Plum-Good Improvements

Have you ever wondered why new ingredients are created? Which comes first, the ingredient or the problem that the ingredient was created to solve? This classic chicken-or-egg question has important implications for how the ingredient is researched and ultimately marketed. Unlike finished goods sold at retail and in foodservice, industrial ingredients are more likely to come into being due to their production economics than their proven market demand.

Whatever the path to a new ingredient’s creation, the manufacturer must undergo a discovery process to understand a novel ingredient’s functionality and safety in various applications prior to commencing marketing and sales efforts. Basic questions must be answered: What will the customer do with the new ingredient? How does it interact with other ingredients? How much should be used? And, perhaps most importantly, how does it stack up against competitive products for its intended use?

Given the number of possible applications for most food ingredients, these are not simple questions to answer. Sales and marketing are particularly keen to ensure they properly prioritize a new ingredient’s market opportunities to justify the investment in developing it.

Not surprisingly, this is a problem tailor-made for culinologists to help solve. With a mix of culinary and food science skills, they bring together the expertise to answer the key questions posed by potential customers. Along these lines, an interesting case study is provided by three new, all-natural prune-based ingredients recently created by Sunsweet Growers, Inc., Yuba City, CA—and the products in which they recently saw newfound functionality.

NOT YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ PRUNES

Sunsweet is the world’s largest handler of dried tree fruits, mostly plums, which they dry into prunes. The grower-owned cooperative goes back to 1917 and represents more than one-third of the worldwide prune market, processing much of it into prune juice. Most of the fruit is grown in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. The Sunsweet brand is one of the most-recognizable in America.

By creating new dried-plum ingredients, Sunsweet followed in Ocean Spray’s footsteps (where they successfully turned a quivering Thanksgiving staple into a diversified $1.5 billion company). Sunsweet’s massive processing operation has also yielded many innovative products designed to expand the market for dried plums.