Consumers‵ demand for zero-additive and clean label has become more and more obvious, which also means that natural and healthy solutions will usher in greater opportunities.
The phrase “it‵s all about technology and hard work” made video blogger Xin Jifei gain 5 million followers in 30 days, and also made the whole network suffer from PTSD.
The seemingly mellow Tangbai is added with “three-flower evaporated milk”, gelatin sheets cut into silk foam, soft and sugared, which is a bowl of nourishing bird‵s nest with “aniseed enough”... In Xin Jifei‵s video, everything can be eaten in the mouth. Additive Synthesis. This undoubtedly hit the public‵s deep-rooted and ever-evolving food safety anxiety, and also set off a great discussion on the truth of whether food additives are safe or not.
This public opinion turmoil has even indirectly shaken the 100 billion market value of the “soy sauce tycoon” Haitian Flavor Industry. Faced with the question of “double standard”, Haitian‵s statement that “the use of food additives in all products and their labels comply with the requirements of relevant standards and regulations” obviously cannot calm the anger of the market.
#01 Ancestral Additives
When it comes to food additives, it cannot be demonized. After all, “it‵s hooligan to talk about toxins aside from the dose”, let alone that humans have been using “food additives” since thousands of years ago - such as table salt, which appeared 8,000 years ago.
Food preserved by salt not only tastes good but also does not spoil easily. From a functional point of view, “preservative” salt may be regarded as the ancestor of food additives.
In order to solidify the tofu, brine, that is, magnesium chloride, was used in the Eastern Han Dynasty. About 900 years later, alum, which was criticized for exceeding the standard aluminum element, was added to the Song people‵s fritters formula, which is more in line with today‵s perception of food additives.
Looking overseas, the development history of food additives also has a long history.
In 1500 BC, the Egyptians used pigments to make beautiful candies; in the 4th century BC, the red color of wine was mainly adjusted by artificial hands. As for chemically synthesized food additives, the British took out a dye pigment, aniline violet, from coal tar in the 19th century.
In the following 100 years, food additives started the journey to dominate the world food industry.
Specifically for the Chinese market. Before the reform and opening up, a small amount of monosodium glutamate, yeast, enzymes, xylitol and citric acid basically made up the territory of the first generation of domestic food additives. Since the 1980s, the rapidly expanding commercial society has released the productivity of the food industry, and the field of food additives has also entered a period of explosive growth.
In 1996, China issued GB2760 “Hygienic Standards for the Use of Food Additives”, officially pressing the power button for the large-scale application of additives in food processing.
As of 1999, the number of domestic food additives has soared from dozens of types before the 1980s to 1,474. By 2021, this number has risen to nearly 2,500, ranking the first echelon of food additive production and sales countries.
Today, there are more than 25,000 kinds of food additives in the world, and the dense list of ingredients almost completely transcribes the taste memory of human beings for nearly a century.
The so-called deliciousness only tells half of the story in the food field; the other half belongs to the additive testing ground of “making chemistry improve life”.
#02 100 Billion Industry
Today, the scale of China’s food industry is close to 300 trillion, and it is steadily advancing at a growth rate of about 10%. The accompanying food additive product output and industry output value are also growing at the same rate.
In 2021, the output of China’s food additive industry will exceed 11.97 million tons, a year-on-year increase of 13.26%, and the sales of major types of products in the industry will reach 134.1 billion yuan. In the same year, the number of Chinese food additive companies exceeded 110,000, a year-on-year increase of nearly 80%.
Over the past 30 years, China‵s food and food additive industries have been linked together, and they are still in the honeymoon period of accompanying development. The significance of food additives to food can be seen.
From the point of view of product function, food additives “enchanted” for color and flavor attributes cater to the common denominator of public tastes. In the business world, the essence of food additives is flattery to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
In the field of contemporary food, the raw material cost of the product generally accounts for one-third of the total cost. In the initial era of large-scale production and sales, a large part of the confidence in mass production and low-price competition of food brands was given by food additives.
Half a century ago, Lee Kum Kee squeezed out its century-old rival, Rong Yeung, to become the new king of the oyster sauce industry. To a certain extent, it relied on the introduction of automated industrial production lines to replace manual labor and accelerated its occupation of the market with large-scale production.
Under the technical conditions at the time, mass production and quality traded off and on. Rong Yuan, who has been relying on hand-cooking with thick wood and charcoal fire, can only produce 2 pounds of oyster sauce for 100 pounds of raw oysters. In front of Lee Kum Kee, who was assisted by caramel, monosodium glutamate, and potassium sorbate, he was powerless to fight back.
The profit surplus brought by “low quality and high yield” has also vigorously fed back the construction pace of enterprises in channels, marketing, product development, reproduction and other links, thus ultimately helping brands to monopolize the market on a large scale.
Similar cases are numerous.
Food additives help brands quickly staking their horses with low quality and low prices. This is no different from the rudeness of the Internet model that used money-burning subsidies to grab the market in recent years.
The only good thing is that technology has been advancing, and the value turnaround of food additives is underway.
#03 Angel or Devil
Regarding food additives, prejudice is farther from the truth than ignorance, and comprehensive and objective cognition cannot be established overnight.
First, no matter how valid the reasons may seem, it is necessary to face up to the negative health effects of traditional food additives.
The law is the bottom line of morality, so the national standard is just a passing line for food quality. Brands are trapped in the current survival, and can temporarily shelve the underlying health disputes of food additives within the legal boundaries, and develop silently tacitly. But to use “legal additions” in a big way as a shield for low quality is just stupid or bad.
Today, many industry parties have thought of creating high-quality and differentiated products by formulating local, industry and enterprise standards that are generally higher than national standards. Even though some industry insiders question the rent-seeking operations of some of the giants, on the whole, the pursuit of quality and standards should be encouraged at the conceptual level.
