Drink mixes sometimes turn out to be quite crazy. Who actually comes up with the idea of a pear-beet-ginger smoothie? Or an aronia syrup? Or an apple spritzer with raspberries? At Holderhof Produkte AG, food technologist Tobias Stadler is responsible for the recipes of the drinks. He is curious by nature and takes every opportunity to discover new flavours. In his laboratory at the Henau site, he is constantly tinkering with possible new beverage mixtures. He has up to 300 raw materials at his disposal, many of which are organic. From common herbs such as mint or lemon balm, elderflower extract and apple juice to hibiscus blossoms or white tea and guarana, to name but a few. They are used in the more than 1200 different articles we produce, for the most part with private labels – also known as private label products.
The story behind the private labels
What about the famous private labels? How does that concept work at Holderhof? A good example here is iced tea, an extremely popular drink among the Swiss. Many restaurants or bakeries, for example, first develop their own iced tea until the whole thing becomes too colourful or too elaborate for them. “They then send us the recipe and a sample of their iced tea with the request to produce a similar product on their behalf,” explains Tobias Stadler. He analyses the drink, looks at what’s inside, determines the sugar and acid content and puts it back together with his own raw materials. Thanks to his many years of experience in iced tea development, the product can often still be optimised, be it in taste or shelf life, he says. If the proposal is right for the customer, he sends the label template to our bottling plant and production starts. By the way, the process is similar for other beverages, such as fruit juices, apple spritzer, syrup, smoothies or even cola. It’s even easier when a company uses existing Holderhof recipes and only adds its own label to the bottle. By the way, we handle such orders for quantities as low as 5000 bottles.
Exciting raw material procurement
When it comes to special beverage requests, customers like to come see us and benefit from Holderhof’s know-how in the procurement of food raw materials. Take the example of pomegranate juice, which had to meet the strict cultivation regulations of Bio-Suisse. In other words, a real niche product and a fairly unknown fruit even for Tobias Stadler. Thanks to the large network of possible raw material suppliers, he came across possible addresses relatively quickly. But who knows that pomegranate juice tastes very different depending on its origin and that the juice is also a variety of different colours? Holderhof Produkte AG put together various samples, which finally went down well with the customer. “Sourcing the pomegranate juice was quite exciting and educational,” says the food technologist looking back. Now he has upped the ante with another experience.
Holderhof enables customers to produce drinks under their own brands.