It’s well-known that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but with increasingly hectic schedules — not to mention the hard-to-resist snooze button — time-crunched consumers often find themselves skipping the meal. Breakfast cereal-makers long ago created ways for breakfast foods to permeate throughout the day, such as granola bars and snack mixes featuring cereal. Recently, the emergence of oat-based beverages that vary from juice-type consistency to smoothies to chocolate milk-style offerings have added to the mix.
In addition to oat milk dairy alternatives, in March’s Beverage R&D article on digestive health, Beverage Industry discussed fiber-rich beverages, such as OatWorks. The fruit smoothies are formulated with ingredient supplier Biovelop AB’s PromOat betaglucan natural soluble fiber. David Peters, director of sales and marketing for Biovelop AB, mentioned that oat-derived ingredients capitalize on consumers’ understanding of the health benefits of oats, and specifically, the recent understanding of the positive qualities of the soluble fiber in oats.