Food product innovations with grain legumes: which products for which markets?
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Slides presented during " The Diversity of end uses for Legumes"
Webinar 4: European legumes in transition 27th April 2021
"Food product innovations with grain legumes: which products for which markets?"
- Global overview from MINTEL-GNPD 2010-2019 data
We know very little on food product innovations with pulses or soya on markets, and especially in Europe. The Mintel Global New Food Database was used to identify all new food product innovations, launched between January 2010 and January 2020 in the world, that contain pulses and soya, in order to compare the market dynamics of these two main groups of legume species.
We categorized them according to their market positions and identified the species used in the ingredients. To do so, original methods based on automatic language processing were developed. Overall, the food product innovations containing soya are 4 times much more numerous than ones containing pulses at global scale, and 2 times much more important at European scale. The main pulses more and more used in food innovations are respectively chickpeas, lentils and peas in Europe. Their use as fractionated ingredients is very small compared to soya market. Many claims are associated with these food innovation products with rising interest in environmental sustainability and health compared to the claims observed on American market. Market position towards meat-less foods is not so much used by pulses compared with soya, but it increased over last years. For both, the bakery sector remains a strategic market. We noted also differences between countries and, finally, a low diversity of pulses species used.
The fact that most of the new products currently released onto the European market which contain legume ingredients tend to be with soya, confirms a strong path dependency: crops having benefited from higher investments by the past are currently more and more developed and gained more market shares. Only a strong public policy could reverse lock-in reinforcement that hampers higher legumes diversification.
Presented by: Tristan SALORD - UMR AGIR, INRAE-Occitanie Toulouse, France
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