From yoghurts full of friendly bugs to calcium-enriched orange juice, functional foods are here to stay. To make them pay, however, manufacturers are beginning to realise that they can’t just target those of us who know our probiotics from our prebiotics. All of us have to buy into it.
As exclusive research conducted by HI Europe for Food Manufacture reveals, an in-depth understanding of gut microflora is no longer a pre-requisite for buying ‘nutritional’ foods. Manufacturers are addressing a more general anxiety about health and lifestyle, and consumers are buying into it in droves.In an ideal world, say Unilever and others, we wouldn’t need to worry about our bacteria, friendly or hostile, because we’d all be eating a healthy diet and getting plenty of exercise. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so we’re offering you the next best thing, a convenient, pre-packaged solution to assuage your guilt.
What might surprise the marketers, however, is that while affluent consumers are more willing to pay extra for functional foods, they are not the only ones worth targeting, with more people in social group DE (48%) believing that they play an important role in maintaining everyday good health, compared to 38% of those in social group AB.
The perception that only older people are interested in functional foods is also challenged by our survey, with more than a quarter of 16-24 year olds looking out for products to help them maintain healthy bones, compared to just 14-17% of 25 to 54 year olds.
Perhaps less surprising is the gender divide, with just 25% of men prepared to pay extra for functional foods, compared to almost a third (32%) of women. Overall, the results are very encouraging for manufacturers, and suggest that functional foods are now firmly in the mainstream, says HI Europe’s Caroline North. “Nearly half of women (48%) and a third of men (35%), see these foods as playing an important role in everyday good health.”