Trust is our greatest source of energy

In our company, working together goes far beyond applying operational expertise. It is about solving dilemmas, daring to let go of certainties, and sharing plans and ideas for the future. The basis for our fruitful collaborations: trust. Intangible and hard to measure, but if you manage to earn it from your colleagues and stakeholders, trust is an inexhaustible source of energy – and the key to overcoming many challenges.

Trust within our teams

Some months ago, we started working in customer-centred teams for our largest clients in the Netherlands. The teams meet every week to discuss performance and solve operational issues. During monthly meetings, in turn, they anticipate the needs of our customers and look at opportunities, threats and potential improvements.

Each of our commercial teams is supported by a large group of specialists who think along with them and offer help where necessary, enabling us to serve our customers even better. It is great to see our colleagues trust and empower each other, and come up with the best solutions and smartest innovations together.

In short, because our employees go the extra mile, we continue to create added value for our customers, and we can think strategi- cally about how to fulfil the wishes of consumers today and tomorrow.

Trust from consumers

What it’s all about at the end of the day is, of course, good food. Food can be a purely practical affair, but it can also be intimate and very personal. The moment when consumers sit down at the table: that’s what provides us with food for thought. At What’s Cooking?, we think about ease of use, but above all about the quality of our products.

More than anything else, food simply has to be good. Since Covid came into our lives, ‘good’ increasingly means ‘good for me and my body’. That is why we will be focusing even more on tasty, healthy products in the coming years, for all our target groups and for every moment – from breakfast to dinner, and everything in between.

Trust from our customers

Ambitious sustainability targets, the war on waste, foil reduction, chain optimisation, the need for even more efficient delivery and category planning, ... We have had an eventful year, which started with a major Covid peak, followed by discussions about raw material prices, production costs and rising energy prices. These setbacks threw a spanner in the works for a while, but we were able to overcome them thanks to trust, transparent communication, and open collaborations with our customers. In the end, 2022 turned out to be a year of progress.

Thinking big and acting on it

Despite its challenging start, the past year has been a good one for our customers and the end consumer. We are bringing less plastic into the market through smarter and smaller packaging, we make better use of raw materials during our production processes, and we have made our products even safer to consume. Thanks to well-thought-out logistics solutions, there are also fewer trucks on the road.

Day after day, our teams deliver top products to our customers, with passion and energy. They succeed in doing so because they have the interests of our customers, consumers, and society at heart, but above all because they trust each other and are trusted by our customers to simply do what they are good at: taking the connection between production and commerce to an even higher level, and thus taking care of our customers in the best ways possible.

Martien van den Boer Commercial Director - Savoury The Netherlands

Adapting and reacting

The whole UK team has consistently pulled together in our shared mission to re-build and grow stronger after the impact of Covid-19. Our buying team worked hard to secure raw materials. We developed a recruitment and retention strategy. We automated as many production processes as possible. We built stronger relationships with our customers. We developed new and innovative products supporting menu changes. And we mitigated infl ation.

Now, we face a cost-of-living crisis. In response, our NPD strategy has become largely rooted in affordable quality without compromising on fl avour or fl air. With our marketing department keeping us updated with current trends, market insight and consumer behaviours, we are able to ensure we develop dishes that are inspirational and relevant.

Food service trends

A first food service trend that we saw in 2022 and that will continue to dominate the industry in 2023 has to do with the sustainability topic, which is of course top of many people’s agenda. Waste reduction plays a big part in that. This means championing under-utilised ingredients like wonky veg, celebrating leftovers and scraps, and using all components of an ingredient – whether this be nose-to-tail or root-to-stem.