GAYLE DE MARIA
Managing Editor (Tks Publisher & Events Organiser)

Dear Readers,

here we are once again thinking about what has happened during the year and what novelties the functional ingredients market has brought. At the beginning of the year we focused our attention on the probiotics market dealing with developments in the manufacturing process, IP, taxonomy, analytical requirements, regulatory issues including the use of health claims for probiotics in the EU, challenges and opportunities of the application of the Nagoya Protocol.

Then we gave space to a discussion on healthy lifestyle on how digitalization, sustainability and other trends are affecting consumer behaviour, and how the industry is responding with the development of new products, services and business models. Microbiome, for example, is gaining more and more attention and this is confirmed by a huge increase in number of yearly publications on this topic. Individual differences in nutritional requirements and responses to stimuli can now be better understood by an analysis personal of differences in the genetic makeup and microbiome, although there is still much to learn.

We then entered int ...