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Case Study

Sweet Earth Sweet on Probiotics and Innovation

Ever wonder where the future of consumer packaged foods is headed? The California-based company Sweet Earth offers a good indication. The company’s all vegetarian plant-based line of convenient foods nails it with an emphasis on healthy ingredients, transparency and functional foods.

To offer its trend-setting Functional Breakfast BurritoTM line it turned to a top-notch probiotic ingredient—BC30™ (Bacillus coagulans GBI-30, 6086). “We love to help food and beverage companies innovate by turning products into cutting edge, on-trend offerings by simply adding our probiotic.”

Why Create a Functional Burrito?

The development of the Functional Breakfast Burritos line was driven by several key trends, according to Kelly Swette, CEO of the Moss Landing, Calif.-based Sweet Earth. “Consumers, now more than ever, are making food choices to support specific health needs. We fell in love with the concept of ‘you don’t need a pill for that!’. Instead of taking a supplement to get your omega-3, protein, or probiotics, you can eat a delicious, nutritious, savory breakfast that delivers key nutrients naturally with superfood ingredients,” Swette explains.

“BC30 revolutionized our understanding of what we could achieve with probiotics.”
- Kelly Swette, CEO, Sweet Earth

Functionally Healthy

The company’s line focuses on health conditions, a trend that more food companies are jumping on. As a top consumer health concern, it was an easy decision for the company to create a burrito that emphasized healthy digestion. “As we were thinking about the health need states that people care most about, we kept coming back to gut health and digestion. Rising sales of fermented foods and drinks like kombucha, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, and yogurt show that shoppers are actively seeking products shown to support a healthy gut. More and more research shows just how important it is to consume probiotics and create gut health – it’s amazing what a healthy gut can do for the entire body,” Swette says. “We had been experimenting with a Korean-inspired breakfast burrito and felt like it was the perfect fit for a probiotic.”

Probiotic Fueled

Fueled by the understanding that probiotics are more effective when consumed with food, Sweet Earth was determined to develop a breakfast option that offered probiotics as part of a savory and satiating meal.  “We loved the idea of a probiotic breakfast burrito, but knew that we needed to find a probiotic strain able to withstand the freezing and microwaving process. At first we scratched our heads thinking about how it could be done, but were thrilled to discover that BC30 offered products that met our needs,” Swette says.

Get Cultured! Breakfast Burrito

sweet-earth-get-cultured-burrito

“Many of us on the team really weren’t sure we could design a product that contained active probiotics after microwave cooking. BC30 revolutionized our understanding of what we could achieve with probiotics” Swette says. “BC30 was an extremely helpful partner from the get-go. The BC30 team was informative, clear, and ready to help us create a successful and innovative product.  Having never worked with probiotics before, BC30 was helpful to us in understanding the quantity we would need in order to achieve efficacy through the cooking process.”

Want to include BC30™ in your food or beverage product? Contact us.

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