Three dominant drivers directing innovation in the ingredient business are health, convenience and costs, whereas safety is a boundary condition. Within Health, the main trends are weight management and satiety. Safety will become more of an issue when mild processing steps are increasingly being applied; this offers opportunities for the ingredient industries to develop natural preservatives.

Because of the growing concern to quality and availability of water and the costs for energy, there is a driver to develop sustainable processes and ingredients. Finally, the EU legislation and the reframing activities for the use and declaration of ingredients is a concern to many ingredient suppliers leading to an increased interest in natural ingredients. However, to maintain high quality, it is essential to understand how ingredients and processes interact and what the functionalities of the ingredients and/or new natural sources should be.

It is the challenge for the ingredient industry to add functional and emotional benefits to ingredients that ultimately results in the satisfaction of (latent) consumer needs.
NIZO food research assists the international ingredient industry by developing new functionalities for protein, starch, fat and a whole range of specialty products. Next to that, ingredients are applied on a lab or pilot plant scale in a wide series of applications to demonstrate technical functionality.