NPEW 2025 live: Virginia Dare elevates healthy beverages with organic flavor offerings

US-based Virginia Dare is responding to the growing demand for wellness beverages with its range of flavors and extracts, including organic raspberry and lemon flavors. The company is showcasing its hydration beverages concepts featuring organic ingredients at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California, the US (March 4-7).

The extract and flavor supplier has a large organic offering with “over 250 flavors and extracts” that are certified organic through Quality Assurance International, Philip Caputo, marketing and consumer insights manager at Virginia Dare, tells Food Ingredients First live from the showfloor.

“We also do custom flavors and extract formulations that can be organic certified. So being that this is our first show, we wanted to show a hydration beverage, since beverages are a big part of our business.”

“We have a raspberry lemonade hydration beverage that features two of our organic flavors, and the rest of the formulation is also with organic ingredients. It’s coconut water based and all the electrolytes come from there. All the vitamins are from fruit and vegetable sources.”

Tapping clean label trends

Consumers believe clean labels should be a key focus for innovators, with more than two in three consumers globally saying they are “somewhat” influenced by these labels, according to Innova Market Insights’ analysis.

The company is showcasing its organic raspberry and lemon flavors in hydration beverages at the show.Caputo also observes a strong demand for wellness and clean label properties in beverages, including functional and non-functional varieties. This is leading to an increased focus on reformulations to replace artificial flavors while ensuring a natural taste that can “withstand processing.”

The company also follows the trend of common flavors with “complex profiles,” Caputo tells us.

“For example, a lemonade or an orange-flavored low-alcohol beverage or a non-alcoholic beverage, and adding cardamom to that or some vanilla can make it very familiar,” he explains.

Meanwhile, he also highlights the rise of demand for organic flavor formulations in sweet baked goods, which the company is also focusing on.

For instance, “mash-up flavors” like maple waffle muffins can be replicated by using organic and natural flavors without being “artificial tasting.”

Overcoming off-note challenges

Formulating beverages with functional ingredients presents challenges, since they add “off notes and off tastes to products,” flags Caputo.

“We have an entire line of masking agents, masking flavors, and flavors with modulating properties for sweetness. We also have natural, organic versions of those.”

“The raw materials that we use to create these masking agents are used to tackle those types of issues. The biggest challenge that people bring to us is adding functional ingredients to products like bakery or beverages.”

Adding functional ingredients to beverages presents off-note challenges for formulators.The company’s masking systems can block bitter and astringent tastes while balancing saltiness and acidity, and taste modulation solutions can extend or inhibit sweetness, improve mouthfeel, and reduce salt.

Push toward personalization

Caputo further sheds light on personalization and customization as major trends driving consumer choices in the organics market, along with a demand for “create your own” type products or “kits.”

“If it’s a bakery kit, you have all the components, and then the consumer can add their own milk or other ingredients to it for customization, and we’re providing the flavor systems. It’s been a big trend that we have been following.”

He believes this is especially important in the clean label space, where consumers want both customization and convenience.

In the future, Caputo expects healthy beverages to remain in high demand, focusing on “less sugar, less artificial ingredients, but still making them taste good,” he concludes.

With additional reporting by Louis Gore-Langton from NPEW 2025, California, US