The primary goal of this publication is to help you build better snack and bakery products and grow your business. Of course, many factors get into the game here.

This involves trend analysis, grounded in timely data, to illustrate prevailing shopper and dining patterns across key snack and bakery product categories and foodservice segments. It’s insight from thought leaders across food—distilled perspectives packed with poignancy.

Building better snack and bakery products requires ongoing ingredient analysis to meet core target shopper and diner demographics and formulation requirements related to key drivers like gluten-free and better-for-you—or just the latest developments in ingredients for traditional products that will increase product functionality and streamline throughput.

Today, many industry factors are related to meeting requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), improving food safety and meeting goals for peak equipment sanitary design to propel plant processes well into the future to meet processing demands as your business grows. This also means investing in traceability measures that permit rapid upstream and downstream tracking for instant mock recalls. It’s outfitting lines with the targeted levels of automation throughout to yield strong return on investment. And increased productivity today often means integrating some level of ongoing “lean manufacturing” analysis tools. It’s building in the flexibility to shift packaging strategies on a dime to grow consumer appeal and meet demand for today’s on-the-go, convenient snack and bakery products, while also offering products that meet similar demands for value while maintaining product freshness and quality.

More than ever, building better snack and bakery products means investing in the best logistics solutions to help ensure you can maintain peak product freshness and quality while meeting the distribution needs of customers. It’s better warehouse and shipping technology and tactics.

When the entire process comes together, it can yield products of great beauty and value that resonate with people today—products that see significant repeat purchase within their first year of launch while bringing great profit to the business. These are the products that spread across the spider network of distribution channels across this great country—and beyond. They set the tone for future product and line extensions—and often set the tone for the industry as a whole.

They also win awards. To that end, we will open voting for our 2015 “Best New Snack and Bakery Products” awards this month on www.snackandbakery.com. Just look for the link on the home page or in our regular newsletter, The Weekly Mix.

We will present one award for each segment of our coverage—one for the best new snack product on the market today and one for the best new bakery product, targeted toward either retail or foodservice customers. Voting will conclude as we approach the end of 2015, and we’ll report on the winners in our January 2016 issue, presenting the physical awards at key industry events taking place in early 2016. Is your new product among those within the nominees? The only way to find out is to visit www.snackandbakery.com to find out for yourself and cast your vote for the top product in each industry.

Building the best new snack and bakery products takes polished acumen, strong innovation and no small amount of perfect timing—all tempered with the need-to-know information related to trends, ingredients, equipment, packaging, logistics and more found within the best possible content we strive to bring to you in these pages and on www.snackandbakery.com.