While 2020 has certainly been a year of ongoing challenges, there remains plenty to celebrate for UNIPEKTIN Ingredients AG.
Strong demand for our established and new product lines, the constant adjustment of our marketing and communications strategy, our dedicated staff willing to go the extra mile, significant improvements in production technology and capacity, and the commitment of our distribution partners, made 2020 a truly successful year for UPI.
2020 brought yet another significant increase in sales volume, of more than 40% compared to the previous year, with 2019 having been the most successful year in the company history with the turnover more than double compared to 2018.
Ever since Covid-19 came along, travelling to meet and exchange information with suppliers, customers and distributors has become near impossible. This lack of face-to-face exchange is particularly felt when it comes to critical planning and budgeting decisions for products like ours, where raw material planning is crucial. You get it right, you are fine – you get it wrong, you are in trouble.
The Locust Bean Gum market remained strongly volatile throughout 2020, and raw material prices increased further and reached new historical heights. We started to publish regular market updates on LBG on our website to make sure our distributors and customers are fully informed about the developments in our core market. These market updates obviously created confidence in UPI as one of the main LBG producers and helped existing and new customers to make the switch to our LBG and the available alternatives which we had further optimized in anticipation of the market development.
Our VIDOFIBRES range of plant fibres has quickly become one of the main pillars of our business, we added citrus and recently also carrot fibre to our sugar beet, apple and pear fibres. The VIDOFIBRES product family now complements perfectly our VIDOGUM Galactomannan product range of Locust Bean Gum, Guar Gum and Tara Gum, the VIDOPECTINE pectin product line, relaunched in 2020, the VIDOGUM PRO carob and tara proteins as well as the VIDOGLACE ice cream stabilizer product line. With these, we offer our customers a wide range of functional solutions for thickening, stabilization, gelling and texture for countless applications in the food industry.
Good information = Good decisions.
Already in 2019, we began to optimize our marketing efforts with the implementation of a new strategy centred around our website www.unipektin.ch and the News blogs as the central information hub and sales support database. Since then, our website has developed into a powerful and particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, indispensable marketing and communication tool for the numerous new product launches we had. A large number of regular and new visitors now use our website. We have also gained a large number of subscribers to our News blogs, many of our distributors and customers alike have subscribed to receive the newsletters and blogs automatically.
In the past 15 months, we have published more than 50 News blogs covering topics like, e.g. LBG market updates, company updates, new presentations, new product launches, updated or latest information etc. about our company, markets, products, services.
We have regularly updated our product information sheets, brochures, presentations etc. and we expanded the number of downloadable product information significantly, making them quickly and directly accessible.
So, while 2020 has brought about unprecedented uncertainty, it is worth acknowledging that challenge and opportunity do tend to go hand-in-hand. And we remain very positive about the opportunities the year ahead presents.
We wish you all a safe and happy 2021.