On December 21, 2022 we celebrated 30-year anniversary of VERIPAN.
In 1825 my ancestors founded in Westzaan one of the first chocolate factories in the world. Being the 7th generation Meiert J. Grootes decided as a young food process engineer to strike out in a new direction. In 1992 he founded with two Swiss partners Veripan as innovation platform for the invention and innovation of functional ingredients for the bakery industry.
From the beginning VERIPAN was established as a so called “Technology Platform” with 5 key technologies. For the manufacturing of VERIPAN’s solutions a network of licensees and toll manufacturers was established. The first years of operation were difficult, because at that time nobody understood the business concept. The first questions were always “where is your factory?” and “how many people do you employ?” Meanwhile Industry 4.0 has arrived and now everybody understands the principle of a Tech Platform. Since 1992 VERIPAN has created stunning 3’000 solutions for their global bakery customers with several blockbusters amongst them.
We have always been pioneers
In 1997 we built the first factory for frozen doughs in Asia. We had complete freedom to implement our own ideas and a built a future-oriented factory. Looking back, we can say that we wouldn’t do it differently today. It was the first step for hotels and catering to buy pre-proofed frozen croissants and rolls to replace their in-house baker’s.
The early 2000s we started with valorisation of side streams. Not because of buzzwords like sustainability, carbon footprint or Upcycling. Thinking outside the box we discovered that the processing of those side streams with our key technologies resulted in natural ingredients with amazing functional properties. Currently, our portfolio includes nearly 20 functional ingredients based on the valorisation of side streams.
Co-creation innovation
In 2015 we had to re-invent our business model after the Swiss National Bank gave up the peg with the Euro. From that time we decided to focus on co-creation innovation, and not only on innovation. We discovered that the joint development of new products together with our customers leads to the generation of real solutions to real problems. And suddenly there were much more synergy effects like reduced time-to-market, access to diverse capabilities and resources as well as risk & cost sharing. As a result we had very engaged customers and together we were able to reduce the innovation risk. Rapid innovation was born!
The past three years were challenging for all of us with the coronavirus pandemic, the Ukraine crisis, delivery problems and skyrocketing energy prices. We have taken up this challenge and face the future positively. The early integration of local and natural side streams have enabled us to react quickly on the changing circumstances.
As a result our pipe-line is full than ever before with our next generation PANATURA in liquid sourdoughs and the scaling of our liquid cake concept. Furthermore, we launched different innovations to replace or boost gluten, almonds and salt. And last but not least Brotzauber the first B2C Product in our history. Brotzauber is our all-in-one sourdough/predough for easy home-baking with 100% success guarantee. This disruptive innovation will change the home-baking scenery forever.
Disruptive innovation
Although sustainability has become extremely fashionable in recent years, we unfortunately see an opposite development in our industry during the crisis. In our opinion the time has come to walk the talk. Our society needs disruptive innovation based on local ingredients and new technologies more than ever to be able feed the planet in 2050. Our innovative technological solutions based on local ingredients make a significant contribution towards increasing productivity in an environmental friendly way.