Winclove Probiotics is a family-owned company founded in 1991 and has developed from a two-person company to a medium sized company employing around 80 people. The company has specialized in probiotic food supplements, selling them business-to-business all over the world. “Export accounts for 95% of our production”, Saskia van Hemert says, ” most of it in Europe but North and South America and Asia are also important and growing. In several countries Winclove Probiotics succeeded in getting strong business partners to become the market leader, in other countries we are working hard on a market breakthrough”.
Winclove Probiotics is optimistic for the future. “There is a growing public attention for health, because due to lots of research and analysis we know more about the gut microbiota and especially the working of probiotics in relation to diseases. So, in the next years this will be a growing market, expects Saskia van Hemert.
Innovative research is essential for Winclove Probiotics. As a consequence, one third of all their people is employed in R&D, with another one third in manufacturing of probiotics and operations. The remaining one third is working in business development and various services.
Winclove Probiotics decided to cooperate in scientific research with external partners, sometimes 1-to-1 cooperation, sometimes in consortia. Product quality analysis and a limited amount of experimental work is carried out in its own laboratories. Obtaining patents based on the results from scientific research is not a primary goal, focus is on a better understanding of the working of products and improving the quality. That’s also why Winclove Probiotics decided to join the CarboHealth-consortium. “CarboHealth was very valuable to us because we had little knowledge of prebiotics or carbohydrates in general and the program enabled us to learn quickly and to implement new knowledge into our business. Besides that, in CarboHealth we met several suppliers of raw materials, with whom we now cooperate as business partners”.
For Winclove Probiotics 5 research topics will be leading for the forthcoming years: side effects of antibiotics, allergies, female health, the ear nose throat microbiota and the gut-brain connection. This means new research collaboration with partners from various European countries. “CCC may be one of them depending on the subject and our budget,” Saskia says,”in any case Winclove remains interested in CCC and will follow its activities and aims to remain part of the CCC-network”.
