Low-calorie meets high-convenience
Reported August 07, 2008With the rise in interest in low-calorie foods and concern about metabolic syndrome among health-conscious consumers, food companies are offering healthier products that can be easily introduced into one’s daily diet.
Smile Diner Inc. has launched Smartdeli, a series of frozen meals to help people control their weight and health. All 12 meals are less than 350 calories and have a sodium content of less than 2.8 percent. The product range covers Japanese, Western and Chinese dishes, ranging from hamburger steak with tomato sauce to ginger pork. Each set meal comes with three to five side dishes.
I tried a set whose main dish was sweet-and-sour pork cooked with kurozu vinegar. The taste was richer than I expected, and the five side dishes–rice noodles and kikurage tree ear mushrooms tossed with peanuts; crab and scrambled egg; sauteed carrot and bamboo shoots with nira; mustard-flavored nanohana (rape blossom) and shredded egg crepe; and cooked broccoli–were pleasing to both the palate and the eyes. I was rather surprised that the whole set came in at only 250 calories.
“Even if you eat a set menu with a bowl, or 150 grams, of rice, it is still less than 600 calories in total,” Smile Diner President Yoshiyuki Miyamoto said. “While reducing oil and salt content, we keep rich taste and volume by choosing good ingredients and devising ways to cook and flavor them.”
“Thanks to such efforts, the packages have been welcomed most by people in their 30s and 40s, the group we targeted,” said Miyamoto, adding that getting the support of that age group is usually difficult as they often are choosy about food, as they have been exposed to a variety of tasty things over the course of their lives. The meals, 840 yen each, are delivered frozen after customers order them over the Internet or by phone.
Miyamoto advises replacing one meal, especially dinner, with a Smartdeli set twice a week. “You will notice changes in your weight if you continue.”
Kewpie Co. is also in the low-calorie meal business these days.
“We didn’t introduce the products to support weight control, but it turned out they have been welcomed by people, especially women, who are careful about their diet,” Kewpie spokeswoman Ritsuko Ikeda said, referring to the company’s Hotto Taimu instant cups of soup.
The firm, best known for its mayonnaise and low-calorie mayonnaise-type dressing, introduced the soup cups with the concept of a “meal after 9 p.m.” with working women in mind. “But since the soups, which just need to be warmed up in a microwave oven, are around 100 calories each despite using such filling ingredients as beans, root vegetables or millet, they became popular among weight watchers,” Ikeda said.
On Aug. 22, Kewpie will introduce two more kinds of such soup containing root vegetables and noodles made of soy and konnyaku. I tried one of them, the 32-calorie kenchin vegetable soup, which has a light flavor and reasonable volume. (The sesame-flavored Chinese-style soup is 83 calories.)
The company will also add six items to the Renji Kukku series, doubling the available options to 12. Renji Kukku (microwave cook) is a line of dishes you can cook in a microwave oven after adding one kind of fresh ingredient. If it is Nikumisoni (a miso-flavored ground meat dish), for example, you simply add freshly cut daikon radish to the provided soy- and miso-based sauce with ground meat, and cook it in a microwave oven for about 10 minutes.
“We introduced the Renji Kukku series as handy menus, but because of the low-calorie feature, they became popular among diet-conscious people, too,” Ikeda said. The Nikumisoni package for two people is just 130 calories.
Last month, Asahi Food and Healthcare Co. introduced Kessen no Tai-fu Karakuchi Supu, a 129-calorie Thai-style soup with konnyaku noodles, as a “filling but low-calorie” meal. A company spokeswoman said the soup seems to have been welcomed because of the distinctive hot and sour taste that is achieved by adding hot water.
“We also are going to add two menus to our healthy soup series on Aug. 25. Both soups will be less than 100 calories and have relatively abundant vegetables,” she said.
Source : Smile Diner