Five leading product platforms coming together to serve growing customer needs
If you need a reliable supplier of cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts or spices, our sheer scale and specialist knowledge in each makes us a go-to. But the real value comes when we cross-pollinate our thinking to open up exciting new possibilities.
It's not a film. It's who we are.
olam food ingredients is now known as ofi. Focused on the raw materials and ingredient platforms that we're known for globally - cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts, and spices. We still offer everything we did before. What’s new is that we’re adding capabilities - especially in product development - working closely with our customers, sharing our fresh ideas to inspire new concepts. Making it real at every step, from plant to palate.
Traceable, delicious & nutritious?
It's not a new idea.
It's a chance for infinite possibilities.
It’s easy to make something taste amazing. It’s much harder to fill it with nutritional benefits too. And what about making sure it’s ethically sourced and right for the planet? Whatever category you’re serving, let’s supersede the benchmark with our portfolio of highly complementary natural and delicious ingredients. Co-creation is easy!
Bakery
Your next cookie filling, cake topping, pie crust, biscuit crumb or bread mix starts with our playground of ingredients. Let’s get busy combining tastes, textures and colors that not only delight consumers, but also the people and planet around them. Give sweet treats a natural twist by combining our cocoa powder and nut pastes to create indulgent center-filled cookies with a premium texture.
Beverages
From cold brewed spiced coffee to golden milk made with dairy powder or nuts to suit modern consumer preferences. Even the most basic ingredient can make a real difference. With us, you can customize and co-create from plant to palate to find taste, texture and nutritional profiles that make your hot, cold, or plant-based beverages unique.
Chocolate & Confectionery
The world loves cocoa, in chocolate, confectionery, ice cream, bars and desserts. The need to make these better for our bodies and planet has never been greater. We’re bringing lots of fresh thinking to the table – like reducing sugar and sodium in recipes with clever cocoa creations and vegan, organic and traceable solutions. How about creating delicious vegan ‘milk’ chocolate bars with our gluten-free and grain-free cashew flour?
Dairy & Desserts
Emerging flavor trends in milks, yogurts and ice-creams are a real opportunity to create healthy, tasty, formulations that consumers can indulge in. Why not try new twists on familiar pairings, such as chocolate doughnut and coffee flavored ice cream? In cocoa alone, our R&D specialists can help tackle challenges in both dairy and plant-based desserts: from a unique methodology to pair cocoa powders with pea, nut, or oat bases to address taste, to reducing bitterness of FMP formats with our Fresco Cacao.
Savory & Culinary
It’s great when you can respond to trends. It’s even better when you spark them yourself. Together, we can create sauces, nut-based cheeses, and spice blends that fulfil existing desires or even feed new ones. How about putting a new spin on traditional dishes with trend-led ingredients like our choco mole sauce inspired by the Oaxaca region of Mexico? Using authentic spices and premium cocoa, this sauce is rich in antioxidants with a deep color and enticing aroma that will delight the senses.
Snacking
Join our search for the next trail mix, cereal, or snack bar hit. Together, we can find new ingredient combinations that fulfil consumer desire for taste, texture, nutrition, and traceability. One idea? Take consumers on a journey through the world’s most vibrant cuisines with seasoned nut recipes drawing on our Blends of the Americas spice range, including Blanched Almonds with Spicy Citrus Coast and Candied Cashews with Warm Sedona Sunset.
ofi is already part of your everyday life…
1 in 5 chocolate bars consumed globally use our cocoa beans and products
The coffee beans we supply annually can provide around 90 billion cups of coffee
Our annual volume of dairy products can make 19 billion slices of cheese
Almonds we supply will produce enough flour to bake 350 million cupcakes per year
We add taste and flavor around the world with 270 million bottles of spices per year
Read ofi news
A new carbon monitoring tool developed by leading food ingredients supplier ofi and Google geo-spatial partner NGIS, has been recognized in the “Net-Zero Innovation of the Year” category at this year’s Edie awards, which celebrate sustainability leadership.
The tool is designed to measure carbon gains and losses across supply chains. It uses satellite imagery and machine learning to track changes in forest cover and carbon stocks at a granular level - down to the individual farm1. This data is helping ofi to identify areas at risk of deforestation and prioritize conservation efforts on cashew, cocoa and coffee suppliers’ farms and in sourcing landscapes.
