Koppert Cress: Creation of New Markets

Author: Orietta Marsili

Pub. Date: 2018
Product: Sage Business Cases
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526429421
Keywords: functional food, marketing, niche markets, vegetables, entrepreneurial marketing, food,
supermarkets
Disciplines: Business & Management, Strategic Management, Corporate Strategy, Decision-Making,
Industry Analysis
Access Date: May 25, 2023
Publishing Company: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
City: London
Online ISBN: 9781526429421

© 2018 Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University All Rights Reserved.

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Abstract

Koppert Cress, a Dutch horticultural company founded by Rob Baan, specializes in growing and selling
micro-vegetables that promote health or prevent disease. It began business under the name Kop-
pert Trading, before its acquisition by Baan in 2002. Baan redesigned the business model, has de-
veloped new products, expanded production capacity, invested in the latest technology, enlarged the
work force, recruited talented managers, and made Koppert Cress a world-class player in the niche
market in the gastronomic world. The company’s business model centres on innovative price-setting.
Unlike other Dutch horticultural firms, Koppert Cress is detached from auctions that determine agri-
cultural prices. It works on ‘imaginative’ pricing and sells its products at high premiums based on the
unique added value they create for customers. Baan also established Cressperience, a multifunctional
meeting centre with a demonstration kitchen furnished with state-of-the-art technology, where interna-
tional chefs can try out new recipes with ingredients provided by Koppert Cress. Baan kept returning to
the idea of expanding his business to the consumer market, a dream he had cherished since he went
into the agriculture business 20 years earlier. He was undecided about whether he had the resources
and capabilities to create better value for a mass market without disturbing his up-market niche cus-
tomer base. Since the consumer market was more difficult to predict than the chef market, he needed
to devise a strategy that minimized risk and would increase his chances of success.

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Case

Rob Baan, owner and director of Koppert Cress, was meditating while driving to the office. It was an early
morning in April 2008 before the rush hour, quiet on the highway. It was Baan’s favourite time of day. He lived
in Enkhuizen, one of the most important harbour towns in the 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age, which was
125km from Monster, where his company was located. Every day he drove 125km each way, which meant
two and half to three hours of precious time for thinking.

Baan had several things on his mind. He had just been speaking to his daughter who worked at Albert Heijn
(one of the biggest Dutch high-end supermarket chains) who had told him that the supermarket regularly
threw away huge quantities of poor quality BroccoCress supplied by Baan’s company. Since 2002, Koppert
Cress had been growing and supplying cresses and other micro-vegetables to top chefs around the world.
The business was good. Sales growth had topped 40%, with over 20,000 boxes a week sold in the Euro-
pean market, and an annual turnover of €9 million. Baan had judged that the time was right to move from
the business-to-business (B2B) market to the business-to-consumer (B2C) market, and had chosen Albert
Heijn as a test case. The supermarket had no experience of selling these delicate cresses, and kept them in
cold storage, with no insulation, at below zero degrees centigrade, which quickly ruined them. Stored at room
temperature the cresses would last for up to 14 days.

Throughout his career in the horticultural sector, Baan had striven slowly but steadily to realize a dream – to

provide people with tasty, healthy, functional food. 1 But BroccoCress was dying in the cooling boxes at the
entrance to the Albert Heijn supermarkets. Some consumers had read newspaper articles about BroccoCre-
ss, and had written to Koppert Cress to ask where they could buy it. In the circumstances, Baan was unsure
about how to respond to these enquiries. To bring functional food to the consumer market, Baan had planned
to invest €15 million to extend his greenhouses across the adjoining canal, which would have meant filling up
the canal, something that was against the norm in Holland that is proud of its canals. Extending his green-
house area was as full of uncertainties as entering the completely new consumer market.

The Entrepreneur

Baan is the son of a police officer, and does not have the family-business background that is generally typical
of the horticultural sector. An interest in plants led to his studying for a degree in agriculture. His first job was

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with Syngenta, a multinational seed producer, and he continued with the company for 22 years, working in
70 countries throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Enjoying local food and learning
about local culinary styles, he observed that ‘across the world people eat because they know the food is good
for their health – except in Holland’.

