We’re pleased to welcome CJ Schwan's to Bridge2Food North America 2025! What motivated your team to participate this year, and which aspects of the event are you most looking forward to engaging with?
We’re excited to join Bridge2Food North America as it brings together a diverse innovation-forward community offering thoughtful perspectives on the future of food. I’m most excited for the networking opportunities, panel discussions, and overall industry insights exchanged on the challenges, strategic solutions and overall outlook shaping the sector.
In your panel on scaling up with processing equipment, can you share a glimpse of the solutions or collaborations you are most looking forward to explore with fellow panellists?
I’m keen to explore the strategic staging of manufacturing capability and capacity to support new launches. Through co-man partnerships, modular equipment configurations, and optimized manufacturing processes we’re able to de-risk innovation enabling speed-to-scale and thoughtful capex deployment while testing consumer demand to validate product-market fit before committing to full-scale optimized production. (Auroni Majumdar – CJ CheilJedang)
With the spotlight on convenience and customization in your upcoming panel, which directions or approaches do you see as most influential for shaping the next generation of plant-based snacks and RTE meals?
The next generation of plant-based snacks and ready to eat meals will be shaped by a blend of convenience, personalization, and functionality. Consumers don’t want to sacrifice when it comes to their food choices. They want options that go beyond “plant based” such as bold flavors, interesting textures and added benefits such as protein, fiber, or gut health all while being easy to prepare/heat/eat or customize. The digital frontier is also enabling continuous feedback loops for companies to quickly understand consumer preferences such as flavor, portion size, ingredients, and nutrition at unprecedented speed. This can be helpful as we learn faster and adapt.
At CJ Schwan’s we are continuing to explore food and packaging technologies that provides competitive advantage for our brands. Clean label, enhanced nutrition, sustainable sourcing, ecofriendly packaging, and plant-based protein are priorities as we work to ensure that our brands and product portfolio are the best in the market. Our approach will be to combine best in class taste, health, and convenience at competitive price points. This means that we must continuously challenge our selves and our suppliers while also re-imagining how we design our food with an advanced plant based protein ingredients as long as taste and texture are optimized. At the end of the day the products must deliver to the brand proposition and eating occasion with amazing sensory / taste with craveability. (Stacey Fowler – Schwan’s)
Looking at the North American market, what shifts or trends do you see as likely to influence how CJ Schwan’s approaches R&D and innovation in the coming years?
In North America, growing demand for global flavors and ethnic Korean foods is playing a key role in shaping the CJ Schwan’s innovation roadmap. Along with health and wellness trends including sugar, sodium, saturated fat reduction as well as the push for nutrient density. The focus for the organization is to strike a balance between sustaining growth in established categories like frozen pizza and responding to increasing demand for global foods.
Can you share some of the latest innovations, research, or news from CJ Schwan’s that you’re excited to highlight with the industry?
At CJ-Schwan’s, we’re excited about the progress we’re making in introducing global flavors and ethnics foods from our Korean CPG portfolio as well as our health and wellness and sustainability efforts – from initiatives related to nutrient density, reduction of sugar and sodium from our products to reducing energy usage and packaging sustainability. These efforts ensure our innovation pipeline meets evolving consumer needs.
One of many exciting highlights is the Sioux Falls investment in state-of-the-art modern manufacturing plant focused on frozen products, it certainly showcases our commitment to growth in convenience on trend snacks and modern meals given packaging, speed, quality. Additionally, we just launched our renovated line of Annie Chun’s shelf stable meals, Bibigo refrigerated Kimchi with Walmart with a probiotic claim, six Bibigo single serve meals with crave-able Korean-inspired flavors, Steamed Dumplings into our Food Service channels with K-sauces, and a new 7” Red Baron Deep Dish XL pizza, which is the biggest microwaveable single serve pizza offering!
