Our mission!
We are young food innovators who are passionate about healthy and sustainable nutrition. Therefore, we seek ways to provide the consumer with food products that fulfil their hedonic, health and sustainability goals. We aspire to make a real difference by disrupting the food system with our innovative products!
Our journey
During brainstorms for our first innovative food idea, we looked at some of our favourite meat snacks, among these snacks were biltong and droëwors, two delicacies we look upon fondly due to our experiences with South-Africa. South-Africans love a game of Rugby and biltong is an essential part of enjoying a game! Biltong and droëwors are strictly meat-based and therefore we set out a challenge for ourselves to make a more sustainable alternative. Biltong is a product similar to beef jerky but with a different, more clean flavour profile that is created by vinegar and coriander seeds, traditionally biltong is made from a variety of animals found in southern Africa.
We decided to challenge ourselves by creating Shiitake Biltong, using shiitake mushrooms for their great nutritional profile and umami flavour. The usage of shiitake mushrooms gave us a hearty umami snack that packs a punch.
With Shiitake Biltong, we participated in the Dutch Ecotrophelia competition. Shiitake Biltong proved to be the winning idea in this competition. From here on we entered the European finals, where we met some tough competition out of 13 European countries! Unfortunately we didn’t end up winning any prizes, but we ended up with some great contacts and feedback which helped us tremendously in developing our new product.
Using the feedback and inspiration from Ecotrophelia we set out to create a new venture, Bitez. Bitez represents the use of sustainable ingredients to create tasty and healthy alternatives to traditional snacks. We are very excited to show you our newest product where we take our citrusy meaty flavours from our biltong and we managed to put it into a chip made out of primarily side products created during mushroom cultivation.
”Traditional South African Flavour, Modern Ecological Footprint!”