You have the choice between Tomato, Sour-Cream-Onion and Garlic – or even better – take them all. You can grab a bag and eat them as they are or try adding some dip. The good thing is that they are much more healthy than chips and snacks usually are with organic wholemeal rye, 13% fibre and only 9% fat content.

Now that the products have been developed and launched on one market we are looking at taking the next steps in terms of opening other markets. I will keep you posted.

In addition to these flavored snack products Linkosuo has launched also unflavoured variants on the Finnish market – with 100 % organic wholemeal rye and also with a bit of wheat to soften the bite.

Enjoy the Rye!

Linkosuo Organic Rye Crisps brochure

A NEW PARTNERSHIP ON EU – US ORGANIC TRADE: NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR EUROPEAN ORGANIC FARMERS AND FOOD PRODUCERS

EU and US agree on partnership on trade in organic products 

U.S. Organic Industry Praises U.S.-EU Partnership in Organic Trade

COMMISSION IMPLEMENTING REGULATION (EU) No 126/2012

Finnamyl is offering certified organic potato starch to the market – including NOP certified potato starch from Aloja Starkelsen in Latvia. We actually have some stock left but we also want to discuss the future needs of our customers and start discussions for contracting the 2012 campaign.

Nordic Koivu is offering birch sap into three different channels: for retail in the beautiful 500 ml glass bottle, for the beverage industry for developing exiting new products and for the natural and organic cosmetics industry.

Finland and Sweden are together in one joint block in Hall 1 – Stand 602 between the Danish and the French. Altogether there is some 10 companies in Finnish-Swedish block which is less than for many years. It might look like a backward development but actually the biggest single reason is probably the very positive development in those countries. The manufacturers have markets closer by! In Finland the organic market value grew over 50% in 2011 and we expect strong growth to continue through 2012.

See you all at BioFach!

For further information please check our previous posting: Availability of organic potato starch secured from the Baltic-Nordic region. 

In the past years the availability of organic potato starch has been insufficient on the European market. This has created a bottleneck for some processed organic products where potato starch would be the natural choice ingredient. Now Aloja Starkelsen Ltd in Latvia – a subsidiary of Swedish Culinar Ltd – and Finnish Finnamyl Ltd have entered into cooperation for expanding organic potato starch production and market. Culinar in Sweden and Latvia together with Finnamyl in Finland represent about one third of the total production of organic potato starch in Europe. The production will be further increased in Latvia and Finland in the coming years securing a reliable long-term source for processors in need of organic potato starch. The native potato starch is available certified both to EU organic standards and to NOP standards for the US market.   

Potato starch has applications in many food products including soups and sauces, canned food, noodles and pasta, bakery products and processed meat products among others.

The organic potato starch will be presented at Culinar’s stand in the Organic Pavilion of Food Ingredients Exhibition (FIE stand 3D82 in Hall 3) in Paris on 30.11. to 1.12. and at Finnamyl’s stand in BioFach in Nuremberg in February 2012.

The sales of the organic potato starch from both Culinar and Finnamyl is taken care of by Organic Food Finland who has been responsible for sales of organic potato starch from Finnamyl since 2003. Mr Erkki Pöytäniemi at Organic Food Finland has a long experience in international organic business and export. His contact details can be found below or you can use the contact form.

www.culinar.se
www.finnamyl.fi
www.organic-finland.com

Mr Erkki Pöytäniemi
tel: +358 50 5505225
email: erkki (at) organic-finland.com

Organic rye in Karjalohja, Finland

Traditional Rye Sour Bread drying on a pole at Peltolan Organic Farm in Vilppula, Finland.

Rye of course is the healthiest grain used for baking bread. The history of rye in Finland goes back over 2000 years and it was the predominant grain in Finland through the middle ages (replacing barley) until the early 20th century. Still a major part of bread in Finland is rye bread. The archetypes of rye bread is the “reikäleipä” or the round hole sour bread and the round sour rye bread “ruisleipä” with a simple recipe: rye, water, salt. So this is a sour bread with 100% wholemeal rye flour – no wheat and no yeast. The hole bread has the hole because in the old times the bread was hung on poles to dry close to the ceiling of the house. Western Finnish tradition stressed rare baking sessions combined with long-term storage. Of course the dry bread would be too hard to bite but it would be soaked in soups or milk. Nowadays with commercial bakeries baking fresh bread every day this tradition has largely disappeared.

