Heart-Support Tomato Ingredient, Functional Chocolate Take Home NutrAwards

Functional chocolate brand Good Cacao and tomato-based heart-health ingredient Fruitflow took home this year’s NutrAward for best finished product and best new ingredient, respectively. The awards were presented at the Natural Products Expo West trade show in March.

Good Cacao calls itself the “world’s first organic superfood chocolate,” incorporating a range of high-profile brand-name functional ingredients. Ingredients range from Ganeden Biotech’s (Cleveland) Ganeden BC30 probiotics and Biothera’s (Eagan, MN) Wellmune WGP beta-glucan for immune health to Cognis’s (La Grange, IL) Heart Choice phytosterols, Martek Bioscience’s (Columbia, MD) life’sDHA, and Fuji Health Science’s (Burlington, NJ) AstaReal astaxanthin.

Cardio-health ingredient Fruitflow is a water-soluble, tomato-based ingredient originally developed by UK-based firm Provexis and marketed in partnership with DSM Nutritional Products (Parsippany, NJ) since last year. By supporting healthy platelet aggregation-through mechanisms such as smoothing blood platelets and preventing unnatural clumping-the ingredient helps stimulate blood flow and support overall cardiovascular health. The ingredient was the first-and is now only one of two-ingredients approved for a health claim by the European Food Safety Authority. (The other is CreaNutrition’s oat beta-glucan, which now merits a claim for supporting healthy cholesterol.)

In a press release, DSM’s senior marketing manager Reto Rieder says that that seven human studies, two published, have been done on Fruitflow. He adds that in the cardiovascular-health category, in which ingredients largely target cholesterol management, there aren’t a lot of contending ingredients for maintaining healthy circulation.