PowCow, launched in January 2016, is a high-protein, reduced sugar, frozen yogurt which is made of Greek strained yogurt. With the same creamy, dairy texture like normal ice cream, it contains less than half the sugar and fat.
Challenges of product development
“One of the biggest challenges starting of was the cost of having to do laboratory analysis on samples. Particularly when you go through so many reiterations of the product all the time to make sure it tastes amazing and have to do the nutritionals from scratch every time, it would cost the business an awful lot of money from the start. Using nutrition analysis software is the perfect solution. It allows us to be more flexible with our development and recipes changes whilst looking once again at nutrition because this was something really important to us from the get go.”
Finding the right solution
“Before learning about Nutritics at ISENC, I was aware of other systems but they didn’t offer the flexibility and were quite expensive to use. Nutritics was very good for allowing me to see the nutritionals within regulation to make certain claims.
“When evaluating options, claims and the flexibility to change ingredients easily and make comparisons to previous iterations of the recipes stood out.
“The ease of adding in your own foods, which used to be very complex in other systems, was a key selling point as well as being able to tweak the quantities of certain ingredients very quickly, getting instant results and then being able to compare them all for claims.”
Other selling points for implementing Nutritics were:
- Automatically calculated nutrition and health claims
- Weight change factor function and
- EU rounding rules.
Gaining a competitive edge with health claims
“The claims piece allows us to put them on front-of-pack. As we have a high-in-protein claim, a low-in-sugar claim and high-in-fiber claim, these were key selling points in terms of pushing our product differentiation. A lot of the more niche shops, for example the health food stores, have specifically taken us on because of the claims on front-of-pack.
“With health claims being our main selling feature, targeting our core target market, using Nutritics led to 25% increase in our overall sales."
Speeding up product development
“Our competitive advantage is we can now reiterate our products quickly and come up with new formulas better.
“Nutritics does a lot for reformulation. We recently brought out a salted caramel product, which went through reiterations of 15 different recipes. When doing the tastings at a third-party RND site, it was great having Nutritics in front of us to say “ok, we are way above or way below the sugar or protein content that we need or change the milk protein concentrate to 10% versus the 12% you gave us here”.
Similarly, noticing ”Oh, the sweetness needs to be a little bit more”, we would go back onto Nutritics and increase the sweetness by 2-3%. We then could see the impact that was having on claims, on the nutrition on back-of-pack and therefore make a decision on the best version of the product.
“You could easily say, using Nutritics sped up getting our product to market by at least six months, to be honest. Every time you have to send a sample to the lab, it takes forever to come back, it is about two or three weeks downtime every time. With Nutritics, however, you can literally taste your product, change it and get it into production again.
“This made it easy to work with the food technologist and really sped things up. Normally, their life span of the product once they start working on it, they say to give it at least 12 months but we actually got it done in at least six months.
“Nutritics is really easy to use, and you can download it in so many formats, like the csv files. As the reports were very easy to share with the rest of our product development team, it really did help to make the whole team understand why I was, for example, telling them to take out sugar because they would say “no it wouldn’t taste sweet enough” all the time but at least with Nutritics I was able to go “no, no, we need to take it down to this percentage in order to make claims on the pack”. This is where the brand sits, so I think it helped to get everybody on board in the team and getting the product we wanted.”
Increasing the product range
“Within the next 12 months, we are looking at creating a further range of products, coming out with a range of ice cream products but also diversifying potentially the format of the product so it’s not just tubs. We may look into doing other stuff within the frozen category like novelties, for example, on-sticks or other formats, and also potentially expanding out into other sectors. We may look at healthy yogurts as well to increase our brand range across the supermarket and not just be in the freezer aisle. Nutritics will help with that and get us to the market in six months quicker.”
Nutritics meets all needs for high level product development and recipe analysis. Just sign up for your free trial to give it a try. It is that simple!
PowCow is available in Lidl, nationwide, in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. Why not treat yourself to some of its deliciousness?