Market opportunities
Foods that meet higher quality expectations
Changing landscape for brand owners:
Shaka® processed ambient long shelf life foods can compare in quality to the best chilled short life foods, but with ambient costs. The costs, energy usage, and waste in the production, pasteurisation, packaging and distribution of chilled foods are far higher than those for sterilised and ambient packed foods. These extra costs are reflected in the prices – chilled foods are much more costly and expensive than equivalent canned or pouched product.
Technically, Shaka® processed foods could be made with the potential value of chilled products – but at the cost of ambient foods. There is a substantial market for the fresher tasting and looking chilled products, but it is limited by the high prices that producers are forced to charge. For a producer of ambient foods, the Shaka® process, together with sophisticated marketing, could be the keys to competing in this premium market sector.
Here is a summary of the advantages the Shaka® process can give to ambient foods:
- Better taste, colour, texture
- Better nutritional qualities, according to currently available evidence
- Ability to retain delicate flavours
- Ability to make new recipes with new ingredients
- Better retention of spicy flavours
- Ability to use recipes that would not survive conventional processes
- Ability to reduce salt, additive and colourant requirements – ‘Cleaner’ labels
Here are some suggested market opportunities for brand managers:
- Opportunity to review formulations and improve current products
- Opportunity to encourage trading up to premium variants
- Ability to offer quality comparable to chilled, but at ambient costs
- Ability to offer reduce salt, colourants and other additives – cleaner labels
- Potential to gain significant customer goodwill
- New options for home food preparation – quality packed vegetables to compete with fresh?
- Revolutionise foodservice sector with much improved quality in large packs
- Opportunity to create a quality mark and branding for a premium category
Foodservice
The quality of ambient foods in large foodservice packs can be severely compromised by the heat burden imposed by conventional batch processing. With the Shaka® process, 4250 gm packs can be sterilised in just 10 minutes within a total cycle time of less than 20 minutes, providing foods of quality similar or better than many current retail pack offerings.