Noud van Stekelenburg of FI&S continuously researches and develops

FI&S stands for Food Ingredients and Services and started in 2005 as a supplier of functional additives for the meat processing industry. Examples include spice mixes, marinades, coatings and binders. Over the past decade, the vegetarian and vegan industry has been on the rise. What started as a niche, is now a serious business that now represents 30% of turnover and is growing fast. Kiempunt visits managing director Noud van Stekelenburg to talk to him about market trends and product development.

Value

For every client, FI&S has one starting point: adding value to the product. Whether it's about developing a completely new product or improving the taste, structure or shelf life of existing products: it's all about adding value. That is why there is a large application lab where not only the own product can be tested and made, but also the final product and a recipe can be developed and tested. But FI&S goes further than just application technology. Van Stekelenburg: "We really want to understand how ingredients are put together chemically and how they work. That's why the company itself has all the knowledge and people to do this, just like all the major food manufacturers. In collaboration with Synex we are developing new extraction techniques with which we can measure all kinds of things: fibers, fatty acids, viscosity, structure, you name it. With this knowledge we can better support customers and develop our own products. That makes us flexible and proactive."

Exports

Sixty percent of FI&S's turnover comes from the home market (BeNeLux), the remaining forty percent from around the world: South-East Asia, North-West Africa, America, the Middle East and the EU. Van Stekelenburg: "The focus remains local, precisely because logistics is such an important issue. And where we grow, we want to set up new companies on location. For example, we now have a company in Romania. Right now that's just a service and support location, but we want to start manufacturing there as well in the future."

Less e-numbers

Noud van Stekelenburg follows trends closely and together with his team of product developers proactively looks for new opportunities. "Consumers are suspicious of e-numbers and so our customers are looking for opportunities to reduce e-numbers or even produce completely clean label. It means we look for natural extracts with the same effect, so that the final product retains the same taste and the same shelf life. That means a lot of research and testing. The whole market goes through a learning curve in this area. For example, the skin of passion fruit and mangosteen fruit digests very slowly. We then investigate what properties that skin has and how we can apply that knowledge to products to extend the shelf life."

Food for Food

Also the increasing focus on healthy food, sustainability and CO-2 reduction and the growth in plant-based foods is getting a lot of attention from Van Stekelenburg. "From a sustainability point of view, we have been working a lot with residual streams in recent years, with the help of the Food for Food program. The food processing industry has all kinds of residual streams that still contain fibers, sugar or proteins that you can use to conserve, bind or color food products, for example. It is of course a great opportunity if you can use those residual streams."

Vega 4.0

In the vegetarian and vegan market, Van Stekelenburg notes remarkably little attention to additives. "Strangely enough, the vegetarian consumer does not seem to find e-numbers and other additives a problem at all. But that battle will be fought in that segment as well. We are now gradually moving towards a fourth generation product. The first version was really inedible: dry and tasteless. The second version started to get more structure and flavor. The current version is already a very nice product that is not inferior to many meat products. The fourth generation will be further perfected: even tastier and with more attention to the right concentration of proteins as a full-fledged meat substitute. The advantage is that we can use the same techniques as for the meat industry, you only work with vegetable proteins. There will also be products that are not so much like meat, but are a category in themselves. Compare it to Indian cuisine, which is largely vegetarian. What that will look like is still uncertain."

Hybrid meat

Also Van Stekelenburg expects to see more and more hybrid products. "The availability of meat is going to be a problem due to population growth and one solution is to develop a product in which part is meat and part is other protein, vegetable or from insects. For example, we have already developed an insect burger in collaboration with a customer, which consists of fifty percent insects and is fifty percent vegetarian. We have also developed a version that is half insect and half meat. This is not music to the future, it is already on the shelves of Kaufland! Insects have a fantastic energy conversion of 1:1, so that is just a very interesting development. We will have to go through a similar process of habituation and acceptance with insects as we did with vegetarian ten years ago. The meat market will remain, but the livestock population is not growing, especially not beef. So the question arises: how can we make meat expand, make more with less meat? Then you'll have to broaden the protein base."

Local mini-factories

In addition to shortages of raw materials, Van Stekelenburg identifies bottlenecks in the logistics chain and its footprint thereof. "It is extremely expensive to distribute fresh products from the farmer to the end consumer. I therefore expect mega-factories to remain, but there will also be micro-factories, close to the farm. Vegetables, milk, eggs will be delivered directly from the farmer to the local supermarket. This is much more efficient, the footprint decreases and the THT time for the consumer becomes longer. You will also start to see local, small production plants at farms. Small vegetable processing plants operating within a 50 kilometer radius. That will become a new revenue model for some of the farmers. I am not saying that this can be done everywhere and at all times, but you have to look at this seriously as an industry. Many of my customers are very concerned about the logistics issue. If we see that a third of the food produced worldwide is lost, and even two thirds in the Netherlands, then it is clear that we have to find solutions for this. In that respect, it is interesting to look at the meat industry. The sector has its square footage in order, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in the case of vegetable products."

Four types of food

Van Stekelenburg distinguishes four types of food. "Food in the traditional sense of the word, fortified food, mainly aimed at the recovery and strengthening of the elderly and sick, health food, where the food is personalized and has a preventive effect and food as medicine, aimed at curing ailments and complaints. As an industry, we have mainly focused on traditional nutrition over the past 50 years. While there is enormous potential for the other three. That makes the future extremely interesting."

Mass market remains

Too, Van Stekelenburg has no illusions that the entire market will switch to sustainable and plant-based. "Still the majority of our sales come from meat. We also see that the average meat consumption per person in the Netherlands is not declining. The mass market will continue to exist, that is the backbone of the food industry. But the top of the market is making more conscious choices and is prepared to pay higher prices. There is room there to gear your products to that."