Abstract
Consuming too much fat, sugar, and salt is associated with adverse health outcomes. Food reformulation is one possible strategy to enhance the food environment by improving the nutritional quality of commercial products. However, food reformulation faces many hindrances. One way to alleviate some of these hindrances is to embrace a multicriteria approach that is based on a market inventory. In this objective, additional sensory screening and water content analyses allow going beyond nutrition and composition information on the packaging. However, due to feasibility reasons for later in-depth analyses, it is necessary to work with several reduced and manageable products. To the best of the authors' knowledge, in the literature, there is no sample selection approach taking into account multiple criteria as a base for future food reformulation. The overall aim of this paper is to propose a method to select the best representative products from the market base, for future reformulation by going beyond nutrition and composition information on the packaging. This approach considered therefore nutrition, composition, economic, water content, and sensory information with the example of the cookies market. The first step is the creation of an extensive cookie database including sensory and water content information. In total 178 cookies among the French market were identified, then focus was placed on 62 chocolate chip cookies only. Sensory screening and water content analyses of all 62 products were conducted. The second step is to make an informed subset selection, thanks to a cluster analysis based on 11 nutrition, composition, and water content variables. A representative subset of 18 cookies could be derived from the obtained clusters. The representativity was evaluated with statistical uni- and multivariate analyses. Results showed a broad variety of chocolate chips cookies with a large nutritional, compositional, water content, and sensory differences. These results highlighted the first paths for future reformulation in this product category and showed the importance to include physical product information beyond the information on the packaging. This complete database on the selected cookies constituted a solid base for identifying future reformulation levers, in order to improve the nutritional quality and health.
Highlights
Food reformulation is an interesting lever to reduce overconsumed nutrients and to enhance our diet and health [1, 2]
This study focused on chocolate chip cookies only, it was shown that this product category provided large nutrition, composition, water content, and sensory diversity
We suggest that the water content provides important information when it comes to food reformulation among baked cereal products
Summary
Food reformulation is an interesting lever to reduce overconsumed nutrients (such as sugar, fat, and salt) and to enhance our diet and health [1, 2]. A recent study across 20 European countries showed that many packaged foods and drinks still have too high fat, sugar, and salt, as well as too low fiber content [4]. These results of concern are surprising as the link between overconsumed adverse nutrients and negative health outcomes is well known [5]. For example in the UK, most of the companies between 2015 and 2018 did not reach an overall sugar reduction of 5% among the top five product categories which contribute the most to the high sugar intake (biscuits, cereal bars, breakfast cereal, chocolate, and sugar confectionery, yogurts) among the UK population [6]
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