Botanicals - the case for ingredients that do more with less

If you handed a consumer two products - one with 18 ingredients and one with 6 - they already know which one they’d choose. But here’s the more interesting question: what if the product with fewer ingredients didn’t just look better, but performed better?

That’s the argument at the heart of this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our event in London's Olympia.

Clean label has largely been framed as a removal exercise, but often that leads to having to add something else in. Daniel Jones, Head of Food and Beverage at Blue Sky Botanicsis argues it makes more sense to choose better ingredients in the first place, ones that bring flavour, function and fibre simultaneously, without the downstream cascade of additions.

In this context, we learn about the baobab, a fibre-rich African superfruit that also delivers mouthfeel, viscosity and system stability. 

Daniel also makes the case for elderflower as a masterclass in what gets lost when you isolate compounds: there are 148 identifiable flavour compounds in an elderflower, and extracting each individually produces wildly different results. But if you extract the whole plant naturally, it tastes of elderflower.