Creating the perfect texture for the perfect snack

Cooking the perfect snack with a fruit filling can be a tough ask! Will the texture be too thick? Will the fruit filling boil and spill out? Whether for a snack bar or a pastry, the science behind cooking with starches in food applications is highly complex.

Toaster pastry made at Tate & Lyle

The art of thickening requires stabilising a texturant to maintain the delicate mouthfeel, taste and appearance of creamy, crunchy or gel-filled products, and to withstand harsh processes like heating and freezing. For fruit-filled snacks, a texturant helps stabilise the filling and keep the filling from boiling out during baking. Our CLARIA® Clean-Label Starches came to the rescue when a long-time customer needed to ensure optimum performance for a fruit filling in their new toaster pastry.

Improving fruit filling performance

Our customer wanted to launch a new range of toaster pastries with a fruit filling and needed the fruit filling to stay stable during the baking process and maintain its taste and sensory properties until the consumer would enjoy it. The catch? They needed a solution quickly, because they planned to trial production in a plant 10 days later. The customer came to us to tap into our texturant stabilising expertise and ingredient portfolio, knowing we could help them achieve the extraordinary quickly. Working in our customer’s lab, our scientists were able to stabilise the filling and perfect the texture.

Using different concentrations of our CLARIA® Functional Clean-Label Starches for the different fruit flavour fillings on offer, we ensured they had the intended viscosity and texture and the entire pastry baked without the fruit filling boiling out. The trial proved successful, and the new snack went into full production on time.

Achieving the texture, meeting the trend

Tate & Lyle experts baking toaster pastries with CLARIA® Functional Clean-Label Starches

We know that taste reigns supreme with consumers around the world. But today, consumers are looking for food and beverages that satisfy their desire for taste and contain ingredients they recognise and trust.

While there’s no single definition for the clean-label trend, we know consumers around the world are reading ingredient and nutrition labels to find products made with simple, recognisable ingredients. Ingredients like our CLARIA® Functional Clean-Label Starches, which appears on labels simply as ‘starch’, coupled with our technical expertise, can help manufacturers achieve complex formulations that meet the clean label trend.

Are you looking to simplify your formulation but not compromise taste? Contact our experts today to learn about how our ingredients can help you and request a sample!


Are you struggling for the perfect texture in your own food formulations? Take a look at Texture University, our free webinar curriculum. Each one-hour, on-demand session explores the many texture science solutions food formulators can use to make their formulations extraordinary. Take a look here!