Leading plant-based food producer Alpro is set to harvest its first soya beans in Belgium, its home country.
The company says the local soya ban crop – estimated to be 100 tonnes – will help with its mission to minimize its ecological footprint and secure year-round availability of high-quality, non-GMO soya.
Alpro already has a factory in France that uses French-grown soya. More widely, around 50% of the conventional beans and 100% of the organic beans are currently purchased in Europe, mainly in France, as well as Italy, Austria and the Netherlands.
For the Belgian crop Alpro has partnered with AVEVE, the Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. Five farmers are among those pioneering the professional cultivation of soya in Flanders.
Greet Vanderheyden, sustainable development manager at Alpro, comments: “We want to decrease the ecological footprint of our soya-based food products and drinks even further. This Flemish soya fits in perfectly with our strategic choice of not using any genetically modified soya beans.”
Johan Van Waes of ILVO adds: “Between 2012 and 2017, ILVO has created several test fields with soya. A great deal of the focus was on refining the cultivation technique. Soya is a subtropical plant that, in principle, does not get enough sun in Belgium to ripen and, as a crop, does not bring nearly the yield of, for example, grain or corn. Via research, we can optimise some things in order to make cultivating soya possible, both in the technical and financial sense.” Only very early ripening varieties are suitable for the soya cultivation in Flanders. In addition to screening the already existing varieties from the list of European soya varieties, ILVO also started its own breeding programme.”