Join us at Tastes of Better Manchester

Tastes of Better is an opportunity for ingredient innovators to showcase first-hand their latest ingredient, flavour and colour innovations to brands, manufacturers, retailers, foodservice and QSRs.

As part of our campaign to highlight the importance of prioritising oils and fats in foods, we’ll be showcasing a number of our products and applications in action.

This includes:

• Crisp, fresh salad with plant-based feta cheese, drizzled with basil oil.
• Plant-based pâté served with caramelised onion chutney on a crunchy cracker.
• A simple, sweet lemon and poppyseed muffin with a moist crumb.
• Deliciously indulgent vegan ganache with a smooth and silky texture.
• Choc-chip cookie with 20% less sugar.
• Dairy-free cheesecake served with a gooey vegan salted caramel sauce.
• Vegan Jaffa cakes, light, egg-free and dairy-free sponge topped with a zesty orange and coated in vegan milk chocolate.
• A light dairy and egg free carrot cake bite topped with a whipped vegan cream cheese flavoured frosting.

Helen Flower, Marketing Manager, Food Ingredients, AAK, said:

“More and more businesses are looking to science to provide innovative products to meet food challenges. Whether you’re looking to reformulate your recipes to reduce the fat, salt or sugar, create tasty plant-based products, or decrease production costs, looking carefully at the oils and fats used is often the key to success.”

Find out more and book your VIP place here.

As part of our campaign to highlight how ‘fat makes food fabulous’, we spoke to Food Matters Live about the concept of oleogustus – the way fats taste. Oleogustus is a combination of two Latin words – Oleo, which means 'fat', or 'oily', and Gustus, which is 'taste'.

We’re encouraging food producers to consider the importance of the fats they’re using when thinking about the formulations of their recipes – not just for taste, but on the effect fats have on the other elements of their products. They don’t just work in isolation.

Dr Kaly Chatakondu, Commercial Director at AAK, explains:

"The role of specific fats and oils in formulated foods is often massively underestimated. The perception of sweetness, juiciness, the flavour delivery, the shelf life, the cost and even the carbon footprint depends greatly, and often unexpectedly, on the type of fat used.

“For example, the perception of sweetness in a cookie can depend as much on the type of fat as the type of sweetener. A reduction in sugar of 15-20% but with the same perception of sweetness as full sugar can be achieved simply by changing the type of fat rather than doing anything else.”

To find out more, read our exclusive feature with Food Matters Live here.