Dive Brief:
- The R&D team at Gold Coast Ingredients is focused on creating vegetarian savory flavors in powder and liquid forms, satisfying consumers’ need for meat flavors without the use of animal proteins or products.
- The custom flavor house creates a specialty line of savory flavor enhancers that maintain essential flavor characteristics while meeting consumers’ requests for natural and organic ingredients.
- Gold Coast's vegetarian savory line consists of chicken, beef, and pork flavors. The vegetarian marketplace increasingly calls for meat substitutes made from vegetables and other products, with a pickup in demand for these flavors in breakfast and snack products.
Dive Insight:
Like food manufacturers around the globe, Gold Coast develops products that address the requirement for organic and non-GMO products, both certified products and flavors, and natural and artificial flavors. Vegetarian savory lines provide alternatives to companies so they don’t have to bring actual meat products into their plants, removing regulation hassle, Megan Trent, marketing coordinator at Gold Coast Inc., told FoodIngredientsFirst.
The food and beverage industry continues to look for innovative ways to create vegetarian and vegan flavors to placate consumers. For example, younger consumers, "are not just seeking foods that mimic meat," Andrew Loucks, president of the U.S. frozen foods business at the Kellogg Co., which owns MorningStar Farms, told The New York Times in 2014. "Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients."
Keep an eye out for umami flavors, which can reduce salt or sodium in products. Umami-generating or -enhancing ingredients, such as yeast extracts, hydrolyzed proteins, and soy sauce, can be used to create vegetarian or vegan products or meals that have enough savory flavor to perform as suitable meat substitutes, according to a press release from Reportlinker.