Baan considered himself a hobby chef: ‘I am a pretty decent cook myself, but what I really like is to bring
different flavours together’. He was much taken with The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michel Pollan. This book
was published in 2006 and eight of Baan’s friends, each thinking he should read it, had given him a copy.
He found himself in complete agreement with this book: food is what your grandmother would recognize as
food, not something that is produced by the modern food industry. He believed that we had a lot to learn from
ancient wisdom because trial and error had taught our ancestors what to eat and had helped them to develop
a preference for good food. Combining his hobbies of travelling, eating and cooking, Baan wanted to pass on
his beliefs to consumers and bring them tasty, healthy and functional food.

People have been eating functional food for thousands of years, but have understood little about how it works
on the body. For example, it has only recently been discovered that Sulphorane Glucosinolate (SGS), a com-
pound in broccoli, protects against intestinal cancer, and that lycopene, found in tomatoes, has a healing
effect on skin burns. Baan was convinced that there were many compounds we were ignorant about their
beneficial properties.

Baan left Syngenta in 2000 to become managing director of Koppert Trading, a small horticultural company
specialized in micro-vegetables such as sprouts and cresses (plant seedlings 2-4 days old, which are rich in
vitamins B and C). From his travels, he knew that Chinese cuisine had used taugé, a sprout, since ancient
times, and that garden cress was a traditional ingredient used to enhance flavour in dishes in many parts
of the world. Baan acquired Koppert Trading in 2002, and changed its name to Koppert Cress. At that time,
the company was cultivating five types of cress with several new varieties in the pipeline, and selling them
to hotels, restaurants and catering establishments worldwide. Baan could finally realize his dream. He made
functional food his specialty, saying that ‘To me, Koppert Cress is the culmination of what I have been doing
all my life’.

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Company History

Koppert Trading

Koppert Trading was founded in 1987 and specialized in simple products such as radish sprouts. Over time,
cresses became an important part of its offer. The company was renowned for its operational efficiency and
high quality, achieved partly through technological innovation. It invested heavily in automation, developed
new techniques for packaging and sowing, and owned several patents including a ‘packaging for cress’ and
a ‘plant cultivation method’.

Monster, home to Koppert Trading, is a town in the Westland region of Holland and the heart of the Dutch
horticultural industry. The Netherlands has a €15 billion horticultural industry, bigger than Rotterdam Port
and Schiphol International Airport. The Westland region faces the North Sea and has miles and miles of
glasshouses. It hosts the two largest Dutch auction houses, through which flowers, fruit and vegetables are
marketed throughout the world. A sophisticated high-tech logistics system and the Greenport horticultural
cluster facilitate the distribution of these goods.

The highly efficient production, trading and logistics infrastructure in Dutch horticulture is hard to beat. Com-
petition in horticulture is fierce with many small producers concentrated in the Westland region, all competing
on price at auction. Production costs in the Netherlands are high. It is a small country and the price of agricul-
tural land is among the highest in the world, as are labour costs, given the high levels of education required
for the workforce. These high costs minimize the profit margins of individual producers.

When Baan joined Koppert Trading in 2000, the company was no longer growing. Its owner and founder
hoped that Baan would revive the firm. Baan saw cost-price production tied to auctions, as an obstacle to
Koppert Trading’s business development. He explained: ‘the auctions are both a blessing and a disaster for
Dutch horticulture. By making it possible to distribute products of uniform quality and efficiency, the system
prevents the building of unique own brands’. When products were received at the auction houses, they were
removed from their boxes and repacked according to product type and quality, which left no opportunity for
individual production to be differentiated. Based on his experience of working in Eastern Europe under com-
munism, Baan compared Dutch auctions to the communist system: ‘produce, produce, produce … with no
idea about what the market is like. The factory may be perfect, but if products don’t sell, in the end it becomes

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a big warehouse’.

The renewal of Koppert Trading

Many companies had tried to control costs and to improve efficiency, but had been defeated by rising energy
prices and competition from developing countries, which eventually resulted in financial loss. Baan believed in
what he called ‘imaginative pricing’: products should be priced not based on their cost plus margin but based
on their special qualities – their health effects, their taste. ‘If it is not expensive, we can make it expensive’.
Instead of waiting for the market to determine the price for his products, he set prices himself and kept to
them. While other producers were going for the cheapest prices, he focused on being expensive. ‘We don’t
skim the market, like everyone else’, he said, ‘we create added value based on a unique positioning’. His aim
was to make cresses a luxury horticultural good.

