Tapioca Starch Revival

Ulrick & Short Ltd, a leading clean label ingredients specialist, is reviving a renowned traditional staple food by successfully developing clean label tapioca-derived ingredients, which can replace waxy maize starches and fat.

Tapioca has been around for centuries as a gluten free food and as a thickening agent but has been criticised for its relatively high processing costs. Because of this, the food industry has favoured waxy maize starches.
Recognising the tremendous potential over nine years ago, Ulrick & Short has since launched over 30 different highly functional clean label ingredients all produced from tapioca.
The company achieved this by expertly identifying the tapioca plant as a source of highly functional food ingredients, which are now bringing significant cost savings and nutritional benefits to food manufactures.
Not only this, but food producers can in many cases simply declare the ingredients as tapioca or sago, which consumers are familiar with as many households would traditionally have some in their kitchen cupboards.
Ulrick & Short’s forward-thinking approach and intuition is keeping it ahead of the competition. With the future commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) corn in Europe, it will become more difficult and expensive to guarantee the non GM status of corn grains due to concerns over cross contamination risks.
Tapioca, on the other hand, will have a continued non-GM status, which provides Ulrick & Short with an excellent opportunity to make further significant inroads into the European food industry.
Ulrick & Short used intense product evaluation and development programmes to identify that from careful selection and management of tapioca roots combined with various processing methods, it can actually match the performance of waxy maize starches.