President Heinrich Schaper explains that there are two ways to fulfil demand for natural flavour extracts at a quality and price that suits food manufacturers and consumers: Backwards integration, such as having your own fields or contracts with farmers to provide the fruit and vegetables required; or securing long-term contracts with big fruit and vegetable juice processors whose by-products can be a source of high potent natural ‘from the named flavour’ extracts.
As sustainability is a fairly recent subject every flavour company has its own start line, he said. But in time, it will become a prerequisite of doing business in the flavour industry, just as quality was 20 years ago.