Similar to most companies in the horticultural sector, Koppert Trading depended on traders and wholesalers to
market its products. Once its boxes of cresses were loaded onto traders’ trucks, the company lost control and
had no idea who was buying its products. As Baan remarked: ‘A distant shipment goes through the capable
hands of all these exporters. For us the product disappears in a hi-tech distribution maze that is considered
one of the best in the world’. Baan looked at the typical European distribution chain for companies like Kop-
pert Trading and found that there were some 200 exporters selling to 2,000 distributors, who serviced 20,000
greengrocers which in turn sold to 200,000 chefs (see Appendix 1). This last link was market he wanted to
conquer.

Baan needed to focus on which part of the distribution chain would be most effective at selling his premium
cresses. It was certainly not the traders and wholesalers because they focused only on price and were con-
cerned with the size of the discount they could expect; retailers were of no interest either for the same reason;
supermarkets and greengrocers might work if they specialized in high-end products. However, Baan was sure
that professional chefs should be his focus since for a chef good ingredients are crucial. ‘The quality of your
ingredients dictates how well you cook’. He believed also that chefs could influence the tastes of consumers.

Thus, focusing on chefs, in Baan’s view, was the simple and obvious solution. Of course, he knew that going
beyond the 200,000 chefs, there were 200 million end consumers, but he did not have a big enough sales
force to address them. The chef market, however, he could handle, and these chefs would share his passion

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for food.

Chefs traditionally had used cresses simply as garnishes. But Baan wanted his products to become ingredi-
ents in the dishes. He realised that to convince chefs and restaurants to use his cresses not just as ornaments
but also because of their flavours, he needed to do some face-to-face marketing. He and his colleagues vis-
ited several top restaurants and picked their brains about which other restaurants and chefs should be con-
tacted. It became routine for marketing managers to go off in their cars for a few days at a time, with a supply
of boxes of cress, to visit chefs around the Netherlands. Although time-consuming, this method was effective.
The chefs liked trying out the samples brought by the marketing managers.

Chefs do not shop at local supermarkets; they rely on suppliers who deliver straight to the restaurant kitchen.
Their time lines for planning day-to-day menus are tight. For them, what is important is fresh, high quality
produce available in substantial quantities available the year round.

Based on these requirements, Baan decided that instead of supplying directly to chefs, Koppert Trading would
continue to use the regular wholesale distribution channels. Once chefs showed an interest, they were asked
(by questionnaire) from which greengrocers or food specialists they normally bought their fruit and vegeta-
bles. Koppert Trading contacted these suppliers to find out which distributors or importers they used, which in
turn allowed it to find the name of the wholesaler or exporter that serviced them. Orders could then be deliv-
ered to the appropriate wholesaler or exporter.

Koppert Trading’s whole product range was available all year round, at stable prices and with no minimum
order requirement. Chefs could order from the company direct or through their regular suppliers. An order
prompted a response to the restaurants when the shipment could be expected. This provided reassurance
that the product would arrive, and that the order had been received. Once placed, the order could be delivered
to any location thanks to the excellent Dutch logistics system.

Most chefs ordered two boxes of cresses per week, equivalent to a pallet per year. Supplying chefs meant
sales were stable. Once a Koppert Cress product was on the menu, the demand for most of the year was
guaranteed. Apart from a few public holidays, restaurant kitchens rarely close. Baan considered this seem-
ingly complex, but actually straightforward distribution system the most ingenious part of this business model:
‘If the company ceases to exist, I can sell the system’.

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The birth of Koppert Cress

Baan acquired Koppert Trading in 2002 and changed its name to Koppert Cress. His first move after the
acquisition was to hire an expert to help develop an innovative strategy to promote the new company. The
report of this consultant showed that the company had all the necessary functions in order – communications,
research, logistics, and supply management. The recommendation was that Baan should use his passion to
promote his company: ‘Koppert Cress is Rob Baan and Rob Baan is Koppert Cress’. Baan was advised to
give lectures and appear at exhibitions in person. That way people would remember him and, therefore, Kop-
pert Cress.

