex ‘chicken’ and ‘beef’, the Meat & Grill flavor family is increasingly driven by the heightened desire for cooking cues to be translated into a snack format.

Our portfolio includes proprietary natural grills and in-house smoking capabilities for food ingredients to ensure consumer-friendly labelling is available in these growing taste directions.

Additionally, our ‘inspiring collection’ has made available authentic meat profiles, developed to present true beef and chicken tastes in a variety of flavors and inspired by haute-cuisine culture.

Functionality

Functionality

We deliver functionality, efficiency and consistency in production to support our customers in bringing products to market in the best way possible. Our functional performance expertise allows us to offer improvements, from sample to scale-up, to support the delivery of great-tasting snacks that consumers crave.

Performance can be particularly affected when ingredients such as salt, sugar and fat are reduced. Here functionality becomes key to your future success in snacks.
Best-in-class functionality means applying our extensive knowledge and proven performance capabilities, replicating and testing customer processes and providing regulatory and quality support.

Scale-up solutions include functionality testing to identify any potential issues, ensuring products are fit for purpose. Our team of specialists supports scale-up trials and tailors all solutions to our customers’ end applications.

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