Weight loss… drinkable collagen… 10 vitamins in a chocolate biscuit…

Got your attention? I’m not surprised, we Brits are a nation obsessed with beauty and health products, with the likes of Cheryl and the Beckhams to keep up with no wonder the market for health products is worth around £495million in the UK (Mintels report). As a fellow ‘quick fix – keep active’ kind of girl myself, the research into functional foods seemed right up my street let my first Andventure begin!

The term functional food was first used in Japan in the 1980’s; this is where foods have health promoting benefits over and above their basic nutrition value. We gathered 17 testers with a variety of eating habits, diets and snacking abilities to come down to the think tank and test the products. Luckily, for us we stumbled across the most talkative opinionated group of thinkers, which knocked Dougie and Aba right off their feet. Not only did we discover that these people could cook they would prefer to take an hour cooking then buy a microwave meal – due to the nutritional value and contents which they could control. Were Jamie, Ramsay and Nigella really having that much of an impact on the British Public? Lucky for us we had some products to make them think twice what nutritional content they were not adding to their meals. One of which was a brown rice chocolate biscuit with around 10 added vitamins – I wonder what Peter Kay would have to say about that! Well, our testers referred to it as a well-known American chocolate biscuit. With added vitamins, the testers felt that they were more than willing to swap it for their usual choccy biscuit and couldn’t believe that it was possible for something so healthy to taste so good! No, wonder the Japanese are a nation of the healthiest eaters in the world – they eat biscuits with vitamins and snack on iron and folic acid sweets!

Some of the other interesting products that landed on And Partners desk were a high catchein Green Tea (helps aid weight loss), a Collagen drink and vitamin drink (helps skin, hair ect) and a Turmeric Drink (which cleanses the liver and claims to cure hangover). This may be three new products for us Brits to add as weapons to our beauty armory. Most Brits associate collagen with lip injections and the resultant trout pouts (not naming any names!). Japanese women are drinking it instead, with the promise in Japanese department stores claiming: “Take a collagen drink for 30 days and have skin as soft as a baby’s.” So why is this news to us… does it taste that horrendous it wont sell… well you’ll have to just watch this space, who knows it could be us Brits walking around drinking collagen as we shop, drink green tea as we diet, snack on vitamins biscuits for benefits and most of all drink turmeric to ensure that us Brits carry on doing what we do best… cheers!