Wellness Foods: Healthy Beverages offer Health in a Can - Food Processing

Wellness Foods: Healthy Beverages offer Health in a Can - Food Processing


Consumers are guzzling antioxidants, fruits & vegetables and other good-for-you ingredients – but formulation hurdles remain.

Building healthier beverages once was a matter of swapping sugar for cyclamates or saccharine and then developing a new marketing campaign. For decades the only thing that changed in that paradigm was the name of the substitute sweeteners — cyclamates were banned, saccharine had its troubles, so aspartame – with or without acesulfame K – and to some extent sucralose took over as the zero-cal options.

Then the idea of energy drinks hit with a jolt. Jolt Cola, that is. And the idea that a cold beverage could do more than slake thirst flung open the doors to using liquid refreshment as a vehicle to more energy or a “trimmer, slimmer, better you.”

On the heels of energy — first from ginseng and caffeine, then from such exotic botanicals as yerba maté and guarana — came concoctions with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other nutraceuticals.

Today’s healthy beverage is built with any of several different ingredient aspects in mind — sweeteners, vitamins/minerals, natural ingredients (i.e., naturally derived flavors and colors), antioxidants and other bioactive compounds — and more often than not a combination of several of these. The goals have expanded too, to target not just weight control and energy needs but any number of different conditions, including cognition, mental health, digestive health and even social and ecological health.