The IFE 2017 at the ExCel Arena in Docklands, London was the biggest to date and perhaps one of the best showcases for beverages in the United Kingdom, certainly this year.
Wandering the many exhibitors, we were able to examine and assess a number of new ideas offered up by the newbies and the more established. Soft drinks have always been ripe for innovation and a few stand out and one of the recent trends is the development of cold pressed drinks. These are products processed using high pressure processing and they have been gaining considerable interest because they are do not rely on thermal heat treatment to stabilise the product.
Beeyond Water showed a couple of products which make use of the healthy properties of honey as their name suggests as part of the ingredient mix. Most of their products rely on cold press technology or high pressure processing to treat the product. The examples on show would exploit aseptic processing as they were employing the very handy 330ml Tetra Prisma pack. Two products, a ‘honey and cranberry water’ and a ‘herbs and spice infused water’ were on show. The latter contains chrysanthemum and cinnamon as well as honey and had a very distinctive, slightly bitter herbal note on top of the warmth contributed by the honey. Unlike the cranberry variant which offers some acid indicative of a juice, both are generally treated as low in acidity.
A fascinating combination of fruit and vegetable juices was to be found at the Juice A Day stand where a number of cold pressed juices in PET bottles were found. If you like variants like watermelon with strawberry, grapefruit/orange/pineapple, or pineapple with cucumber then this business is presenting a number of products in this genre.
Apples are always popular. Appley Goodness based in the Netherlands offer glass bottles of pure apple juice, pure apple and orange juice, and pure apple and blackcurrant juice.
We looked at Birch Water when we wrote about the products last year from Amazing Forest (see the earlier article). For IFE 2017, Amazing Forest not only offer the raw, natural organic birch water, but also juice variants using bilberry, lingonberry or cranberry. These are berry fruits with strong nutritional health claims and lend a strong flavoursome berry lift to the birch water. We know birch water contains natural sweetener, xylitol and the important element manganese.
Kombucha an ancient fermented form of sweet black tea from China contains a remarkable array of exotic beneficial bacteria. It is loaded with vitamins, minerals and various proteins too. In its own right it has strong claims to be a very healthy drink given it is known as the ‘tea of Immortality’. Equinox offer organic Chun Mee green tea with their own version of a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast or SCOBY as it’s known in the press. It has a taste somewhere between champagne and cider. As well as the soft tart notes of the ‘original’ there are variants laced with ginger to lend spicy heat, a raspberry and elderflower version and wild berry.
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