DAVAO CITY –A leading Japanese firm made its first provincial exposure of its latest technology and ingredients for baking in Davao.
Nagase Philippines Corporation president and chief operations officer Ishiwatari Tomohiko said his firm is looking for a good distributor in the Philippines.
“I am confident of the industry where the Mindanao market is big,” he said.
Tomohiko said he also plans to frequently visit bakery shops in Mindanao.
“We have learned also that most of the bakeries in Mindanao are looking for high-end products and coming here to Davao is our way of contributing to the change in the industry market,” he said.
Nagase Philippines is under Nagase & Co. Ltd, a chemicals trading firm founded in Kyoto Japan in 1832 that leveraged its technology and information gathering expertise as well as a global network offering superior manufacturing, processing and R&D functions as well as trading company services. It has 102 group companies in 22 countries.
Nagase Philippines also distributes food ingredients such as the Treha, Pullulan, and SUNMALT-S.
The company’s sales executive and nutritionist Ruth Brillantes Dumaraos said Treha (trehalose from Hayashivara) is a crystalline saccharide containing two water molecules per molecule of trehalose, the Pullulan is an edible linear polysaccharide with exceptional adhesiveness, binding and film-forming properties while SUNMALT-S also from Hayashibara is a high purity maltose which is produced by the enzymatic processing of starch.
Dumaraos said the Treha is a brand name of the Japanese ingredient trehalose which improves the quality of food products, extends the shelf life of bakery products as it prevents from staling and starch retrogradation.
With the trehalose, it can retain the moisture intact in the bread products and therefore it is still soft and spongy even placed in the refrigerator.
“Although Nagase Philippines has been here for 20 years the food ingredient was available in the country only in 2016 and we wanted to spread this to other industry sectors in Mindanao,” she said.
The company already has 3 big meat industry processors using the product for sausage and ham as it also reduces the size of crystals formed during the freezing process.
Nagase is conducting tests with large manufacturers. But we are already supplying commissaries of big brand coffee shop chains in the country which they use for their buns and cakes, Dumaraos said.
Dumaraos said all the companies where Nagase introduced treha were impressed on the result in terms of increased volume of production. The ingredient also shortens the waiting time for bread making and works well with yeast, she said.
She said treha can replace sugar as one of the baking ingredients and in terms of glycemic content the count is lower.
“We have some published report regarding the effect of Treha as to glycemic index,” she added.
Treha is produced in Okayama, Japan of about 48,000 metric tons annually. But of this figure 38,000 MT is the consumption of Japan per year while the balance is distributed to the rest of the world. The Philippines’ share in terms of volume consolidation is only at 5 MT per month.
The trehalose is extracted through the starch enzymatic process from cassava or from cornstarch.
Dumaraos said Nagarase is aggressively marketing the ingredient around the country because other than extending the shelf life of the products it also reduces wastage. (Digna D. Banzon/PNA)
