- Could you tell us in brief about Azelis?
Azelis is a leading global innovation service provider in the speciality chemicals and food ingredients industry present in over 50 countries across the globe with over 3,000 employees. Our knowledgeable teams on industry, market and technical experts are dedicated to a specific market in Life Sciences and Industrial Chemicals. We offer a lateral value chain of complementary products to more than 51,000 customers, supported by 2,300 principal relationships, creating a turnover of €2.8 billion (2021).
Azelis Group NV is listed on Euronext Brussels under ticker AZE.
Azelis India have been actively growing its portfolio of speciality ingredient and food additives to become the one-stop-shop of our customers. We have built strong partnerships with key players of the food & health industry such as DSM, CP Kelco, Corbion, KMC, recently added Symrise, and more to support our customers in all their challenges.
- Your thoughts on Food ingredients market with your nine plus years of experience in this field.
The food ingredient market like any other has evolved tremendously over the year. The focus from mass production has tilted towards quality ingredients. We see trends in India which were being experienced in other developed countries perhaps, seven to eight years ago.
Sustainable farming, natural preservation, clean labelling, sodium reduction and so on are just some of the trends India is catching up.
- How does an ingredient company work with a consumer company in terms of their requirements? Give us a sense of how does it happen.
Across our extensive network of more than 60 application laboratories, our award-winning staff helps develop formulations and provide technical guidance throughout the customers’ product development process. We combine a global market reach with a local footprint to offer a reliable, integrated and unique digital service to local customers with attractive business opportunities to principals. EcoVadis Platinum rated, Azelis is a leader in sustainability. We believe in building and nurturing solid, honest and transparent relationships with our people and partners. Impact through ideas. Innovation through formulation.
From process, texture and stability, taste and colour, to nutritional profile, we can help our customers in the development, customization and troubleshoot of their formulation. Our technical sales teams, supported by our Food & Health application laboratory located in Mumbai, help customers for all the applications from concept ideation, ingredient selection, formulation, industrialization to launch. We are here at every step of our customers’ project! Innovation is at the heart of what we do, embedded in who we are.
It is our tagline “Innovation through formulation”. We recently upgraded our Food & Health application lab to upgrade our capabilities for our customers. We work on deepening our ingredients expertise, unveil new ingredient synergies, develop our inspirational formulation library and support our customers’ projects! To take R&D and innovation further, the Azelis group invested in a new connected e-Lab, a module of the new customer portal, available now in India. Connect at any moment of the day with our technical team to create your customized brief in a few steps, our technical teams picks it up from there to help
- How was the year 2021 and your plan for 2022?
2021 was a challenging year with the disruption of the second wave of Covid which hit us badly as it brought the industry to a grinding halt when we thought Covid was beyond us. It taught us important lessons to learn how to pivot business strategies and evolve as a flexible market player.
In 2022, we are seeing business and volumes back to pre-pandemic levels. The plan is to very much assert our presence using our extensive list of ingredient and solution offerings and ensure our existing and future clients to come out with the best products and take full advantage of the economic growth because that is the only way we can grow!
- How did Azelis deal with Covid disruption?
Azelis was and is extremely flexible as we understand, we are in the business of servicing and catering our clients. To ensure there were no disruptions in production of essential foods and ingredients is something, we take pride upon not only from a business stand point but also an ethical responsibility to the society.
We ensured that we got the relevant permissions from authorities and engaged with clients to estimate requirements which could be covered with fewer deliveries.
We ensured all safety protocols and hygiene standards and maintained it throughout the whole process. We have definitely managed to come out a stronger and more capable organisation as it has been humble learnings!
