PLANT BASED DAIRY ALTERNATIVES 2022
The new Berief Food plant built in 2016 Berief Food plans to label all
January/February 2022 ¦ international-dairy.com · 11
Raw materials from Europe
Only organic raw materials from Europe are processed,
from soy to rice and oats to spelt and almonds
(coconut and cashew not included). The range includes
vegetable drinks, yoghurt alternatives, cooking creams
and spreads as well as tofu in various preparations.
Eßer: "Our products have a unique character, we do
not want to imitate dairy products in any way, but we
want to establish our own position in the market by
targeting consumers who, for whatever reason, want
to eat a plant-based diet".
In fact, when you visit Berief Foods, you don't get
a whiff of ideology or the "moral acid" that is common
among some plant-based processors. Rather, professionalism
determines the business. As Eßer explains,
any new plant-based raw material sources are first
thoroughly checked to see whether they actually meet
a consumer need and whether they are also available
in sufficient quantity and quality. "We don't do any
product development just because a raw material is
being hyped at the moment," says Eßer. In the meantime,
there are only two or three product innovations
that come onto the market every year, preferably they
are presented at BioFach.
The Berief Food products are mainly delivered to
food retailers, both as own-brand and private-label
products. In addition, they are exported to 26 countries.
In contrast to the philosophy of many dairies, the batch
volume in production is not a control variable. Since the
products with the Nutri-Score
company has been dealing with niches for a long time
and always has to deal with allergens, Berief Food has
developed into a specialist for complex production.
Digitalisation
Professionalism is also evident in Berief Food's digitalisation
strategy. The 25-person IT department is constantly
combing through all processes in order to possibly
optimise them further and to create cost-cutting
effects. Berief Food is the only company in the German
State of North Rhine-Westphalia to carry out a statesubsidised
5G project, which is intended to develop applications
for fast mobile communications technology
in an industrial environment.
The extent to which Berief Food has developed in
the past five years is not only shown by substantial investment;
at the end of 2021, the Beckum-based company
started sponsoring TV shows for the first time.
The marketing department was expanded in order to
be able to serve social media as well as print. In addition,
the brand was relaunched with a big "B" that
reflects the company name, the city of Beckum as a
guarantor of regionality and the focus on organic ("bio"
in German).
There seem to be few limits to the further growth of
Berief Foods. The company is still hardly represented
in the organic or natural food trade, and cooperation
with franchise chains has not yet been seriously considered.
/international-dairy.com
