Dive Brief:

• IFT marked the official launch of Welch’s Global Ingredients Group's FruitWorx products, according to Wayne D. Lutomski, vice president of international and global ingredients at Welch’s.

• The new division is the company’s effort to get their traditional product out of the bottle.

• "We’re the original superfruit, but it’s been locked up in that bottle," Lutomski said. "As a consumer products company, we see the trends. It’s about health and wellness, it's about better for you, clean label, functionality ... The first thing we were able to do is find this partnership with Taura, who now takes that juice and so forth, concentrates it even further, and gives us the fruit solids, and that has allowed us now to go to new applications, new places that we could never go before. We can now go to baked goods, cereal bars, nutrition bars, dairy, cereals — a lot of places where we just couldn’t go before because we were juice."

Dive Insight:

What makes this particularly unique is that within such an established company is this startup division internally, which Lutomski calls an "exciting time."

While Casey Lewis, a registered dietician at the company highlighted the polyphenol properties found in this launch of products, Lutomski said that at the end of the day, it comes down to taste.

"At the end of the day, if the product doesn’t taste good — I don’t care how healthy you are," he said. "It doesn’t matter. And I think that’s one of the big challenges for food manufacturers, is how do you create these healthy products that consumers want that taste good?"