Fruit snacking has many forms but industry collectively agrees the future must be about stripping back ingredients and giving consumers fruit in its purest form.
“In the near future you’ll find a lot of cleaner ingredients; a lot less preservatives; a lot less ingredients in the product. People just want, you know, fruit,” Donny Edson, director of Smirk’s, told BakeryandSnacks.com at Sweets & Snacks Expo 2015.
Miriam Ryngler from That’s It said: “The consumer is more and more aware every day of what they’re eating and they really want to be able to go into the ingredient deck and understand what it is. So many companies tout ingredients you can pronounce and say, but there’s nothing more compelling than an ingredient deck that says ‘apples and cherries’ because not only can you pronounce it and say it, you actually know what it is.”
Just fruit?
However, Ian Kelleher, head of sales at Peeled Snacks, said unfortunately there were plenty of fruit snack firms heading down a very different route.
“I would hope that the future of fruit snacking is fewer ingredients; closer to fruits and finding ways to deliver it without tarnishing it, but I see companies where fruit is more of a marketing concept than an ingredient,” he said.
Johnathan Brownbill, North America sales director for Paradise Fruits, agreed. “The demand for pure fruit is becoming higher and higher and we found it necessary to come to the marketplace with our pure fruits because the impure fruits on the marketplace, we feel, don’t represent value for money and quality that the general public deserves. They’ve got fillers, additives; they’ve got fortifications in some way, shape or form that we don’t agree with.”
