How can ingredients lists be made shorter summary
- Clean-label trend grows as consumers demand simpler and clearer ingredient lists
- Familiar ingredients like yeast extract help replace additives and improve taste
- Functional plant proteins reduce bitterness and cut need for masking agents
- Combining neutral-tasting and highly functional ingredients supports clean-label goals
- Manufacturers aim to deliver same texture and nutrition with fewer components
Clean-label has been one of the biggest trends of 2025. While many consumers want functional benefits from food, others are interested in shorter ingredients lists and clarity around nutritional value. This is particularly pertinent as ultra-processed foods dominate the spotlight.
In fact, consumers are increasingly distrustful of the food industry in general, in part because of long ingredients lists.
How are manufacturers responding to demand for clean label? Is it a threat, or an opportunity?
Embrace familiarity
One of the biggest reasons that clean-label ingredients are in demand is that consumers do not like long ingredients lists. Embracing familiarity is the best way to counter this, using ingredients that consumers already know and love.
This is certainly the strategy being taken by Ohly, an ingredients company and part of ABF Ingredients.
One of the benefits of the use of its yeast extract, explains Aaron Rasmussen, head of global applications at Ohly, is that “people are familiar with yeast”.
The yeast extract works in two ways, explains Rasmussen. Firstly, it can replace savoury ingredients that consumers don’t like.
Secondly, it can mask off-tastes from other clean-label ingredients, such as clean-label sweeteners, whose aftertaste often lingers longer than artificial sweeteners. According to Rasmussen, Ohly’s yeast extract can not only remove this aftertaste but improve the sweetness.
Fewer ingredients, more functions
The simplest way to respond to the clean label trend is to shorten ingredients lists.
One way in which products can be made more clean label is through carefully chosen ingredients. Additives often provide functionality, as well as mask off-tastes from ingredients. By choosing ingredients that already provide this, the use of additives can be avoided.
Ingredients company KWS Saat produces pea protein which, the company says, does not have a strong taste, meaning that masking agents are not as necessary.
Because the product has “less bitterness, less off-flavours, less beaniness”, explains Alexandra Molitor, commercial director at KWS Saat, such masking agents are not as necessary.
Different types of pea protein isolate can also provide the texture or functionality needed by the consumer, says Molitor, meaning that there is less need for additives to provide said characteristics.
“We support cleaner label, because you don’t have to add so many substances to get to the result that you want”.
Ingredients company Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) has a very similar strategy.
“The best way to create clean-label food products is by combining neutral-tasting and highly functional ingredients, facilitating formulation for customers,” explains a spokesperson for the company.
“To address this requirement, LDC’s plant protein solutions combine a neutral flavour profile with excellent solubility.”
The ingredients allow manufacturers to develop more clean-label products without sacrificing things such as mouthfeel, texture or nutritional value, the spokesperson says.
In the end, developing clean-label ingredients is about doing more with less: getting the same results from fewer ingredients and not turning away consumers.