Organic Food is More Mainstream,
Frozens Increasingly Make the Scene
By LISA SHOEMAKER, QFFI Correspondent

Range of offerings at BioFach proves that an industry has truly come of age.

BioFach is the world’s leading fair for organic products. The main event is held every February in Nuremberg, Germany, and has spawned branches in Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paolo and Boston. As production of organic food is a globally proliferating industry, the fair keeps growing from year to year.

The green consumer has long ceased to be an offbeat outsider. Indeed, going organic has become a lifestyle, almost but not quite mainstream and très chic, so BioFach has started adding a bit of glamour to its halls.

French actor Gérard Depardieu (Cyrano de Bergerac, The Count of Monte Cristo), owner of a vineyard and a restaurant, delivered an opening address for this year’s running, emphasizing that “respect for nature, people and the environment is tremendously important.”

The number of exhibitors at the Feb. 21-24 show rose from 2,547 in 2007 to 2,764, with one-third of them hailing from Germany. Cumulatively, another third were from Italy (397), Spain (211), France (175) and Austria (112), and the remaining participants came from all over the rest of the world. The 46,484 visitors (up by 1,015 from 2007’s 45,469) were mainly from the retail and wholesale business, followed by producers and staff of hotels and restaurants – more than a third of them foreigners.

BioFach as a fair is strictly organic, adhering meticulously to organic regulations, so the products presented all have to meet the respective standards of their certifying organizations. Therefore the target clientele for the show’s exhibitors is to be found among the natural food shops and supermarkets, and only to a lesser extent in the conventional retail trade.

So what makes these cod from Deutsche See organic? Well, they’re farm-raised, fed only organic feed, and spent at least two thirds of their lives on the fish farm.

Ristic (www.ristic.com), a company that imports and distributes organic shrimp in Germany, no longer attends the fair. First of all, its share of the German frozen organic shrimp market exceeds 90%. Secondly, it is developing new products with organic ingredients for conventional supermarkets, not conforming to the very tight standards of organic certifying regulations.

For example, the Burgthans-based company’s shrimp burger comes in a crispy, crunchy coating, difficult to achieve with organic ingredients only, and has flavorings added that are not on the positive list for organic additives. For that reason, the burger will be marketed as “made with organic shrimp,” as it cannot be called an organic product – but that is good enough for conventional retailers who aim at satisfying customers who are looking for a clean product without getting worked up over the purist details.

Bremerhaven-headquartered FRoSTA (www.frosta.de), which avoids using artificial colorants or flavorings in all of its products, offers various fish items with MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) certification and free-range eggs. The company’s Copack unit compliments its range of private labels with an organic line, BioFreeze, offering herbs peas, spinach and beans. [Read more about the FRoSTA on pages 82-84.]

Advocates of strictly organic, on the other hand, argue that such tendencies in the food market are dangerous as they might lead to false impressions and confuse consumers, who might wrongly assume that a product is organic when in fact only one ingredient, and perhaps not even the main one, is certifiably so.

Old and New Cod

One of the main trends to be observed at the fair in the frozen foods sector still is found in fish, either sustainably fished or bred in organic aquaculture.

A new producer in this sector is a cooperative from the Andes Mountains in southern Peru near Lake Titikaka, Bio Trucha Andina Peru (www.biotrucha.com), which raises organic trout, fulfilling German NATURLAND standards for organic aquaculture and also certified by an accredited certifying agent for USDA (United States Department Agriculture) and EU standards.

Bremerhaven-based Deutsche See (www.deutschesee.de), a market leader for fish and seafood in Germany, has a particular fish up its sleeve these days: organic cod. Cod fishing has been one of the most controversial fishery issues in recent years, ever since the species just about all but disappeared from the Northeastern shores of the United States (Cape Cod!) in the late 1980s.

Certifying wild catch is obviously problematic as, even if the fish was caught in clean waters, who is to know where it spent its previous life? So certified organic fish is always farm-raised, fed exclusively with organic feed and must spend a minimum of two-thirds of its life in an aquacultural environment.
The future target is, of course 100%. But that cannot be achieved yet as there is not enough supply from organic hatcheries. Deutsche See bio fish meets the standards of Naturland (Germany), Soil Association (Great Britain), Debio (Norway) and Agrior (Israel). In addition, Deutsche See presented a gourmet seafood mixture consisting of mussels, shrimp and squid.

