Making products healthier

One outcome of COVID-19 is that consumers are more conscious of health and hygiene. What does this mean for producers? 

During COVID-19, we’ve understandably seen an increased awareness of product safety with consumer concerns focused firmly on hygiene and food safety. But it’s also led to a heightened awareness around health, wellbeing and immunity. It’s been well reported how packaged foods and shelf-stable products soared during the lockdown and this demand for safe and trusted products is expected to continue. And with consumers more aware of health and diets, they’re looking to producers to offer products with more natural ingredients and clear health claims.

So what kind of products are consumers looking for as a result of growing concerns around health and wellbeing?

In a nutshell, consumers are increasingly looking for functional and nutrient-rich products with proven health benefits. When looking into current trends and research, we’re seeing that many consumers, particularly millennials, think products with fewer ingredients are healthier. They also want whole food ingredients like real fruit pieces when snacking. And they’re actively using food and drink products to improve their health. We’re also seeing growing interest around immune health snacks and drinks promoting immune health that are backed by science.

How can producers respond quickly and easily to the demand for healthy and nutritionally valuable products?

Customers of SIG can take advantage of our unique filling capabilities, which enable you to offer safe, nutritional and quality products across all segment types. With our ground-breaking drinksplus technology, for example, you can fill a wide range of liquids with different viscosity levels and particulates, such as fruit, vegetables or cereal grains. This means you can create everything from healthy, premium fruit juices to drinkable milk snacks and more, so you can easily answer the growing dietary and wellbeing demands of consumers.

What makes SIG’s drinksplus and particulate technology unique compared to other solutions?

With our drinksplus concept, an aseptically filled carton product can contain up to 10% particulate content with food pieces up to 6x6x6mm in size. This means you can easily open up new product categories that satisfy the demand for healthy, nutrient-dense products. The solution is possible thanks to our advantageous sleeve system. Unlike other systems, SIG cartons are delivered as flat-packed sleeves with the long side already hygienically sealed. Each sleeve is individually shaped, sterilised and filled at a customer’s premises using our filling machines. After filling, the carton pack is ultrasonically sealed above the filling level – not through the product. This prevents pieces of food or fibres from getting trapped in the sealed seam and causing leakages or contamination. And it guarantees the aseptic safety of the product, helping retain vitamins and nutrients.

How exactly can this sleeve system help producers to be fast, resilient and adaptable in the future?

Traditional wisdom dictates that when flexibility in your assets goes up, speed and efficiency will go down and vice versa. But the key is to ensure both aspects can increase. Flexibility and efficiency means having the right production and filling setup in place with the fastest possible change-over times for formats, volumes and designs, together with filling machines that can handle multiple product variants. And this is precisely what we offer at SIG – high flexibility and high speed. So you can not only meet your current product needs. You can quickly react to changing consumer demands and continually meet the growing health trend.

Scaling up sustainability

In addition to health and hygiene, another impact of COVID-19 is that we can expect to see a greater commitment from consumers to purchase from responsible companies. Check out part three in our Flexible for the Future series when we’ll look at how producers can scale up their sustainability efforts – fast and flexibly.

Get every story in the series sent straight to your inbox. Subscribe to the SIGnals Update, our exclusive bi-weekly newsletter.