Healthier snack development pitfalls explained
- Health messages can discourage trial when shoppers associate better nutrition with disappointing taste.
- An ingredient’s nutritional benefits must survive formulation and processing without making the snack too costly to produce.
- Changing the proposed format can make better use of an ingredient’s distinctive colour, flavour or functionality.
- Projected ingredient savings need credible production volumes and funding behind them.
- Supplier reliability, documentation and openness during trials deserve scrutiny alongside the prototype.
Some healthier snacks never reach supermarket shelves despite being perfectly good products. Their downfall isn’t necessarily a protein ingredient that fails during processing or a recipe that becomes too expensive to manufacture; sometimes, the proposition gives shoppers too little reason to try them.
“The market pull wasn’t there, or the way we talked about nutrition made consumers expect a sacrifice in taste before they had even tried the product,” says Robert Mitchell, head of food science at Bühler Group. “People had been disappointed by so many ‘healthier’ alternatives that they weren’t necessarily willing to give another one the benefit of the doubt.”
His experience points to mistakes that can undermine development long before a launch: presenting nutrition in a way that diminishes appetite appeal, persisting with a format that doesn’t suit the ingredients and overlooking whether an emerging supplier can support commercial production. Better nutritional numbers won’t resolve those problems on their own.
Those decisions will underpin the Healthy Snacks Challenge 2027, organised by AAK, Bühler, Givaudan and Ingredion. Five Asia-Pacific businesses will develop their concepts with the partners before meeting in Singapore for Snacks Hack Week on 18-22 January. This hands-on stage will involve formulation, processing and tasting trials, concluding with a Demo Day where finalists present their refined concepts and offer tastings to industry representatives and potential customers. Three businesses will then be selected for further development support, with laboratory work expected to begin in mid-February on areas including formulation, texture optimisation and scale-up assessment.
Selling health while signalling disappointment
Mitchell believes changing attitudes to food create an opportunity to reconsider ideas that previously struggled to attract an audience. GLP-1 medicines have increased attention on portions and nutrition, while food-scanning apps have made ingredient lists more visible.
“Manufacturers are seeing that shift, too, and I think it creates an opportunity to revisit ideas that might have struggled to find an audience a few years ago,” he says. “We still have to make snacks people genuinely enjoy, of course, but there is now a commercial urgency behind that work that I don’t think we always felt before.”
That opportunity comes with a difficult legacy. Consumers who associate healthier snacks with disappointing taste may interpret a nutritional message as advance warning of another compromise. Brand owners therefore need to consider what their proposition leads shoppers to expect from the eating experience.
Taste has topped Americans’ food-buying priorities for 20 years, according to the International Food Information Council’s 2025 Food & Health Survey of 3,000 adults. Meanwhile, 86% said they’d noticed food and drink prices rising over the previous year, leaving healthier snacks competing for shoppers’ money as well as their approval.
With that in mind, the challenge is to find ingredients that improve nutrition while helping producers make an enjoyable, affordable snack. Four of the five finalists are exploring fermentation or microalgae as ways to achieve that, and Mitchell says their attention to the finished product helped them stand out.
“What interested us wasn’t fermentation or microalgae for its own sake. It was the way these companies are using them to get past some familiar trade-offs in snacking: improving nutrition without making a product difficult to formulate, unpleasant to eat or impractical to supply.”
Microalgae’s dark green colour and fishy taste can make it difficult to use in snacks, but Mitchell says Protoga, for example, has developed a light-yellow ingredient without the fishy flavour, giving developers more choice over where to use it.
Agro Ludens is growing koji on rice, with mycelium contributing protein and the process supplying umami, giving formulators something useful on flavour as well as nutrition.
“That doesn’t mean a novel ingredient will beat an established one in every application,” Mitchell says. “It means there is something specific here worth exploring.”
An ingredient’s novelty can attract attention, but its contribution to the finished snack determines whether it deserves a place in the formulation. Mitchell’s first priority is to test whether the qualities that make it interesting survive its use in a product.
“Can you keep the nutritional and sensory benefits through formulation and processing, without introducing complexity that makes the product too expensive to produce?” he asks.
Sticking with a format that doesn’t work
A distinctive colour or flavour can be an asset in one snack and a persistent problem in another. Developers risk making the job harder when they become so committed to the original format that successive trials focus on suppressing characteristics a different product could use.
Mitchell has seen the value of changing direction during a programme run by MISTA, a San Francisco food innovation platform where start-ups work alongside established food, ingredient and technology businesses. Its facilities include an extrusion hub capable of producing snack and cereal prototypes, allowing teams to investigate how unfamiliar ingredients behave in food applications.
During MISTA’s 2025 Growth Hack, an intensive collaborative development programme, one start-up’s protein produced a much brighter orange colour than expected, suggesting a cheese-oriented snack. Another protein brought an earthy flavour that prompted a savoury mocha coffee direction.
“Those weren’t reasons to discard the ingredients; they were clues about where the ingredients might work best,” Mitchell says.
What makes a snack worth buying again?
A healthier recipe still has to satisfy the person eating it, whether they’re replacing part of a meal, seeking more nourishment or choosing a smaller treat.
