Active minds continually seek to innovate. We seek solutions to problems.  

There is always something new we can learn — a new problem to solve — following a pathway of continuous improvement and innovation. Thankfully, the dairy industry provides multiple potential opportunities to learn about — and foster — new industry innovations throughout each year. 

Events often bring innovation to the forefront. During the IDFA Ice Cream & Cultured Dairy Innovation Conference that took place in early April in beautiful Clearwater, Fla., innovation intersected with key areas like flavors, formulations, and industry pillars like sustainability. 

Flavor innovation and concept ideation formed the focus for the event’s centerpiece, the annual Innovative Ice Cream Flavor and Innovative Cultured Dairy Product competitions. The contest, sponsored by Dairy Foods, invites attendees to sample and vote on dozens of delicious conceptual and commercialized flavors and concepts in various categories: 

The entrants at this year’s event provided a wonderful range of delicious inspiration (for details on the winners and additional coverage of the event, see “Innovative Ice Cream Flavor and Cultured Dairy Product winners announced”). Some submissions presented twists on timeless classics, while others engaged with regional and emerging global flavor trends, offering sophisticated, and often sublime, combinations of flavors, swirls, inclusions and sometimes an elegant simplicity. Every year opens up new opportunities to innovate with flavors. 

Educational sessions at the event brought innovation with dairy byproducts into the spotlight, presenting new work related to topical upcycling subjects. In one, a team of researchers from the USDA Agriculture Research Service discussed its advances in finding uses for ice cream manufacturing waste stream, including strategic uses of its fat, water, and other fractions, subjected to fermentation, that show strong potential application possibilities in bioplastics (see “Reclaiming Value from Coproducts of Dairy Food Manufacture.” 

In another session, Samuel Alcaine, Ph.D., associate professor, Food Science at Cornell University, talked about new approaches to using upcycled whey in beer and cheese, and cheese rubbed with said beer, for a meta-circular product example. He also talked about Vodcow, a lactose-free cream liquor that stars upcycled whey permeate. 

ADPI Annual Conference 

I also attended ADPI’s Annual Conference, held in Chicago, where dairy ingredients formed a primary focus as spring emerged at the end of April. Market analysis and continual refinement of our processes — to grow leaner, more efficient, more sustainable — was at the core of the event, along with focused looks at ingredient innovation.  

In one session, upcycled milk permeate starred as Michelle McBride, founder and CEO of GoodSport, discussed her company’s creative use of the ingredient’s unique electrolyte and carbohydrates profile in her hydration-forward, natural sports drinks, actively in use by college and professional athletes, and available at Walmart.  

Later in the proceedings, Dairy Foods and ADPI presented the 2024 Breakthrough Award for Dairy Ingredient Innovation for landmark work in developing clean-label milk protein isolate, enabling quick commercialization of improved natural nutrition beverages with a long shelf life (see details in “Idaho Milk Products wins 2024 Breakthrough Award for Dairy Ingredient Innovation”). Clearly, dairy continues to gain ground in the beverage market. 

The beautiful merger of nature and science enables such advances. Our ingredient supply chain sees continual innovation on the nutritional and functional side of the business, an area of primary focus for the annual Membrane Technology Forum, taking place June 10-13 in St. Paul, Minn. This event, run by Dairy Foods and ADPI, serves as a springboard for discussing new filtration and separation techniques, spotlighting how dairy processors are translating those improvements into commercial success. The dairy industry’s brilliant scientific community continually finds ingenious ways to flex filtration and separation technologies to improve the ingredient supply chain. 

Innovation is the lifeblood of an industry. In order to better showcase how dairy continues to find new market and business opportunities through supply-chain and processing innovations, Dairy Foods recently launched a new monthly enewsletter, “Dairy Innovations.”  

We are always looking for new and better ways to serve your business information needs, so if you want to share one of your success stories, or would like to provide some feedback on how we are doing, I would always welcome the opportunity to connect. 

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