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  At the food makers’ market

  Where do the companies that manufacture our processed food do their shopping? The European marketplace for this business is an annual trade show called Food Ingredients. Under one roof, over three days, this exhibition hosts the world’s most important gathering of ingredient suppliers, distributors and buyers. Think of it as the food manufacturer’s equivalent of an arms fair.

  At Food Ingredients, the buyers, representatives of companies that make our ready meals and convenience foods, meet sellers with imposing job titles – Global Procurement Ingredients Director, European Lead Buyer and Innovation Partner, R&D Product Developer, Ingredient Specification Technologist, Product and Application Development Manager, Formulation Project Leader – who present them with the ‘personalised solutions they need to grow and nurture their business’.

  Food Ingredients represents the beating heart of the modern food industry, showcasing its very latest innovations and trends, and its dialogue is thoroughly international. In 2011, when it was held in Paris, over 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries – industry movers and shakers who collectively represented an ingredient buying power of €4 billion.

  Consistent with the industry view that the general public is best given only the sketchiest notion of what goes on behind the scenes of food processing, Food Ingredients events aren’t open to the general public. Anyone who tries to register has to show that they work in food manufacturing but, using a fake ID, I managed to register for Food Ingredients 2013. It was housed in the vast, eerie expanses of Frankfurt’s Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe, a fitting venue that mirrors the sheer scale of modern food manufacturing.

  For those who love to cook and eat, food trade exhibitions are sometimes alienating, disillusioning experiences, a through-the-keyhole insight into aspects of food production you’d rather not know about, but Food Ingredients had a surreal quality all of its own. I wasn’t greeted by the smell of food, and hardly anything on display much resembled it. While exhibitors at most food exhibitions are often keen for you to taste their products, at Food Ingredients, few of the stand-holders had anything instantly edible to offer. That’s possibly something to do with the fact that their potential customers, while prepared to buy the products on display for manufacturing, don’t much fancy eating them.

  And even the foods at those stands that did want visitors to taste something weren’t all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat under a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read ‘Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone’; the latter ingredient is, apparently, a ‘cyclic ester of gluconic acid’ that acts as an acidifier, thus prolonging shelf life. A pastry chef in gleaming whites was rounding off his live demonstration by offering sample petit fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, glossy fruit jelly, foamy cream and chocolate you’d see in the window of a classy patisserie, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the crafty substitution of potato protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient is ‘tailored to the required functionality: foaming, emulsifying, or gelling’ and provides ‘the volume, texture, stability and mouthfeel’ we look for in classic cakes, baked with traditional ingredients.

  Many exhibitors had striking visual displays, arranged like installations at an art gallery. Gleaming glass shelves were back-lit to show off a rainbow of super-sized phials of liquids so bright with colouring, they might be neon. Plates of various powders, shaped into pyramids, were artistically stacked on elegant Perspex stands bearing enigmatic labels, such as ‘texturised soy protein: minced ham colour’, or displayed in cabinets, as though they were exhibits in a museum.

  Walls were given over to geometric displays of powdery substances, from white, through beige and brown to orange in hue, each bearing an alphanumeric code, and glowing white, yet cryptic captions that read ‘pork skin products’, ‘beef products’, or similar. One porthole-sized convex glass round housed a liquid that captured the hue of harbour water on a dark night, another framed a solitary blueberry muffin. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t some art college end-of-term show though, because these intriguing objects were, according to the explanatory signage, ‘solutions for coating, glazing, polishing, releasing, emulsifying’. Still unsure what, exactly, I was looking at, the further information ‘flavour vehicles’, ‘MCT oils’ and ‘pan oil’ didn’t hugely enlighten me.

  Seeing a plate of puce-striped, chocolate-coated granola bars centre stage in a glass case, my initial reaction was that some avant-garde artist was making an ironic comment on modern life, like Carl André’s controversial floor of bricks at the Tate Gallery. But then I read the notice: ‘cereal bar with compound coating: oil-dispersible technology of ‘plain’ caramel colour and beetroot red’, and realised that everyone else was taking them deadly seriously.

  Perhaps the most beautifully curated artefacts on display were vases containing glowing orange liquids – some cloudy, some crystal clear – for colouring fruit juices. One looked particularly spectacular, like a lava lamp with ghostly threads of gossamer-like material suspended evenly in it. These were ‘orange cells’: they come in handy, apparently, for making those cartons of juice composed of pasteurised orange concentrate and water look as though they contain some freshly squeezed juice.

  In the absence of any sight or smell to whet the appetite, a lay visitor to Food Ingredients, one who was not part of the food manufacturing fraternity, might feel the need to double check that they were indeed at a food exhibition. For Food Ingredients is so clearly the domain of a technocracy of engineers and scientists, people whose natural environment is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field, people who share the assumption that everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably.

  The broad business interest portfolio of the companies exhibiting at Food Ingredients was disconcerting. For instance, the Swiss company DKSH, whose sales pitch is ‘performance materials, concepts and ingredients for the confectionery and bakery industry’, described itself as ‘a leading speciality chemicals and ingredients supplier’. Its business interests span ‘speciality chemicals, food and beverage industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the personal care industry’.

