Bread loves Health - Pågen
Pågen is a family company whose history goes back to the late 19th century when Anders and Matilda Phålsson started their first bakery. Today eight of the ten most sold breads in Sweden wear the Pågen logo. The company has gone through major changes the last couple of years and a breaking point took place in the late 1990's. The Pågen group then consisted of many different bakeries, where the two major ones were Pågens in Malmö, Sweden, and Phåls in Gothenburg, Sweden. In the year 2000 Pågens and Phåls joined forces under the same flag and the smaller bakery in the group was put on the market. The new company name became Pågen. Øresund Food Network met up with Anna Holmberg, marketing manager at Pågen, to discuss health in marketing bread.
- At the time of the merger the management at Pågen decided that the company should not be just an ordinary bakery, Pågen should also be a brand with a message. We put in a lot of effort to find out what our main values were, and what bread meant to the consumers. The management came up with three core values; pride, enthusiasm and consideration. This later on developed into the catch phrase "Pågen, baking with love", says Anna Holmberg.
Around the time when the new guidelines were implemented at Pågen the focus on health related issues in the food industry was at a minimum. In the years to come health related issues got more attention in both the media and public debate.
- In 2002 we asked the consumers what the most important factor was when choosing bread. The answer was freshness, taste, overall quality and price. But, in 2005 something happened in Sweden. The health debate was raging and bread was back talked in many different contexts. When we in 2005 returned to the consumer and asked the same question the first thing the consumer mentioned was that the bread should be healthy. Even if freshness was ranked as the highest when the consumers put their opinion on print, the health issue was the first thing to pop up in the consumers heads, says Anna Holmberg.
Even if you produce healthy food you cannot be sure that the consumers are aware of the fact that you do. Now days Company needs to be associated with health in one way or another.
- Health has always been of great concern to Pågen and is corresponding well with our core values. There were already many healthy types of bread in our product portfolio when consumer began to demand healthier products. The problem was that health was not something the consumers associated with Pågen. You can say that we did not own a health position on the market. To make our healthy breads more visible we introduced the Heart label, which is our own label on products that contains relatively high numbers of fibre and whole grain, Anna Holmberg states.
If all companies have their own label it would be difficult for consumers to separate one product from another - this may lead to confusion for the consumers. But sometimes the external circumstances force you to take action on your own.
- The bakery industry in Sweden has tried to come up with a joint label with guidelines for how much fibre and whole grain a product need to contain to be able to be called bread with whole grain or fibre. Within the bakery union the task became too difficult to carry out and the whole idea came to nothing. That is why we constructed our own label, the Heart label, says Anna Holmberg.
The marketing of food with health claims in Sweden have for long been ruled by the Sweden Nutrition Foundation, where they have strict rules about what can and what cannot be said on the packages. The label has sometimes been criticized by the industry for being too academic.
- Sometimes it feels like death marketing, like the warning labels on cigarettes. Even if the message is positive, the outcome does not always respond to that. We have products that live up to the requirements for the Swedish health claim label, but we have decided not to use the label. The taste is such an important factor for Pågen and our products should always come with a tasty message. Due to the new EU-legislation I hope we will be able to communicate to consumers in their own language, where health messages and good taste goes hand in hand, says Anna Holmberg.
Big companies often have their own research & development division where they put a lot of pride and prestige into developing new and unique products. At Pågen they look at it from the other way around - they can choose to cooperate with the external partners who show the most interesting research at the moment. One great example of external cooperation is the Leva bread, which was the first bread in Sweden that contained Omega 3 lipids. The bread was developed together with Tom Saldeen, professor at the Department of Surgical Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.
- If you spend three years of internal research on a project you sometime choose to continue with developing the product, even if the outcome is not as huge a success as you hoped for. It is often due to internal prestige that you continue to develop a final product. At Pågen we do not have this problem because we have no in-house research. But we are very good at picking up new research and findings from external players and institutes, and we can assist with turning research into commercial products. That also means that the step from idea to final product at Pågen is no huge leap, Anna Holmberg points out.
According to Anna Holmberg the health trend is no mayfly. Due to the present lifestyle in the western world she believes that the industry needs to produce more healthy food that tastes good.
- I believe the trend is here to stay. If you take the western world for example we are living in a society of great surplus which in some cases may result in lifestyle related diseases like obesity and high cholesterol. But there are always different trends in the food and health area, first it was low sugar that was on the agenda and now everybody is talking about whole grain. In the future I think that there will be a more overall health focus. People will always eat candy and cookies at certain occasions, but we need to find a balance. The food industry needs to come up with products that are both tasty and healthy, says Anna Holmberg.