Linkosuo Rye Crisps in different sizes.

Linkosuo Rye Chip with traditional organic Finnish "Bread-Cheese" and organic rucola..

Linkosuo Rye Buttons with cheese, sour cucumber and paprika. All organic.

Linkosuo was the first to adapt the dry rye bread to commercial baking. The first version was just a thinner version of the traditional hole bread. It is not produced anymore because the bite was far too hard – even for Finnish teeth. The breakthrough innovation was to tear the upper part and bottom of the bread apart before drying resulting in a thinner and crispier dry bread known as “Varrasleipä”. Varrasleipä has been hugely popular in Finland for decades.

Finland, as the rest of the Western world, has developed a taste of snacking and this challenge was met by developing the hole of the traditional bread into a “Rye Button”. The Button could easily be used at home or f.ex. at parties as a kind of delicious cocktail snack by just putting butter, cheese, cutleries, vegetables etc on the Rye button.

The most recent modernization of the Rye Crisp was to develop it into a real snack – ready to eat as it is. This was achieved by adding some wheat to the dough to make the Rye Chips bite easier and crumblier and to flavor them. The non-organic range of flavored Rye Chips is already on the market in Finland but also the flavored organic Rye Chips range are in the pipeline. We have already tasted them and they are delicious! But the pure rye version “Aito Ruis” might still be the best. So keep posted and I will let you know as soon as they are available.

You can also already get Finnish Ruis – the fresh bread – in New York. Visit www.nordicbreads.com to see how two Finnish brothers bake real organic Finnish Rye Bread or Ruis Bread in Queens.

For more information about how healthy rye is visit:

The Rye info site of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland 

and

About Rye and Health

An other possible reason could be that Finland is a leading market for functional food – ie food with nationally accepted health claims. An opposite example is Denmark, which is the leading country for organic food and on the other hand has been extemily strict on health claims making it virtually impossible for Danish manufacturers or importers to focus on functional food. Maybe therefore the industry has focused on organics.

In Finland the mood may now be changing in favor of organic food. Why? I think there are two main reasons: one relates to how the Finnish consumer perceives the food system and the other relates to EU rules on health claims. Let’s take the first one first:

The image of Finland – we think – is that of a modern scandinavian, industrialized high – tech (remember Nokia) nation in the extreme north. However compared to other European and even Nordic nations Finland was predominately agrarian very late. In my generation ( I’m 50) almost everyone even in downtown Helsinki would have had relatives in the countryside and as youngsters we have been helping these relatives at least in their hay works. So Finnish urbanism was very thin. We were loyal to our relatives in the countryside and trusted them to produce the best possible food for us. Becoming critical requires distance.

In the 21st century – while driving our car on the highway somewhere in the Finnish countryside – we tend to believe that the idyllic farms from when we were young are still there somewhere. We just need to take a smaller road and we would find that world ( but we don’t have time – we are in a hurry). In reality of course that world doesn’t exist. The idyllic farming systems of the 70′s are gone.

The point is that the younger generation is more distanced from farming and the kind of farming where they could be involved doesn’t exist. Finnish farms are still relatively small (average 40 ha) but much bigger than before, the farming regions have been segregated ( grain, pork and chicken in the south – dairy in the east and north) bigger and more efficient (=industrialized) animal production units and in many cases disconnection between farming and animal production units. Even I believe that the situation is worse in other parts of Europe – not to mention the (big bad) USA – but the point is that the trend – or even the aim – is the same. During the last few years we have had activists take video tapes secretly on animal farms showing how animals are suffering which has raised the awareness of ordinary people. We are realising that the romantic 70′s is not how our food is produced.

