Contemporary consumer products
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| Valio has a proud tradition to live up to in cheese R&D. A.I. Virtanen, long-time Director of the Valio Laboratory, achieved a world first in unravelling how and why Emmental cheese has holes. Drawing on this tradition, we have developed cheeses such as Valio AURA®, Valio Polar® and Valio Oltermanni® that appeal to Finnish tastes and have quickly become brand leaders in Finland. We’ve also scored notable successes beyond Finland in e.g. the US and Russia.
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Product development means more than just developing new products. It’s also about advancing the quality of cheeses that have been in our range for decades. A good example is when we succeeded around the year 2000 in eliminating the use of additives in matured cheeses. Valio was a pioneer in the once dominant trend for low fat cheeses that started in the early 1990s.
They still account for almost half of the cheese volume Valio manufactures for its domestic market. But today the dominant trends are naturalness and taste, so cheeses with a higher fat content are gaining in popularity. Around 40% of Valio’s raw milk volume is used in the production of matured cheeses.
Product development for cheeses requires seamless co-operation between marketing, R&D and production. Valio’s Lapinlahti plant has a 1,000 litre pilot production line for project start-ups and production scale trial runs are always conducted prior to retail customer sales, which allows us continuously to measure consumer opinions of products under development. We also ensure that we know what consumers think about our well established cheeses, and continuously develop their production qualities.
Cheese product development staff work in close collaboration with the plants, where production safety, hygiene and environmental factors are significant everyday development issues concerning which the developers audit the plants regularly in tandem with Valio Production. Individual development projects are set up as required.
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