Plant-based foods, products, and menus continue to grow in popularity across Vancouver.
Despite plant-based foods becoming more commonplace, converting from dairy to a plant-based alternative can be a jarring transition for some.
Jade Herrmann knows that experience all too well. After converting to veganism, trying and finding an "alt-yogurt" that had the same texture, as well as healthy ingredients, proved challenging.
The need for an alternative to yogurt that didn't sacrifice taste or health benefits led the Vancouverite to crack coconuts in her kitchen.
Nearly five years later, Herrmann was awarded Woman Entrepreneur of the Year at the BC Food and Beverage awards for Yoggu!, her plant-based "alt-yogurt" that not only tastes good but is also great for the gut.
Why is it so hard to find a good-tasting, healthy, vegan yogurt?
"After spending about a year of my life living in Paris, I really wanted to create a decadent yogurt alternative just like the yogurts I was eating in Europe," shares Herrmann with Vancouver Is Awesome over the phone. Though she wasn't vegan when living in Europe, the Vancouverite noticed that even in dairy products, the taste and ingredients felt different from North American yogurts.
Stepping into the plant-based dairy industry, she quickly realized the reason why many vegan yogurts struggle to replicate the real thing, or even taste good.
"A lot of other companies will use gums or fillers or stabilizers [which] are things that essentially add volume to the product but that are very low cost," she tells V.I.A. "Our competitors will often use acids or things of that sort to attain the tangy flavour."
When first introducing her "alt-yogurt" formula to the world, Herrmann saw the aftermath of unpleasant experiences with plant-based yogurts. Vegan yogurts were still a new product when she first started, and consumers were turned off by the taste and texture of some of the non-dairy yogurts already on the market.
"When we were first starting out, it was a bit of an uphill climb because we were having to reassure a lot of folks that had already tried plant-based alternatives," she says.
Herrmann's philosophy is to create a dairy yogurt alternative that retains the taste and nutritional benefits, without the additives oftentimes used in other plant-based alternatives.
What is Yoggu! alt-yogurt made of?
A staple ingredient in Yoggu!'s yogurt is organic coconut cream, which isn't common in the plant-based dairy industry according to Herrmann.
She says her formula consists of healthy fats derived from the organic coconut cream and probiotics from the traditional fermentation technique used to create the yogurt. In the end, Yoggu! is made with high-quality ingredients, free of refined-sugars, fillers, or artificial flavours.
The alt-yogurt brand is transparent about its ingredients too, listing the seven natural ingredients used to make each batch on its website; organic coconuts, organic coconut nectar, probiotics, agar (a plant-based gelatin derived from seaweed), organic B.C.-grown strawberries, Alphonso mangoes, and vanilla.
The focus isn't just on clean ingredients, but on their functional benefits too, such as probiotics, healthy fats, vitamins, antioxidants, and many other nutritional properties.
After around five years, Yoggu! has become a prominent name in the plant-based industry and was recently awarded Emerging Business at the BC Food and Beverage awards.
"It's really nice to see people you know falling in love with yogurt again," says Herrmann.
Making healthy, plant-based yogurt more accessible
After operating out of small commissary kitchens for several years, this year the company moved into a manufacturing plant, which was a pivotal moment for Yoggu!.
"We knew that if we wanted to make our product more accessible across Canada we needed to grow our facility," says Herrmann of their new 12,000 sq. ft. facility in Coquitlam. "We're distributed not only in Vancouver, but we're also available as far as Nova Scotia. Now we're available in all Save-On-Foods as well."
The next year has big changes in store for Yoggu!, too, as the brand plans on launching in a national retailer, which will make the plant-based yogurt more accessible to Canadians. Herrmann isn't able to divulge details yet, but promises 2023 holds more in store for the brand and consumers: "We're going to be launching something that will allow our customers to have access to Yoggu! in a more convenient way."
