Real Fruit Ingredients meets consumer demands for better for you snacking and baked offerings.

From functional foods to indulgent treats, today’s snack and baked goods offerings cater to diverse range dietary needs, tastes, and forms. As consumers increasingly prioritize health, convenience, and transparency to ingredients, brands are continuously innovating to meet these demands.

Fruit is a nutritional powerhouse, boasts a long-held health halo and is a flexible ingredient to achieve high quality outputs. Innova cites 20% of consumers are influenced by reduced sugar or fat claims for both sweet and savory snacks, while about 15% are influenced by high fiber claims for both snack types.¹  As product developers seek to meet consumers expectations, real fruit ingredients are increasingly being integrated into formulations. 

Fruit ingredients qualify as “no sugar added”

“Reduced Sugar” and “no sugar added” continue to dominate the market as consumers seek better-for-you offerings from their snacking choices. These products bridge the gap between nutrition and convenience.

Per FDA guidelines, fruit puree, dried fruit and single strength fruit juice do not contribute to total added sugars. Considered a “real” ingredient that aligns with clean label preferences, fruit is an ingredient both well liked and well understood by consumers, with 31% responding that food and beverage products sweetened with naturally sweet ingredients, such as fruit juice, are most appealing.¹

Source: Innova and Tree Top Inc. 

Utilizing fruit in food formulations can help with the unique challenge of balancing label-friendliness with taste appeal. Fruit is inherently sweet. Fructose, a sugar abundant in most fruit, is the sweetest of all naturally occurring carbohydrates, about 1.2-1.8x sweeter than table sugar (sucrose). That inherent sweetness opens the way for many products to use fruit as a sweetness enhancer while remaining label friendly. 

Fruit Purees are an alternative to added sugar

Fruit purees provide an excellent alternative to using added sugar, either alone or in a blend. While fruit purees are not as sweet as cane sugar, using fruit purees have other added advantages. In blending, apple and pear puree can be great carriers for bolder flavors. Banana puree is one of the sweetest but also has the added advantage of a creamy mouthfeel, making it an excellent sugar and dairy alternative. All three purees also take on color very easily, reducing the cost needed for a deeper shade and can be blended with other single strength and concentrated fruit purees to achieve desired attributes such as pH, brix, acidity, and viscosity.  

Fruit Powders to boost nutritional claims

When added moisture is not desired, Fruit powders are an excellent tool to control viscosity or water activity, often providing better performance with a moisture level of ~3% and easy rehydration. In addition to the added functionality, powders can also boost the foods nutritional profile, giving it more vitamins, minerals and fiber. Consider adding it to a formulation with traditional sugars or using it as a coating to provide sweetness as well as color.

Source: Getty Images/FreshSplash

Manage costs with dried fruit ingredients

For visual inclusion of real fruit in offerings, consider a variety of dried fruit options. Available in a plethora of sizes and shapes for different piece identities, dried fruit is considered a real fruit inclusion, providing taste and texture to the final product. Dried apples can serve as a neutral base for other color and flavors to be introduced into the snacking application at a lower cost. 

Better for you Baked Goods

A simple way to reduce fat content, added sugar and increase nutrients in baking applications is with fruit. Replacing fat with fruit increases the vitamins, minerals and fiber of your baked application while reducing cholesterol and saturated fats. Applesauce is commonly known to be an excellent fat replacer, with many other fruit purees also functioning as a fat substitute.

Reduced Fat, Lower Added Sugar and Natural Ingredients 

In all baked goods, fat plays an important role in texture and flavor. Fat molecules act as a tenderizer by surrounding proteins and starches and preventing them from forming stiff structures, resulting in a crumb-like texture. The natural sugars (fructose) and pectin in fruit mimic the tenderizing effect of fat by competing with gluten and starch for water to inhibit structure forming interactions. Additionally, since many fruits contain water, substituting fruit for fat adds more moisture to baked good providing a softer texture.

Fat also acts as a carrier for flavor compounds so when reducing fat, flavor can be compromised. It’s important to choose a puree that pairs well in flavor with your application. Tree Top recommends using fruit puree and fruit flake powder to replace a portion or majority of the fat in your formulation. Apple and pear puree are ideal substitutes because they do not impart much flavor in the final baked good.

Breads, cakes, muffins, bars, brownies and cookies are all great applications for fat substitution. In most applications, all fat cannot be replaced without compromising texture and taste. The key to substituting fat with fruit is finding the proper ratio for your application. A 1:1 fruit to fat ratio is a good ratio to begin experimenting and from there replace more or less fat with fruit until a desirable taste and texture is achieved. With less fat to coat the gluten and starch molecules, be mindful not to over mix that allows more interaction between gluten and starch ultimately leading to a tougher texture. In addition, baked goods with fruit as a fat replacer tend to lose moisture faster so baking time and temperature may need to be adjusted.

   ¹  Innova Database, Innova Health and Nutrition Survey 2023