Climate Action Manager at ofi, Dr Pedro Lafargue said: “We are delighted to be recognized for our innovative solution that is helping us monitor and measure GHG emissions and progress towards net-zero goals. Part of this is about driving transformational change in strategic landscapes which means keeping growing and retaining more trees on and around farms.
“Planting more trees is one of the ways to move towards net-zero, but carbon sequestration potential is highly dependent on tree species and farm typology. The tool allows us to assess the optimum level of planting for different farmers and farms so we can create more efficient agroforestry programs that maximize both yields and carbon storage.”
ofi’s customers, who are some of the world’s largest food retailers and manufacturers, can access results of the data-driven sequestration efforts in their joint supply chains via performance metrics on ofi’s sustainability management system AtSource. These insights can help them monitor and reduce their climate risk and meet science-based targets, as well as prepare for compliance with new EU rules and disclosures in relation to nature and climate risks.
The move by ofi to take carbon stock monitoring from a manual, desktop-based process to an integrated pipeline which leverages cloud computing, is allowing ofi to progressively scale this analysis across multiple commodities and regions – covering over 950,000 farms so far.
But Lafargue says that there’s a role for industry partners to play to scale up the innovation and progress towards net-zero at scale: “While the tool can help our customers quantify the ecosystem services provided to supply their ingredients and invest efficiently in better farming systems, we need them to recognize the efforts made by farmers to plant trees and maintain agroforestry systems with financial incentives, like annual premiums, to scale up these efforts over the long-term.”
Looking ahead, there is potential to take the tool beyond ofi supply chains to quantify carbon stocks and removals across entire production landscapes to provide better data for the industry on land use change and carbon removals.
ofi was also a finalist in the Circular Economy of the Year award for using residual cocoa shells to fuel its cocoa factories2, where it produces its premium cocoa ingredients deZaan. The circular biomass boilers will reduce natural gas usage and CO2 emissions at ofi’s Koog aan deZaan facility in the Netherlands by 50% and in Mannheim, Germany, where it is believed to be the first cocoa shell boiler of its kind in the country, it will save approximately 8,000 tons of CO2 annually.
Discover much more about what ofi has to offer at ofi.com
Notes to Editors
1 The Carbon Sequestration Monitoring Tool combines data from ofi polygon-mapped farms and satellite data with machine learning techniques to build models in Google Earth Engine that calculate the total aboveground biomass (AGB) - vegetation above the soil, such as stumps, trees, and foliage and how much carbon is present in each plot.
Come connect with ofi at our booth at Natural Products Expo West 2024, the leading trade show in the natural, organic, and healthy products industry. Stop by to discover our portfolio of nutritious and delicious ingredients and learn more about how we drive sustainability impact through collaboration and work directly with customers to create new recipes and better products.
This year our theme is Flavor Fusion where you can see if you are sweet or spicy as you explore our ingredients through creating your own trail mix. We’ll be featuring a variety of ofi ingredients from our spices, nuts, and cocoa portfolios along with highlighting some of our capabilities.
Visit us from March 14-16, at Booth #3887, Hall D at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA.
Author | Madeline Bills | Cocoa Innovation Manager at ofi
Chocolate has long been synonymous with Valentine’s Day, with sweet treats a classic way to celebrate the season of love.
But Valentine’s Day is evolving, with Gen Z and Millennials redefining traditions. Many consumers are choosing to celebrate this day with friends and family members, as well as significant others. In 2023, 40% of Gen Z and 20% of Millennials said they were planning to buy their friends a Valentine’s gift.[1] And what better way to do so than with cocoa?
As consumers change the way they celebrate Valentine’s Day – and who they celebrate with – there is an opportunity for manufacturers to develop new products. From introducing more exotic flavors in confectionery to creating more experiential formats and expanding into new categories, we’re seeing companies inventing new ways for consumers to celebrate the season of love with those who matter most to them. At ofi we explore the top chocolate, confectionery and bakery trends shaping Valentine’s Day 2024 and how manufacturers can develop new offerings to win the hearts of consumers.
[1] Actually, Lots of Gen Z Would Rather Spend Valentine’s Day with Their Friends - YPulse
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