Biofach: Bösch Boden Spies on value chain storytelling and maintaining transparency for organic ingredients
22 Feb 2024 | Bösch Boden Spies
At the Biofach trade fair in Nuremberg, Germany, Bösch Boden Spies presented its varied portfolio of organic ingredients, including cashews from Cashew Coast and cranberries from Ocean Spray. Ann-Kathrin Bache, account manager, details the value brought by working with a single partner for each ingredient to uphold transparency and brand storytelling when sourcing ingredients from West Africa to North America.
This is Benjamin Ferreir on the show floor of BOA in Nuremberg, Germany, and I'm sitting here with Anne Katherine Baker, and she is the account manager of nut ingredients for Borschboden's bees.
So Anne Catherine, can you please share some insights about what you're exhibiting here today at the show?
What's your product development, and what are some of the applications?
Thank you so much for having me here.
And yes, I'm Anne Katherine.
I'm from Bosch Boden Spies.
In short, we are representing different world market leaders from the nut and from the food industry here in the European market, so we are the ones bringing cranberries from Ocean Spray to the European food industry to a lot of different applications in bread, in muesli, in chocolate, but also for food and nut snacks.
So maybe here you can have a small look at our portfolio.
What we have here and here at Bach of course we are focusing on the organic ingredients we have from our partners Ocean Spray, organic cranberries, but also organic cashews from Cashew Coast and organic apple from Bioanica.
So let's talk about the sustainability profile of your ingredients.
We know that sustainability is very important here in Europe, and there are new rules coming out which are enforcing stricter rules on sustainability.
What are some of the things that you are doing in this area?
I think the biggest advantage of us with the new laws on sustainability is that we are working exclusively for one partner so we can.
It's not that we have different partners.
We have one exclusive partner, and so we know that if we sell cashews, it's always from cashew coast and we are really closely related to them to go to the origins.
So for example, my colleague was in May in Ivory Coast to see what is cashew coast doing there, how do they process cashews, what is the impact, and so on.
And so before we onboard a supplier, we do a really, really careful screening.
And then we are continuously working together and improving the whole value chain and yeah, so I think we can definitely tell you where our nuts and fruits are produced and harvested.
So for myself, I was in October at Ocean Spray myself to see the cranberry harvest, and I think this is a really, really big advantage for us and our.
Partners themselves, they do a lot of different activities in the origins.
One is of course like carbon footprint, which you can see with the cashews from Cashew Coast.
A lot of cashews, the majority of cashews is sourced in West Africa but brought to Vietnam for further processing.
Our partner Cashew Coast, they do the production and so the value chain also.
In Ivory Coast in West Africa, and so the cashew doesn't have to travel the whole globe to go into the final application of snacking, baking, or whatever it is.
And with ocean spray, they are also like a cooperative and so they are like farmer owned, which means that the return of our activities are directly going back to the farmer.
And they are all learning from each other and it's our job as BBS to educate our partners from overseas about the European sustainability standards.
For example, we do like sustainability trips, so which means that the almond growers flew in here and really look what is.
What are our key customers and our key customers is absolutely the retail and different industry customers.
What are they focusing about in California, of course it's a lot of water and with these cooperative structures, most of our partners have in like the US or wherever they can.
And build up knowledge together and everyone can profit from it and I think this is what makes us really special that we and our partners deal hand in hand.
We give them access to the market but also access to information about what our customer wants to have.
And on the other hand, so we are like the bridge from the origin to our customer base here in Europe.
Catherine, thank you very much for your insights.
Thank you.