Standards are, after all, high and low.
Second, be wary of some pseudo-health marketing under the banner of “0 addition”.
Many brands use “restored hand-made” and “ancient craftsmanship” as their selling points to promote products that are natural and harmless, but in fact they sell illegal products that have not even done basic sterilization work. Blindly rejecting food industry technology is no different. An anti-intellect. There are also brands that claim to be green and organic on the surface, but play word games behind the scenes. For example, the preservative was changed to “fermented fruit juice”, the tea polyphenols were written as “green tea extract”, and “0 sucrose” was equivalent to “0 sugar”.
Exaggerated marketing rhetoric, excessive withdrawal of consumers’trust, and thus become irreversible because of the misnomer after the incident. Just like the ingredient list can be as high as Zhong Xue Gao, even if the carrageenan is controlled within the standard dose, it still cannot be forgiven by the consumer market. Basically, it still suffers from the deviation between the propaganda and the actual product.
All of these are actually taking advantage of consumers’fear of food additives to earn traffic, so that a new consumption sinkhole has been opened on the outer edge of food additives.
Third, avoid some significant and unreasonable cognitions caused by excessive stress responses to food additives.
For example, it has become a kind of cognitive inertia to a certain extent to equate crudely containing food additives with “toxic”. As a result, the ancient classic rumors such as “instant noodles can’t be rotten after eating” and “pigment causes blindness” have still not faded in lethality.
What’s more, generally speaking, the more developed a country is, the more types of food additives it has. Taking the superpower of the United States as an example, the number of available domestic food additives has reached 4,000, which is much higher than the nearly 2,500 domestically licensed.
Based on the above cognition, the answer is also obvious - for health, the use of food additives should be subtracted; at the same time, if there are necessary needs such as sterilization and anti-corrosion, the market is also in urgent need of safer and healthier food additive solutions.
In the middle lies the “impossible triangle” of “healthy, delicious, cost-effective”, which essentially points to the multiple games of product quality, consumer preferences and industrial profits. Under the trend of “necessity and want” among merchants, consumers and even the entire market, such a game will undoubtedly continue for a long time.
But there is no doubt that this is exactly what the continuous development of food technology should mean.
#04 Clean Label
The most serious side effect of food additives is the erosion of human health.
More than a decade later, there are still many consumers who have not recovered from the food safety incidents caused by illegal additions such as Sudan red and melamine. Food safety incidents provoke the vulnerable nerves of the public one after another.
Some studies have shown that even if the extreme situation of serious violations is put aside, the long-term intake of standard food additives is at least one of the incentives that lead to the “disease of civilization” or “disease of wealth” in modern people. The threat of additive food to health is also an inevitable product of the development of the domestic food industry.
“Our lives are inseparable from food additives. Everyone has to eat hundreds of food additives every day. This is definitely not an exaggeration.” The manager of the R and D department of the food additive company North Xiaguang mentioned in the article, “An estimated 50 to 100 additives are used to make a loaf of bread, from start to finish.”
Based on this, and then substituting into the calculation of the condition that “the cost of ingredients accounts for 1/3 of the cost of the product”, for those numerous “national food” with a unit price of a few dollars, what consumers eat other than loneliness, the brand is really in the heart Countless?
In fact, behind all the doubts are consumers’increasing emphasis on “health”. It is this undertone of growing dislike of food additives that provides today’s Chinese food brands with an opportunity to upgrade and iterate.
For example, too much sugar, calories, and fat intake can easily induce obesity, affect metabolism, and accelerate aging. Young people want to eat healthier, more and more cautious about processed foods and artificial additives, and brands are starting to start from the ingredient list.
For example, high-end tea brands such as HEYTEA, Naixue and other high-end tea brands advocated real materials and freshly-made milk tea, so that the traditional milk tea brand blended with non-dairy creamer has gradually become invisible; the adoption of a cow and the dairy products led by Jane Eyre are “zero-added” The wave has opened a gap for them to survive under the duopoly structure of Yili Mengniu; the trend of natural short-term guarantee and ready-made baking led by brands such as Momo Dim Sum Bureau and Hutou Bureau has created a new market for Chinese dim sum in terms of quality. West Point’s dominance has earned some presence.
The upgrade of product brands is behind the iteration of the entire industrial chain including food additives. When it comes to the mutual progress of food and food additives, as well as the win-win development of industries and brands, the case that has to be mentioned is the “father of zero sugar marketing” Yuanqi Forest.
Before Yuanqi Forest, many consumer brands have discovered the health risks brought by sucrose, and thus developed sugar substitutes. However, these food additives invented in the name of health not only still have the risk of disease, but also are not used by food supply and demand. Both ends are widely accepted.
Since the advent of Yuanqi Forest, a new type of sugar substitute “erythritol” has become a prominent science in the field of food and food additives, and even subtly changed the entire food consumption market.
In terms of the current level of food technology and the accumulation of experimental data, erythritol cannot be included in the absolute health whitelist. However, this does not prevent erythritol from becoming a beneficial attempt for the continuous evolution of food additives and even the food industry, nor does it prevent it from being deeply tied to the vitality forest and becoming the era of the national tide consumer industry. good case.
Consumers’choices and expectations are becoming more and more diversified, and their requirements for the healthiness of product ingredients and the resonance of brand values are increasing. In other words, the current era can already accommodate real materials and higher-quality food addition solutions, and even to a certain extent can withstand the prices jointly pushed up by them.
When sucrose was replaced with “0-calorie” erythritol, potassium sorbate “preservative” was removed, and sodium benzoate “preservative” was also removed... The new ingredient list also means all aspects of production technology and other aspects. upgrade.
It can be seen that the ever-simplified clean label has become the general trend.
