Technical collaboration drives
innovation with
purpose for Industrial Bakers
Zeelandia UK is a leading bakery ingredients and solutions supplier, and part of the global Royal Zeelandia Group, working closely with industrial bakery manufacturers to drive innovation with purpose.
Similar to food manufacturers, our team consists of highly skilled NPD professionals and bakers, who have a dual focus not only on improving our range of value-added ingredients for the commercial baking sector but also helping industrial bakers to identify, test, and perfect products, ready for the consumer.
We asked our NPD Manager, Andrew Taylor about what is unique about Zeelandia's NPD process and why collaborative efforts can be crucial in driving solutions across the bakery and wider food manufacturing sector.
Firstly, it is no secret that the baking industry always calls for inspiration, speed of response and technical support across NPD. The sector is very responsive to trends, be that seasonality, a new flavour profile, or new ingredients to bring added value to a product.
For commercial bakers, the NPD process often starts with research and development, then procurement and testing of specific ingredients to match new product ambitions before scaling up production. We can add value and access to a global technical team to this process. The need for faster NPD has been heavily influenced by the increasing pace at which consumers are spotting new trends, with bakery products showcased across Instagram and TikTok creating instant demand.
Accumulating technical knowledge and market insight from our sister companies worldwide puts us in a unique position where we can respond quickly to NPD customer briefs and offer valuable support to our industrial customers to steer product innovation, as well as make use of a global portfolio of ingredients and European processing sites for projects that span across different countries. Our range includes Bread Improvers, Custards, Mincemeat, Fruit Fillings, Jams, Caramels, Cake and Doughnut mixes,Release Agents and more.
In addition, with the supply of a broad portfolio of value-added ingredients and a purpose-built technical centre in Colchester where our industrial customers can test, trial and taste the production of specific products, this collaborative effort can significantly speed up the NPD process. You can learn more about this in our video below.
As an example of this collaborative process, in recent times, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we worked with leading modern craft bakery company Country Style Foods to develop a red rye grain blend, whittling down from 30 malt trials with a local maltings company and driving a process to make the grain acceptable for bread making. Country Style Food’s ‘Yorkshire Loaf’ was recognised as ‘Specialty Bread of the year’ at the prestigious British Baker’s Baking Industry awards, with the flavour of beer in bread, a growing trend across UK consumers.
While the above example showcases innovative NPD, it is also worth noting that the best innovation doesn’t always come from being ‘new’. NPD for us also means exploring how we can improve our existing products and make them more sustainable, such as a new cap on our Carlex Release Agent Sprays, which will lead to a 17T reduction in plastic from the Zeelandia global supply chain. As an ingredients supplier, we are extremely proud to offer our wide range of NPD expertise to drive purposeful innovation for our industrial bakery customers.
Get in touch with our team today to discuss your NPD and Innovation needs.
