Belgian Award Best First Sustainability Report
As Belgium-listed European Fresh Savoury Food Group What’s Cooking? renewed its strategy and investment program witnessing the sector requires growth and sustainability (ESG) to go hand in hand.
Multidisciplinary product development
Stronger Together: multidisciplinary product- and concept development makes the difference.
E.S.G. or Environmental and Social Governance at What’s Cooking? also drove our attention to providing healthier, more sustainable and animal-friendly products for the consumer.
Within the Processed Meats division we are constantly striving to improve our products, respond to consumer trends and invest in new product and packaging concepts. Through a driven development process; validated by external panels, we meet consumer expectations in terms of taste, nutritional values and corporate social responsibility when marketing our honest fine meat products.
Multidisciplinary teams, consisting of sales, category & product management, technologists and developers, work together on projects. We are convinced that this is the most efficient way to incorporate all perspectives on new developments and thus to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers and consumers.
A constant in our developments is the improvement of nutritional values, better known as NutriScore. We are actively working on reducing the salt and fat content in our products to improve the overall score and composition. With this approach, we have already improved the composition of a considerable part of our product portfolio. This gives our developers a double challenge: to strive for a better composition, without compromising on taste! In addition to NutriScore optimisation, food safety is a permanent concern for our technologists, who have built up industry-leading expertise in this field.
Within the framework of corporate social responsibility, we are always actively working, in consultation with our customers, on increasing the use of more sustainable and animal-friendly specifications. A recent case involved the complete conversion of poultry products into the animal friendly “better-life” alternative.
New trends in packaging and nutrition; such as plant-based concepts and products & the use of alternative, plant-based proteins; are a constant source of inspiration for our innovation strategy.
Meanwhile, our development process has become smooth and streamlined. We start with a joint briefing of the project, in which as much information as possible is shared with our developers and technologists. Our product development is then usually validated with independent taste panels. For us, the preference and taste of the consumer is paramount and this remains our most important principle throughout the entire process. Recipes are really fine-tuned based on these insights. We also find it very important to do the development process in consultation with the customer, whereby we work in partnership on the development of a specific recipe, product or concept.
Our latest news
What's Cooking Group reaches agreement on intention to sell its SBU Savoury
What's Cooking Group NV (What's Cooking?), the leading European fresh food group with wide range in savoury cold cuts and ready meals announced in March 2024 that it had started a process to explore strategic options and maximize shareholder value. As part of this process, preliminary discussions had started on the possible sale of 100% of the share capital of What's Cooking Savoury Belgium NV and its subsidiaries in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and Germany that produce, slice and sell savoury cold cuts (together the Strategic Business Unit (SBU) Savoury).