Biofach 2025: Agrana combines plant proteins with buckwheat for organic drink alternative for toddlers
26 Feb 2025 | Agrana
Agrana unveiled a vegan, organic beverage base powder for small children that meets their nutritional requirements and parents’ demands for sustainability. At the recent Biofach trade show, Tamara Ranzenberger-Haider, the company’s sales director of Special Nutrition Solutions, said it is the only vegan alternative that corresponds with the amino acid profile for young children. It combines pumpkin or faba bean protein with buckwheat to develop a profile that aligns with European Food Safety Authority recommendations.
This is Yolande van Haal from Nutrition Insights.
I'm here at BUA 2025 with Tamara Ranzenberger Haider, who is a sales director at Agrana.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for the opportunity.
You're welcome, and I'm really curious if you can talk about some nutrition innovations that you're presenting at BOA this year.
This year at BFF we are very happy to present a very innovative product.
In relation to children's drinks, especially for toddlers, so it's, the only vegan alternative, we know that, also, corresponds with the amino acid profile for young children and it's really based 100% on vegan ingredients and of course organic, of course that's where I think that's very important.
How do you ensure that the plant-based, these plant-based nutrition solutions balance both a great taste, functionality and convenience for health conscious consumers?
Yeah, that's a very good question and it's a quite challenging one as , and especially as we know that plant-based proteins do have some challenges, and there we find a formulation, a way for the.
Formulation where we can combine special plant-based proteins with buckwheat in a way that we get a good texture, a good mouth feeling, a high solubility, so which is very important for this target group for toddlers because they are, they are very, very sensible in regard of taste and solubility.
And what kind of challenges did you face in developing these products, especially as you're mentioning in terms of face or texture formulation, what can you tell us about that?
Very challenging is of course the part to have a good nutritional profile, especially for this group.
Parents are very much behind to find good nutritional profile and in the way we made the mixture of the raw materials, we could find a good way to meet these recommendations of the ESA and exit profile.
OK, awesome.
And just looking more in general, where do you see this industry heading and what.
Kind of trends do you expect will increase?
Yeah, there's this huge trend of sustainability which we are also focusing and there's also this ecological footprint that we can see.
So for our product, it was also very important to have no soy, no milk, all those ingredients which might have a bad taste in the society.
This is really one trend and also this beneficial.
Values for food, so it's not only food, it's more to have unhealthy benefit of it.
OK, and as for Agrana, how do you anticipate and respond to those trends in consumer demands?
Agrana is an Austrian company and we are very much into, especially organic ingredients and we have a very broad.
Spectrum of different ingredients, also food preparations, so we are very close to the market and this is also very important to understand the trends, how they can come in and how we can combine them, that we can offer the ingredients in a way that they are beneficial for the food industry.
Awesome, thank you so much.