In Greek mythology, Demeter was the goddess of grain and fertility. Today, the name refers to organic food products in Germany.

Demeter Felderzeugnisse (www.demeter-felderzeugnisse.de), Alsbach, Germany, is one of the leading producers of premium organic frozen food in Germany with such product lines as Natural Cool (vegetable and potatoes), Hänsel and Gretel (vegetarian convenience), and Wild Ocean (fish). Now it is adding an economy line to its range, BioInside, beginning with an assortment of popular vegetables (peas, beans, spinach).

Its Wild Ocean brand is presenting new fish gratins, made with pollock (dubbed “the new cod” by some British newspapers as pollock sales have surged by more than 40% in 2007).

One of these is Seelachsgratin provençale, a pollock fillet with a tomato-zucchini crust based on breadcrumbs, the other Seelachsgratin Gärtnerin (à la female gardener), topped with potatoes and various garden vegetables. The fish for the gratins is sustainably harvested in tested clean waters off the shores of Iceland and Alaska.

The company’s Racchelli ice-cream line features a multi-pack with assorted fruit sherbets on a stick, keeping in mind the growing number of children with food intolerances.

Berlin, Germany-headquartered Ökofrost (www.oeko-frost.de), a wholesaler supplying more than 600 customers with 350 products all over Germany, began developing an own brand, Biopolar, in 2005. Starting with a shrimp range, then adding salmon, it has now introduced a couple of tilapia products: fillets and tilapinos, bite-sized coated tilapia fillets, both farm-raised in Honduras.

Among the other fish and seafood products are Atlantic Fare (www.atlanticfare.com) offering frozen Irish salmon, Morubel (www.morubel.be) from Belgium with natural prawns and prawns in bio-sauce, and Norwegian Villa Salmon (www.villaorganic.com) with organic salmon, cod and trout raised in aqua farms off the Norwegian coast. It utilizes cleaner fish to eat lice off the salmon, thus avoiding use of chemicals to control the pest.

Battling Allergy/Intolerance

The organic image of healthier and cleaner food also accounts for the trend toward developing more products for people with food intolerances or allergies. The difference between a food intolerance and an allergy is that the intolerance might make one feel sick and uncomfortable – a classic one is gluten intolerance – while an allergy provokes an immune reaction in one’s body that could potentially be fatal.
Nature et Compagnie, Vallet, France, is an example of a company that produces exclusively without gluten – and offers all those products normally associated with flour: pizza, tartes, pasta and cakes. Its range now includes three new lasagnes (provençale; tomato-mozzarella-basil and spinach-salmon) and cakes – but not the kind one typically associates with the word cake.

French “cakes” is almost a movement set in motion by the cookbook author Sophie Dudemaine who wrote “Sophie’s Cakes,” selling millions of books worldwide. Most of her creations are savory, and research and development people at Nature et Compagnie (www.natureetcompagnie.fr) were perhaps under her spell when they created the salmon-leeks and the salmon-dill cakes for the new range, combining two trends in one product: fish and gluten-free.

Another French company producing gluten-free convenience products, Valpiform (www.valpiform.net), has a lemon tarte and a strawberry cream tarte in its range. Though not all French products are free of gluten, Les Delices du Chef (www.lesdelicesduchef.com) prebakes blinis, crêpes and American pancakes.

Siegfried Schedel (www.schedel-biobrot.de), one of Germany’s leading bakeries for organic frozen baked goods, has complemented its ever-expanding range with spelt products (aimed at people who can’t manage wheat but will tolerate spelt) and regional specialties, introducing a number of whole grain spelt pastries (including small spelt-apple cakes, spelt plum danish, spelt muesli sticks), a pane espelta (a Mediterranean spelt roll), pesto pretzels and banzgauer, a flat rye bread.

