Veganz Group AG is a German public limited company (‘Aktiengesellschaft’) based in Berlin. As Europe’s sole multi-category provider of vegan food products, we pick up on global food trends for our product offerings and develop concepts and products that are placed and sold exclusively under our Veganz brand. Our product range includes products for all storage types (unrefrigerated, refrigerated, frozen) and for the most important meals of the day: for example, we offer breakfast ingredients – such as spreads or our honey, cheese and egg alternatives – as well as meat and fish alternatives, protein products, ready meals, sweets and snacks.
In December 2022, we also secured a new and unique patented 2D printing process for producing printed oat, almond, soy and other milk alternatives called ‘Mililk’. This will enable us to produce a line of both market-ready and patent-protected, as well as environmentally friendly and competitive printed milk alternatives, in various formats for the food service sector and directly for consumers.
Our offerings are characterised by a complete absence of all animal ingredients or products which use animal ingredients in their production and are available at over 28,000 points of sale (POS) around the world. In addition, we are continuously optimising our product range – not only with high-quality new items, but also by concentrating more on our focus categories¹ – and thereby constantly enhancing our value chain.
¹ Our focus categories include plant-based fish, cheese, egg and milk alternatives, as well as textured protein for the production of unrefrigerated meat substitutes.
We utilise the relevant distribution channels
Our main distribution channel is the branded goods business of the food retail sector. In our core market of Germany, Austria, Switzerland (the DACH region), we market our purely plant-based food via the classic retail chains, such as REWE, EDEKA, Kaufland, SPAR Austria and Coop Switzerland, via drugstore chains such as Rossmann, dm Germany and Austria, Müller and Budnikowsky, and the promotion business of German discounters such as LIDL or ALDI. Internationally, our products are also sold primarily via food retailers such as SPAR International, Kaufland International, dm International, Albert Heijn Netherlands, MPreis Italy, Ahold Czech Republic and Coop Denmark.
For reasons of profitability and efficiency, we decided to significantly reduce the store business of Veganz Retail Berlin GmbH & Co. KG – in other words our ‘Stores’ distribution channel, which included the sale of our own articles as well as vegan products from other manufacturers around the world via our own Veganz stores in Berlin. Of the three existing Veganz stores in Berlin, we closed two already in the fourth quarter of 2022.
In order to reach consumers online, we also offer our products via our own online shop (shop.veganz.com) and online sales platforms such as amazon.com, rohlik.cz, puroshop.cz, snacky.ch and vekoop.de, as well as via quick online commerce providers such as Gorillas, Frischepost and Flink.
Since late 2021, we have also been using the distribution channel Food Service in the form of cooperation agreements and brand licensing partnerships – for example with one of Germany’s largest caterers Aramark, the football club RB Leipzig, the baked goods company Bakerman, the German airline Eurowings, the foodvenience provider Valora as well as Hack AG, one of the leading manufacturers of bakery and confectionery products. As a result, our customers not only come into contact with our products and our brand in the supermarket, but also in a wide variety of everyday situations.
Our strategy integrates sustainability and economic efficiency
According to scientific studies, animal food production is responsible for 30% of global CO2 emissions and 70% of biodiversity loss¹. This makes nutrition a major driver of global warming. Veganz regards itself as a pioneer and innovation driver for plant-based and climate-friendly food.
As a multi-category provider, our objective is to make vegan products available to as many people as possible at competitive prices as a genuine alternative to animal food. Sustainability and environmental protection play a central role for us and our business development. And these issues are equally important for our structurally growing core target group of consumption- and nutrition-conscious Millennials+ and Generation Z customers.
During our evolution from a single purely vegan supermarket to an innovative food tech company, we have not only expanded our distribution channels, but also increasingly focused on making our own products. So far, we have largely outsourced production to external suppliers, providing recipe and process know-how and enabling our partners to produce the desired products for us.
In future, we aim to realise an increasing number of our product ideas ourselves. To this end, we are already using a production site for cheese alternatives in the heart of Berlin, which currently specialises in the production of vegan cashew-based Camembert. In addition, we opened a further production facility on 4 October 2022 in Spielberg, Austria – the Veganz Food Factory Austria. As demand from retailers and consumers for ‘Cashewbert’ exceeded the capacity of the production facility in Berlin, which already opened in 2020, the cheese alternative is now being produced at a further production site, from where it will primarily serve the demand of retail partners in Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia. We have also been producing our vegan smoked salmon – a sustainable algae-based fish alternative – in Neubrandenburg since June 2022.
The Veganz Food Factory Germany, originally planned for Werder (Havel), Brandenburg, has now been opened in Ludwigsfelde, also Brandenburg. On 1 February 2023, we already took over the production facility of around 3,000 square metres, newly built in 2022, in an excellent location in the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region with first-class transport links directly next to the Berliner Ring motorway. We will benefit from the site’s high-quality building infrastructure, enabling a liquidity-preserving start-up and optimal production ramp-up. The new and innovative plant-based milk alternatives will be produced here in future using the patented 2D printing process, as well as the plant-based meat alternatives using peas (Textured Vegetable Protein, TVP).
In addition, we are planning to pool our current production capacities in Berlin and Neubrandenburg at a certified production site for the production of our plant-based cheese alternatives ‘Cashewbert’ and ‘Bluebert’, the algae-based fish alternatives and ‘Das Vegane Ei’ (the vegan egg).
The declared target of this forward-looking decision towards more in-house production is to improve profitability and strengthen our innovative power by increasing the vertical integration of our value chain.
¹ Source: Science Vol 360, Issue 6392.