  Omya, which seemed proud to be based in Hamburg because it is ‘the largest chemical trading place in the world’, announced itself as ‘a leading global chemical distributor and producer of industrial minerals’. The company reeled off its list of markets as food, pet food, oleochemicals, cosmetics, personal care, detergents, cleaners, papers, adhesives, construction, plastics, and industrial chemicals. Omya was at Food Ingredients selling products as diverse as granular onion powder, monosodium glutamate and phosphoric acid.

  Corbion, a ‘global market leader in lactic acid, lactic acid derivatives, and a leading company in functional blends containing enzymes, emulsifiers, minerals and vitamins’ pointed out that its products have applications not only in bakery and meat, but also in ‘pharmaceuticals and medical devices, home and personal care, packaging, automotive, coatings and coating resins’.

  Helm AG introduced itself as ‘one of the world’s biggest chemical marketing companies’. It has sales offices in more than 30 countries across the globe, and a product portfolio that includes chemicals, ‘crop protection’ (pesticides), pharmaceuticals and medical products, animal and human nutrition, and fertiliser. It appears to be a big name in artificial sweeteners, with products such as Acesulfame K, Cyclamate and Aspartame.

  Wacker, from Munich, trumpeted that it is ‘one of the world’s leading and most research-intensive chemical companies’; no exaggeration there, given that in 2008 its sales totalled €4.3 billion. It too had a catholic range of products, which it catalogued as ‘silicones, binders and polymer additives for diverse industrial sectors to bio-engineered pharmaceutical actives and hyperpure silicon for s
emi-conductor and solar applications’.

  At Food Ingredients, I rapidly realised that for big companies with a finger in many business pies, food processing is just another revenue stream. They experience no cognitive dissonance in providing components not only for your ready meal, but also for your fly spray, air freshener, shower sealant, deodorant, computer casing, scratch-resistant car coating, paint and glue. But as a food manufacturing outsider, this queasy juxtaposition of the industrial and the edible comes as a sobering shock.

  You don’t have to be at Food Ingredients for any time at all to pick up the central marketing message of companies selling their wares to food manufacturers. The strapline for a product called Butter Buds®, described by its makers as ‘an enzyme-modified encapsulated butter flavour that has as much as 400 times the flavor intensity of butter’, summed it up in six words: ‘When technology meets nature, you save’. And just in case that was too airy-fairy, the small print spelled it out: ‘Using Butter Buds saves you money, resulting in a healthier profit margin’. Or plainer still: ‘Butter Buds helps you cut costs’.

  In fact, as I walked round the exhibition, it was apparent that the main point of Food Ingredients is to sell food manufacturers wonder products that allow them to reduce their spend on more costly, real ingredients. The show is a bazaar stacked with merchandise that will be ‘cost-effective at low dosages’, ‘generate cost savings’, ‘improve profit margins and yields’ and allow for ‘cost optimisation’. In the words of All in All, an Irish company that supplies brines, binders and stabilisers for comminuted (processed) meats and rotisserie chicken: ‘Why buy ingredients when you can buy solutions?’

  ‘Solutions’, of course, is a buzzword in food manufacturing, the thinking being that natural, unprocessed food is just one big headache, loads of hassle and too much expense. Accept this premise, and it’s obvious that any financially prudent manufacturer needs customised adaptations of natural food, ‘functional’ components designed for their production process.

  Manufacturers look to the companies that supply them to collaborate, or in industry speak, to ‘co-create’ and design the processed foods that line our shelves. Given the ever-growing range of such ingredients with very specific physical characteristics, modern food manufacturing is potentially a quagmire of technical complexity. In this industry, few ingredients are totally straightforward. A seasoning is rarely just a spice, more often it is part of a ‘seasoning system’ or ‘coating system’. Meat is hardly ever meat as a craft butcher would know it, but comes as a ‘protein booster’ or ‘broth’. Lentils aren’t lentils but ‘high viscosity pulse flour’. Cheese isn’t cheese, but a ‘goat flavour cheese powder’. Onions aren’t onions but ‘caramelised onion juice concentrate’.

  If your company doesn’t keep up with technical developments in the field, you can be sure that your competitors will, and the current drive to clean up labels puts manufacturers under further pressure to source new ingredients that do the job, but which sound better on the label. There’s just so much to know. As the Danish R2 Group put it: ‘Purchasing the right ingredient is no longer enough, and R2 Group therefore offers you all the building blocks [note the emphasis in bold] you need when innovating and producing food products.’

  Once embarked on the modern processed food experiment, a manufacturer faces all manner of technical challenges never encountered by any home cook, and these require state-of-the-art ingredient know-how. For instance, at various stages in large-scale food processing, manufacturers can struggle with the problem of excessive foam. The answer to that issue is a product such as Silfoam®, a silicone-based system solution that controls ‘foam-intensive applications’ and ‘facilitates smooth running processes’. This silicone product is also used in other industries, including ‘textiles, detergents, cleaning products, pulp, petrochemicals, dispersions, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, food, biotech, fermentation or wastewater treatment sectors’.