At the gourmet end of baked goods is Belgian Pains & Tradition (www.pains-tradition.com) of Luxembourg, which is a member of the international Slow Food movement. Baker Jean Kircher holds up the traditional baking values such as slow kneading, soft dough, long fermentation, shaping by hand, baking on stones, and nowadays even supplies customers in Japan with his premium breads.

Global Fruit Movement

Frozen berries and other fruit for juices, jams and baby food come from all over the world. Far from the traditional berry growing countries of Scandinavia, as with Nordic Food Group (www.ollesab.com) of Sweden, other companies are creating new markets.

Blue Dreams of Argentina offers blueberries and strawberries; Surfrut (www.surfrut.com) of Chile includes kiwis and grapes; Covelt of Helmond, the Netherlands (www.covelt.nl) has blue and black berries in an easy to handle “fruittube” to be added to desserts and smoothies; while the Dutch Berrico Food Company sells cranberries from Canada.

The Danish Berrifine includes elderberries, elderflower, lingonberries, sea buckthorn, sour cherries and a relatively unknown yet quite interesting fruit with a dry and light sour flavor called aronia, which is also known as black chokeberry or mountain ash.

The health benefits of aronia are said to include compounds to fight cancer and cardiac diseases including high blood pressure. It can be used in wine making and as a colorant for all kind of juices, jams and other products.

More berries are available from Ecoplod of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria (www.ecoplod.com), and Bionest from Spain. Urenbio (www.urenbio.co.uk) of Britain also has rhubarb in its range, while Sanex Foods (www.sanex-foods.com) of Izmir, Turkey, offers apricots, pears and grapefruit.

Ökoland (www.oekoland.de), Wunstorf, Germany, which had until recently concentrated on small packs of a single frozen herb, has added an Italian herb mixture. Another new product is a classic German stand-by: a bunch a “soup greens,” namely the basic vegetables for cooking soup: celeriac, leeks, carrots, parsley and onions, now available in a handy frozen version. And last but not least, there are a couple of new convenient pasta dishes: ravioli with a spinach-ricotta filling and tortellini in a creamy cheese sauce.

Venlo, Holland-based Oerlemans (www.oerlemans-foods.nl) grows its own organic range of vegetables and fruit, including berries, in Holland, Hungary and Poland. Sales are increasing due to the growth of the organic food market globally. The conventional range from the company, which recently was acquired by the Vion Group, offers an assortment of “forgotten vegetables” which consists of purslane, salsify and Swiss chard among others, vegetables that are usually sold fresh through organic markets. Unfortunately, there is not yet significant demand for those greens and roots in frozen organic quality.

BiOvum (www.biovum.de), Salgen, Germany, sells scrambled eggs in frozen form, plus Italian and Indian burgers with eggs as their main ingredient. It has been awarded golden, silver and bronze medals, respectively, by the DLG (German agricultural society).

The most sensational product for the sweet tooth this year probably came from the Booja Booja company based in Norfolk, Great Britain. The continent was introduced to its Stuff in Tub ice cream desserts, which won the award for best organic new product for 2007 in England. Flavors include Keep Smiling Vanilla M’Gorilla, Hunky Punky Chocolate, Coconut Hullabaloo, Feisty Winjin Ginger and Pompompous Maple Pecan. The names live up to their promise.

Denmark, which was the “Country of the Year” at the BioFach, contributed – you guessed it: Danish pastries by Le Blé d’or (www.lebledor.dk). There was a lot more frozen food from Denmark, including ice cream from Skee Is (www.skeeis.dk) and pizza and lasagne products from Hanegal (www.hanegal.dk).

But the best known Scandinavian product came from Sweden’s Gunnar Dafgard (www.dafgard.se), which served up the organic version of what every child and many adults have eaten at IKEA outlets: Köttbullar, otherwise known as Swedish meatballs.

The organic frozen food market is well established. Happy with increasing sales, companies are consolidating their programs, occasionally adding one or the other new product. Despite the fact that the number of organic convenience products is slowly growing, innovations in that field will come from conventional retailers using bio ingredients as their customers will demand the product they are used to, only in better, more sustainable quality.