Samyang: Navigating new frontiers in food science and industry-shaping innovations
10 Jul 2024 | Samyang
We catch up with Dr. Wookyung Chung, the VP and head of Food R&D at Samyang at the company’s headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Chung details the company’s latest innovations, speaks to the trends and consumer demands impacting the industry and offers a glimpse into Samyang’s future focuses.
Hello everybody.
This is William Bradford Nichols, and I am here today in Seoul, Korea, speaking with Wuyung Chung, the Vice president and head of Food and R&D Center here at Samyang.
Hello, how are you today?
I'm very , and you?
I'm great.
We're here and we have some questions from food ingredients first and nutrition insight, and if it's OK, I'd love to just jump right in.
OK, sure.
Can you share some of the latest nutrition products Samyang has developed and what the key benefits of these products are?
OK, I think there's a really good question for our business.
Lately, since 2015 and 2017, we produced the nutritional product which is the first one is the resistant dextrine we call the non-digestible resistant starch, and also allulose, which is the fructose epimer, contains zero calorie.
To give you nutritional benefit for the consumer, especially for blood sugar control and also body fat control.
Oh wow, what sort of innovative technologies has Sam Young implemented in the development of its nutrition?
Products and how do these technologies improve the nutritional value and production efficiency of your offerings?
Actually, since Samang Corporation has a long history of starch and starch sugar business and we have quite extensive technology accumulated.
And one of the technology we are, you know, proud of is enzyme technology, especially for allulose.
We developed, non-GMO enzyme for allulose in 2014, and we commercialized our allulose with that, you know, enzyme technology as.
And with our technology we own right now, we can contribute to consumer and the society with sugar reduction as as the nutritional benefit which contains, as I said, blood sugar management as as fat management in the body.
And that definitely leads into my next question which is what are some of the current trends that you're focusing on in consumer demand for nutrition products here in South Korea and globally.
And how is Sam Young sort of meeting these trends in its product offerings?
The trends we're expecting or looking for is, you know, the bigger trends in the sugar reduction.
I think that is quite huge in Korea right now.
As as global market like US and Europe and including some of the Asian countries, as I said, we have a technology already developed and commercialized with our allolos.
We are trying to develop sugar reduction solution for our customers, which means who doesn't have deep science background.
Or product development competency, we can provide our sugar reduction solution with our existing ingredients with the flavor or texturizer and those ingredients we make our own solution per category in different categories like beverage and confectioneries or dairy products, and we Can deliver to our customers eventually benefit to the consumers.
That's fascinating.
Can you tell me a little bit about, do you have plans, and you, you're kind of talking about this right now.
How do you plan to expand the availability of more of Sam Young's nutritional solutions and offerings to more international markets?
Actually, we have alolos with zero calorie and.
So resistant dextrine, which is dietary fiber with prebiotics characteristics, and with these two main ingredients we own and we are expanding to high functional ingredients to the future and that makes us the player and eventually key players in the nutrition area as.
And what is our strength is to have a very close or similar to sugar.
You know, taste and texture and flavor with our alolos with other ingredients such as flavor, and then with those, you know, total solution.
You know, the platform and we can provide those benefits and the functionality to customers to develop their own product and with those benefits to the consumer and eventually Sayang Corporation lead nutrition area with a very high functionality to the solution.
That is our vision.
Excellent.
Can you tell us more about what sort of future innovations, Sam Young is currently working on and the company's long-term vision for its role in the nutrition industry?
Actually right now we are focusing on the sugar reduction.
However, we are trying to do some physiological, you know, the functionality and the nutritional benefit test via the preclinical and the clinical test to show real effect on the human physiology and also.
I mentioned earlier, we are developing the total solutions for each different categories, and then we are combining all those ingredients like clinical test, you know, data and, functional data with our ingredient and solution, and then we can have, the, the leader position.
In in the food and nutrition area, is there anything else you'd like to tell us about Samyon before we sign off today?
Actuallyang Corporation, our company, has a long history, like in 100 years.
However, those history until now kind of limited in the Korean market as a domestic player.
However, we have a bigger vision with our specialty ingredients such as alolose and resistant dextrin.
To the global market and I'm pretty sure we are going to be the number one player in this area with the wonderful benefit to the consumer and eventually in the society.
Wonderful.
Dr.
Cheng, thank you so much for talking to us today, and we look forward to hearing more of your insights and seeing more from Sunny in the future.
OK, thank you so much.
