Application Of Plant Extracts In Food Raw Material Market
Plant extract is a kind of product formed by taking plants as the basis, obtaining or concentrating one or more effective components in plants directionally through physical and chemical treatment, without changing their components and functions. The greatest advantage of plant extracts lies in the enrichment of effective ingredients. As an important intermediate in modern industry, plant extracts can be widely used in food, medicine, health products, cosmetics and other fields to play a functional role.
Since the rise of plant extracts in the 1990s, it has maintained a high growth rate. Medicine and food are the two main fields of application of plant extracts. As pharmaceutical intermediates, the application trend of the world is consistent, because maintaining human health is an eternal topic without regions. As the raw ingredient of food, the use of it varies greatly in different countries, which leads to two completely different application modes at home and abroad.
Since 2016, affected by the external market, the growth rate of China's plant extract export has declined significantly, and the situation will not be reversed until 2018. According to statistics, China's export of plant extracts reached 2.36 billion US dollars in 2018, up 17.8% year on year, even faster than the growth rate in 2015. This is mainly due to the growth of food applications, among which stevia extract, eucalyptus leaf oil, menthol, licorice extract, marigold extract, bilberry extract, hesperidin, ginkgo juice and extract, rutin and silymarin extract are more popular categories.
Different from the domestic market, plant extracts have been developed in foreign markets, and food, medicine, cosmetics and other fields have made considerable progress. Looking at the global market, nutritional health food has become the largest demand market for plant extracts, accounting for 45% in 2017, and its proportion is still expanding, followed by plant pharmaceutical preparations, accounting for 26%, and cosmetics, accounting for 12%.
As far as nutritional and health food is concerned, North America is the main consumer of plant extracts. Lycium barbarum, which performs mediocrely in China, has a good performance in North America, with a growth rate of 637% in 2018, and its application is different from that in the domestic market. Its main function in North America is as a weight management supplement.
From the lycium barbarum category, we can see the difference between the domestic and foreign plant extract markets, so their performance in the food industry will be very different. The domestic market will always be dominated by legal raw materials, among which the drug food homologous substances are the first choice for developing raw materials, and the functions are mainly the auxiliary improvement of common diseases, such as lowering blood sugar, lowering blood fat, improving cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems, and improving immunity.
