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Protein wars -- command and conquer: oh, how the Natural Products Expo has changed! (R&D Tech Trends).

Article Excerpt
Don't get me wrong... Natural Products Expo (East or West) remains the food industry's (and cosmetics and pet foods and vitamins and...) greatest "alternative" carnival experience at the cutting edge of creativity. Turbans and Birkenstocks still mingle comfortably with medicinal, all-natural herbs-du-jour and the not-so-natural steroids and silicones of the beautiful people. Still, like the first cool breeze of autumn, this year's event harkened a change in demeanor to come, a shift from the sparkly eyed if somewhat muddled nutritional evangelism of years past to the more flinty eyed, pin-striped ethos of modern mainstream marketing. It was inevitable.

This year's (March 8-10) Anaheim, Calif.-event saw ingredient suppliers, great and small, mobilize forces for a major upcoming battle to determine who will dominate the market for high-value protein ingredients. Proteins, that is, as found in nutritional bars and beverages, weight-loss products, milk- and meat alternatives and bakery foods.

Not long ago, industry attention was focused on the value-added nutritional properties of milk proteins, be they the immune-stimulating and anti-bacterial properties of lactoferrin or the probiotic and blood pressure-reducing properties of specific whey protein fractions.

Whey proteins are still sold by the ton into the burgeoning bodybuilding market. Now, it may be soy's turn to bask in the limelight and the main players are hardly the...