Over the past few years the food market has seen an explosion of innovation from companies capitalising on bigger shifts towards veganism. But in their quest to mimic meat, ingredient lists grew longer, negating some of the biggest reasons for a move away from meat.

“Plant-based foods made a lot of headway during the COVID-19 pandemic as people shifted towards healthier lifestyles. But what we saw was food that contained endless lists of unnatural chemicals and additives to make them taste like meat,” says Juval Kürzi, founder of Wild Foods in Switzerland.

This graphic designer – a vegan since childhood – spent much of lockdown experimenting with vegetables in his kitchen, employing methods like smoking and drying to achieve meat-like flavours in vegetables.

“The first time I smoked carrots it was so good, I thought, you must be able to buy this,’” Kürzi says.

With the pandemic creating a lot of conversations around what people were eating, what it contained and where it came from, it was the ideal climate to launch a product that was natural, vegan and locally produced.

In 2021, Kürzi took the leap to start a food company that would bring ‘clean label’ vegan food to the market. Today the company is based largely on just two products – smoked ‘salmon’ made from carrots, and beetroot ‘charcuterie’ and jerky (biltong). Both boast fewer than five ingredients each.

A third product was introduced this year to mimic tuna. The celeriac-based product is presented as a tuna-mayonnaise-like filling for sandwiches or dips, with the mayonnaise component made without eggs.

Scaling up

Kürzi relates that when he started his experiments in his home kitchen, smoked vegetable products were not found in supermarkets.

“I was surprised that no one had thought of using this technique before, because it is such a natural way to infuse food with a barbequed flavour.”

The downside, however, was that information on smoking techniques and times were few and far between, necessitating a lot of trial and error. This was especially challenging when Kürzi tried to scale up production to produce the products commercially.

“It’s easy when you are working with small batches for home use. But a commercial product requires bigger batches, and absolute consistency in flavour from one week to the next.”

The first product, smoked ‘salmon’, proved to be immensely popular and Kürzi was soon able to lease a factory with an industrial kitchen to ramp up production.

“Consumers really took to the product because it was a clean, natural alternative to all the other vegan products on the market with their long lists of ingredients. Carrots have the right texture and colour, and by smoking it really comes close to tasting like smoked salmon. It’s still our best seller today.”

Another challenge with scaling up production is changes that result from switching from manual to mechanical processes.

“Manual labour is very time-consuming, which means your production output is low. Mechanisation is expensive, so you need to ramp up production to make it worthwhile. But the end result from the two processes is not always the same, and we needed to make a decision in the business to compromise on certain things in order to move the company forward and expand production,” Kürzi says.

For example, when carrots were sliced by hand, long slices could be achieved that better mimicked salmon ribbons. Mechanised slicing resulted in small pieces.

“We thought this would be a deal-breaker for consumers. But after doing a survey, we found that they didn’t actually mind, so there was at least a good outcome.”

To make the ‘salmon’, the carrots are roasted, smoked and sliced. No fish flavouring is added since the smoking does enough to mimic the smoked salmon. To achieve a charcuterie-like consistency for the beetroot, the vegetables are marinated, dried, smoked and thinly sliced. It can be used on sandwiches instead of cold meat, or eaten like biltong.

The vegetables are bought from a company that sources from farmers, washes and peels them. Kürzi notes that they are working towards sourcing directly from farmers and processing the vegetables themselves, but that this requires an additional production line for which they are not yet equipped.

Part of Wild Foods’ philosophy of producing ‘clean’ products means that they only source vegetables from Switzerland. Vegetables therefore need to be either available year round, or be able to be stored for long periods.

This is why root vegetables form the basis of their products. Since the food is marketed as natural, no preservatives are added. Pasteurisation is used to remove any unwanted bacteria, resulting in a shelf life of around 30 days when kept at 5°C.

Products in the development phase include a ‘hotdog’ where a whole smoked carrot will be used to mimic a vienna, and a breaded line to make ‘chicken nuggets’ from cauliflower.

Dried sausages are also in the making, which will contain only vegetables and not the usual ingredients of grain, soya bean and nut fillers common in vegan sausages currently on the market. This, however, presents a significant challenge in both production and pricing.

“It’s not a very economical venture because vegetables are mostly water, so once you’ve dried them out, you’ve lost most of your volume,” laments Kürzi.

Developing new products starts with considering market demands.

