Healthy and nutritious pastries are expected to steal the limelight from traditional mooncake flavors this Mid-Autumn Festival, domestic retailers and bakeries said yesterday.
New ingredients such as ginseng, mushroom and "kan-ten" (
"Traditional stuffing still has support from a loyal clientele, usually those above the age of 40. But for youngsters, we've found that `snow cakes,' with ice cream wrapped in a mochi crust [made of glutinous rice], are catching on," said Antonia Pao (
PHOTO: YANG YA-MIN, TAIPEI TIMES
Traditional mooncakes made of lotus seed or red bean paste with yolk from salted duck eggs contain 700 to 800 calories each, she said.
To ease consumers' concerns about weight gain, Westin Taipei features smaller size mooncakes and a variety of novelty choices, ranging from mango and pineapple to ginseng and a mushroom and lotus-seed paste mixture.
Riding on the health trend, President Starbucks Coffee Corp (
Moreover, its mooncakes use seaweed sugar in place of granulated sugar in the making of the crust, which lowers the number of calories by about two-thirds, Chung said.
"The health concept will only get hotter and hotter. The only difference is the flavors introduced to lure orders," he said.
Domestic mooncake sales are estimated to be worth NT$3 billion (US$91.6 million) a year. The Mid-Autumn Festival, which is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, or Oct. 6 this year, is also the biggest sales season for gift boxes.
A survey conducted by President Chain Store Corp (
To snatch a bigger market share, retailers started promotions and taking orders early this month.
But the costs of raw materials, such as flour and pulp, have jumped by an average of 30 percent from last year, according to Chen Ming-fa (陳明發), chief of the e-retail business section of Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店).
"To avoid hiking retail prices for moon cakes, retailers are increasing the portions of cookies or tea bags in gift boxes, which also give consumers more selections to choose from," Chen said.
Examples are seen in Taiwan FamilyMart's offering of mooncakes with oolong tea and one of President Starbucks' series that combine cakes with ball-shaped pastries.
NEW IDENTITY: Known for its software, India has expanded into hardware, with its semiconductor industry growing from US$38bn in 2023 to US$45bn to US$50bn India on Saturday inaugurated its first semiconductor assembly and test facility, a milestone in the government’s push to reduce dependence on foreign chipmakers and stake a claim in a sector dominated by China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened US firm Micron Technology Inc’s semiconductor assembly, test and packaging unit in his home state of Gujarat, hailing the “dawn of a new era” for India’s technology ambitions. “When young Indians look back in the future, they will see this decade as the turning point in our tech future,” Modi told the event, which was broadcast on his YouTube channel. The plant would convert
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday. New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed. Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month,
RSS