FMCG Innovations and Trends by Sophia Nadur

It’s #WorldObesityDay today. 2/3 of Britons are overweight or obese, up from 1/2 just 20 years ago. I am one of those statistics but am doing my best to change things, for me and for communities here and abroad. A research physician & I invested our life savings to develop a truly healthier drink to help wean us off our sugar habit. It’s better than virtually all of the new drinks offered by big companies to retailers.  WATCH this 1 min World Obesity Day VIDEO However, a big UK supermarket told us yesterday that unless we spent £££££s with them, we would not be stocked. Despite all the promises made to be more responsible, retailers are continuing to fill shelves with certain food & drink, simply because big companies have deeper pockets. These restrictive practices happen not just in the UK but all over the world.  This plea is not about a drink I want to promote. There will be other startups with better products too. How much money do retailers, manufactu...

My mother has Type 2 Diabetes. Like 20 million Brits, I am at risk to get it too if I don't lose weight and/or change what I eat and drink. But changing behaviour is really hard.  We all want that healthier food and drink to look good and taste good too. However, what we're seeing on store shelves are lots of drinks  being reformulated to take all/some sugar out and put instead lots of aspartame, sucralose and weird ingredients in that actually none of us want or need in our diet. We also see lots of healthier drinks are quite expensive and, even though health should have no price attached to it, we still have very tight wallets so we do want healthier food drink to be available at an accessible price. So the real " sweet spot " - the "holy grail" - is a drink that is  nutritionally sound, naturally functional and available at an affordable price. Like Tg green tea .  A drink that was inspired by ancient Chinese...

I am pleased to be presenting at the Food Vision Asia conference in Singapore 26th April 2017, on the topic of "East meets West meets East. Tapping plant wellness for new beverage segments" which will also showcase Tg green teas  - considered a leading beverage platform for translating ancient TCM wellness traditions into mass-market drinks. East meets West meets East. Tapping plant wellness for new beverage segments People instinctively know the value of consuming plant-based food and drink; they feel it’s good for their health and for the planet, its animals, climate and the environment.  In recent years, however, increased availability of highly processed products, largely marketed by Western companies, has broken the connection with indigenous plant-based diets for Asia’s millennial consumers.  At the same time, on the other side of the world the West is experiencing a fundamental consumer shift towards vegetarian, vegan and other plant-based formulations. S...

"Consumers want to eat more healthfully, but they can't do it alone. They need help from food & drink manufacturers to formulate products with good-for-you ingredients. They need help from retailers to stock right-priced healthful assortments."  Nielsen 2016 Global Health and Ingredient Sentiment Survey. In North America, " Groundhog Day " is the day when the groundhog is said to come out of its burrow at the end of hibernation. If the animal sees its shadow—i.e. if the weather is sunny—it goes back into its hole, which signals 6 weeks more of winter weather. If it's cloudy and he doesn't see his shadow, spring is not far away! "Groundhog Day" has another, more colloquial, meaning. When someone says " It's like Groundhog Day " today, they mean the day is one in which people say the same things and do the same things over and over. I had a " Groundhog Day " moment earlier this week while waiting on a train ...

Today, store shelves are filled with drinks that entice us with sugar and empty calories.  Even drinks that claim to be good for us are all too often high in sugar or filled with artificial ingredients.  Worse, many “new age” drinks come from unfamiliar and unsustainable sources.  And as for the drinks that really are healthy? Sadly, many of them do not taste great. This is what drove Hua & I to create Tg green teas in London, in 2015.  With our own savings, a few grants and buckets of passion, knowledge and tenacity, we developed a range of drinks that are tasty and low in sugar, so low in sugar that each drink wears proudly a "green" nutritional traffic light.  We also based our drinks on green tea, a leaf that has been refreshing and nourishing folks for thousands of years. It's no surprise I guess that we have already won a number of UK & international innovation, quality, and design awards for our drink concept.  Awards are ni...

There has been a lot of discussion, especially in the past couple of years, about the amount of sugar we’re consuming as a nation - especially from soft drinks. That’s actually what got Sophia, my co-founder, and me wanting to develop the  Iced Tg  range. Our Tg green teas  do contain added sugar . In total,  less than 2 teaspoons  of it per bottle but, before you click the “delete Tg from consideration” button, give us  2 minutes ! Just how much sugar is in  my drink ? Take a bottle of your favourite soft drink and look closely at the  nutritional table  on the back of the pack. Look closely at the number in grams of sugar that is in the drink in your hand. The vast majority of drinks contain much more than  7g of sugar  per bottle and many of them you’d never expect are loaded with 4 or more teaspoons of sugar! Look carefully because even a drink that has a flash on front of pack  “No added sugar”  can pack...