  Manufacturers who need their tomato sauce to be thick enough not to leak out of its plastic carton, smooth, and just a little bit glossy, so that it doesn’t look matt and old after several days in the fridge, can see the advantages of Microlys®, a ‘cost-effective’ speciality starch that gives a product a ‘shiny, smooth surface and high viscosity’, or Pulpiz™, Tate & Lyle’s tomato ‘pulp extender’. Based on modified starch, its makers say that it gives the same pulpy visual appeal as an all-tomato sauce, using 25% less tomato paste. Companies that put added colour in their products may find that they stick to their equipment, forming clumps through the product, or ‘migrating’ from one part to another, from a sponge to an icing, say. These issues can be resolved by using colours in ‘oil-dispersible technology’ that guarantees a uniform effect every time.

  If your company makes low-grade processed sausages, surimi, scampi or ‘structured’ (reformed) or ‘injected’ cooked hams with lots of added water, you’ll probably be interested in using a product such as BDF’s Probind®, made from an enzyme, transglutaminase, that will firm the meat up a bit and encourage liquid retention. As this enzyme is classified as a processing aid by the European Commission, you won’t have to declare it on the label. Or perhaps you’d prefer to use a phosphate-based product, produced from phosphoric acid, such as Carfosel®, because it ‘reduces thaw drip’ and ensures ‘a homogenous product’.

  ‘Off flavours’, which can come both from the extreme heat of the manufacturing process itself, the addition of additives, packaging, cleaning chemicals, rogue bacteria and many other sources, are another constant bugbear for large-scale food processors. But these can be ‘masked’ in many product formulations by adding a product such as ‘dairy essence’, which are concentrated cream and milk flavours ‘unlocked’ using enzyme technology, or simply by adding an assertive dose of flavouring, either ‘natural’ or synthetic.

  A further occupational hazard of being a food manufacturer is that you have retailers leaning on you to reduce levels of ingredients in your products that are on the public health establishment’s hit list. Salt is a case in point: the processed food industry has depended on it heavily to compensate for the depletion of natural flavour that comes hand-in-hand with industrial-scale food processing. Supermarkets like to sell processed food plastered with reassuring low-salt declarations and green traffic lights. Unfortunately for manufacturers, the obvious substitute is potassium chloride, but it has a bitter, metallic flavour. So manufacturers might well be tempted to try out Scelta Mushrooms®, a ‘umami salt reduction tool’, one of the latest industry answers to this pressing problem.

  Food Ingredients 2013 was a veritable treasure trove of hugely clever food manufacturing ingredients such as these, but to the lay person, and, I suspect, many manufacturers, lots of them are a puzzle. Natural foods aren’t shrouded in mystery. Meat, fish, dairy, fruit and vegetables – their production processes are well documented. But without an advanced grasp of chemistry and biology, it isn’t possible to figure out what, precisely, most of these food manufacturing ingredients actually are, and how exactly they are produced.

  Certainly the ingredient companies, although happy to make big claims for their products, are extremely reticent when asked to explain how they are made. Doing the rounds at Food Ingredients, I got into conversation with several company representatives keen to persuade me of the fantastic properties of their ingredients. But when I began to ask questions about how they were formulated, and what they contained, a definite reticence crept in, and my respondents began to answer like Ministry of Defence press officers. The best they could come up with were vague references to ‘thermal’ or ‘mechanical’ or ‘enzymatic’ treatments, or ‘edible coating technology’. The parsimonious details of formulations offered, descriptions such as ‘lactic acids with other ingredients’, or ‘contains natural nucleotides’, or ‘part of a revolutionary new generation of texturisers’, left me little the wiser. Indeed, it was obvious that merely to seek a more informative answer instantly marked me out as an industry outsider, s
omeone disinclined to accept claims for revolutionary new products uncritically without supporting documentation.

  I was particularly drawn to the stand of Dohler, ‘a global producer, marketer and provider of technology-based solutions to the food and beverage industry’, by its vivid ‘red brilliance’ colouring ‘from a 100 per cent natural source’. The basis of this colouring, I learned, is black carrot, grown mainly in Turkey, where the company’s processing takes place. But how is this colour concentrate actually made, I asked? What does the processing involve? What needs to happen to a pile of carrots, harvested in a Turkish field, to transform it into a powerful, gleaming substance that can bestow on food and drink ‘a fantastic colour spectrum ranging from warm and bright red hues to shining ruby tones all the way to blue shades of red’? The company’s representatives obviously did not expect to answer such a query. ‘It’s a special process’ was the only answer I could get.

  Food Ingredients 2013 was full of products that are made by ‘special’ and ‘unique’ processes, ‘innovative technologies’ and ‘sophisticated manufacturing methods’, but the detail of them is never spelt out. No surprise there. The majority of the products that were on offer are protected by a little ® or ™ registered trademark symbol, which marks out a company’s exclusive ownership of a product. The presence of the trademark signifies its intellectual property rights over a product and enables it to legally prevent others from copying or ‘free riding’ on its investment. From a consumer point of view, the trademark symbol also has another very important function: it allows companies to hide behind an ethos of commercial confidentiality and trade secrets to duck any less than superficial questions about how their products are actually made.