Since entering the US plant-based products in 2021, Germany’s Stern-WywFiol Gruppe and its Planteneers GmbH business have expanded their North American business. This June, they opened a Customer Center of Excellence in Aurora, Ill.
For the record, Stern-Wywiol Gruppe, Hamburg, operates 12 distinct businesses that supply food ingredients, systems and services to manufacturers worldwide. It created Planteneers in fall 2020 and borrowed the strengths of its texture and taste stabilizing business, Hydrosol. In Aurora, Planteneers’ new Customer Center of Excellence also represents an expansion of the company’s SternMaid business, a sister unit specializing in contract production of powdered products and granulates in individual formulations.
Planteneers’ new space can host customers for collaborative product development sessions with a full plant-based meat laboratory and a plant-based dairy laboratory (coming online soon-). The Aurora building also houses sales, distribution, marketing, product managers and R&D team members.
On hand to celebrate and speak were Stern-Wywiol’s CEO Torsten Wywiol; Managing Director Dr. Matthias Moser; Dr. Dorotea Pein, Planteneers’ director of innovation; Brian Walker, CEO of Planteneers LLC; and Kyle Borkovec, R&D Manager for North America.
“Planteneers helps its customers to manufacture innovative plant-based food products,” said Pein. “We see ourselves as the enabler for the food industry to bring very good products fast to the market.”
Addressing the company’s technical approach, she identified four pillars of Planteneers’ work and related customer service.
Ingredient Research: “We cannot develop food products without knowing the ingredients. We investigate the properties and the technological functions of the ingredients and mix them … because what’s most important for our customers are the properties of the final product. We only get this if we have the have the right ingredients. Creaminess, mouthfeel, taste, texture—all this comes with the right ingredients. It’s not an easy job to source, select them and identify applications where we can uses them. This is the first part of our job.”
Product Development: “When we know what the ingredients can do, we put them all together into recipes and functional systems that work for the final product. Plant-based food is very complicated because we do not have a base like milk or meat. We have to build this base first and then try to build something out of it. We need to combine ingredients in a new way to get the perfect product. We at Planteneers had to learn that. We had to learn how to apply common food technologies and processes to these new products we wanted to bring to market—products that look and feel like the ones that people are used to. Because we only meet the needs of our customers if [consumers] know what to do with the products … Most of us want to have plant-based products that can be used like the animal ones. So we needed to build our knowledge on protein resources, new flavors, new combinations of food colorings and the right hydrocolloids in the right products. At the end of the development, we’ll have a recipe for a prototype to fulfill our customer’s needs.”
Application Technology: “When we have the ready developed product, we need to apply this into commonly used technologies. It makes no sense to bring a new product with a new process because that means heavy investment for our customers. No. We apply new products and processes that are on the market. Therefore, we have specialists in dairy technology, meat technology, fish technology and sauce technology—because they know how the conventional product works and they can think about to use this process for the new category … We enable our customers to bring the line up and running. We go into the facilities of our customers and help them bring their vision into an industrial process and then to the market.”
Raw Material Supply: “Our fourth part, of course involves raw material supply because these are plant-based products. As the name suggests, our ingredients are made of plants and they undergo harvest fluctuations. From one year to another, you could have a totally different protein [level] coming out of the same crop. We need to study this and—when we source our proteins—we check the properties for every supply. Of course, our customer’s target is to always have the same product on the market and we need to ensure that our ingredient fulfills this.”
Planteneers’ grand opening also featured its ingredient solutions with an added culinary spin. Food Network’s Julia Child Challenge finalist, Chef Dustin Hogue created a range of entrées and hors d’oeuvres featuring various Planteneers ingredient systems.
In a prepared statement, Borkovec shared Planteneers’ product vision:
“Our portfolio comprises three product areas—plant-based alternatives to meat and sausage products, seafood, and cheese and dairy,” he said. “In plant-based sausage products, our focus is on alternatives to raw sausages like salami and chorizo and in meat alternatives we naturally address the BBQ classics, ground meat, and our new marbled steak options. We’ve also tailored the plant-based seafood line ingredient solutions for salmon filet and smoked salmon, shrimp, calamari, sashimi, fish sticks, and breaded filets. Cheese and dairy products are also interesting from our perspective. Manufacturers can use our systems to make plant-based alternatives to whipped cream, traditional hard cheeses like parmesan and feta, ice cream and cream cheese.”
