Before we rethink savoury crackers, let’s understand what today’s consumers are really looking for. In 2024, consumers globally mentioned “quality”, when asked what they prioritize when purchasing food products.
Quality is a broad concept. So what does it truly mean to consumers? According to Innova experts, six key factors consistently shape how consumers define food quality¹.
Consumers see food quality as more than branding or price. Freshness, health benefits, shelf life, nutritional content, naturalness, and ingredient sourcing matter most.
This highlights the growing demand for clean-label products. To succeed, brands must prioritize these attributes over flashy packaging or ads. You can view more insights in the graph.
In this article, Biospringer’s experts would like to show you how yeast extract is the ideal ingredient to correspond to consumers’ expectations in terms of taste, texture, naturalness, health benefits, and even price.
Why yeast extract is a “quality” ingredient for savoury crackers
Yeast extract is a powerful, natural flavoring that supports cleaner, healthier formulations without sacrificing taste. Here are four main reasons it’s a standout for savoury crackers:
Reduces salt and fat for healthier product claims
Enhances taste while enabling up less salt and fat without compromising flavour.
Enhances taste and texture with fewer ingredients
Delivers rich flavour and mouthfeel, simplifying formulations with fewer raw materials.
Natural flavour ingredient, never an additive
Derived from yeast, it’s label-friendly and can be listed as “yeast extract” or “natural flavor.”
Vegan, halal and kosher-certification friendly
Suitable for vegan formulations and can meet halal and kosher requirements for global appeal.
These are just a few of the benefits. We also support sugar reduction, gluten-free options, organic claims, and more. But first, let’s dive into practical, actionable takeaways you can apply to your savoury crackers. Let’s start making shifts that meet today’s consumer demands.
What you can achieve with yeast extract
Improve the taste of your crackers while optimizing your formulations
Thanks to its natural and complex composition, yeast extract is widely used globally for its ability to improve the taste of snacks. However, “improving taste” can mean a lot: we can be talking about its ability to improve savouriness or to mask undesirable notes such as the floury, unbaked notes commonly associated with crackers.
Yeast extract is able to have a positive impact on these aspects mentioned above. Let us guide you through the taste benefits of yeast extracts in savoury crackers. To address these challenges, our experts developed dedicated solutions to improve taste while optimizing costs.
1. Improve the savoury taste, and umaminess in snacks
When asked which aspect is the most important when consuming food and beverages, 40% of Asian consumers mentioned “flavor and taste”².
However, as healthiness remains important, food manufacturers are often facing difficulties creating a long-lasting savoury taste, while avoiding taste enhancers such as MSG, that would prevent them from labelling their snacks as “healthy” or “natural”.
Yeast extract is a natural ingredient coming from yeast fermentation. The most common taste associated with yeast extract is umami, which is one of the five primary tastes.
Indeed, yeast extract contains a blend of naturally occurring amino acids, which contributes to its umami taste.
The main benefit of yeast extract is its ability to intensify perception of existing flavours and complexify and enrich the taste of food products.
Biospringer’s product ranges, such as Springer® Umami and Multirome®, can be used in combination to achieve a synergistic effect to improve overall umaminess. Therefore, yeast extract is the ideal solution for food manufacturers looking to improve the taste of their food products while achieving a clean label.
2. Mask undesirable notes in your savoury crackers
Consumers trends are evolving quickly. Food manufacturers are constantly challenged to reformulate their current recipes to make them cleaner, tastier, healthier, more natural, more functional. Trends such as plant-based or low-salt foods involve reducing or replacing ingredients like animal proteins or salt and sodium.
This impacts the overall taste and texture of food products. Food manufacturers innovate by using alternatives like sweeteners or plant proteins, but these alternative ingredients can bring off-notes. Besides the use of alternative ingredients, the common off-notes in savoury crackers are often presented as an unbaked, floury note, due to flour being the main ingredient used.
The taste properties of yeast extracts allow food manufacturers to mask those off-notes. In fact, Biospringer has developed a dedicated range of yeast extracts, able to mask many different types of off-notes: Springer® Mask.
What you can achieve with yeast extract
Improve the texture and mouthfeel of your crackers
As mentioned above, reformulating your crackers using alternatives might impact negatively the texture of your product.
But distinct product textures, ranging from crunchy crackers to thin and crispy toasted chips, deliver a satisfying bite experience that consumers are craving for.
Therefore, when formulating your crackers, the texture will most probably be one of your priorities.
On top of possible reformulation of your crackers using alternative ingredients that could negatively impact the texture of your product, crackers are often drying in the mouth and can get hard to swallow especially when you consume an entire pack.
Biospringer has yeast extracts with improved water-binding properties, which can help to reduce the dry mouthfeel of crackers, promoting an overall enhanced consumption experience.
See how yeast extract improves taste and texture in concrete formulation sheets.
What you can achieve with yeast extract
Reduce salt while maintaining an appealing taste using yeast extract
Today, health is an important concern for consumers. 59% of Asia Pacific consumers prioritize health and nutrition in food and beverages.
As a matter of fact, there is a strong increase in New Product Launches aligning with the reductionism trend. It represents a CAGR of +15.8% between July 2021 and July 2024.³
In Asia Pacific, on average, consumers consume 9.6g of salts every day.⁴ It is nearly double compared to the 5g per day recommended by the World Health Organization.
Globally, most countries are implementing strong salt reduction regulations in order to fight against cardiovascular disease associated with high sodium intake.
However, again, reducing salt (and therefore sodium), will alter your savoury crackers: taste, texture, shelf life and price will be impacted.
Thanks to its natural umami composition being able to compensate for up to 30% salt reduction, yeast extract is used as a salt substitute in 41% of F&B launches.⁵
What makes yeast extract such a good replacement for salt is that it improves the flavour of foods with an umami taste.
This flavor profile naturally occurs in yeast extract because it is rich in nucleotides and amino acids, which produce the umami taste.
Biospringer has developed a range of yeast extracts dedicated to salt reduction and umami enhancement, called Springer® Umami and Maxarome.
Biospringer: Your trusted partner for healthy, tasty, and cost-optimized savoury crackers
The food industry has been facing a significant raw material crisis in recent years, which has posed major challenges for food manufacturers in their efforts to maintain the quality of products.
Supply constraints and price volatility caused by raw material shortages have led to manufacturers looking for ingredients that can be used as an alternative while optimizing costs.
Consumers are also increasingly conscious of the ingredients used in their food, and we have seen growing demands for clean labels, natural and sustainable products due to regulatory concerns.
Yeast extract would be an ideal ingredient that is able to address these issues faced by food manufacturers some other ingredients that may raise health or dietary concerns – such as allergens, animal-derived components, or those associated with disease risk – yeast extracts are perceived as safe and natural, and contributes to a clean label, making it a fitting alternative for ingredients reduction or replacement.
Access our full set of savoury crackers recipes using yeast extract.
Our Asia Pacific team of experts based in Singapore developed 10+ recipes to showcase all of these benefits from yeast extracts in concrete savoury crackers formulations. Fill in this contact form to receive these recipes in your mailbox!
Sources:
¹Innova Database, 2024
²Innova Flavor Survey, 2024
³Innova Database, 2024
⁴World Action on Salt and Health
⁵Salt substitute and flavor enhancer ingredients as a % of total F&B launches tracked with a low/no/reduced sodium claim (Global, Oct 2022- Sep 2023)