Speciality foods are a tasty business
From gluten-free treats to authentic British fare with a Halal twist to kielbasa sausages for Polish natives, speciality foods are booming, reports Rebecca Burn-Callander.
8:00AM GMT 21 Feb 2014
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Gluten-free products, once dismissed as tasteless, stodgy fare for coeliac sufferers, have hit the mainstream. Advances in food science and new trends in nutrition have seen the niche come on in leaps and bounds.
“Gluten-free” is now the most popular dietary search term on Google in the UK. As well as gluten-intolerant consumers, health-conscious Brits are now seeking to vary and improve their diets. According to last year’s research from Datamonitor, a third of British consumers either already buy gluten-free products or would consider doing so in the next 12 months.
One of the pioneers of the gluten-free movement is Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, founder of Genius Foods. In 2007, she found out that her son was allergic to wheat and began scouting for gluten-free alternatives.
“All the gluten-free bread products that I could find were dry and gritty and had a nine-month shelf life,” she said. “I didn’t want to feed my child a chemical experiment. He was miserable at children’s parties with nothing to eat, so I began experimenting with gluten-free recipes.”
Mrs Bruce-Gardyne, a trained chef, spent three years working alone in her kitchen, improving her recipes through trial and error.
In 2009, she cracked it. “I made a bread that was soft, could be sliced, and tasted like bread,” she said.
She launched her company and found a bakery in Scotland to manufacture her product. But it took another year to turn her Magimix recipe into an industrial batch.
The fledgling Genius Foods had a few false starts – only 2.4pc of consumers bought gluten-free bread at the time, so buyers were wary of taking on a new range that might end up in supermarket bins. But when Mrs Bruce-Gardyne approached Tesco, it placed an order for 700 stores. “They embraced the idea,” she said. “We went from zero to 10,000 loaves a week within a fortnight.”
The consumer response was unprecedented. “People were queuing outside shops and buying crates of our bread. The shops couldn’t order our products fast enough to keep them on the shelves.”
This year, Genius Foods will turn over more than £40m and the company employs more than 400 staff. Its loaves are available in every major supermarket in the UK, as well as in North America, the Middle East, Spain and Australia. It now boasts a wide range of products, including pastry and cakes.
The company acquired two bakeries last year for £21m to allow it to embark on a huge expansion drive across the globe. “We’ll be selling gluten-free flatbreads and naan in Dubai, croissants in France and pies in Australia,” said Mrs Bruce-Gardyne.
The gluten-free market will be worth $6.6bn worldwide by 2018 according to Markets and Markets, and many of the big corporations are hoping to grab a slice. The likes of Warburtons and Udi’s both offer gluten-free ranges, but Mrs Bruce-Gardyne is confident of her advantage.
“Our customers are very loyal to our product and it’s very hard to copy,” she said. “Our recipe is a closely guarded secret. There are lots of challenging variables. Yeast is a living organism. The processes we use to turn the flours into something substantial, without using chemicals, are unique.”
Today, Genius Foods bakes 1m loaves a week. “When I first started out, I wanted to be the UK brand leader in gluten-free,” she said. “We were there in two months. Now we are on course to be the global brand leader.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/festival-of-business/10652271/Speciality-foods-are-a-tasty-business.html