Koppert Cress participated in an average of 75 events per year, including expos, trade fairs, culinary exhi-
bitions and restaurant shows, where Baan gave about 50 presentations. Chefs often met up at exhibitions
and trade fairs to share their culinary experiences, and inspect the latest gastronomic novelties. These events
provided an opportunity for a few minutes conversation, but an invitation and an opportunity to taste cresses
with exotic names and surprising flavours could result in half an hour or more at the Koppert Cress stand.

Another opportunity for Baan to talk to chefs face to face was at the training schools where they learned the
culinary arts. He co-sponsored events and gave taste seminars at cooking schools for professional chefs, and
delivered weekly lectures. One of the first of these events was in 2005 at Casa Alimenti, a culinary school in
Brescia, Italy. It resulted in chefs calling Koppert Cress directly to learn more about its products.

Koppert Cress exhibited at Madrid Fusion, the leading exhibition for avant-garde cuisine. In the three to four
days of event, top chefs from all over the world presented their most creative recipes using the latest tech-
nologies. Ferrán Adrià, the Catalan chef considered one of the best in the world, had been a keynote speaker
since the first Madrid fusion exhibition in 2003. Adrià, head chef at El Bulli (a famous Spanish restaurant), was
a ‘gastronomic innovator’. His ‘deconstructivist’ recipes found inspiration from different cultures and cuisines
and were famous for surprising the diner with new combinations of different, often contrasting, tastes, tem-
peratures and textures. He was especially popular with young chefs, who were willing to pay the €500 entry
to Madrid Fusion, just to see the master chef in person. Over time Baan built strong connections with Adrià
and they co-developed certain products.

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Cressperience

In March 2006, as Koppert Cress’s production facilities were expanding from 0.6 to 1.2 hectares, Baan inau-
gurated Cressperience, a multifunctional meeting centre with a demonstration kitchen furnished with state-of-
the-art technology. A Molteni Podium IV, an exclusive French stove for professionals, dominates the kitchen.
At the time, there were only three such stoves in the world so the opportunity to cook on one appealed to
chefs very much. Baan commented: ‘To cook on this stove for a chef is like getting a ticket to Italy and being
allowed to drive a Ferrari’ (see Appendix 2).

To celebrate the opening of Cressperience, Baan threw two big parties, one for his employees and the other
for their families and friends. Meanwhile, he organized an opening ceremony for VIPs (including the mayor of
Monster), the press and customers. Guests were treated to an informative lecture and some excellent food.
His final gesture was to invite 500 chefs to an annual meeting. These various social activities created much
goodwill and feelings of ownership in Koppert Cress – on every level.

Since 2006, Cressperience had organized various events, from formal presentations with audio-visual aids,
to informal meals cooked by a chef and served in the adjacent meeting room accompanied by wines. While
Baan entertained his master chef customers, his marketing manager talked to the assistant chefs to gain their
suggestions and insights. The chefs were invited to inspect the greenhouses and test areas for tomatoes,
peppers and other fresh produce. A culinary professional who had attended one of these events described it
as being for ‘education and fun’.

Getting the €250,000 start-up investment for Cressperience was difficult because the market was new. Baan
was obliged to explain to the banks, again and again, what edible plants were. ‘I told the bank my business
was fun, but banks hate the word fun. I approached several banks and at last ING gave me the loan.’ Not long
after start-up, Cressperience became a major Dutch tourist attraction for professional gastronomes, alongside
the better known attractions such as the Gouda cheese market, and the Jenever distillery in Amsterdam.

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Company Characteristics

Products

Baan described the Koppert Cress product range as an ‘Architecture Aromatique’ of Cresses, Specials and
Mixes. Cresses are edible micro-vegetables that can be grown with a variety of tastes, fragrances, shapes
and colours. Their high vitamin and mineral content is often difficult to find or to preserve in other types of
food. Cresses are at the heart of the company’s offer. When Baan took over Koppert Trading in 2002, it was
producing give types of cress, and by 2008, the range had expanded to 20. The tastes and colours are di-
verse. For example, Scarlet Cress has a mild red beet taste; Shiso Green tastes of mint and anis; Shiso Pur-
ple is cumin flavoured, and Tahoon Cress tastes of roasted beechnuts.

