Leiber Awarded for Yeast Product Line Excellence

Leiber’s focus has always been on maintaining high product quality, and the company’s international certifications such as ISO 9001/2000 establish its success in this field.

27/11/08 The “2008 European Yeast Product Line Excellence Award,” is presented to Leiber GmbH (Leiber). This Award is in recognition of the company’s success in developing an excellent product line of specialty yeast extracts catering to wide application areas while achieving customer satisfaction. The company invests in research considerably, and maintains a steady flow of new and innovative products to enhance its product line. The widespread network of the company with suppliers and end users helps it broaden its outreach.

Value-added features such as special focus on taste enhancers help raise the popularity of its products even more. Leiber’s focus has always been on maintaining high product quality, and the company’s international certifications such as ISO 9001/2000 establish its success in this field.

“Within the yeast market, Leiber is focused on the processing of purely natural brewers yeasts, catering to a wide array of products - food, feed and fermented specialties and hence Leiber products are widely used in the market. These cumulative factors make Leiber GmbH the worthy recipient of this Accolade,” says Natasha Telles, Head Analyst, Chemicals, Materials & Food, Frost & Sullivan.

The range of yeast extracts supplied by Leiber is based on naturally reared brewers yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, raw materials obtained from selected breweries that impart a pleasant flavor to the extracts. These yeast extracts are nutritionally rich having important B vitamins, amino acids, minerals and trace elements. None of the products developed by Leiber contain any genetically modified organisms (GMO) or hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), which is claimed might lead to certain health problems.

The Leiber yeast extracts are used in diverse applications such as soups, sauces, broths, condiments, seasonings, baked goods, snack products, seafood products, meats and sausages. Approximately, 70 per cent of the yeast extracts are supplied to the ready-to-eat soup industry. Leiber’s products that impart flavor besides others are supplied to large ingredient manufacturers for use in its ingredients. Also, bulking agents produced by Leiber are catered to the end users. Leiber thus operates at multiple positions in the supply chain, providing services to both ingredient manufacturers and the end customers. The broad range of products has helped the company demonstrate such flexibility in offering products according to customer preferences.

Innovation is an ongoing process at Leiber, and every year, the company introduces new innovative extracts to enhance its offering yet again. For example, Bouillon type extracts and HNY extracts have been launched into the market during 2003 to 2006. Recently, Leiber, in cooperation with a large Italian soup products manufacturer introduced a new yeast extract, highly concentrated but liquid like honey to ease the industrial, subsequent processing. Thus, it is a continuous process of leveraging on research and development (R&D) at Leiber that helps it complement its robust product line with new innovations.

Leiber holds a strong bond with the microbiology department at the University of Osnabrueck, where a major part of the company’s research is conducted. Among others, the Technical University of Berlin and the Technical University of Munich/Weihenstephan are important research partners for Leiber. The technology intensive approach of the company has enabled the development of highly sophisticated fermentation processes relevant to the company requirement. The new technologies are in accordance to Leiber’s business activities, and have contributed immensely to its high product quality.

Leiber invests approximately 5 per cent of its annual turnover on R&D, with the goal of developing innovative products at regular intervals in collaboration with various universities such as University of Osnabrueck.

“We at Leiber GmbH, Germany are very much obliged to Frost & Sullivan for awarding to us the “2008 Yeast Product Line Excellence Award.” This award recognises our efforts to supply natural and healthy ingredients to the international food, feed and fermentation industry. We thank Frost & Sullivan for the efforts taken evaluating our company and hope the award may support customer conviction with Leiber to have a “best practice” specialist and partner.” Dr. Wilfried Brandl, Head Food Division, Leiber GmbH.