“For example, we know vegan bacon will be a good seller because bacon is a product the market is familiar with, and would be in high demand among vegans. Since smoking is a large part of what we do, it would also be an easier product for us to develop. The challenge is to find a vegetable that will work as a vegan bacon in terms of texture and flavour. This is where a lot of time and money is spent to do the research and development to find the right recipe, test it on industrial scale, and get the packaging right to ensure the product will be preserved in the market. It was a lot of fun when I was still working on a small scale in my kitchen. But now it’s just hard work,” laughs Kürzi.

Fitting into the market

Wild Foods sells their products in over 2 000 stores across Switzerland. The products have proved to be immensely popular as meat alternatives, but Kürzi states that this is not necessarily the market they want to be in.

“Over the last year there has been a lot of pushback from vegans against products with too many additives, so going the route that we did proved to be the right one and gained us a lot of market share.

“But our slogan is to reinvent vegetables. Ultimately we want consumers to buy our products because they are tasty vegetables, exciting as a food that is good enough to stand on its own, without competing with meat. But we would never have attained the market share we have now if we just introduced smoked vegetables into the vegetable section of the supermarket, and there is still a lack of excitement from supermarkets today to stock such products.”

As far as prices go, the carrot salmon is on par with real smoked salmon.

Wild Foods’ consumer profile is 30% vegan, 30% vegetarian and 40% flexitarian, pointing to interest from consumers for innovative vegetables. Kürzi says that for some, the carrot salmon is a real alternative to eating salmon, for others it’s just a fun ingredient in their meals.

Food from waste

Looking to solve the challenge of food waste, a brewery in Switzerland has developed products that uses spent grain from the beer making process.

Traditionally this grain has been used as animal feed, but with declining herds and Swiss environmental legislation that makes grain an unfavourable feeding option, brewers have had to dispose of this waste product elsewhere.

Brauerei Locher, which produces Brauerei Locher beer, generates over 14 000t of spent grain per year. Consisting mostly of barley, with a small portion of wheat, the grain has been diverted to biogas facilities since demand for animal feed has dwindled.

But with transport being a considerable cost, and no payment received for the grain, Brauerei Locher sought an alternative.

“Spent grain still has so much nutritional value; how can we throw it away, or not use it for human consumption?” asks CEO Aurèle Meyer.

With this question in mind, Brauerei Locher turned to upcycling.

“Unlike recycling, upcycling creates added value, so the focus is on improving the quality of the product. The recycling of unused waste reduces the need for newly produced raw materials and thus protects our resources.”

Brewbee was opened in 2017, producing products like pizza bases, pasta and chips from the spent grain, which is high in protein and fibre. The chips consist of spent grain that is dried, flavoured and pressed into a chip shape.

Pizza and pasta dishes are sold as ready to eat to capitalise on a market increasingly looking for convenience meals.

While the chips, pizza bases and pastas require additional ingredients to the spent grain, Meyer notes that they have maximised the portion of spent grain used, without compromising on taste.

A key consideration in positioning the products in the market is that using a waste product has not necessarily meant that the cost of the product is lower.

“The technology to process the spent grain is costly, and overall can’t compete with a product like flour that is abundant and cheap. But the aim is to produce a product that has a smaller environmental footprint – by upcycling waste and reducing the land and inputs needed to grow an ingredient that is already available. Much more consumer education is, however, still needed to explain the benefits of buying products that have been upcycled. Right now, there is very little awareness about it,” says Meyer.

He notes that the trend towards reducing food waste and upcycling is gaining traction but has yet to catch up with the availability of spent grain.

“For us to convert all of our grain into chips and pizzas, the whole of Switzerland would need to live off them alone,” Meyer says.

Until that consumer demand picks up, Brauerei Locher is developing other product avenues, partnering with start-up Upgrain and opening the largest food upcycling plant in Europe in September.

The plant has the capacity of converting around 25 000t of spent grain into valuable raw materials every year that can be used by other food manufacturers, instead of ingredients that need to be grown first.

This includes a flour alternative consisting of 27% protein and 47% dietary fibre, a filler ideally suited to meat substitute products that has 70% fibre, and a barley protein powder with 45% protein.

“Food upcycling is the name of the game,” says Karl Locher, owner of Brauerei Locher.

“We’re showing that economic success and environmental responsibility really can go hand in hand. Wasting valuable resources is becoming a thing of the past and at the same time, high-quality food products are being created that taste good, too.”

While still at the early phases of the journey, Meyer believes upcycling will be a vital component of food production in future.

“We may be ahead of our time, but the innovations we are developing today will be a big advantage in the future.”

Visit Wild Foods at wildfoods.ch, or Brauerei Locher at brewbee.ch.