Granarolo has acquired a majority stake in White & Seeds, an innovative start-up founded due to the intuition of Alessandro Ghizzardi and Federica Zanaglio.
These two young people, driven by their strong passion for fitness and taste, and a special attentiveness to nutritional balance, decided to set up a company at the beginning of 2019 to promote protein products for athletes on the Italian market.
These include both dairy products such as yoghurt, breakfast products and snacks such as muesli, snack bars, porridge, spreads that are complementary to the dairy market. The agreement involves the acquisition of 51% of White & Seeds shares by Granarolo, with the possibility of reaching 100% in the next few years.
The founders had a clear objective right from the very beginning: to create a brand that offered healthy foods to an “extended” sports target market, made with selected ingredients, with careful research in order to achieve an excellent taste, special attention to nutritional value and a ready-to-eat format.
White & Seeds is already available from Cortilia, Eataly, Fresco Frigo, Erbert, Conad, Gruppo San Donato and Sigma. It has a turnover of over 100,000 Euros in significantly expanding markets: +60% for protein bars, +794% for UHT desserts, +316% for UHT drinks, +114% for vegetable drinks, +31% for protein powders.
Filippo Marchi – general manager of Granarolo S.p.A. said: “The strength of the offer by this young start-up lies in the competency and passion of its two young founders. They are both sports lovers, one who is passionate about the market and the other is an expert nutritionist. They have researched products intended for a generation of people who are attentive to wellness but with little time and who are looking for genuine ingredients and flavours.
“Granarolo has been focusing its attention on the same target for quite some time and over the last few years has placed products on the market that are inspired by well-being combined with taste and sustainability. Today, 25% of Granarolo’s turnover comes from innovation and we are convinced that this will be more and more the case.
“Attention is no longer paid only to the product in terms of its ingredients, like in the past, but with specific attention to factors such as age, eating habits, country, packaging and food trends. In terms of innovation, we are working on two important fronts: internally to be able to predict trends before others (proof of this for example, is the great success of products such as the Unconventional Burger) and externally, with innovation generated through strong synergies such as the one with White & Seeds and through Agrofood Bic, the multi-company accelerator we founded.
“We will therefore make our Research and Development department, factories and our commercial and logistics network available to Federica and Alessandro, in the belief that we will know how to grow together.”