For youngsters who don’t like milk, Arla Foods Ingredients can provide nutrition that appeals
There comes a time in many young lives when milk is out and sugary soft drinks are in. It’s the time when healthy childhood habits are given up and replaced by a diet with an inferior nutritional profile often at a critical stage in a young person’s growth and development
Arla Foods Ingredients has developed a series of opportunities to satisfy the trend and still ensure young people get the nutrition they need. As a result, manufacturers can now produce clear beverages with the taste and mouthfeel of traditional soft drinks but the nutritional content of milk. The answer is ultra-purified milk proteins.
Project leader Finn Jacobsen explains: We can manufacture transparent drinks almost right across the pH spectrum. What’s more, we can make them entirely without refined sugar.
Beverages need to be clear to encourage young people to drink them. Today soft drinks containing more than 10% refined sugar are a major contributor to obesity. Using milk protein, it is possible to achieve the same mouthfeel as sugar without excess energy being stored as fat.

Unique nutritional value
The project team has focused on solutions based on whey, due to the unique composition of amino acids that gives it the highest nutritional value of all protein sources. At the same time, their goal has been to create powder proteins with top technical functionality in terms of flowability, solubility and dispersability.
Whey protein isolate (WPI) is one such product. Manufactured with the help of Arla Foods Ingredients’ own technology, WPI contains no milk fat - an essential factor when securing beverage clarity. Tests have proven it a particularly ideal choice for acidic beverages with a pH below three, similar to Cola or juice. In such applications, manufacturers can not only offer consumers the benefit of nutritional protein but also a high level of calcium.
For high pH beverages with a less acidic flavour profile, Arla Foods Ingredients has come up with a successful concept containing 3.5% protein - equivalent to that of milk. The whey protein hydrolysates (WPH) used for this solution are, like WPI, free of milk fat and lactose. A WPH-based lemonade presented at IFT 2005 in New Orleans was warmly received.

As hydrolysates tend to have a bitter taste, they are particularly useful in citrus-flavoured beverages - although flavours with a bitter-masking effect are also highly suitable, says Finn Jacobsen.

Wider potential
The market potential for clear protein beverages is not only restricted to the youth market. The markets for sports, energy and nutraceutical beverages also have great interest in this high clarity source of nutrition. Here, the active peptide caseinoglycomacropeptide (CGMP) comes into the picture.
Known to promote satiety, CGMP is a valuable ingredient in weight management diets. But ongoing development work by the clear beverage team has revealed more possibilities with CGMP, noticeably in the Japanese concept known as almost water. Current research suggests that it has both antiviral and antimicrobial properties.
Countering obesity, lowering blood cholesterol levels and balancing the diets of consumers with type2 diabetes, clear beverages made with whey proteins have high nutraceutical potential. In beverages targeting the young generation, they can play a vital part in avoiding lifestyle-related health conditions altogether and providing the balanced nutrition that makes for a top performance.