Continental marketing manager Trusha Madhoo shares the story behind the company’s new natural recipe base range as health and wellness becomes more of a focus for food companies.
Q What consumer trends led to the creation of the new naturally flavoured base range?
We’ve noticed that consumers have become more engaged and more sceptical about their food these days. They are wanting to know more about where it comes from, who makes it, and what it contains.
This has fuelled the demand for free-from foods and even better ‘more natural’ products.
The Naturally Tasty Recipe Base range is our very first meal base range with natural ingredients rather than just free-from artificial ingredients.
These products contain only recognisable ingredients that are familiar to the consumer from everyday use and therefore can be trusted more easily.
And of course we believe it makes a big difference to the taste and flavour delivery. For example, in our new Naturally Tasty Beef Stew product, we have onions, tomato, bell peppers, wheat flour, paprika, garlic powder, pepper, caraway, nutmeg, all spice, potato starch, sea salt, sugar, corn oil, herbs like thyme, rosemary, bay leaves and some lemon juice powder – all familiar-cooking ingredients blended in the right proportions to give the cook the ideal blend to make a delicious stew for the family.
The new Multi-Dish Gourmet Paste range is a local Australian development that we’re truly proud of. It was developed by our chefs, technologists, and developers right here in Sydney.
This range was inspired by the growing love of authentic cuisines from around the world. It’s a truly authentic blend of herbs, spices, and vegetables in every jar.
And the real bonus is that it’s so versatile that with one jar you can create many different types of dishes, from something wintry to a summer salad, or something vegetarian.
Each jar is packed in a beautiful box that has four recipes printed on it to give extra inspiration on what to cook. The glass jar is a great way to preserve the goodness and allow consumers to see the beautiful ingredients. It stores well in the fridge, and could go on to be reused in the home.
Q You also use sustainable and freshly grown ingredients in some products such as pasta. What are your goals in this area?
In fact, all our pasta is made from sustainably grown Australian wheat. And we have ambitious targets to source all our agricultural produce from sustainable sources by 2020. We are well on our way to achieving this goal in Australia, and already source most of our vegetables and herbs sustainably as well.
We are also looking at sustainable sourcing of our materials, lightweighting ?our packaging, and using recyclable materials wherever we can.
There will be a lot more exciting things to come from the Continental Kitchen in the coming few years.
We are passionate and excited about bringing to market new products that meet the needs of our consumers, and to keep evolving as a brand.
