Dressing up: Kewpie expands sales of Japanese functional salad dressings
The salad dressings are "sesame dressing with linseed oil," "Japanese style onion dressing," and "lemon and acerola dressing."
Takamasa Hayashi from Kewpie’s seasoning department told NutraIngredients-Asia: “Sales have been steady since the launch in July 2017.”
“There is overall greater awareness in health and vegetable intake, so the number of people actively eating salad has increased. This creates growth for the dressing market.”
“Dressing is a product with high palatability. There are many types to suit various tastes.”
He said: “We want to continue to appeal to people with high health awareness that they can easily ingest ingredients with health functions by simply putting them on a salad.”
For high blood pressure
The “sesame dressing with linseed oil” contains 27% of linseed oil and was developed for people with high blood pressure.
Linseed oil contains α-linolenic acid which in a clinical study conducted in Japanese participants with normal to high blood pressure and hypertension, it was found that ingestion of 2.6 g of α-linolenic acid a day reduced systolic blood pressure.
Dietary fibre
The "Japanese-style onion dressing" and "lemon and acerola dressing" both contain indigestible dextrin, a source of dietary fibre.
As a water-soluble dietary fibre processed from starch, it said to suppress the absorption of fat and help moderate blood triglyceride levels after eating.
Indigestible dextrin is approved as a functional ingredient of 'food for specified health use' by the Consumer Affairs Agency (Japan).
Recommended intake
The recommended intake is 20g/meal which contains 2.6g of α-linolenic acid for the sesame dressing with linseed oil, and 5g of indigestible dextrin for the other two dressings.
Takamasa said that these products are ‘functional labelled foods’ which means they are not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease.
Apart from increasing interest in functional ingredients in dressings, he said dressings that use healthy ingredients such as onions and sesame were proving popular.
The products have a capacity of 210mL and are priced at 398 yen (including tax). They have a shelf life of seven to 10 months.
The dressings are sold online, supermarkets and drug stores and previously only available in Tokyo.
