Trend Tracker: Instant meals, halal trends, health-nourishing tonics, and more feature in our round-up
Convenience key: Australia’s largest organic kids’ snacks range Whole Kids plans APAC expansion
Australia’s largest organic children’s snacks brand Whole Kids sees convenience for both mothers and kids as well as delivering delicious tasting products as its major priorities whilst planning for its upcoming expansion into the Asia Pacific region.
The entire range of Whole Kids’ snacks, which comprise over 50 product varieties, are certified organic, additive free and allergen friendly.
More importantly, in the firm’s attempt to cater to its prime target demographic of mothers and children between six months and ten years of age, it has innovated a variety of products to deliver ‘good quality nutrition’ in a convenient way.
“Convenience is a very important concept to us – we want to ensure our products are convenient for both parents and children,” Whole Kids co-founder Monica Meldrum told FoodNavigator-Asia.
South East Asian push: Takasago unveils 100% halal production focus for its new Indonesia factory
Japanese flavours and fragrances giant Takasago International has revealed a completely halal production focus for its latest factory established in Indonesia, in a bid to strengthen its presence in the South East Asian market.
The new facility is located in West Java, Indonesia, and involved US$25mn of investment to complete. According to Takasago, this was the company’s first local production factory, and its biggest investment in the country so far.
“Indonesia represents a significant opportunity for Takasago to improve its share in the Asia-Pacific region,” Takasago International (Singapore) Managing Director Andy Arguelles told FoodNavigator-Asia.
“[It is] the biggest market in the [region], and Takasago has made a significant investment [here] to enable us to further strengthen our presence in this growing market.”
Functional porridge: Malaysian firm targets major halal markets with bird’s nest product
Malaysian firm Vesbo is hoping to target major halal markets with its functional instant porridge containing bird’s nest and collagen.
Vesbo Malaysia’s founder, Terry Swee, said it was a huge advantage that the product was halal certified.
While the firm is currently focusing on the Asian market, Swee believes there is high market demand for their products in other regions such as in the West and Middle East. “We obtained the halal (JAKIM) certification in 2016. We think that our product is fit to fill up the needs of halal food market across the globe.”
The products contains brown rice, oats, collagen, bird’s nest and milk, and is preservative and MSG free.
Tmall forecasts sports nutrition and health-nourishing tonics to take the centre stage in 2020
Tmall has identified six food and beverage consumption trends that will take the centre stage this year, including the rising demand for sports nutrition products and health-nourishing tonics.
Instant meals, single-person consumption, place of origin, and cross-category products (i.e. products made from collaboration with non-food and beverage brands) were the other four key trends.
The e-commerce giant made the forecast based on the consumption statistics from last year, where the middle-aged, elderly, females, and consumers born post-1995 were core spenders.
As a whole, the market size of health-nourishing foods expanded at a faster rate than the general food and beverage products for the last two years.
Snacking, hemp and energy drinks: Three categories ripe for APAC F&B industry growth in 2020
With the Asia Pacific food and beverage food industry growing at a rapid rate over the past few years, and even more advancement predicted to come, we bring you three of the most significant emerging categories showing strong potential for growth moving into 2020.
Emerging snack markets in India, China, Indonesia Snacks as a category are rapidly growing in popularity within the Asia Pacific region, driven by consumer trends such as a preference for convenience and GDP growth.
Within this region, snacking giant Mondelez has identified the markets in India, China and South East Asia, especially Indonesia, as those with the most significant potential for growth moving forward into 2020, making these very significant emerging markets for the company.
