Quinoa and puffed varieties can be used in range of food applications thanks to “health halo”
27 Mar 2023 | The British Quinoa Company
The British Quinoa Company presented its range of ingredients, including a puffed quinoa and various rice grains. Company founder and director Stephen Jones made a breakthrough when trialing new quinoa varieties bred for European climates. The new varieties produced a high-quality quinoa sample with big white grains, allowing The British Quinoa Company to harvest the crop mechanically.
This is Elizabeth Green reporting for Food Ingredients First.
I'm at the IFE manufacturing event in London.
I'm here with Stephen Jones, who's the director of the British Qunoa Company.
Now, Stephen, can you tell me a bit about the history of the company and how it came about?
So our company was formed in around 2005 when my dad and I had the idea to start growing quinoa on our farm.
And from there we had to try and get new varieties that we could grow in the UK climate and in around 2012 we actually properly formed the British Quinoa Company as a limited company using varieties that from our previous seven years' worth of trials we found to actually work to grow in the UK climate, and from there we grew quinoa on our farm.
Expanded it on to other people's farms and now where we are today is that we've got quinoa grown across different locations in the country and we sell it to primarily food manufacturers, to co-packers, and a lot of retailers who use the products.
Stephen, can you tell me a bit more about how difficult it must have been to establish the right climate and growing conditions in the UK?
So it has been challenging to figure out how to grow quinoa in the UK.
Primarily quinoa comes from South America is suited to a very South American high altitude climate which we don't have in the UK.
So it's been quite difficult because often quinoa doesn't mature evenly in this country and it required finding new varieties that.
Had much better genetics that allowed us to actually have a quinoa variety that matured on its own in maybe September that we could then put the combine into.
So that's been one of the biggest challenges for us.
The second challenge we had really is just the presence of weeds, so we don't have the availability and the luxury of herbicides for use on quinoa.
So what that means is that we can't just Grow quinoa anywhere.
We need to be able to choose a field, understand the field, know whether it's got a high weed population, and if it does have a high weed population, we would avoid it, whereas if it's got a low weed population, it should be good for growing quinoa on.
So there's very subtle, almost sort of organic views you have to take for growing this crop in the UK.
That's really interesting.
What do you think is driving the peak in demand for quinoa based ingredients?
So the peak in demand for quinoa ingredients is coming from gluten-free, the rise in vegan foods, and obviously just the rise in healthy eating as.
So I think between those three that accounts for quite a large proportion of the requirements of quinoa nowadays, but we haven't seen it reduced yet.
I think it's probably slowed down in terms of the rise of quinoa because we had the year 2012, the International Year of quinoa.
We saw a Very, very big boost in its consumption and it has continued to rise since then, but maybe it's started to slow down a little bit as we start to get to the point where it's more saturated, but it still continues to grow for us and also in terms of other quinoa products like flakes and puffs, things where we've had to transform them into other ingredients to help them be used in other products, that just continues to grow very strongly for us.
What sort of applications are you talking about when using such Ingredients such as puffed quinoa, so puffed quinoa or flaked quinoa, we're looking at the breakfast cereal market quite often where it's included as a pre-cooked flake or a pre-cooked puff so you can just add milk along with the other ingredients, of course, and just eat it like that.
A lot of customers nowadays are making it into a breakfast bar where they are mixing with other ingredients, often with dates and just pressing it into a very, very simple raw bar, and that seems to be quite popular.
These ingredients must offer different textures to food formulations.
I think it offers new textures, but beyond that, I think it's the nutritional properties that quinoa is imparting to the product, and I think a lot of people say that it carries a health halo.
So anything with quinoa in it is generally deemed as being very healthy.
Obviously it only works if you put enough of it in and you don't include other unhealthy ingredients, but on the whole, people are putting into things because of that health halo that it carries.
I would say it's really easy to formulate with.
It's very versatile because although it is its own unique product in terms of its nutritional use, it's still got a lot of other equivalents.
So for example, you get rice puffs, very, very, very similar to our quinoa puffs.
You get oat flakes again, which is very similar to our quinoa flakes.
People already know how to use these products.
It's just a slightly different take on them.
What other ingredients have you got here on the stand today?
So we've got other ingredients on the stand such as black rice, brown rice.
We do a lot of red split lentils, dark green speckled lentils, yellow split peas.
So essentially, although our company started out producing and trading in quinoa, we have a lot of customers that come to us and they say, we buy quinoa from you, but we also need these other ingredients.
Where can we get them from?
Quite often they are products that we already supply to other customers, so as long as it's like a dry ingredient like a seed or a grain, then we are quite happy to handle it.
We try and prioritize British grown ingredients first where we can.
But there's a lot of things like lentils.
We've tried growing them in this country.
It's a very challenging thing to do, so we often will import them from other parts of the world.
And what about the plant-based movement, it's, it, it's obviously growing and growing, you sort of positioning yourself within that?
I don't feel like we are positioning ourselves just within the plant-based movement, although we have a lot of customers that are interested in that.
I think quinoa kind of transcends that a lot from the point of view it's not like a bacon where it is being transformed from one ingredient into another.
It's still a very raw based ingredient that.
Mixed with a whole load of other things, so we're more than happy and we think it's a great thing that the whole plant-based revolution seems to be here.
But if people are trying to mix quinoa with meat to maybe dilute the meat down to replace it with quinoa, then also that's a good situation as.
We feel.
That's fantastic, Stephen, thank you very much.
