Nutrition Industry Executive (NIE) magazine sat down with Nena Dockery, Scientific Affairs Manager for Cartgage, MO-based Stratum Nutrition, and here’s what she had to say.

NIE: What are the latest developments in this area, in terms of innovative ingredient types, taste profiles, applications, delivery forms and types of products?

The main area where innovation is taking place is in plant-based meat substitutes. According to NielsenIQ, purchases of meat alternatives have jumped 60 percent over the past two years, driven by a wider availability and better-tasting products.

When meat alternatives began to enter the market, they were mostly soy-based products and were used not only as a dietary substitute for meat, but also as a low-cost filler to stretch the amount of beef or pork in a product. However, the motivation for choosing plant-sourced meat substitutes has changed dramatically through the years because of the increase in the number of individuals selecting to either reduce their consumption of meat, fish, and poultry or eliminate it altogether.

This shift in preferences has been accompanied by a demand for products that can provide both the nutritional protein content of meat and taste either like their meat counterpart or at least have a palatable taste and texture. This has led to an explosion in plant-based offerings sourced from a wide range of ingredients including mushrooms, algae and seaweed, jackfruit, and various peas and beans.

Plant-based protein supplements designed for use in sports-focused formulations often now contain pea protein instead of dairy options such as whey, and innovative technologies to improve taste profiles have enabled further diversity in protein supplements to include hemp, brown rice, pumpkin and various nuts and seeds.

Though the increase in vegetarian and vegan diets has led to an increase in consumer purchasing of dietary supplement products that are also derived solely from plants, environmental and sustainability concerns are often equal motivating factors.

Many supplements are already derived from botanical sources, so the switch to vegetarian capsules from gelatin-based capsules was initially the main area where the increase in plant-based diets made the biggest impact on the supplement market. This has changed as the supplement industry has expanded. The rise in the sports supplement market is responsible for much of this change, because of the popularity of protein supplements for athletes, which has sparked the demand for plant-sourced proteins. Another major factor that has influenced the plant-based supplement market is the rise in consumer demand for plant-based functional equivalents for omega-3 fatty acids and collagen.

Collagen is an animal protein, so the technological challenges have centered around finding vegan ingredients that promote the body’s production of collagen. This has been accomplished in formulations that contain ingredients that are known to be essential for collagen production, such as antioxidants like vitamin C, and specific combinations of amino acids.

A vegan source for omega-3 fatty acids already exists. The only true essential omega-3 fatty acid (essential because the body cannot make it) is alpha-linolenic acid or ALA, commonly available through consumption of canola or soybean oil, tofu and nuts, such as walnuts. However, the omega-3 market has promoted from its onset, the need to consume the end-products of omega-3 fatty acid metabolism – eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and for many people this was reasonable advice because of the inefficiency of the body’s mechanisms to convert ALA into the longer chain beneficial omega-3s. Unfortunately, fatty fish and some algae are the only direct sources of EPA and DHA, putting a strain on the marine ecosystem; and consumption of fish, either in food or supplement form as fish oil, is not acceptable to vegans.

Algae farms have begun to make algal DHA and EPA more widely available to the consumer and research into plant sources that contain additional omega-3s that are intermediate in omega-3 metabolism, has led to the introduction of ingredients, such as Ahiflower seed oil that provide not only the health benefits of EPA and DHA, but also the benefits of the intermediates, such as stearidonic acid (SDA), eicosatetraenoic acid (ETA) and docosapentaenoic acid (DPA).

Feature