In a recent blog post on the Mintel web site, Marcia Mogelonsky, Director of Insight, Mintel Food & Drink, explored the opportunity for combining tea and coffee with salty flavours.

While salty snacks have explored seemingly endless flavours, she said, there is one relatively untapped combination that has yet to properly test the snacking market. Tea and coffee have turned up in other food and drink products with their range of flavour notes and bases. While the vehicles for coffee and tea are limited, strong flavours currently popular in tea and coffee can pair well with nuts and potato snacks.

A number of tea flavours have been gaining popularity, she noted, with matcha and other green teas lending their flavour to a range of food categories. Black teas have also been bridging beverages to foods, as the smoky flavours of oolong and the floral notes of jasmine are appearing in sweet foods such as cakes and biscuits.

Few salty snacks take advantage of the complex range of tea flavours, which appear primarily in nuts, popcorn and rice snacks.

Consumers are, she believes, looking to find the “right” way to enjoy food and tea. In Poland, three in ten tea drinkers are interested in learning about how to pair tea with food. Interest in tea pairings can easily segue into the use of tea as a flavour note in foods, Mogelonsky said, as shown by the 20% growth of matcha as a flavour for a range of categories over the past two years.

Salty snacks provide an excellent base for tea flavours, she wrote, as there are a number of nut, rice and popcorn snacks with matcha already on the market. However: according to Mogelonsky, there is room to experiment beyond this trio of bases. For example, potato chips are neutral enough to carry tea flavours while fruit snacks play well with tea and spices.

Coffee-inspired flavours, mocha, café au lait, cappuccino and espresso, are seen in sweet categories, such as sweet biscuits to flavoured milk. While coffee flavours are not common in salty snacks, she pointed out that PepsiCo’s Frito Lay explored the concept in 2014 when it trialled cappuccino-flavoured potato chips in its crowd-sourced “Do Us a Flavor” contest. Cappuccino Chips were edged out by Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger Chips and the product was discontinued.

Coffee’s flavour complexities give it the potential to be paired with a range of other foods, Mogelonsky said. In China, nearly half of coffee drinkers pair with “Western staples” such as hamburgers or sandwiches, and nearly one-third drink coffee with savoury biscuits.

Such attitudes bode well for broadening flavour horizons in salty snacks. Coffee flavours would pair well with meat snacks, paralleling coffee-scented barbecue sauces. Less aggressive coffee flavours such as mocha, latte or café au lait can move beyond nuts and chips to grain-based snacks or snack mixes, paired with nuts and fruit such as dried orange pieces.

Salty snack manufacturers can take advantage of the popularity and variety of tea and coffee flavours that have already gained acceptance as flavor ingredients in a range of food categories. Mogelonsky concluded. Given the number of bases for salty snacks (nuts, potato snacks, rice snacks, etc), she believes there is potential for a great number of combinations that will attract tea or coffee lovers.