Outlook and opportunities in the nutrition sector
25 May 2018 | Stern-Wywiol
Stern-Wywiol is eyeing strong potential in the nutritional space, with emerging platforms such as vegan being targeted. At this year’s Vitafoods in Geneva, their SternVitamin business presented micronutrient premixes that address individual consumer wishes. FoodIngredientsFirst spoke to Stern-Wywiol CEO Torsten Wywiol about the outlook and opportunities that exist in the nutrition sector.
This is Rob Warriors of Vital Foods Europe in Geneva, and I'm here with Thorsten Mbial, who is the CEO of the Stern Vivial Group.
Thorsten, how important is nutrition to you as a, as a business and a growth pillar?
And what are you doing right now because you're making a significant investment at the moment.
And what are, what are some of your other plans on these platforms?
Nutrition is very important.
You know, healthy products are important.
Healthy products are growing.
The population worldwide is growing, and they just can grow if, if Food is healthy and therefore nutrition is important for us.
We are growing steadily.
Last year we had a big turnover of 520 million and a lot of this volume comes of the growth comes from healthy products.
So therefore nutrition is critical for our future growth and you just mentioned our investments.
Yes, we are investing this year in Asia with a new product, production in Malaysia, which should serve.
The local areas Southeast Asia, with what are you going to produce there at that facility in general food ingredients, but in concrete, it's vitamin premixes targeting the beverage and the infant industry.
What are some of the trends then that you really see happening within the nutrition and health sector?
The health sector, sure, if you, if you speak about vegan, vegan could be a health sector.
Yes, this is a big trend, but I think this is more.
A niche than just a trend.
It's definitely for the developed country and we have fantastic solutions from the different companies of which belong to our group for this for the sector.
Where are you looking to develop right now?
What what are some of the R&D things that we can, we can expect to see from Stern Wheel?
We have plenty of points, so it's quite difficult to explain, you know, we are very strong and application orientated.
So we are working on all different, different fields.
So how do you feel right now within the industry?
What, what is the state of the of the nutrition industry right now also as you walk around here at Vita Foods?
No, I haven't been here in the Waterford for a couple of years and I found out this is , the, the, the exhibition is established now and looks better, better than years ago, and I'm very positive, astonished about.
The booths and about even the suppliers, you can get new ideas and I think this is it's a nice and very organized show.
OK.
And in terms of the, there's obviously been a lot of turbulence within from a regulatory environment in Europe.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
I guess you've probably benefited being such a supplier of mic of blends of vitamins, etc.
Sure, there are always advantages, disadvantages we are gaining of this.
But this is critical, and as a good supplier you have to look at this critical and we're doing this perfectly.
So are there things that we can expect to see coming forward in the months ahead from CERN where we are?
Yes, not just even investment in Malaysia.
We have other investments.
We are investing in the moment heavily even in in Mexico with the new production, and we have great ideas for Germany, but we speak about this in the future.
OK, thank you very much.
Thank you.
