It's all in the mix

22.01.2020 From the Bell Food Group

What do potato chips have in common with a Sunday roast? Hardly anyone knows the answer better than the food industry experts at Hügli: it all comes down to the right seasoning. And so they find tailor-made solutions for every taste. Their customers now also include sister divisions of the Bell Food Group.

Whether dry or liquid, a mixture or a single ingredient - Hügli's Food Industry division supplies its customers with a wide range of flavorful products. "Compounds" is the technical term for food components that are used everywhere in the food industry. Snack seasonings, which add a wide variety of flavors to potato chips or nuts, for example, are currently very much in vogue. Seasoning mixes for meat products are also among the segments with promising growth potential.

The Hügli team often turns products that have already been defined into reality. For a successful result, it is very important to know the customer and their circumstances precisely. This is because the system on which the end product is produced or whether it is subsequently frozen or heated can have a significant impact on the taste.

In addition, the Food Industry division also focuses on marketing its own product ideas. "For some time now, we have been increasingly developing trend-oriented concepts on our own initiative," reports Daliborka Dragojevic, Marketing Manager Food Industry at Hügli. "In doing so, we are very close to current market trends, such as conscious nutrition or exotic flavors."

Among the nutritional issues that the spice specialists are currently focusing on are the reduction of salt and sugar and the replacement of palm fat with other fats. "The new EU Organic Regulation, which comes into force in 2021, also presents us with challenges with its stricter requirements for raw materials, for example for various flavour categories and yeast extracts, as well as with the regulations on food contamination. Under certain circumstances, certain ingredients that are still approved as EU organic will no longer comply with the new regulations. Our colleagues from the development and procurement department are therefore extremely challenged to find suitable alternatives," explains Daliborka Dragojevic.

This June at the "Snackex" trade fair in Barcelona, for example, the department demonstrated just how innovative it is: In addition to potato chips and nuts, pellets made from mealworm meal were used as a carrier material for Hügli spice mixes. The stand team received a lot of positive feedback from the trade fair visitors as well as astonished faces.

Hügli has the most modern mixing plant in Europe for the production of powders, pastes and liquids. The 40,000 square meter facility in Radolfzell has twelve outdoor and 30 indoor silos for the most frequently used raw materials. The respective recipes are mixed in an automated process. The plant can produce a trial batch as well as several wagonloads of a product.

When supplying its FoodIndustry customers, Hügli benefits from two decisive advantages over many of its competitors: the company itself is a user of many types of food components and is also in close contact with a large number of food service customers. Based on this wealth of experience, the experts are able to continuously improve existing products as well as develop new products that are in demand.

And they are now also doing this for companies in the Bell Food Group. For example, Hügli produces dressings for Eisberg and Hilcona and seasoning mixes for Bell meat products. This intragroup collaboration has already enabled the company to replace a number of third-party suppliers. Here, too, the team found tailor-made solutions such as stick packaging for dressings as a salad addition or a spice mix packaged precisely for a batch of meat production. However, the synergy effects are far from exhausted. And so intensive work is already underway on further cooperation projects.