Biofach 2024: Wholey Organics switches out breakfast sugars with date-sweetened cereals and smoothie bowls
04 Mar 2024 | Wholey Organics
Wholey Organics presented its range of organic and vegan breakfast products at Biofach in Nuremberg, Germany. Philipp Stahr, co-founder, highlights the brand’s smoothie bowls of frozen fruits for instant “Bali vibes” sold alongside a newly launched range of cereals and granolas that can be used as a topping. The brand only sweetens with dates, ditching refined sugar, in its disruption of “traditional categories that do need an upgrade.”
This is Benjamin Ferreira on the show floor at BOA in Nuremberg, Germany, and I'm sitting here with Philip Starr, co-founder of Holi, the cereal brand.
Philip, can you share some insights about your exhibit here today at the show?
Yeah, it's, it's great being here.
It's our, I think, 5th Berach.
And we are representing a wholly and a wide range of organic and 100% natural vegan breakfast products.
What are some of the specific bestsellers in your range today?
Our main bestsellers are definitely our smoothie bowls, but also Frozen fruits, Frozen fruits, yeah, it's a mix of frozen fruits, vegetable superfoods that you just need to put in the blender, add water, and then after 45 seconds you have your barley wives at home.
But we also now launched a range of cereals last year.
And we already sell them in over 7000 supermarkets here in Germany.
Is that strategic to have the muesli sold alongside the smoothie bowls so that people can combine it together?
Definitely.
We also have a range of granolas that people can use as a topping, but us as a whole, we always try to either bring innovation to the markets or disrupt traditional categories that.
That do need an upgrade and when you look at the cereal shelves, there's definitely too much sugar in it, low carbs, that's what we wanted to change, so our products have less than 15 g of sugar.
We only sweetened with dates, so no refined sugar.
It's fully organic, high in fiber, so what do you actually want to give your kids for breakfast?
And speaking of the disruption of the segment, what are you observing about trends on the cereal market at the moment and particularly the health cereal market?
It's, when you look at the cereal shelf, it pretty much hasn't changed for the past 20 years, especially in the last 1 or 2 years, you do see more and more different approaches coming to the cereal market like high in protein.
But often with a lot of sweeteners, so that's what we try not to do.
We try to avoid artificial sweeteners.
That's why we do sweeten with dates, and we can see that consumer trends are definitely shifting towards less sugar, towards natural ingredients, and that's what we are definitely trying to cover with Hoy.
What are some unique and interesting ingredients that you hope to experiment with in the future?
An interesting ingredient, yeah, it's, could be a natural sweeteners like the monk fruit.
Yeah, it's, it's not allowed currently in, in Germany, but I think it is in the US market, so this could be something of interest for us.
What else?
Yeah, that's, there are a lot of trends going on, but like precision fermentation, stuff like that, but.
We leave it to other brands to cover that space.
We are more into really natural ingredients and it doesn't always have to be super fancy.
It's sometimes innovation is super simple.
And what what are some of the key markets that you're targeting this year?
We're based in Berlin, so our key market is Germany, but we are already also available in Austria and Switzerland, and we're now more and more also expanding to overseas and also in Europe, so it's definitely a goal to establish wholly as a global brand at one stage.
And lastly, what can you comment about the organic trend in cereal?
What's the consumer appetite for that?
It's, it's, it's not an organic.
It's not a big thing at the moment in the cereal space.
I would say we are in the mass market here in Germany.
We're probably the only brand who is really.
Putting a high focus on organic, but we try, we try to push the organic organic products also more and more into the conventional retail, and we try to play our role in boosting the organic market as a whole.
Thank you very much, Philip.
Thanks Benjamin.
