Trends in Candies - Vitamins, Minerals, and Botanicals Oh My!
With the Halloween recently kicking off the holiday season, we all know what that means—friends, family, traveling, but also holiday spirit and full bellies with tasty food and sweets! With all the sweet treats around, what if we can now get more than a sugar rush from holiday treats?
A lot of dietary supplements available now are in the form of gummies or chews, so many people look forward to getting their daily dose of vitamins and minerals. This isn't a new idea, as the first gummy vitamins hit the marketplace in the late 1990s. In recent years, the dietary supplement industry has shown a newer trend of adding vitamins and minerals in other candies, too.
The Market for Chocolatey Supplements
The idea behind gummy multivitamins is to quench the consumer's sweet cravings while providing the daily vitamin and mineral requirements. However, gummies and chews may not be enough for many people. As a result, consumers still reach for something sweeter after taking their gummy vitamins (Nutrition Insight, 2020).
Since 2015, the market for chocolatey supplements and functional chocolate has been on the rise. Several chocolate producers started adding vitamin- and mineral-infused chocolates to their growing portfolio of products. For instance, M&M's released their Hi-Protein chocolate and peanut bars in 2020.
Overall, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for supplements with chocolate flavor was 14% from 2015 to 2019. During that period, the most popular subcategories of chocolate-flavored supplements were vitamins and minerals, probiotics, botanicals, with supplements for hair, skin, and nails experiencing the fastest growth with a 78% CAGR (Nutrition Insight, 2020).
What Functional Ingredients Can You Add to Chocolates?
Chocolate is a good vehicle for functional ingredients as the aroma and flavor of chocolate can mask the unappetizing taste of some vitamins and minerals. However, it can pose a challenge when it comes to testing your finished products and verifying your label claims. You will want to make sure you have validated methods for testing potency in your products.
Energy-Boosting Vitamins
Adding energy-boosting ingredients to chocolate has been growing each year. Producers have started adding energy-boosting ingredients—such as caffeine, B-vitamins, guarana extracts, and botanicals—in chocolate products. Many of these products are often targeted to athletes, fitness enthusiasts, or individuals who need a quick and tasty pick-me-up during the day.
Probiotics and Prebiotics
Chocolates can be a good vehicle for encapsulated probiotics as they maintain the stability of probiotics through a low moisture system. The most common probiotic organisms used in this process are Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus rhamnosus. To create functional chocolates with probiotic organisms, the bacterial strains are microencapsulated via spray-drying. Then, they are added to milk chocolate pellets with 33% cocoa. The microencapsulation process and the low-moisture content of chocolate keep the probiotic bacteria viable so they can perform their function in the gut.
Some companies have also added prebiotics into their formulations. Prebiotics are compounds that act as an energy source for probiotic bacteria to grow. The addition of prebiotics in products has been found to help extend the life of probiotic bacteria.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Plant Sterols
Aside from probiotic bacteria, chocolates may also be a great vessel for unsaturated fats such as omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Research suggests using functional chocolate to deliver fish oil as it can help mask the flavor and can be emulsified well in the matrix.
Phytosterols, plant sterols that maintain blood cholesterol levels, are also becoming a common ingredient of functional chocolates. These plant sterols are approved by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart diseases. In fact, one study funded by Mars suggested that its sterol-infused CocoVia chocolate bars can lower cholesterol by 2% and low-density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol) by 5.3% after an eight-week trial.
Testing for Functional Ingredients in Chocolates
Dietary Supplement and Functional Food companies can appeal to consumers with products that combine function and flavor—and capitalize on the fast-growing growing functional chocolate trend. However, chocolate is one of the more difficult food matrices to test, so having an expert testing partner is a must.
Eurofins employs more than 200,000 reliable analytical methods for characterizing safety, purity, composition, quality, the origin of food products, and ingredients of your food. To learn about the functional ingredients in your chocolate supplements, contact your local Eurofins lab today.
