Efficient Manufacturing Through Food Technology
Food manufacturing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, is not for the faint of heart. Consumer health is leading their increasing demands for food that they feel good about eating while their environmental concerns trail closely behind. Forbes said it first:
“It is becoming more difficult to be a successful food company. Despite industry-wide revenue growth, major players are seeing their sales shrink, their production costs rise and competition from small brands intensify.”
At one point, large brands could find comfort in their grandiosity but now that smaller brands have begun to embrace technological advances that help reduce their costs while keeping them on trend, more and more consumers are rooting for the underdog. And while many manufacturers, both large and small, come to use the LabelCalc platform for their nutrition analysis and nutrition facts panel needs, the technological advances needed to keep everyone growing during this pandemic can also be found right here at your LabelCalc home. What food technology are we talking about? You’ll have to continue reading to find out.
Highlighting Health Claims on Product Packaging
According to analysts at Lux Research, there are specific trends that food producers must fall in line with in order to thrive during (and well after) the COVID-19 pandemic. One of these trends being providing food that can potentially improve the health of the consumer. In the upcoming quarters, more and more manufacturers will benefit from citing health claims on their front-facing packaging. You might be surprised to discover that you can use food technology to do just that, and can you believe that there is a health claims tool already built into the LabelCalc platform? We tell you no lies.
When your food product meets the FDA standards for certain nutrients that meet the threshold for health claims, LabelCalc will alert you to their presence and offer the option to include the health claim on your product label. Now more than ever, consumers are obsessed with improving and maintaining health, and rightfully so. Citing health claims is quickly becoming an enticing piece of marketing material. Advertisers need to look no further than a product’s nutrition label to derive ideas to attract customers to purchase a product.
Consumers are obsessed with food that will help them remain healthy. What tools are you using to identify what might appeal to your target audience? We have a few suggestions…
Nutrition As Alternative Medicine
The more dialed-in a manufacturer is to the health benefits of the ingredients within their product recipe, the more they understand how valuable a nutrition analysis is for all aspects of their business. What once was a required component of the journey to retail is now becoming the holy grail in attracting consumers and fulfilling their demands. COVID-19 has sped up the way that we view how food affects us. In the not-too-recent past, nutrition science was a confusing area of study, and many consumers and medical practitioners alike, did not see the correlation between the food we consume and the current state of our health. With a global pandemic in play the mentality about nutrition’s role in our overall health has shifted substantially. Now consumers are looking to food to solve problems with the foods they consume instead of relying on pharmaceuticals that have overtaken our nation since the baby-boomer generation.
Allergens are a huge part of this equation. Because consumers have begun to understand the impact of food consumption upon their health, more and more people have begun looking into (and discovering) food allergies. Only a few short years ago, food allergies seemed to be a trend that rode the tails of the “gluten-free” wave. However, allergens are not a trend, but an anaphylactic-inducing danger that impacts food safety for consumers. For this reason, allergen-statements have become just as important as nutrition facts panels themselves.
To solve this major safety and health concern, LabelCalc has implemented specific food technology in the form of an allergen-flagging tool to help manufactures understand which of the Top 8 allergens might be lurking within their recipes. More and more consumers are reading labels before choosing a product to add to their cart, and allergens are a primary reason why.
Healthy Communication
The biggest cost for any business is labor. The money spent on tedious tasks can keep a food company from growing. This is why it’s important to use technology to reduce labor costs by increasing efficiency in accomplishing daily tasks. This can be done easily with an API in place to replace the the time it takes to upload and download information. If you haven’t guessed it yet, yes, LabelCalc has the capability to make API calls — allowing you to share your nutrition data with a click of a button, instead of taking up space on your computer just to export once again.
If we asked you to record a day’s worth of dietary information on myfitnesspal.com, save it to your computer in a CSV file, and then upload to your FitBit, you would think we were crazy! Why? Because an API automatically shares your information with FitBit from your myfitnesspal account.
Why should your nutritional data share be any different for your business?
