NEW ZEALAND – Dairy giant Fonterra is stepping up its innovation and science spending to move its milk into higher-value specialty nutrition products as it looks for ways to increase profit in an environment where milk volumes are no longer increasing.
The New Zealand multinational cooperative has launched its new B2B brand called Nutiani which will see the use of its intellectual property and research to help its business customers develop products in areas such as nutritional supplements, sports nutrition, medical nutrition, and generic health and wellness.
The brand will offer powders and drinks with attributes such as helping to mitigate stress, improving mobility, and managing body weight.
Fonterra expects North America, North Asia, China, and Southeast Asia would be big markets for Nutiani.
Chief innovation and brand officer Komal Mistry-Mehta said: “Fonterra’s deep expertise in nutrition science gives us an incredible advantage here.”
We will use Fonterra’s existing expertise in nutrition science to develop targeted solutions while opening up opportunities for strategic partnerships to deliver access to new markets and consumers.”
The co-operative is targeting the US$66 billion (NZ$108b) global market for physical, mental, and inner wellbeing nutrition which is growing at 6% per year, and the US$50b medical nutrition market which is growing at a 5% annual pace, Stuff website reports.
According to Research and Markets, the global health and wellness market reached a value of US$ 3,294 Billion in 2021. And looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach US$ 4,277 Billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.2% during 2022-2027.
Mistry-Mehta explained that Fonterra’s customers were facing growing pressure to accelerate their innovation pipeline in response to consumer demand and were looking for partners to help them identify and develop new products.
Four in five consumers had become more health conscious since the Covid-19 pandemic, she said, citing Euromonitor research.
The research showed that 96% of consumers actively managed their well-being, with more than half of these consciously managing their diet to improve their well-being.
“There’s no doubt that people are paying more attention to wellbeing and managing it through diet offering a huge potential for doing business,” she said.
The dairy industry is progressing in sports nutrition, as industry players recently highlighted that protein bars are the most popular dairy performance snacks.
Additional recent innovations from the company include using VitaKey’s space-ready technology to design dairy products with the help of probiotic strains.
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