FiE 2024 live: Beneo eyes faster and cost-effective plant-based launches amid supply chain volatility

Beneo is demonstrating how producers can streamline their hybrid and fully plant-based development processes to facilitate faster market launches.

Using texturates from Dutch company Meatless and faba bean protein concentrate, Beneo has created a selection of product samples that showcase the company’s solutions. These include technical samples highlighting ingredient and recipe development, primary processing components, as well as semi-finished and final products.

By covering larger parts of the value chain, Beneo helps producers simplify the development process. Beneo can offer them highly scalable solutions that deliver a range of cost and quality control benefits that will appeal to consumer purses and palates.

Food Ingredients First speaks with Rudy Wouters, head of Beneo technology center, live from the show floor at Fi Europe 2024 in Frankfurt and discusses the company’s position in the value chain and how Beneo is prioritizing the end-consumer.

“Our key focus is on ingredients and how they foster closer relationships with consumers. If you go up to the value chain, the closer you are to those consumers.”

Interest in plant-based continues

In an evolving market where almost three out of five consumers across the globe are interested in plant-based nutrition and around 1 in 3 identify as flexitarian, hybrid and plant-based recipe development is more relevant than ever. Taste, texture, cleaner labels and price remain the primary factors influencing consumer adoption of plant-based diets.

Beneo is using this year’s Fi Europe to demonstrate the potential of its solutions. The company presents a range of ingredients and concepts using its ingredients.

Egg-free innovation

For example, its egg-free meringue has been developed using faba bean protein concentrate to deliver a stable foam and well-aerated texture after baking.

Fréderic Fernandes, product manager of functional proteins.Wouters explains: “We’re using the faba protein as the egg replacement, which ensures the meringue is rich, creamy and tasty. Here, the faba has a very special functionality and you can benefit from the emulsifying properties because it’s an excellent plant-based emulsifier.”

“The range of plant-based egg replacers that we are offering also answers to issues we are seeing in F&B  supply chains with eggs, for example,” he adds. “Faba proteins or other plant-based proteins can compensate for functionality in recipes.”

“We see a lot of price fluctuations in eggs,” Fréderic Fernandes, product manager of functional proteins at Beneo, tells us.

“For the time being, looking at a market that we left behind in 2022/23, the egg prices were really high, rapidly high, and today they are fluctuating significantly. What we’re seeing is that customers and producers alike are not only looking at price reduction but more price stabilization. Additionally, plant proteins can offer this price stabilization.”

Fernandes explains that Beneo can “offer a much more stable pricing in end products.”

“By already replacing a part of your eggs in your recipe, you can actually have a more stable pricing for your end product. So that’s something that we are seeing actually producers being very impressed by.”

Hybrid concepts take shape

In collaboration with industry partners, hybrid consumer products within the convenience category (e.g., pies, rolls and tacos) are also possible.

These ready meals benefit from an improved Nutri-Score thanks to Meatless Textured Flakes, which can partially or fully replace meat in the toppings and fillings.

The flakes include rice and faba bean, among other ingredients, to offer a good mouthfeel, texture and juiciness profile and help deliver an authentic taste while reducing fat and salt.

Wouters comments: “What we can clearly see is that more and more people are interested in hybrids. If you look at surveys, almost 50% of the people worldwide are happy to try hybrids or are interested in hybrids. And if you look at the number of flexitarians around the globe, they are increasing significantly.”Plant-based meat analogs and hybrid concepts are winning over consumers looking to consumer less meat.

He goes on to say that 71% of flexitarians, or even more, actually say they want to pursue hybrid concepts.

“There is much more readiness from the market to accept these hybrid concepts, where before hybrid was really noted as being a way to make cheaper solutions, actually to replace emerald proteins. Nowadays, we see that consumers and producers also know that they can have a benefit by replacing animal proteins with plant proteins. You can add more juice, you can add more texture,” adds Fernandes.

“At Beneo, we want to make people aware that there are many more things that a plant protein can bring to the table than accept cost reduction and actually an alternative to animal protein,” he tells us.

Next steps

In the short term, Beneo will stay focused on its faba bean concentrate facility in Offstein, Germany.

The plant is slated to be ready in Q1 of 2025 and begin production in Q2.

“We are going to be capitalizing on the unique advantages of using fava bean concentrate over other plant proteins with taste, foaming, emulsifying properties, being as competitive as animal protein counterparts,” says Wouters. “These will be reflected in a number of applications and innovations in bakery, meat replacements and even sports nutrition next year.”

He concludes that this will “open up a lot of new possibilities.”

With additional reporting by Missy Green, live in Frankfurt