The latest focus on trends by the global food ingredients supplier follows comments made in September pointing to increasing consumer for functional beverages.
The new initiative draws on articles that explain how umami and kokumi can work together to create complex flavour combinations. It also builds on a report released by Kerry earlier this year. Redefining Umami: An exploration of umami and flavour-building outlines feedback from chefs across Asia about consumer taste preference and top culinary trends.
Four key areas were identified in the paper:
- a move toward taste complexity;
- consumer acceptance of sour, bitter and umami tastes;
- increasing call for holistic taste experiences;
- and reduced public acceptance of processed, industrialised food production.
Umami — also known as the fifth taste — is regarded by chefs and food developers as elevating, enriching and improving succulence, while they view kokumi as bringing depth, fullness of the mouth and richness.
Kerry's campaign is designed to introduce product developers to the depth and deliciousness of clean label umami and kokumi ingredients in savoury products, meat applications and plant-based proteins.
'Enormous emerging opportunity'
“There’s an enormous emerging opportunity in savoury taste for chefs and product developers around the world to create new and exciting food innovations based on umami and kokumi,” said Kay Marshallsay, Kerry’s global product director, fermentation. “To assist in the process, Kerry first spoke to chefs across Asia about how they create umami and kokumi tastes, and then worked to develop ways to make these scalable and accessible to the food industry at large.
"This new research report provides an on-the-ground perspective that details the emerging global taste trends emanating from Asian cuisine.”
Kerry has offices in 32 countries, 151 manufacturing facilities and more than 26,000 employees globally, including more than 1,000 food scientists.