Parripak's latest innovation

For more than 15 years, Beds-based Parripak Foods has been supplying fresh vegetable pizza toppings to a broad range of customers from supermarket manufacturers to retail pizza chains.

Parripak Foods grow some of the vegetables produced on its own family farm, which means that the process is controlled from seed through to finished product. The need to continually re-invest in new product development, processes and efficiencies is paramount, and this investment programme has led to the development of a new modified atmosphere technology which extends the shelf life of fresh products to over 7 days on average.

Parripak’s joint managing director James Parrish said, "Customer demand for the taste and quality of fresh toppings over frozen has been steadily growing. This has led to the production of ever more exotic products such as julienne leeks for duck based pizzas, and marinated vegetables which offer different flavour profiles such as chargrilled mushrooms, Jamaican jerk mix and extra hot onions."

Apart from the staple pizza topping products including chillies, garlic, red onions tomatoes and mushrooms, Parripak says that they are seeing a growing demand for the ‘tear free’ qualities and sweet and mild flavour of the Supasweet onion. This type of onion has a pungency of 2-3 on the pyruvate scale, compared to a standard onion with an 8 rating on the scale. This makes it ideal to eat raw in sandwiches, salads and it has even been used in an ice cream recipe!

Added Parrish, "Because they are suitable to eat raw, the cancer preventing antioxidant properties of the Supasweet onion are particularly potent since none of the vitamin C content is destroyed through cooking."