Guest blog: Confectionery sector set for continued growth with innovative ingredients at its heart
Guest blog: Confectionery sector specialist Geoffrey O’Sullivan offers his views on where the industry might be heading, as it continues on an upward growth curve.
The global confectionery market is projected to grow from £170.08 billion in 2022 to £201.30 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 3.8% in the forecast period. Many of our favourite confectionery products have been around longer than us:1905 Cadbury Dairy Milk, 1910 Cadbury Bournville Plain Chocolate, 1911 Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and Spearmint Gum (UK Release), 1915 Cadbury Milk Tray, 1932 Terry’s All Gold, 1932 Mars Bar 1933, Rowntree’s Black Magic 1935 Milky Way, and Kit Kat were introduced to the UK market.
Recent launches have been on the back of massive advances in engineering to make our old favourites in bites size pieces such as Celebrations by Mars in 1977 followed by Cadbury Heroes in 1999. Formulations are mostly unchanged, and engineering can only contribute so much towards new product development, so what will happen in the future?
Indulgent luxury products will always be here, but the UK government (October 2022) is introducing health measures to limit sugars, saturated fat, and sodium whilst encouraging the inclusion of fibre, fruits & nuts, and protein. Ingredients have advanced in recent years enabling the development of healthier products.
We are seeing smaller manufacturers such as Pri’s Puddings that launched the “UK’s First HFSS Compliant Confectionery Brand” in March 2022 taking advantage of this new trend. Cross over products that have evolved from traditional Mochi Japanese confectionery are a growing market with launches in the ice-cream category “Little Moons” 2010 with ambient stable products to follow from other manufactures.
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