Arla Foods is tapping into the increasing demand for healthy, natural products with the launch of a new fruit yogurt innovation. Driven by the dairy co-operative’s desire to create products with no added or unnecessary ingredients, Arla Bio Nur consists of only organic yogurt (75 percent) and organic fruit (25 percent), offering consumers a healthier alternative to sugar-laden yogurt. The line has just hit the shelves in the German market.

Bio Nur, which translates as “just,” reflects Arla’s ambition to develop a yogurt with simple ingredients and targets health-conscious consumers.

Arla says more consumers recognize that the average fruit yogurt in Germany contains around 14g of added sugar which is leading to a decline in the category. Arla Bio Nur has no added sugar and contains between 6.8g and 7.7g of sugar, depending on the fruit variant, and consists of only natural ingredients.

“At Arla, it is a first for us to launch a fruit yogurt made from just two ingredients. This gives consumers an opportunity to reduce sugar consumption and still enjoy something new. We are committed to offering natural products that provide an alternative without added sugar and additives,” says Christian Trgo, Innovation Director for Arla Germany. “To make sure our products are the best quality, it is in Arla’s ethos that we never add any ingredients that aren’t necessary. However, we wanted to take this even further by creating a new yogurt that contains only natural ingredients. Yet with simplicity comes complexity. We had a very short space of time to bring the concept to reality and overcome some very big challenges.”

Arla Bio Nur has no added sugar and contains between 6.8g and 7.7g of sugar.

Developed as a collaboration between Arla’s Innovation Centre in Denmark and teams in Germany, the timescales, technical challenges, and taste requirements gave Arla and its innovation team one of the toughest product development tasks ever faced in the company.

Achieving the “impossible” 
Lukas Leutgoeb from Arla’s research and development department at its Innovation Centre, explains the challenges involved in creating a yogurt with just two ingredients that also hits the mark on taste.

“When we began speaking to fruit prep suppliers, they told us it was impossible to create a product like this. Traditionally fruit and yogurt only would be a very sour combination so getting the right proportion, flavor, and size of fruit was key if we could achieve a product that had no added sugar but still tasted great,” he says.

The research and development team tested over 180 variations of fruit prep before hitting on the right variations. Increasing the fruit makeup to a quarter of the yogurt, the team made sure that it tasted just as good as products with other added ingredients.

Following several trials, pilots, analyses of cost and collaboration across countries and teams, Arla finally achieved the ‘impossible’.

Arla Bio Nur is available across Germany now and comes in strawberry, tropical fruits, and red fruit variants. Produced in Upahl, Germany, it will launch into other European markets across 2019.

Arla’s long-term dairy growth
The launch comes as Arla Foods steps up its commitment to creating healthy, natural products. The Arla Brand Nutrition Criteria ensures all the good nutrients from milk while limiting the amount of added sugar, salt and fat. Arla is targeting 95 percent of all its Arla Brand products meet the criteria by 2020.

The Bio Nur launch comes just a couple of weeks after the dairy company unveiled plans to build an innovation center in Nr. Vium, Denmark to “unleash the wonders of whey,” by 2021. Part of Arla Foods Ingredients, the new center will be home to leading scientists and innovators who will discover and deliver new ways of using milk and whey.

At the beginning of this year, Arla announced plans to invest €527 million (US$655 million) in 2018, as part of the company’s 2020 growth ambition. The dairy cooperative said it wanted to invest in new, expanded and improved production capacity as well as innovative technology.