KEY INTERVIEW: EPI Ingredients Going One Step Further for Customer’s Satisfaction

18 Jul 2016 --- With new corporate initiative ‘Passion du Lait’ (Passion for Milk), EPI Ingredients takes a stand for enhanced product quality, sustainability and corporate responsibility alongside mother company Laïta. As the dry ingredients division of dairy cooperative Laïta and one of the world’s dairy ingredients experts, Epi Ingredients has been integrating issues linked to quality management, sustainable development and human growth for many years.

FoodIngredientsFirst caught up with Mathieu Lucot, Marketing Manager at Epi Ingredients, who explained that the initiative behind Passion du Lait, will likely serve today’s consumers in a more effective way.

“We believe that ‘Passion du Lait’ was the next logical step towards a more unified approach to form the basis of the group’s sustainable and corporate responsibility development, also setting concrete targets for the next few years”, says Lucot.

After signing a charter for unified values across the French dairy sector supported by the French National Federation of Dairy Farmers (FNPL) earlier this year, Laïta launched the forward looking initiative with the anticipation of bringing together all members of the Laïta network around shared values of progress, transparency and product excellence.

With this new quality management and sustainability program, the company set the stage for continuous improvement in offering diversified, responsible and healthy nutrition that consumers can fully trust, while staying true to the cooperative’s vision and preserving the future of French dairy operations.

“As we launch our quality program for ‘Passion du Lait’, it is proof that we can trust our ingredients and we are involved in every step of the manufacturing process,” explains Lucot. “We have four key areas within the program, with specific goals and criteria for each of them, which go beyond basic quality standards.”

• Quality & Safety
• Land & Individuals Development
• Environmental Sustainability
• Animal Welfare

“We are a cooperative, so we are really proud of our territory,” says Lucot. “The importance of being close the farmers is also something to point out, the farmers are the owners of this company and without them we wouldn’t be able to bring the quality that we do for our clients.”

“Reducing our carbon footprint within the environment is also a priority,” he claims, “And animal welfare is very important to us. We know that if our cows are healthy we will have very rich high quality milk which, in turn, will impact our ingredients and serve our consumers with the best possible produce.”

With consumers seeking reassurance and increasingly looking for ‘natural’ as if it was a token of quality, Epi Ingredients’ customers are getting more and more demanding. In this context, ‘Passion du Lait’ is a useful tool, setting the framework for streamlined operations, efficient supply chain and sustainable milk supply.

The dry ingredients division owns 4 high-performance industrial facilities, all located in Western France and with no farm more than 100kms away from the plant that processes their milk. Keeping full control of the entire value chain from field to fork is how they can offer the highest quality, most natural and safest ingredients possible to fulfill their customers’ needs.

“The market of milk in general is very complicated for all players in the dairy sector,” he says, “On dry dairy ingredients but also for consumer ingredients, and especially in Europe.”

Lucot adds: “Our biggest challenge at Epi Ingredients is to find valuable ingredients for our portfolio and to make the balance between development and produce with solutions.”

“As a major food producer, we also have a responsibility to contribute to enhance people’s lives with natural and nutritious value-added products and Epi Ingredients is committed to providing sustainable solutions to global health-related challenges”, says Lucot.

“What we have discovered in food markets is that consumers are looking for certain benefits when they eat something, it’s no longer just about enjoyment. Consumers are more aware of their wellbeing and our clients who make finished products are also looking for ingredients that support the wellbeing of their consumers.”

“We are also seeing a surge in demand for natural ingredients and as clean label as possible,” he adds.

“We have the facilities and equipment to bring better quality ingredients, but we also need to prove the quality of our products as well as the traceability and sustainability in the finished goods,” Lucot explains.

As such, the company has made substantial investments in marketing, equipment and human resources to support the infant nutrition market, an area in which they can make a difference especially in light of the ‘Passion du Lait’ initiative which provides enhanced transparency and product excellence.

We currently have ten people who work on R&D in the infant nutrition sector,” says Lucot. “We have a big two year big project we are working towards for a new focus on dry ingredients, dedicated to infant nutrition products. It’s an enormous project to with a big capacity – we are producing close to 30,000 tons a year for specific infant formula.”

Looking to the future, Lucot says the capacity to produce infant formula on a large scale is a challenge, but the first products will be available from the beginning of next year. He says: “There is a lot of work in the pipeline as this is our biggest project, R&D are investing heavily into this, but consumer needs and trends are different if you consider the worldwide markets.”

“The decision to probe deeper into infant nutrition was an important one,” he adds, “The €80 million that we invested on this project is the next step for our companies’ evolution.”

by Elizabeth Kenward