In a society always more focused on making healthy choices with regards to food and drink, I often discover new terms and new ways to define a certain category of products or some new variants. More and more often, for example, I’ve heard experts talking about “hybrid vegetable products”, but what exactly are they?

Everyone is caring for their wellbeing. Everyone seems to be focused on having a healthier diet. Many in the last 5 years have been evaluating or just decided to have more salutary eating habits starting from introducing more vegetables in their diet and decreasing their meat consumption. In this scenario “hybrid vegetable products” made their entrance some years ago.

Put simply, the hybrid vegetables products are a variety of food that include processed vegetable as ingredients while leaving out other traditionally used components of the recipe. While products like cauliflower rice, courgette spaghetti and vegetable chips are essentially innovative in the way people present and consume a pure vegetable, in this case products such as pizza, pasta and rice in particular are modified in a way that enrich their content with vegetables and legumes decreasing the “less-good-for-you” ingredients [i.e. white flour or white rice]: the new product contains a percentage of vegetables, but it is still the original product at the basis. One of many examples is when pasta is produced using chickpeas in place of durum wheat flour.

Hybrid vegetable products answer the consumers’ desire to eat what you have in the past together with the need for healthier but convenient food. Other than that, in this moment, comparing the price of a “normal” product in a certain category with the corresponding hybrid one, it appears clear that the second is usually priced at a premium, up to three or four times higher than the regular counterpart.

If you are interested in finding out other innovation trends related to your market, or you are looking for better understanding of your sector and trends with a market analysis, I would love to hear from you.

[via: Nielsen]

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