Know thy product

How to unleash the global market potential of soya drinks and coconut water

POPULAR beverages, like soya-based milk and natural coconut water, offer many opportunities for customers. However, entering new markets or expanding existing product lines to meet rising consumer demand is not without its challenges. it is only through market understanding and  innovation that customers can explore new beverage categories and successfully launch new products to benefit from their growth potential.

Another reason to expand market: recent news points to safe consumption of soy even by breast cancer patients. This has substantial impact on public health and will push demand even more
 
To help customers develop new products and expand abroad, Tetra Pak established product-specific Knowledge Centres back in the early 2000s. the first was the tetra Pak Soya Knowledge Centre. Based in Singapore and drawing on a network of 25 food technologists, marketing,  processing  and  packaging experts, it provides customers with a one-stop shop to develop, test and market innovative soya beverages. the recently opened Coconut Knowledge  Centre provides the same services for increasingly popular coconut water drinks.

Let’s take soya milk as an example.

The Chinese have been consuming soya for 5,000 years. Yet the popularity of soya-based products only really took off in Western countries in the last 20 years. This is thanks to an endorsement by the US Federal Drug administration (FDa) in 1999, which allowed a health claim on food labels stating that a diet with 25 grams of soya protein that is also low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. 

The challenge was that consumers in the West, who did not traditionally consume soya beverages, did not take to the ‘beany’ flavour of soya drinks very well. this presented a challenge to customers expanding into this drinks category in these markets.

This is where tetra Pak innovation played a crucial role. Working with the University of Illinois, the Soya Knowledge Centre developed an extraction technology that is able to deliver different intensities of flavours to suit consumer preferences in different markets. 

This varies from the traditional method whereby beans were soaked in hot water for a long period of time, resulting in the very strong soya bean taste which is preferred in Southeast asia. Our extraction technology continuously grinds the beans and simultaneously extracts the soya base under different temperature parameters. thus, we can create soya base with different flavour intensities. 

Whilst ensuring the right flavour intensity is important, we also need to ensure that the extraction of soya base is efficient. Therefore, we have also developed a two-step filtration system with enhanced grinders, resulting in yields of 75% compared to other methods that yield 65% at best. 

This technology, which we call the tetra alwin Soy system, puts the company at the forefront of soya beverage innovation and has helped our customers capture the growth potential of soya based products. In fact, in South and Southeast Asia, our customers’ soya milk sales have grown by an average of 21% per year in the last six years, since the Soya Knowledge Centre was established in Singapore. Globally, growth of soya milk in tetra Pak packages has grown by 6.2% annually during the same period and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CaGR) of 5.9% in the next three years.

Coconut water in aseptic packaging

The latest explosive trend in the beverage world is aseptically packed coconut water. This trend started in Brazil in the 1980s but saw tremendous growth in theNike Odyssey React