Five new vegan start-ups based at a specialist production site have received an allergen and nutritional data boost.
Newcastle-based Erudus, an online platform that provides the foodservice industry with instant access to food product data, has offered them a year’s free subscription. The move will help them share their food data and vegan products with the rest of the industry.
The start-ups are residents at Plant-Based Valley, a 385,000 sq ft facility being spearheaded by Heather Mills and her vegan food company, VBites.
Acting as an incubator for vegan start-ups, the unit has been designed exclusively for plant-based businesses and aims to be the environmental equivalent of California’s Silicon Valley.
The five start-ups receiving the free subscriptions are One Planet Pizza, Onist Food, Beau’s Ice Cream, Love Seitan and M*lkman.
Jon Shayler, chief operating officer at Erudus, said: “Having been on the start-up journey ourselves we know it can be a hard road – we’ve had friends who have helped us out and so we wanted to pay it forward by supporting other north east-based businesses in the food industry.
“We were really impressed by all of the Plant-Based Valley companies, and because of the vast reach Erudus has within the foodservice sector, we wanted to give them the opportunity to add their products to our data pool and make them as accessible as possible.”
The Plant-Based Valley facility will be based on the site of the old Coty/Proctor & Gamble factory in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland.
In addition to bringing jobs to the region, it will serve as an incubator for VBites Ventures, Heather Mills’ initiative to support local, plant-based entrepreneurs.
Erudus is the leading foodservice data pool software and hosts the specifications of major manufacturers including Heinz, Premier Foods, and Unilever.
It has more than 90,000 manufacturers, caterers, and wholesalers using its software, which contains more than 60,000 products as well as 250,000 product images.
