In October this year, Lucy Willey (Bakery Technologist) and Dinnie Jordan (Founder of Kudos Blends) made the long journey to the other side of the world to visit DKSH, our new distributor in Australia and New Zealand. Lucy explains this successful venture.
The intention of the trip was to spread awareness of Kudos Blends, our products and solutions, and what they can do for bakery manufacturers in the Australian and New Zealand markets. We also carried out some fun and interactive training with the DKSH sales team and Dinnie gave a superb talk at the Australian Society of Baking on Novel Leavening agents featuring the benefits from some of our revolutionary ZEUS™ range.
We travelled around the region, starting in New Zealand with Christchurch, New Plymouth, and Auckland, then flew over to Australia for visits in Melbourne before concluding in the iconic Sydney, Australia! We toured around visiting customers delivering a company presentation. Within this, we were able to explore the product timeline and deep dive into specific areas of interest for different customers, with a key focus on the capabilities of our ZEUS™ range. This presentation was very well received by a range of customers, including cake, biscuit, premix, and gluten-free manufacturers, and piqued customers’ interest through some insightful discussions afterwards. We spoke a lot about the common struggles that the bakeries are facing, including the skyrocketing cost of cocoa, ingredient shortages such as eggs and moving to healthier or cleaner label products.
A key part of this trip was attending the Australian Society of Baking where Dinnie gave a fantastic talk on ‘novel leavening agents’, featuring the benefits from some of our revolutionary ZEUS™ range. We amazed people with just how much you can achieve with the smallest ingredient in a recipe – The 1% ingredient of baking powder. For example, shelf-life extension, natural colour enhancement, cocoa enhancement, texture improvement, and process tolerance. Whilst at the conference, we also got to enjoy other thought-provoking presentations on flour milling, bakery enzymes, cooling systems, chocolate and natural preservatives. This taught us more about the broader market and how our products may be able to work with and complement others. The conference event was followed by a fabulous dinner and networking event, where we got to chat with people in the ANZ bakery industry and congratulate young scholarship winners as the next generation of bakers.
We also carried out some training sessions with both the Australian and New Zealand DKSH sales teams. This included getting the team involved in the bakery, where we made chocolate muffins, cakes with natural colours and American-style pancakes showcasing our ZEUS™ G90 and ZEUS™ C120 products. This was great fun and was fabulous to see the DKSH sales team getting stuck into the practical bakery work. We also demonstrated ZEUS™ C120 in chocolate muffins for a videography project in the DKSH applications lab in Melbourne.
This visit provided us with a much more in-depth understanding of the current Australian and New Zealand Markets. Some of the key trends we noticed included manufacturers leaning towards a cleaner label, shelf-life extension, the ability to reduce cocoa, and healthier products, specifically, ‘low-carb’. Although SALP is not banned in the region, many customers are looking for SALP replacements due to growing consumer health awareness and pressure from supermarkets. Similarly, there are no regulations on sodium levels in this region, so while there’s less for this, some manufacturers who want a ‘healthier’ label, are interested.
Another challenge in the region is the hot and humid climate as well as the size of Australia, which can cause issues for ingredient storage and manufacturing processes. To help with this, the majority of products are sold to supermarkets frozen and defrosted in-store, so many bakery products must be freeze-thaw stable.
This trip was incredibly valuable to meet and get to know the DKSH team in person. It was very useful to see a range of customer sites all around the region and get to meet so many current and potential customers, generating a lot of interest in Kudos Blends baking powders. It was also very insightful to see all the different customer sites, facilities and production sites. We also learned a lot about the range of products produced in Australia and New Zealand, some very similar to what bakeries in the UK would make and some products that are quite different. Most of the bakeries we visited didn’t let us leave empty-handed, we got to try Lamingtons, Anzac biscuits and Afghan biscuits for the first time and I’ll definitely have to try baking these for myself! The Anzac’s were my favourite, especially when dipped in chocolate!
We owe our thanks to the entire DKSH team for accommodating us and organising so many brilliant customer meetings, we had an excellent trip and saw huge opportunity for Kudos Blends products in the Australian and New Zealand markets. We will strive to continue to build this relationship and grow our sales in this region by offering a wide range of solutions to bakeries with the least expected ingredient – baking powder.