- Last year the Swedish book “Genuine Food” by Mats-Eric Nilsson was translated to Finnish and it has created a huge discussion about food additives – as it had in Sweden earlier. Until now the Finnish food industry has used additives liberally and the consumer hasn’t been aware of a problem. Now the industry is trying to get rid of additives.

- “Eating animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer was also translated to Finnish raising awareness of the problems in the animal industry. The books description of the American animal and meat industry however is so unbelievable ugly that I think people are not prepared to believe that anything as cruel as that could be going on in Finland. Therefore the book is not having the same effect. Maybe that is the sentiment everywhere in Europe (please comment) but I believe it is safe to say that the industrialized food system in Europe has much of the same problems. The main difference is that in Finland or Europe in general the small-scale infrastructure has not been lost and producers who don’t want to be part of the industrialized system can still find an other way. For me the main news in Foer’s book was that as a farmer in the USA you have no alternatives (I always keep wondering where this ”free market” is – apparently not in America).

- Also books from Michael Pollan have been translated earlier.

So the first point is that the illusion of romantic idyllic farming has evaporated and consumers are getting more critical towards the food system and are turning more to organics, local food etc.

Point 2: I think the EFSA rulings on health claims is affecting the way of thinking in the big Finnish food companies. Even until now organics was the “poor man’s health claim” but now health claims are becoming too difficult, too expensive and too time-consuming even for the bigger companies (which in Finland by global comparison are of course only medium sized). Health claims will be even more than before only for big multinationals and therefore Pollan’s advice to avoid ”healthy” products is even more true than before. They are often manipulated and filled with artificial ingredients that replace the “unhealthy” natural ones. Going organic is an easier way to getting the attention of the health-consious consumer. Also the Finnish food industry has now heard the acronym LOHAS. The proportion of Finnish consumers who have a LOHAS profile is huge. They just need to be told what it means to them as consumers (as consumerism) – that they should go organic.

As I mentioned earlier Finland is one of the leading markets for functional food. The word functional has a positive connotation to it in Finland while in many other countries you wouldn’t be advised to use the word at all. There are several succesfull functional foods that have been debeloped by Finnish manufacturers – some have even found success abroad including Xylitol (invented in Finland), Benecol, Gefilus etc. Even some small companies like Bioferme have been succesfull in developng functional foods and getting official recocgnition on the national level for their health claims. Bioferme is the only company who has succesfully combined functional claims with organic products. Their products are based on fermented oats and include both spoonable yoghurt type products and smoothy type beverages. The Bioferme products are both probiotic and prebiotic and the functional effects are absolutely natural. The officially accepted health claim its positive gut functions.

So the second point is that developing functional foods with officially accepted health claims is not really an option anymore for small and medium sized companies because of strict rulings by EFSA. Organics is the way to go if you want to get the attention of the health conscious LOHAS cosnumer. And more and more people think that the kind of natural healthiness that organic products represent is true healthiness.

Founding meeting of Pro Luomu ry on 22nd April.

So what is happening? We are feeling a positive mood towards organics among mainstream players in the food chain. The organic market is growing and many manufacturers are facing lack of raw-material. Last week a new organization was founded to promote the development of the organic food system. Pro Luomu ry (Pro Organics) has as its aim to start a large scale development program for the organic market and is seeking for political support so that during the next government period (we have elections in April) there would be substantial permanent funding for the program. All political parties seem to have a positive attitude. Major players in the Finnish food chain – including the two big supermarket multiples S-Group and Kesko (together controlling 80% of Finnish food retail) and the Finnish farmers union (MTK) joined the Association – among others. After the parlamentary elections we will see if those hopes become true from the political side. In any case players from different parts of the organic value chain have come together and started communicating. We shouldn’t depend only on politics even though it can be a great help.

What should such an organization do? Can it really affect the market development? For Finland to catch up with the leading organic markets in Europe we need tiger leaps in the market development. We need to see years when the organic market grows by 30-50% annually. We have seen that earlier in countries like the UK, Denmark and Sweden. Were those leaps caused by promotion of organics with public funds? I think not. It helps but other factors are more important.

