We're in the News!
Woohoo, we were in the news! Aotearoa's vegan cheese sector is doing great things!
Here’s an excerpt from this article which appeared in Stuff on August 22, 2021.
Alice Shopland, a vegan, a pioneer of vegan cheese and founder of Angel Food, is one of two local commercial producers of vegan cheese here.
She said about five years ago the company’s market used to be 50:50 vegan and people with allergies or intolerance to dairy products.
But now it was flexitarians, about 30 per cent of the population she said, who were the fastest growing market segment. Flexitarians are people who are not vegetarian but are trying to cut down their meat consumption and eat more vegetables.
Those were the people Angel Food thought of when developing products.
“So they've really raised the bar for us in terms of getting as close as possible to the dairy product we are trying to emulate.
“A million people reducing their intake of dairy products has more impact than 1000 people going vegan.”
Angel Food supplied the big supermarket chains and others including food service companies like Pizza Hutt, Hell Pizza, St Pierre's and The Cheesecake Shop.
“There are a limited range of producers but far more than there were five years ago. It's just grown very rapidly,” Shopland said.
Ten years ago there were only imported non-dairy cheese substitutes and not many of those. Consumers had to go to an organic food store or one selling gluten-free products to get vegan cheese.
Supermarkets weren't interested at that stage, she said.
The prices of Angel Food cheeses were similar to speciality cheeses. A 300 gram block of Angel Food plant-based cheese in a Countdown would be about $10, she said.
Angel Food will be launching the fourth revision of its products at the end of September. The company kept tweaking the formulations as it discovered new scientific knowledge or new ingredients or a new processing method. Its products were contract manufactured in Tauranga.
“Got to keep those flexitarians happy,” Shopland said.