Firms not making fast buck from obesity crisis

While the commercial pressure to make a fast buck out of the obesity crisis has spawned a whole swathe of hunger-busting ingredients, products containing them have struggled to make headway, said exhibitors. Uncertainty over health claims approvals and a reluctance to invest in anything risky in the current economic climate was also compounding the problem.

Lipid Nutrition, which has been heavily promoting its PinnoThin appetite suppressant from Korean pine nut oil since its launch in 2005, admitted sales had not set the world on fire, despite lots of good PR and new easier-to-use formulations.

“We’ve got new products using PinnoThin in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Eastern Europe, but things are moving more slowly than we would like,”​ said European marketing manager Erik Bakkers.

“It’s still very, very new and getting the right product with the right message at the right price is hard.”​ Chocolate containing PinnoThin under the Naturally Gorgeous brand is still on the UK market, but the smoothies had been dropped, he revealed.

Even DSM, which supplies Fabuless - the star ingredient in Campina’s successful Optimel and Optiwell Control drinks, admitted that these products were struggling to retain their early momentum with volumes dropping off after a promising start. “We’ve got lots of new launches in the pipeline, but it is hard to keep up the momentum for products post launch without very large promotional budgets,”​ said a spokesman.

Meanwhile, Phytopharm, which had been working with Unilever to develop products containing hunger-busting succulent hoodia gordonii, is still looking for a food industry partner following the collapse of their multimillion-pound partnership last year.

The recent demise of several products claiming to help regulate the appetite - notably Unilever’s Hunger Shots (withdrawn last November) - also suggested that translating satiety into sales might be tougher than many firms had originally anticipated, said Danisco Sweeteners scientific and regulatory affairs boss Dr Julian Stowell.

Getting the marketing right​

Getting the marketing and the application right was therefore key, said Stowell, who was presenting a paper on weight management at the Vitafoods conference. “Maybe Hunger Shots could have been a success if consumers knew how to use the products.”​

The fact that Danone had relaunched Shape Lasting Satisfaction yoghurts (containing guar gum and milk proteins) with a new ‘feel fuller for longer’ message also suggested it had not got the message right first time round, he said. However, the fact that it had not simply been withdrawn was probably a good sign.

As for health claims about satiety, it was impossible to predict how many of the 45 submitted might be approved under the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation, said Stowell. However, it was likely that generic claims about fibres or proteins would struggle, he predicted.