Yo, care for a P15 yogurt from Spain?

MADRID, Spain — I have never really been a yogurt-taker. To me it always came off as sour, and personally, kind of snooty. Yogurt — the product that affluent people insist on when taking their morning breakfast, especially at hotel breakfast buffets. Yogurt — that creamy substance that health buffs would take when they want to lose weight or maintain their figures. A good question would be: why eat yogurt when you can essentially drink milk? They supposedly have the same nutrients, being of the same “dairy” family anyway.

Imagine my surprise when, following a conversation with the charismatic Tomas Pascual Gomez-Cuetara, president and CEO of Grupo Leche Pascual (GLP), one of the leading milk producers in Spain and second-generation impresario of the 100-percent-family-owned business, and Tomas Melendez, GLP’s international general manager, I found myself devouring two full cups, a full-cream and a low-fat variant within minutes, and then craving more of it after touring their factory in Aranda del Duero, Spain? “Just try it!” urged the two Tomases, who invited members of the Philippine  media to their corporate headquarters in Madrid. And they were right; besides being let in on the creation process, all it took was one taste to convert, and become a true and absolute Creamy Delight yogurt believer.

The thing about Creamy Delight

Creamy Delight is a new yogurt brand that was launched in the Philippines late last year. Envisioned to be a “healthy snack for the whole family,” the yogurt is now being sold in over 300,000 sari-sari stores and groceries nationwide and delivers on everything you would assume from both its name and colorful packaging. It comes in six variants: Yogi Kids Strawberry Banana, Yogi Kids Strawberry, Creamy Delight Fruit Salad, Creamy Delight Strawberry, Creamy Delight 0% Non-Fat Strawberry, and Creamy Delight Thick and Creamy.

In March this year, GLP, along with its local distribution and development partner, the Lucio Tan-owned Asia Brewery, was able to move one million cups across its distribution points; so much so that they are considering opening a factory in the Philippines sometime in the future to strengthen the supply chain. In market terms, this is a good problem to have.

My curiosity grew about this product despite the fact that I’ve always gravitated towards junk food. Melendez shares, “The most important words concerning Creamy Delight are ‘available’ and ‘affordable.’ You can find it anywhere and it is half the price of the leading yogurt brand.” Its retail price is only P15 to P20, depending on the flavor. How this is possible when Creamy Delight, though conceptualized specifically for the Asian market, is essentially an imported good, wherein most of it is manufactured in factories located more than halfway across the world? The answer is a new technology that doesn’t require refrigeration for a good seven months prior to opening. “Its shelf life is longer than most yogurt products, which only last 20 days,” Melendez says. 

Yogurt the Spanish way

Pascual further explains this new technology. “In Europe, there are two ways of making the yogurt: the traditional French way, and the German way.” In the first case, he says, it’s more difficult to control the fermentation process; it yields a product that is more acidic and steel-like rather than thick. In the second case, “the yogurt is produced in a steel tank; you have the milk, and then the fermentation; you control the fermentation better, and once you have (it), you move the product through pipes.” The end result is a richer, creamier product like Creamy Delight. All quite complicated in theory and hard to digest, but a trip to the factory in Aranda later that afternoon clarifies things.

Eliminating the refrigeration process leads to larger savings on transport, so that it sells cheaper in the market without sacrificing quality. In fact, it is the only yogurt brand being carried in sari-sari stores nationwide because of this. Therefore, you need not pack it all in the fridge with the rest of your groceries from the get-go. This is also part of GLP’s goal to reach a broader market.

Yogurt culture in the Philippines

It’s a bit “curious” how this partnership between GLP and the Philippines began, shares Melendez. Like all great love stories, it happened in the most unlikely of places — an elevator! One of the group’s finance directors had a particular connection with the Philippines and he lit up talking about the Philippines’ economic growth and the over-100-million-population potential for conversion to Creamy Delight and yogurt culture. It was a potential, he said, that needed to be explored. From back-and-forth between Manila and Madrid for a year and a half, to crafting a sound business plan that would harness the market, GLP reached landfall in the Philippines through the original Creamy Delight and found a comrade in the Lucio Tan-owned Asia Brewery.

