SIAL 2024: Essento unlocks the power of insect protein in bars and snack concepts
24 Oct 2024 | Essento
Christian Bärtsch, founder and CEO of Essento, details the company’s newest food additions to its “entovegan” portfolio at SIAL 2024 in Paris, France. He discusses how insects are incorporated into the Swiss brand’s protein bars, snacks, hamburgers and meatballs. Consumer feedback shapes Essento’s product development, with inspiration from regional flavors like Thai spices and Alpine herbs.
This is Anvisha from Food Ingredients First.
I'm here with Christian Birch, who's the founder and CEO of Escento.
Christian, what new products or innovations are you showcasing at CL today?
So this year we brought our newest protein additions.
So we have our new protein bar, high protein bar, with insect protein coated in Swiss chocolate.
We have the chocolate bar coated with dark chocolate.
We have the berry bar coated with white chocolate.
Then we have our protein powders, 67% of best protein.
Then we have also our snack.
That is super popular to have with some wine, a good glass of beer, and we also brought our convenience products, so we have our hamburger that we've been selling for over 6 years in supermarkets in Switzerland, as as the meatballs, and we also brought our energy bars where we have it in chocolate and in the flavor of berry almond.
Super interesting.
Thank you for that overview.
Can you talk to us more about how you incorporate insects into these different products?
What does that process look like from sourcing to processing?
Obviously it's super important to always think about the end consumer.
What does he want?
What kind of features is he looking for?
Something that we did notice it's all about functionality.
So what does the product do to me?
And this is something that we always have in the back of our mind when we're going into the product development process.
So on all our products we're really looking on the high protein end.
So we're combining the insect protein with suitable plant-based proteins.
So all our product range is entero vegan.
So besides the insects we only use plant-based material.
Plant-based proteins are other ingredients that help us to formulate our products.
Depending a bit on the product category and on the application, we select the type of insect.
In the EU we have 4 different species of insects that are legal.
We have for all the respective species we have suitable suppliers.
Then also, depending on the kind of product, we need, we need them in a different form.
We either need them as a powder, we need them as whole dried, or we need them as the frozen insect, all depending on the application of the end product.
So these are all elements that we need to keep in mind when we are working on new products.
Very interesting.
You're also focusing on clean labels, especially with that protein bar concept.
Can you talk to us more about that?
The consumer is becoming much more aware of what is going into a product, so this is obviously also something that needs to be taken into account when developing the product, also working with the suppliers that we can stay on a clean.
Clean basis on the ingredients and that is not always easy, but it is a key for us to deliver products that are a clean label and up until now we've been successful.
Great.
How is the protein bar different from many other protein bars on the market?
So when we look at the protein bar, obviously the taste is one of the key aspects, taste and texture.
So here we have been working hard to come up with formulations where we have enough moisture but also enough protein content.
And then obviously it is the, the, the taste aspect, so having the proper aromas, natural aromas in, in our, in our context, that go with the other ingredients in, in the, in the, in the end product.
What inspired the flavors behind the snack concepts in front of you and how important is it for you to adapt to different consumer tastes?
Also here we're doing a lot of focus groups on the products, so we have, we do come up with a whole range of different flavors.
We go to the focus group, we get feedback of the flavors and then decide which products we're going to bring to the market and We always take the ingredients into account, so that's why for the, the, the Thai cricket, obviously we're getting the inspiration of Thailand, of the Thai spices that work really also with the base flavor of the, the crickets themselves.
What we found is also with our, Locusta product, it, it has this, Idea, this little hint of the Alps, the fresh grass.
So we took that up and combined it with the, with the herbs, with alpine herbs.
And this is something that we have taken from, from all the snack products to, to, to pair it up with the, the best match.
Super interesting.
Can you tell us about What functional ingredients feature in these different products?
Our key functional ingredient that we use in all of our products is the insect protein.
Depending on the application, we use it in different forms either whole, dried, or milled into a fine powder.
And then obviously we combine that with other suitable products, for instance, for the protein bars, we need the fibers, so we need high quality fibers to have the nutritional values that we need, and, and that's like for each different product application we do find the suitable functional ingredient to pair up with the the the superfood that we already have as our key functional ingredient, the insect.
Great.
Do you think insects could really be the food of the future, given the regulatory landscape and customer attitudes?
We're convinced that insects are the future, that we're going to be snacking insects in the future.
Already now we're seeing that the trend is going up and we're in quite a good position because the legal landscape has cleared up in the last few years, so.
In all the EU countries we can commercialize insects without any problems, and this is kind of the key basis so consumers can trust that there are certification controls in place to take the products into the supermarkets and offer it to the consumer.
It's been really fun talking to you, Christian.
Thank you for your time.
You're welcome.
