Food Industry Giants Invest In Nutrition Advances

Time was when nearly all the companies creating the functional-foods revolution were entrepreneurial upstarts: Red Bull. Silk. Odwalla and many more. But nowadays, the mainstream titans of the global food and beverage business are just as apt to be at the forefront of better-for-you innovations, like probiotics, as bringing up the rear.

Groupe Danone, Nestle, even Kellogg are among the major food industry players becoming known for nutritional advances that are key to consumers in the new marketplace. That’s one message of the ten key trends identified by New Nutrition Business, a trade journal published by the UK-based Centre for Food & Health Studies.

It’s true a small Swedish company, ProViva, came up with juices enhanced with oat fiber that aid digestion and boost immunity with the aid of “probiotic” bacteria. (GoodBelly in the US is a nearly identical product.) But it is Paris-based Danone that has emerged as the company most responsible for the global embrace of probiotics in foods through its yogurt products, sold as Dannon Activia and DanActive in the US.

New Nutrition Business identifies General Mills as the first “expert brand” to emerge similarly around fiber, citing the growth of the Minneapolis-based company’s Fiber One line of yogurts, cereals and even muffin mixes. It “has achieved 20% annual growth even at premium prices and even in a recession,” the journal notes.

Meanwhile, Kellogg’s has extemded Special K cereal brand into an entire line of weight-management products, and added immune-boosting vitamins to its cereals, although its marketing of those benefits caused some controversy.

PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have been gradually learning how to transition their junk-food-focused portfolios toward better-for-you fare by purchasing or buying into bottled-water and juice brands. And PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay snack division even came up with a healthy line of vegetable-based chips called Flat Earth.

Flat Earth’s logo is a flying pig. It might be a leap at this point to say major global food and beverage brands are at the flying-pig point in their transition to more healthful offerings. But at least, as old dogs, they’re learning new tricks.