Raisin shortage could open door for hot cross bun innovation this Easter

This Easter will be a good opportunity for food manufacturers to be innovative with their hot cross bun fillings due to the global shortage of raisins. It is also time to start thinking ahead for alternative Christmas pudding flavours.

The UK is currently the world’s biggest importer of dried fruits, and has seen up to 42% price increases in raisins and sultanas since September 2017. This is in response to shrinking raisin crop sizes as farmers move to other crops because of rising labour and land costs. The price rise happened too late to affect the prices of hot cross buns for Easter 2018, but it has the potential to significantly affect pricing of this year’s Christmas puddings.

Nonetheless, this is a good opportunity for manufacturers to be more innovative this year with their hot cross buns, and buns ‘with a twist’ are already beginning to become noticeable launches. Previous launches include fillings being swapped over from classic raisins to other ingredients such as Waitrose’s figs and cranberry or Aldi’s chocolate toffee.

This non-traditional approach works well for UK consumers, 54% of whom said that they would prefer to experiment with new and unusual flavours of food, according to GlobalData’s global consumer survey from Q1 2017.

The price rise will be sure to spark new ideas for Christmas pudding ‘with a twist’ for later this year, as it will certainly be affecting the market by then. Producers can use this opportunity to test the water to see what kind of flavour combination works well for the British market.