Over 200 people attended the

I think there are two important points that have to be met: we need to have the positive mood, a demand resulting from broader trends and social issues etc – and you need availability so that consumers can easily buy. I believe that now we have the mood in Finland and I think the retailers are the first to be aware of it. The easiest way to increase organic marketshare is to increase the range of products that are available in supermarkets. However we need to develop the whole organic business environment so that there is room for the tiger leap. Nobody seems to know how to make the organic tiger leap – but one thing is for sure: we should not stand in its way.

Pure and clean organic food from Finland will be presented at the BioFach organic trade fair in Nuremberg, Germany on 16–19 February 2011. Finnish companies have joined forces with companies from other Nordic countries to exhibit their products at a joint pavilion.

Finland is known for its clean natural environment and ecological know-how. The organic products presented at BioFach are examples of the very best organic production and extensive research and development within the Finnish food industry. In Finland, technological know-how and understanding of ecological processes lay an excellent basis for clean organic food production.

”We believe that the pure Finnish natural environment, strong agricultural tradition and high technological know-how form the best possible basis for clean and safe organic food production for international markets”, says the Finnish representative of BioFach, Mr Arto Varanki from Spokesman Events Oy, who is coordinating the Nordic pavilion and Finnish participation.

”The joint Nordic stand of Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway is already a tradition at BioFach, and together the four countries are set to make an impact”, Varanki says.

Organic food production is also one of the top issues concerning the new Finnish national brand. The brand was released after initiation by Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb. Finnish companies joining BioFach have been devoted and energetic advocates of organic products for several years, commencing long before the release of the new national brand. Germany and other countries in Western Europe as well as the Far East are important trade partners for Finnish organic food producers.

“This year Finnish companies are focusing on consumer products more than before. We have several products based on pure Finnish raw-materials and speciality grains like rye, oats and buckwheat. We have free-from products and products with proven health benefits – all based on the rich food traditions and nature of Finland. We are eagerly looking forward to presenting them to the organic trade at BioFach”, says Organic Food Finland export manager Mr Erkki Pöytäniemi. Organic Food Finland is an export group including, amongst others, six of the Finnish BioFach exhibitors.

The Finnish exhibitors welcome visitors and journalists to their stands (joint stand 1/1-510, Pramia stand 5/5-122 and Viiniverla stand 4A/4A-420c).

For further information, please contact:
Mr Arto Varanki, Spokesman Events Oy, +358 40 544 5598, arto.varanki@spokesman.

Finnish Exhibitors at BioFach 2011:

Bioferme Ltd, Tuula von Zweygbergk, +358 500 505 600, www.bioferme.fi
organic probiotic oat based snacks

Finnish Cheese Company, Esa Luomanperä, +358 400 426 187, www.silva.fi
Silva organic process cheese, ILO organic hummus and freshly peeled organic garlic cloves

Helsinki Mills Ltd, Lhassan El Farkoussi, +358 50 462 4432, www.helsinkimills.fi
organic flour and flakes

Keskisen Mylly Ky, Markku Vitikainen, +358 3 471 6532, www.keskisenmylly.fi
organic buckwheat pasta and other buckwheat products

Linkosuo Bakery Ltd, Leena Järvenpää, +358 20 770 2400, www.linkosuo.fi
small crispy rye snacks and Varrasleipä crispy bread

Nordic Koivu Oy, Susanna Maaranen, + 358 40 523 7348, www.nordickoivu.com
Nordic birch sap

Pramia Oy, Minja Kivinen, +358 40 594 7770, www.pramia.fi
organic alcoholic beverages
stand 5/5-122

Senson Oy, Pasi Heikkilä, +358 500 352 868, www.senson.fi
organic malt extracts

Viiniverla Oy, Juha Kuronen, +358 40 530 9224, www.viiniverla.fi
organic berry wines
stand 4A/4A-420c

Virgino, Perttu Korolainen, + 358 400 770 654, www.virgino.fi
organic cold pressed rape seed oil

We have used our “Christmas card budget” to
buy 1000 m2 of Finnish primeval old-growth
forest through the Finnish Natural Heritage
Foundation. This forest will be put under
conservation. For more information visit
Luonnonperintösäätiö.