Its Specials are other products with special flavours, colours and scents. Sechuan Buttons, for example, are
edible yellow flowers that produce a tingling feeling on the tongue ‘like licking a nine-volt battery’. When they
were introduced in the US in October 2007, the Washington Post called them ‘the new fun food in town’. Nico-
las Mazard, the French manager of the US branch of Koppert Cress confirmed this saying: ‘No joke, 80% of
the people say Whooaa, and 99% smile and find it funny’. Also in 2007, Esquire magazine ranked Sechuan
Buttons 85th on its list of ‘Cooking Ingredients of the Year’. Koppert Cress produced an additional 14 Specials,
the most popular being Pepquino, a kind of micro-melon with a delicious fresh, light sour cucumber taste,
and Karma Orchids, edible orchids with a fresh crispy taste akin to lettuce or chicory, which can be used to
decorate a main dish, or in desserts, salads and drinks (see Appendix 3).

Cresses were packaged in boxes or 16 or 18 cups of seedlings of a single variety, or in assortments, or Mixes,
of Cresses and Specials.

Some products were launched jointly with Koppert Cress’s partners. In 2007, a new Special was brought to
market in a partnership between Koppert Cress and Eminent Food – the Inca Collection, the ‘heirloom toma-
toes’ of ancient varieties Baan discovered in Peru, which seldom figured in European farmers’ markets. Kop-
pert Cress and Eminent Food promoted the product jointly and shared the profits, with Eminent Food respon-
sible for growing and packaging.

The same year, Adrià asked Koppert Cress to promote his Texturas in Northern Europe. Texturas are cooking
powders that have been developed since 1997 by master chefs at El Bulli and allow cooks to experiment with

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sophisticated and often surprising techniques. The powders, which can also be consumed directly, have spe-
cial textures, such as effervescent or crunchy. Baan immediately agreed to demonstrate Texturas at Cresspe-
rience. Adrià, listed in 2004 among TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, described Baan
as his most innovative supplier.

Koppert Cress products came from all over the world, including China, Japan, Korea, India, Italy, North and
South America, the Middle East and Africa. One of Baan’s marketing managers said, ‘We don’t invent things
– we source. We go to India or South America, talk to people with old knowledge, and use the information for
our products’. There was one overriding requirement for a product to be selected, apart from being careful-
ly chosen for taste and health benefits: Baan must like it. Because Bann hated coriander after having eaten
a surfeit of it in India, Koppert Cress originally did not sell coriander although many customers asked for it.
Eventually, Baan found Ghoa Cress, which he and everyone else liked.

Koppert Cress grew all its products organically, with no pesticides, chemical agents or genetic modification.
The company introduced several technological innovations. As a marketing manager said: ‘Though what we
do may not seem very different from what other growers do, there are some unique elements, like the growing
medium that has been patented and the sowing machine’.

Organization

Baan ran the company like a multinational: all functions were clearly identified and represented. As a vision-
ary, Baan relied on his employees to take his ideas and made them work in the market. In addition to attend-
ing meetings and giving lectures, on a daily basis he talked to his staffs. He described a typical day as: ‘I
arrive around 8 am, take a walk around the greenhouse, the office and talk to a few people to get a feeling of
what’s going on. Then I take a look at sales figures and predict what sales will be that week. I won’t miss the
morning coffee break, lunch break or the afternoon tea break because these are the moments that allow me
to “feel” the atmosphere in the company’.

Baan’s work force grew fivefold from 2002 to 2008. He hired experienced and entrepreneurial people. He
worked hard at cultivating employee pride – he wanted his employees to identify with the company and its
products. His staffs liked the informal working environment and felt equal on a team. Baan admitted that any
department could have started focusing on itself rather than the entire group, so he frequently brought people

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together from different departments to challenge or discuss their decisions. He attributed his success mostly
to his staffs – ‘my assets’ – and his staffs, in their turn, valued his openness and honesty.

Functional food and BroccoCress

Baan had the idea of making functional food a business when he was working at Syngenta in the 1990s.
At the time he was in charge of the Japanese market where functional food was important, and he wanted
to enhance the health benefits of the seeds marketed by Syngenta. Before this business got off the ground,
Syngenta was split up. But Baan never forgot his dream.

