Most of the success stories in the business of food and health are about people taking a traditional food or ingredient and reinventing it.

“Reinventing” can mean adapting a food into a product format that is new and more interesting and convenient than the traditional form – such as turning kale into chips or cauliflower into pizza or almonds into a drink.

Or it can mean taking a simple traditional food from a market where it’s an everyday food to a market where it is new and different, as happened with Greek yoghurt and Icelandic skyr.

Companies often ask us how it is that some little-known traditional foods emerge, develop a health halo and become a hit with consumers.

What is it that makes them succeed? How can you forecast the next “hit” food? How can you lead and help create the next new thing?

To help companies answer these questions, in this report we have:

• Created a checklist of the important steps in reinventing a traditional food that you can use to breathe new life into your NPD and hopefully your strategy.
• Identified 20 traditional foods with potential to be reinvented.  For each one we show what consumer trends it connects to, look at its nutrient profile and evaluate it on versatility and texture. We also set out which categories are good matches for each one – from dairy to beverages to breakfast cereal.

Whether you are a small company looking for an opportunity or a big company looking for a platform for new product development, this report is for you.