Page 8 - Food and Drink Business Magazine May 2019

BLUE SKY
What’s
new, old
bean?
A family-owned pulse farm has created a fun and healthy consumer snack brand called Human Bean Co. By Amanda Bryan.
AT A GLANCE
NAME: Angus Woods
POSITION: Head of Woods Foods
TRENDS TO WATCH: High protein pulse-based snacking, driven by the growth in vegan-friendly products.
BUSINESS GOALS: Add value to crops and create a successful healthy snacking brand.
THE Woods family has been growing crops since the 1950s at their farm ‘Billa Billa’ which is based in the crop-growing region of Goondiwindi in southern Queensland.
The family grows faba beans, chickpeas, mung beans and sorghum on more than 13,000 hectares of their own land in southern Queensland and northern NSW.
The Woods Group began value-adding its products almost 20 years ago when it created its Woods Food division, and its latest foray was the creation of a new air-puffed packaged snack brand, The Human Bean Co.
The seasoned snacks, which are gluten-free, nut-free and high in protein and fibre, are processed from its home grown faba beans which are then air-puffed, flavoured and packaged on site.
Woods Foods chief Angus Woods – who is one of the company’s second generation – says this new division of the business was launched a year ago in recognition of consumers’ increased health awareness and changing dietary needs.
“We’ve been growing faba beans for over a decade, and about four years ago we started looking at how we could deliver these super-beans from paddock to plate while retaining maximum nutritional benefit.”
Woods says that pulses like faba beans have been a relatively untapped nutritional source for snacking, because until recently, they haven’t been widely accessible to consumers.
The company’s packaged snacks were created to address this, but getting the faba beans into an edible and tasty state was not easy.
Woods Foods puffs the snacks using a proprietary process, but success came only after much trial and error.
The company first headed to the US to perfect the cooking, and once it did it worked with a furnace engineering company to create the right equipment.
“We played around for a year and a half,” Woods says. “We scaled up from a kitchen bench to our facility, which we built from scratch in 2014.”
Ittookalongtimetogeta light and crunchy pulse, he says, and once it did it, the company had to work hard at getting a
consistent result – the same crunch and the same texture – in different sized batches.
The resulting products are now sold in Costco, at national health food chains and at most IGA supermarkets.
Woods says that sales are growing steadily when the range is launched correctly – that is, in the health aisle, as opposed to salty snacks.
The product’s protein and fibre credentials are so strong the company can add seasoning and still deliver five star health rating, free of all the major allergens, Woods says.
The Human Bean Co product range has also been launched in New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, but the priority is on bedding it down properly in Australia.
With the consumer market in mind, the company also sought to have some fun with the brand and packaging. “We are trying to say that humans and beans are natural for each other,” Woods says.
For Woods, it is an “authentic paddock-to-plate product”, which – at end of day – is another way his family can add value to their crops.” ✷
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8 | Food&Drink business | May 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au