From Oct. 6-10, thousands of food and beverage professionals gathered in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Events Center for SupplySide West 2014. This year’s event had the largest show floor featuring more than 1,700 booths, offering more than 10,000 ingredients and services.
This year, we had a guest correspondent, Mark Crowell, principal culinologist from CuliNex. SupplySide W
est focuses largely on ingredients for the supplement market, and the line between food and supplements has been shifting toward food for a number of years. According to Crowell, this was evident at this year’s SupplySide West where many supplement ingredient companies also promoted their products for food uses. Crowell spoke with Hartley Pond, vice president technical sales at FutureCeuticals, and Pond conveyed that, “there is fatigue in the supplement market from too many single active ingredient products having made too many health claims.” This perspective was echoed by Paul Altaffer, chief innovation officer at RFI, LLC. Altaffer stated, “There is almost a retro movement going on in supplements. It is a move away from standardized extracts to more natural, whole food products.”
Altaffer continued, “The three hottest ingredients right now are various forms of turmeric, black garlic and ginger.” These are all clearly food ingredients, but people have been using them in the dietary supplement industry and delivering them as tabs, caps, gels and powders. Both Altaffer and Pond believe the trend toward supplement ingredients being used as food ingredients will strengthen.
Thanks to Mark Crowell for his report on this year’s SupplySide West. To learn more about his company, CuliNex, visit the website at http://www.culinex.biz/.