When it comes to trade shows, the end of the year is always interesting, with Supply Side West and Food Ingredients Europe in quick succession.
If you ever wanted confidence in your 2024 plans, or further inspiration to fuel those plans, then these two shows can help.
For me, it's always a good reflection point, particularly in refining how we want to approach the coming year and our hopes for what we’d love to see.
So where do we start?
Firstly, there is no doubt that ‘food ingredients’ and ‘health ingredients’ have never been so related. They’ve always been on the same continuum, but the extent to which they overlap is ever increasing. And while this isn’t new, the pace at which the lines are blurring is certainly picking up. In this close-knit world that we work in, it will be interesting to see how this develops over the next 12 months, in addition to how companies will approach communicating their focus and expertise.
But as always, the biggest question on everyone’s lips was: “what’s new?”.
While it’s a valid question, it’s one that can be tricky to answer.
That’s not to say there isn’t plenty going on. The macro trends that we’ve been following over the last few years continue to evolve – plant based is as relevant as ever and collagen holds huge potential, with applications appearing across a huge variety of product types and categories.
But the reason “what’s new” isn’t a straightforward question is that there’s so much noise across all ingredients, formats and categories, it can be difficult for those in the B2B space to really stand out.
Let’s take collagen as an example. Its health and beauty claims have seen it explode onto the market and into consumer awareness, but these claims can quickly start to look and sound the same across brands. The risks of this, of course, are that without clear differentiation, even the best products can become commoditised.
To create a product that can cut through the noise requires some serious market knowledge and category context.
For me, that’s why we go to work each day and build the proposition of Nutrition Integrated and our approach to data. Our data, combined with our insights, narrative and market expertise, continues to help our customers redefine their products into ones that truly turn heads.
It also helps them build credibility with their own customers. As someone said to me at FiE last week, “your data helps me know my customers’ markets better than they know them themselves.”
We’ve no doubt that there were a lot of great new developments on show in Las Vegas and Frankfurt – and were proud to have played a role in the development of some of them – but honestly we found it hard to see much because of the noise and the traditional approach taken to communicating ingredients, solutions and concepts.
Vitafoods is the next big show, and I’d love to see some of our B2B names taking braver steps to make their products more consumer centric in a bid to create real standout, confident in their positioning because it’s based on real data.