As soon as he had his own company, he made functional food his specialty. BroccoCress is one of his
favourite products. It tastes like broccoli and contains Sulphorane Glucosinolate (SGS), an antioxidant found
in broccoli. SGS is lost in boiled broccoli, but is retained in the seedlings. The antioxidant function of broccoli
was discovered at Johns Hopkins University in 1992 by Professor Talalay, who tried, but failed to extract the
glucosinolate from broccoli and put it into a pill. To further explore SGS in broccoli and other plant foods, Ta-
lalay founded the Brassica Chemoprotection Laboratory in collaboration with Procter & Gamble. In 1997, his
team discovered that the sprouts of broccoli contained between 20 and 50 times the concentration of SGS
than cooked broccoli. The discovery was international news and within weeks demand for broccoli sprouts
rocketed in the US. Johns Hopkins University researchers created Brassica Protection Products (BPP) as a
limited company, and the only entity with the rights to utilize the Johns Hopkins’ patent for SGS-rich broccoli
sprouts.

During the time that Baan was working in Japan, he heard about this research and got in touch with Talalay
about exploring this new line. He got a license to offer a new product in Europe under the brand name Broc-
coCress. He set up a new company, Brocco Europe, to introduce BroccoSprouts and BroccoCress to food
stores and supermarkets. They are a zesty, flavourful food that can be added to salads or soups, sandwiches,
vegetables and wraps, or sprinkled on crackers. They are low in fat (only 10 calories per serving) and are a
good source of vitamin C, providing 15% of the Daily Recommended Value.

BroccoSprouts and BroccoCress are produced under BPP’s stringent guidelines for purity, quality and con-
sistency of SGS-levels (a guaranteed minimum per serving). For example, all BroccoSprouts growers use
certified broccoli seeds, adding only water and light, and are required to submit weekly samples of the sprouts

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to BPP’s laboratory for comprehensive testing. No other sprout is grown according to the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity procedures for growing and ensuring SGS content.

Baan, together with Valstar and Eminent, two other fruit and vegetable companies, set up an independent or-
ganization, Best Fresh Functional Food BV (BF3) to help entrepreneurs produce and supply functional food.
BF3 organized and coordinated scientific research, issued certification for nutritional and health claims, de-
veloped methods for quality control, and promoted functional food. The initiative attracted the attention of the
Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority that even considered to become a business partner.

Challenges Ahead

By 2008, after five years of steady growth, Koppert Cress had made its mark in the gastronomic and horti-
cultural world. Baan was featured frequently in the Dutch and international press. He received the title ‘Ho-
nourable Member of Les Amis Saisonnier’ by Culinaire Saisonnier, and was elected ‘Man of the Year 2006’
by Vakblad AGF, a Dutch fruit and vegetable trade magazine. The magazine said: ‘Baan is synonymous for
innovation and now when renewal is the main theme in horticulture, nobody deserves this title more than he
does’.

In January 2007, Koppert Cress entered the US market in a partnership. It built a new high-tech 100,000
square foot greenhouse on Long Island, with the aim to sell a minimum of 2,000 boxes a week. Baan signed
the contract to establish a new company in Spain, but had still to decide on whether to go ahead with pro-
duction. On 12 November 2007, Koppert Cress reached the milestone of supplying a million boxes of cresses
per year, with the millionth box delivered personally by Baan (see Appendix 4). About 80% of Koppert Cress
products went for export, with 60% to countries outside of Benelux, and 5% to destinations as far away as
Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Despite its remarkable success, Koppert Cress did not escape growing pains. Up to the end of 2007, the com-
pany had been growing at 35-50% annually. In the first quarter of 2008, however, it grew by only 25%. Baan
felt that his company had reached a turning point. He had been working on his dream of entering the final
consumer market since the 1990s; now he needed to realize that dream in order to boost a slowing growth
rate.

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However, based on his experience with Albert Hejin, Baan knew he had to be patient and cautious. He pon-
dered whether he had the resources and capabilities to create better value for mass consumers without dis-
turbing his up-market niche, and realized that this would be a risk he could not ignore. The B2B market was
steady; he could predict sales with 80% to 90% accuracy and plan production accordingly. However, the con-
sumer market was more volatile and difficult to predict, which meant higher risk. He had to consider what
would be the best strategy to minimise risk and maximize his chances of success in the consumer market.

Notes

1 Functional food is any fresh or processed food claimed to have health-promoting or disease-preventing
properties beyond the basic function of supplying nutrients.

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526429421

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