“We share values and strategic approaches with the Tan family,” shares Pascual. “We’re both family-owned businesses and they have very strong distribution networks.” He says that the two are working together to develop, first the Filipino market, then Indonesia, Myanmar, and hopefully the rest of Asia, with GLP pushing its aim of growing its non-domestic markets from five percent to 30 percent in the next five years. 

A yogurt company that cares

Besides being a good source of calcium to make your bones and teeth stronger (one cup of Creamy Delight is equivalent to three-fourths of a glass of milk), containing vitamins that improve skin and eyesight, and being low in fat and sodium, which makes it good for heart and weight management, Creamy Delight also works with purely natural ingredients.

It contains real fruit and uses 100-percent-fresh liquid milk as opposed to powdered milk, a healthier option transformed into yogurt by Lactobacilus Bulgaricus and Streptococcus Thermophilus bacteria, which we had the privilege of viewing under the microscope upon visiting the 170,000 square-meter plant at Aranda.

But apart from nutritional value, there is something to be said about how GLP operates as a family-owned business with family ideals — an important core value that the Spanish company shares with the everyday Filipino consumer. “Being a family means two things,” intimates Pascual. “Responsibility to the business itself, and the people surrounding it, and values.”

He continues, “We don’t deal with our project as an economical issue. We go about our business taking into account the long-term view of the company.” It’s not about making money today, he says, “it’s about having a good business forever,” which calls to mind their commitment to society and the people, both on the production and receiving end of the business.

This is also the reason why GLP has decided to focus on developing the quality of their goods and services, one of two pillars for a sustainable business, the other being innovation. They constantly look towards the future, and achieving long-term goals. It’s not about the allure of fast capital but the transformative and indefatigable power of the late, great Tomás Pascual Sanz’s dream.

To look foolish and humble

“My father was a salesman, and a teacher,” reveals Pascual about the company patriarch. “The way he managed people was teaching them, not only technology or technical contents, but how to manage life and business. For him, the most important thing was to help the people who were working with him to make decisions and be an entrepreneur.”

His father used to tell him “to look foolish, and humble.” To be humble is to be curious and to subject yourself to the possibility of learning. “If I want to reach the customer and I only have a small factory,” he says, “and milk can only last two days, and I want to go to Madrid which is a day away, I have to learn, I have to investigate, I have to innovate.” This is precisely the reason why GLP started developing products with long-life technology, now seen via the revolutionary Creamy Delight. “The other thing is to look foolish, meaning you have to listen to the people, to the customer. If you pretend to be the best, you won’t learn anything and you’ll remain the same.” Invest, and things will come.

Future perfect

Besides finding an advocate in local endorser Maricel Laxa-Pangilinan, who embodies the values demanded by the product and the family-owned GLP, Creamy Delight has also engaged in breakfast feeding programs across the archipelago and a partnership with National Book Store, where every P1,000 single-receipt purchase entitles the customer to a free Creamy Delight Yogurt Yogi Kids. It’s also about to begin a series of awareness campaigns to get more people to try the product and expose them to the benefits of including yogurt in their everyday diet. Melendes emphasizes, “I can tell you about advertising and all the qualities of Creamy Delight. But in the end, just try it!”

What’s the next frontier for GLP and Creamy Delight? “Mango flavor,” as this is popular among Filipinos, and “more calcium and more iron in our products,” shares Marco Delgado, the director for innovation who toured us around the factory. He reveals that more than 40 percent of women become more anemic as they hit 40, and there is an opportunity here to address that concern. Also, “more probiotics (or healthy live microorganisms) to add functionality to the product,” he says.

Seeing that care that goes into the five-step process of creating a yogurt like Creamy Delight, to the family dynamic that was evident in the way the GLP employees synergized with one another from the headquarters to the factory, was proof that the late Pascual-Sanz’s dream was, in fact, alive. It was the fuel that energized this whole operation — GLP continuing to innovate and move towards the future from whence it was founded in 1969. It’s all about the future for this family-owned business; whatever the case, it sure is looking bright.

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Creamy Delight is sold in sari-sari stores and groceries nationwide. To find out more about the product, visit www.facebook.com/CreamyDelightYogurt.