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Hambo is a meat producing company with 35 employees. The company has recently invested in 2000 m² of additional space to make fresh (cooked) preparations like sausages, stew, bacon, ham and leek gratin.
Hambo is especially dedicated to high quality meat products and participates in the Vitaproject, a network of independent companies from the whole chain of the meat producing industry in Belgium, from feed producers to wholesalers, who is dedicated to animal welfare and high food quality in terms of appropriate animals husbandry and avoiding the use feed additives such as growth stimulators or antibiotics.
Since the beginning of 2004, Hambo participates in a program in which Vitaproject started improving the fat composition in the nutrition of pigs and chicken to optimize the proportion omega 3/omega 6 by replacing soy oil by linseed and rapeseed oil. Here, Hambo’s interest in health issues shows as well as its engagement in all natural animal husbandry and its commitment to ethical aspects in producing meat products. That is why Hambo now wants to start the development of vegetarian meat replacement product and is especially interested in providing additional health effects with its products.
Within the project Hambo will develop fresh vegetarian sausages which shall provide a cholesterol- lowering effect in order to address the consumers’ wishes for healthy, tasty and ethically pure food. The interest of Hambo in this project is to complement the product range of natural meat products with vegetable meat-replacement products which will enable them to enter new markets and maintain good market shares. The launching of the vegetarian products will be in Belgium first, using existing marketing channels to health food stores, and will then help to expand into new markets in Europe, starting with the Netherlands and Luxemburg. The estimated production capacity for the new vegetarian sausages is expected to be 10 tons every week. Sven Wilssens, managing director, will develop fresh sausages together with his development team and will scale up the production process.
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