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AS CONSUMER demands continue to rapidly evolve, China's food and beverage industry is experiencing unprecedented transformation. Innovations in healthy product formulations, eco-friendly packaging, rigorous safety testing and intelligent manufacturing processes are changing the industry landscape. This is apparent in the selection for the 2024 Food and Beverage Industry - Ringier Technology Innovation Awards.
The awards program which marks its 18th year, recognizes companies and their products that have made outstanding contributions to F&B and technologies, and encourages more companies to invest in technological innovation. This year, 82 products/technologies from 60 companies entered the final judging and votation for the following categories:
Innovative Product of the Year (End Product)
Food and Beverage Ingredients
Food and Beverage Packaging Technology
Food and Beverage Processing and Automation/Intelligent Manufacturing
The judging criteria were based on four aspects: safety, efficacy/performance, cost-effectiveness and green/sustainability. After the online voting and expert review, 43 products from 40 companies emerged as front-runners. The following products emerged as the winners, providing a solid foundation for the industry's future direction.
Seven products awarded Ringier's "Innovative Product of the Year", represented the best response to evolving consumer preferences. Among them is INDIE PURE’s boomboom 200 dark choc which is a weight management product that utilizes "black technology" based on gastric capacity principles, explains the company. Its key component, "satiety particles”, not only polymerize and absorb sugars and fats but also aids in expelling body heat, thus simplifying the challenge of weight management.
From INDIE PURE, boomboom 200 dark choc helps polymerize and absorb sugars and fats and expel body heat, to simplify weight management.
FOSUN JOYGO's PURMEO MagenVital is a probiotic powder created in response to consumers' needs for "stomach nourishing and anti-ghost", which contains patented ingredients Lactobacillus reuteri, zinc carnosine and glutamine combined using microencapsulation technology, which can effectively strengthen the function of nourishing the stomach.
The Microecological Nervonic Acid Complex Peptide Drink launched by HANGZHOU SANMOJIE BRAND MANAGEMENT focuses on brain health. This product contains fish oil DHA, nervonic acid, and phosphatidylserine to protect neurons all-round. It is made using nanoemulsion preparation technology and blood-brain barrier penetration technology, which increases nutrient absorption rate by over 10-fold.
A product for to improve brain health, Microecological Nervonic Acid Complex Peptide Drink from HANGZHOU SANMOJIE contains fish oil DHA, nervonic acid, and phosphatidylserine
List of Winners - Innovation Product of the Year
Ingredients
The competition in the "Food & Beverage Ingredients" segment, particularly within the "Functional Ingredients" category, is extremely intense. The jurors picked 20 winners including products from GELITA, Zymebase, SYNBIOTECH Biotechnology, Kedar/WEDAR, Bloomage Biotechnology, and Shanghai Xier Health which demonstrated innovation in sports nutrition, weight control, immunity enhancement, healthy ageing, beauty, and probiotics.
GELITA's PeptENDURE® is the first protein clinically proven to improve exercise endurance performance, as a functional short-chain amino acid product simply hydrolyzed from natural collagen. Clinical studies have shown that the product can increase exercise speed by 14%
.
The LDL557 probiotic functional fermentation broth of SYNBIOTECH Biotechnology can enhance immunity and alleviate joint damage, providing a new non-drug treatment for patients with joint inflammation.
Probi's Probi® Sensia, which also focuses on the efficacy of probiotic segmentation, is clinically proven to improve cognition, mood and sleep through the gut-brain axis to support overall mental health.
List of Winners - Food & Beverage Ingredients
Packaging
In packaging, sustainability, energy conservation, and material consumption reduction are the main themes of development. Five technologies stood out. Among the winners are the PLU 40 Pulp Lamination Unit launched by ILLIG Haining which can laminate pulp molded parts with extremely thin plastic film to achieve sustainable packaging production.
PLU 40 Pulp Lamination unit
Sidel's Super Venting technology not only reduces blowing pressure and improves bottle forming, but reduces the base weight through the combination of its patented Starlite base technology, all of which deliver significant environmental and economic benefits.
List of Winners - Packaging, Processing and Automation
Now with the rapid development of Industry 4.0 and the changes in the production needs of brand owners, food and beverage production equipment tends to be modular, multi-functional, automated and intelligent.
The winning products perfectly illustrate this trend in the category, Food & Beverage Processing & Automation/Smart Manufacturing. For example, MULTIVAC's new compact bread line, PROGRESSA bread, is capable of producing bakery products with a moisture content of up to 80%. What's more, this production line enables small and medium-volume production customers to achieve industrial-grade processing quality and product variety.
PROGRESSA bread, a compact bread line from MULTIVAC
GEA's third-generation double spiral oven, the GEA CookStar Turbo 1000 uses pressurized impingement air to quickly dry the surface of the food product and improve product crispness. In terms of performance, it can shorten baking time, increase yield, and achieve energy savings and emission reductions.
The FlexDrink (Flexible Production System for Drink) from Siemens helps beverage companies quickly and frequently switch processes at the optimal cost through the standardization of control programs and operation interfaces, the creation and management of process recipes, etc., to cope with the rapidly changing market demand.
Thanks to the winners and all participants of the Ringier Technology Innovation Awards for their ongoing research and development, which paves the way for new opportunities in the future of the industry.
2024 Expert Jury (in no particular order)
Chen Guangxue
Professor, South China University of Technology
Foreign member of the Russian Academy of Engineering
Chen Junjiang
General Director of R&D Center
Want Want Group
Chen Yourong
Member of the Expert Committee of Shanghai Food Association
Executive Director of Probiotics Branch of Chinese Society of Food Science and Technology
Consultant of the Microecology Branch of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association
Eric Du, MD
Chief Scientist of Science and Technology Innovation Center
Amway (China) R&D Center
Ding Shaohui
Deputy Secretary-General of China Food and Packaging Machinery Industry Association
Secretary-General of the Standardization Technical Committee of China Food and Packaging Machinery Industry Association
Yu Peng, Senior Engineer
Director of the Dairy Nutrition and Health Research Center
Bright Dairy Research Institute
Peng Yuan, Ph.D
Deputy Director of the Food Engineering R&D Department of China Food and Fermentation Industry Research Institute
Academic leader of Beijing Key Laboratory of Functional Staple Food Creation and Nutritional Intervention for Chronic Diseases; Secretary-General of the Research Committee of Dietary Ingredients and Medicinal Materials of the Chinese Medicinal Diet Research Association
Deputy Secretary-General of China Clinical Nutrition Industry Innovation Alliance
Expert in the review of the food and fermentation industry
