Multidisciplinary product development

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.

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.