On one side of the food and beverage processing industry, food manufacturers have been tasked with solving issues of food and ingredient safety and security. From the other side, consumers are more closely scrutinizing the ingredients and processes involved in the food products they purchase. These two pressures have brought unprecedented challenges to the product developer.
Compounding those pressures is a borderless economy where many companies increasingly find themselves supplying, and being supplied by, global food and ingredient concerns. Because the terms “natural” and “clean-label” are neither legally defined nor regulated in many countries, there is flexibility for manufacturers to innovate around fluid interpretations of what it means for a product to qualify as such. But this flexibility can be a double-edged sword.