Market Opportunities Amid the Ongoing Flexitarian Trend
23 Oct 2016 | Vivera
This is at the C in Paris and I'm here with Gert Jong Humbert from Vivera, and Vivera offers an extensive line of vegetarian items.
Ger, can you tell me a bit about the mainstreaming of vegetarianism and flexitarianism within the market and where you see market opportunities?
You actually see the market explode in all of Europe at the moment and you see that there is a tendency of people wanting to eat less meat for different reasons.
This is a very main driver.
People are more concerned about health, sustainability and animal welfare is also an issue, and you see all of a sudden because we are in this for 26 years already in this business and especially the last 3 years.
Specifically last year there has been a tremendous rise of meat alternative and demands for What have you been offering to meet this demand?
What type of products have you been launching to address this?
You see that we are really, really good at resembling the texture and the bite and the mouth feeling of the meat alternatives, and I think of all companies we managed to have the best in those three items.
One of the newest things that we created, for instance, is we say crispy chicken scallopi, chicken-like scallopi, which we've had people from all over the world and everyone is really amazed by the likelines to the real meat thing.
We've had many, many people saying that it's just so good that it would surprise.
I would eat it, I think that's one of the benefits.
Another direction of growth is more for the younger generation.
You see them that they are not so like they are not so focused on resembling the meat products, but they are also really keen on eating more vegetables, for instance, a green bean peas burger, a mushroom red pepper burger.
The pumpkin sweet potato burger that is quite new.
And for instance listed at Albertin in Holland and they are really, really, really going.
So there are two directions.
One is the meat alternatives and the other one is the more vegetable-based products.
Which of alternative proteins are you using in your products?
Several ones.
We have soya, which is still the main driver, but we are also trying to get more and more different meat proteins in there like rice or like lupin.
We grow our own lupin.
We have contacted several farmers to do that for us, so we want to widen the range of alternative proteins that we have.
Seaweed can be one, and we are really keen on getting as wide as possible with the proteins.
You're confident on the outlook for this flexitarian trend.
This is something that's got legs and will continue for a while.
I'm quite sure when you see that for instance in terms of food production, the next 30 years we need to produce more food than the last 10,000.
Years and there's just not enough land or soil to have all the cattle and beef walk around so we all need to get our proteins from different sources and I'm quite sure that we will benefit from that.
Thank you very much.
