If you frequently browse your supermarket’s organic section, the likelihood that you’ve come across Biona products is high.
The company, which has a large foothold in the canned goods aisle, has become synonymous with the organic market.
With hundreds of products, and exporting to over 30 countries, they’ve helped to shape what has now become a billion-pound industry within an industry.
Their headquarters – tucked away on a residential street in south-west London – are as unassuming as their founders Noel McDonald and Donata Berger, who started the business from their restaurant kitchen.
Founders: Noel McDonald and Donata Berger launched organic company Biona in 1992
Thirty years later, the husband and wife duo run the country’s largest organic food company.
But what’s behind their meteoric rise – and just how much will consumers want to splash out on organic products in a cost of living crisis?
How a public health crisis catapulted Biona into the mainstream
While Biona might be a familiar presence on the shelves of most leading supermarkets, it took some time until it became accepted by a significant portion of shoppers.
Appetite for organic products was minimal when McDonald first became interested in organic farming in the 1970s.
After university, he joined a small commune off the west coast of Ireland before buying his own farm.
‘After a number of years, I had a feeling it wasn’t having any real impact on the world,’ he tells This Is Money. ‘It was just sorting out my own food supply but not changing anything.’
He packed his bags for London and after a few years, he opened Windmill Wholefoods, a whole food and organic shop in Fulham when ‘there were very few organic products at the time.’
By 1981, McDonald had met German-born reflexologist Berger and the pair joined forces to open one of the country’s first vegetarian restaurants.
In the evenings, they tested products in the restaurant kitchen, which led to the development of Biona’s first product, homemade granola.
‘We wanted to take it onto another level, rather than just a local level in Fulham,’ says Mcdonald. ‘[We wanted] to have a bigger effect on the grocery market.’
After officially launching Biona in 1992, they built up a small but dedicated customer base by selling through wholesalers and health food shops.
However, it took the slaughter of millions of cattle and a public health crisis to push Biona into the mainstream.
Berger says: ‘The stroke of luck was the BSE [mad cow disease] crisis. It really created a huge awareness of the connection between what you eat and your health.
‘Supermarkets were in a real panic too. Suddenly organic food came into a wider platform and they were desperately looking for something that would give reassurance to their customers that they’re selling safe food to eat.’
The brand quickly became a staple in higher-end supermarkets, securing a listing with Waitrose for some of its canned goods.
Fast forward thirty years and Biona achieved a total of £24million gross sales value in 2023, with 16 per cent growth year-on-year.
While retailers have increasingly supplemented brands like Biona with their own core organic range, McDonald and Berger say demand for their own products has kept pace.
The launch of their online offering has helped to offset the impact of the demise of health food shops during the pandemic. Now, they say they are the number one organic food supplier to Ocado and do ‘quite a bit of business with Amazon’.
Why there’s ‘no such thing as cheap food’
Biona’s growth figures seem at odds with the ongoing cost of living crisis in the UK as consumers struggle to keep up with rising food costs.
That is because Biona products are typically priced at a premium.
A tinned can of Biona beans can cost over £2 while a supermarket equivalent would cost between 50p and £1.
The types of customers Biona is going after are largely shielded from the worst of the cost of living crisis, though.
‘We’re not marketing products that are aimed at the lower end of the marketplace,’ says McDonald.
‘There are people who have challenges with the cost of living crisis. But others go to restaurants, pubs… They might have a challenge for the next holiday to Thailand, but not for food.’
Crucially, Biona has honed in on customers who are committed to buying organic not just for health reasons, but environmental ones too.
‘There are enough people out there who care enough about what they eat and put into their bodies, and for their children as well,’ McDonald says. ‘There’s a growing number of people who are a bit more conscious about food than there were, let’s say, 30 years ago.’
That might well be the case, but the dominance of budget retailers like Aldi and Lidl shows consumers still shop with one eye on their budget, rather than their perceived health.
Recent Kantar figures show Aldi is now the UK’s largest supermarket and Lidl isn’t far behind.
Whole food: Biona sells products, including coconut milk and pulses, in over 30 countries
Berger says: ‘Obviously we’ll never be able to compete with food from Aldi or Lidl, it’s not possible. We want to make sure what we’re selling comes from a sustainable supply chain.’
That doesn’t come cheap though and may rile up some consumers looking to get a cut-price deal where possible, when the cost of everything else increases.
However, the recent bad weather and its impact on British farming shows that it may well become more difficult.
‘I think the big misconception is that there’s cheap food. There just isn’t,’ says McDonald. ‘Someone’s going to have pick up the bill somewhere, whether it’s pollution on the farm which needs cleaning up… plastic in the oceans, that’s going to have to be cleaned up.
‘There is no such thing as really cheap food. I wouldn’t go and work on a farm for the wages that produce anything that you can sell for 50p going through a chain, it’s just not realistic.’
Explosion of the organic market
While Biona might be a big fish, the small pond is growing.
That consumers now no longer bat an eyelid at supermarkets’ own brand organic products shows just how mainstream the market has become.
In the UK, it has grown 25.4 per cent over three years and is now worth a record £3.4billion.
The growing presence of shops like Whole Foods and Planet Organic on the British high street further indicate the extent of the demand.
However, the market remains largely protected from being overwhelmed by new challengers as other product categories do.
Organic is a legal definition meaning that any company that claims to sell organic products have to be certified and have an annual inspection.
‘Unlike other trends where there’s no real definition of gut health for example… there’s no legal definition, no one coming to inspect your books,’ says McDonald. ‘It’s just marketing a lot of the time.’
‘Marketeers’ pile into wellness trends
That’s not to say that Biona doesn’t benefit from marketing trends. Some of their bestselling products at the moment include kimchi and sauerkraut, which feed into the recent interest in gut health and wellness.
‘Any trend that comes along like veganism, everyone piles in and thinks it’s going to transform the world,’ says McDonald. ‘Then the air goes out of the balloon and it comes down, but it’s still there.
‘Every restaurant you go into now sells vegan food and that wasn’t the case before. It has lifted the consumption of vegan food hugely but the marketing hype has gone away.
‘That’s a little bit what’s going on in the world now. A search for something to big up and make a fuss about. Those things come and go.’
While the pair lambast ‘marketeers’ who jump on certain bandwagons, Biona has also capitalised on plenty of trends.
They offer products which cut across recent trends including the raw diet, high protein products, gut health and vegan.
Their setup means they can spring into action if they spot a trend they might benefit from.
McDonald says: ‘We’re pretty agile as a company. We have our own production facility so it’s very quick for us to change around and bring new products into being.
‘We have quite a focus on production, we launch between 40 and 60 new products every year. That’s working on new ideas but also building out categories that we’re already active in.’
The pair are comfortable being trailblazers and having been the first of its kind, and Biona is unlikely to lose much ground any time soon.
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