Prerequisites for functional dairy foods range development

Abstract

Background. Offer in some segments or the whole segments of Ukrainian food market are formed by manufacturers and retailers. Often this offer does not consider real need and demands of customers. Especially such situation is observed on most modern and innovative share of food market – functional food market. Frequently customer’s knowledge about features and properties of functional food is insufficient for well-founded choice.
Discussion. On the functional properties’ approach functional dairy food could be divided into the following groups: supplemented dairy food – fortified by peculiar to milk components (minerals, vitamins) or supplemented with non-peculiar to milk components (breast milk amino acids, modified fatty acids); modified dairy food – reduced or removed lactose, hydrolyzed casein; health dairy food with added biological or physiological value – with preventive or healing components (probiotics or prebiotics).
Classification under functional properties is based on some physiological condition recommendation, diseases, and alimentary deficiencies. From this standpoint it was possible to define next groups of functional dairy food: dairy food for gastrointestinal and colonic diseases prevention, dairy food for cardiovascular diseases prevention, for osteoporosis prophylaxis, immunomodulation dairy food, and dairy food for behavioral and brain activity.
Synbiotic and probiotic dairy food physiologal value depends on specific strains with strict defined properties. But in Ukrainian food market there are some examples of discrepancy of marked and real founded probiotic strains.
Conclusion. Lack of strict identitification of probiotic strains and as a consequence lack of information for customers’ proper choice are among main problems of functional dairy food physiological value formation.