TTC's IFT 19 booth

TTC's IFT 19 booth

Our team has just returned from another excellent time at the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual event and expo otherwise known as IFT19. We’ve been attending this event for many years and one of the things we look forward to the most is talking to our customers and others in the food industry to hear what you’ve been working on. It’s fascinating to hear how the food industry is evolving to meet consumer expectation for a wide variety of new products. Some of our top observations are:

Alternative proteins. For the past few years, alternative proteins have continued to evolve and grow. Texture analysis is a key component of this growth as companies seek to recreate the familiar texture of hamburgers, meat, and dairy products. We talked to many of our existing customers and new companies who are developing very exciting new products. We have helped them deploy novel testing methods that quantify their very precise and subtle textural targets.  We are thrilled to be part of their process.

 The food industry’s progress towards clean labels. Our team also spoke to several of our customers about their progress towards clean labeling. The IFT recently defined clean labeling as: “..making a product using as few ingredients as possible, and making sure those ingredients are items that consumers recognize and think of as wholesome—ingredients that consumers might use at home.” (http://blog.ift.org/what-is-clean-label)

The process towards clean labeling can either include cleaning up existing formulations or creating new formulations. Texture analysis is a key component of this process to insure that reformulations and new formulations must work like old formulation.

Show & tell. We also had a great many probes and fixtures on hand and we were able to walk our booth visitors through the textural attributes that each item was designed to elicit.  If you were not able to attend just ask your TTC Regional Manager for the latest version of our probe brochure poster and they will walk through it with you.

Read more about the latest food trends on Food Navigator’s two part IFT recap:

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