Pinnacle’s Darren Doyle gives us a rundown of the latest piping hot trends in bakery ingredients and flavours.
Sweet on the inside
Sweet ingredients, caramels – and fillings in particular – are the fastest growing bakery ingredient at present. Salted caramel continues to go from strength to strength, and has almost replaced caramel as a baseline product. If you haven’t got a salted caramel product in your range you're losing immediate incremental sales. We're also seeing strong demand for premium fillings for doughnuts, biscuits and tarts, as well as higher fruit content and more natural flavour.
Home free
We're expecting to see more premiumisation, including a growing focus on the provenance of ingredients. Consumers want to purchase from Australian manufacturers using Australian ingredients, where price allows. Free-from products – i.e. those without gluten, GMO or palm-oil – will also continue to grow.
Shelf life shift
Our development teams are working on shelf life extension programs for baked goods at ambient temperatures, using natural ingredients where possible. We're seeing great quality products stay fresher for longer, enabling manufacturers to be more responsive to price demands and meet environmental expectations by minimising waste. This will benefit manufacturers of muffins and doughnuts, but the real game changer will be for industrial bread manufacturers who've seen their margins significantly squeezed.
Darren Doyle is sales director of the newly formed Pinnacle Food Group. Kerry recently sold Pinnacle, the local specialty baked goods and bakery ingredients business, to Australian investment company Pacific Equity Partners (PEP).