FoodNavigator’s Positive Nutrition broadcast, Next-gen snacking, on 29 October will explore how changing eating habits affect snack development, from smaller portions and GLP-1 weight-management needs to reformulation and the taste and texture expectations behind repeat purchase.
Contributors include Lumina Intelligence’s Flora Zwolinski, public health advocate Professor Marion Nestle, Hormel Foods’ Abby Evans, Ingredion’s Mike DiMarcello and Kirstie Adams, EVERY Company’s David Knopf and Joe & Seph’s cofounder Adam Sopher.
Register free for Next-gen snacking on 29 October.
The same flexibility applies when a novel ingredient changes how a mixture behaves during processing. A different ingredient system may restore the required functionality, but repeated adjustments can eventually undermine the reason for developing the product.
“I would advise a finalist to move away from a proposed format if, after several attempts to adapt it, we kept running into the same problem and the changes needed to solve it were taking away what made the concept interesting in the first place,” he says.
That’s a consequential decision when a team has already invested time in a particular recipe. An adjustment may solve an immediate texture or processing problem, while several such changes leave a product with less of its original appeal and more cost or complexity.
At the Healthy Snacks Challenge, January’s Snacks Hack Week will also help Mitchell judge how the finalists handle setbacks during development. “Hack Week gives us a chance to see the team working under pressure, and that first-hand experience would shape any recommendation I made about taking the concept further.”
Mitchell also sees value in involving different specialists while there’s still scope to redirect the work. “Someone else in the room may see a different direction, and we can try it while we are still together.”
He doesn’t claim to know the biggest obstacle facing each finalist before working through the concepts. The trials should help establish which problems can be resolved and which suggest the ingredient needs another application.
“If we have explored those options and the format still demands too many compromises, I would rather say so and put our energy into one that gives the ingredient a better chance.”
Judging the ingredient without judging the supplier
An impressive sample can make it easy to concentrate on what an ingredient could deliver while giving less attention to the business behind it. Manufacturers also need to understand how the supplier will meet specifications, manage changes and fulfil orders as demand grows.
Price requires a similarly careful assessment. Mitchell cautions against judging a start-up solely on its current ingredient cost, arguing that greater demand could support larger-scale production.
“A snack that people can see and taste helps make that possibility more concrete for potential customers and investors,” he says.
A lower ingredient price may depend on a start-up securing the investment to increase production. Producers need to know how much funding is required and whether it’s been secured before basing a launch on those projected savings.
And that funding could be harder to find. The Good Food Institute reports that companies operating primarily in the fermentation sector raised $357m in 2025, down from $632m in 2024 – a fall of about 44%. Following closures and restructurings, investors have sharpened their scrutiny of production costs, customer demand and prospects for profitability.
Mitchell says manufacturers still need to work through the numbers at realistic volumes, check that the ingredient can be supplied consistently and establish whether the finished snack meets their quality, shelf-life and production requirements.
His assessment also includes behaviour during development.
“Did the ingredient arrive when they said it would?
“Could they provide the documentation we needed to test it, and did they keep a clear record of what changed between iterations?.
“When a prototype didn’t work, were they open about the problem and able to take feedback constructively?”
These are practical indicators of how a supplier might respond when a production problem puts a customer’s commitments under pressure. They become particularly valuable when recipes are changing quickly and several teams need an accurate record of what has happened.
“Those things may sound mundane compared with the excitement of developing a new snack, but they matter enormously if a manufacturer is considering building a product around someone else’s ingredient,” says Mitchell.
Fermentation and the five finalists
Fermentation has been part of food production for thousands of years, giving us bread, wine, yoghurt and miso. Its recent resurgence has brought fresh attention to how bacteria, yeasts and other fungi can transform raw materials and produce ingredients, from protein-rich biomass to specific fats and enzymes.
Traditional fermentation changes a food’s characteristics, including flavour and texture. In biomass fermentation, the microorganisms are grown and harvested as an ingredient, while precision fermentation turns them into producers of specific substances, such as proteins, fats or enzymes. Each approach offers different possibilities for snack formulation.
Interest extends beyond protein production to flavour and functionality. The Healthy Snacks Challenge finalists illustrate several approaches:
* Anomaly Bio, Singapore: Develops protein-fibre ingredients through submerged fermentation, in which microorganisms grow in a liquid medium. Its processing work also explores ways to support ambient supply chains.
* Agro Ludens, Japan: Produces a rice- and koji-derived mycoprotein through solid-state fermentation, where microorganisms grow on moist solid material. Koji is familiar from Japanese foods such as miso and sake; this approach uses the growing mycelium to contribute protein alongside umami flavour.
* Coa & Co, Singapore: Uses solid-state fermentation in ingredient systems and protein-rich chocolate clusters, targeting improvements in protein quality, fibre, digestibility and taste.
* Protoga, China: Produces microalgae ingredients, including chlorella protein, through heterotrophic fermentation, in which the organisms use an organic carbon source for growth rather than relying on light.
* RÓA Midnight, Singapore: Takes a different route through free from indulgent products using ingredients such as avocado, house-made brown rice milk and psyllium husk, with development focused on fibre and broader nutritional improvements.
