Flora has spent more than half a century perfecting its plant-based b+tter recipe but as it turns 60, the brand is looking at what’s next.

It’s parent company Upfield, which also owns brands including Bertolli, Violife and ProActiv, announced in September it was rebranding to Flora Food Group to better reflect its “evolved purpose” of provide more sustainable, nutritious plant-based foods.

The company’s UK marketing director Ian Hepburn says the name change “positions us as a food company, which is now what we’re all about”.

Grocery Gazette sat down with Hepburn to find out how Flora plans to disrupt the crowded market with its dairy-free alternatives and what new categories we can expect to see next.

Flora is keen to move away from being seen as just a simple spread brand, and one of its first moves saw it launch a plant-based Smoked Garlic butter.

“We saw a real opportunity around flavoured butters,” notes Hepburn. “[It’s] definitely something that we think will remain an ever more dynamic part of the category.

“We’re looking at how we can launch more on-trend flavours, and we see some of our competitors doing that already.”

Flora Food Group has unveiled a slew of new products in recent months

The Smoked Garlic product, which launched in September, has proved popular among shoppers, with the rate of sale matching the same level as Lurpak’s Garlic dairy version in its first four weeks on shelves in Sainsbury’s, says Hepburn.

“This is pretty amazing really because, we have to recognise Lurpak as the biggest brand in the category, so for us, to be selling the same number of packs per store as them on our garlic version is really encouraging.”

Flora’s quest for portfolio expansion also includes the retail launch of plant cream, a product that has been available on a food service basis since 2020.

“Chefs up and down the country use Flora plant cream, because it performs better than dairy cream and takes allergens out of professional kitchens, which is very useful. Now I’m pleased that consumers themselves can use that product” explains Hepburn.

Just like its garlic butter, Flora plant cream has proved popular with consumers, with an estimated 350,000 households across the UK having bought the product since its launched in April. 

Flora debuted paper tubs earlier this year in a bid to cut down on its plastic consumption.

Looking ahead for future innovation, Hepburn shares that Flora is most excited to expand its nutrition ranges in a bid to catch up with competitors already in the space.

Flora is already naturally rich in Omega 3, however, future products could potentially contain ingredients that have the right mix of natural minerals and fortified vitamins to give consumers a boost for a healthy diet.

“We obviously have ProActiv, which is a very successful brand for us and is about cholesterol lowering, but I think there are other nutritional benefits that we can see opportunities in and of course, we know one of our competitors is already doing something in this space,” says Hepburn.

Flora may have struck gold with its new plant-based products lines – but the FMCG brand has not been so lucky in the past.

Flora briefly reintroduced buttermilk into its well-known Buttery spread in 2020 – a move that risked alienating an entire demographic of loyal plant-based consumers.

Hepburn explains the move was “driven by wanting to make sure that we give our consumers the best quality products” and as the dairy-free formulation “wasn’t quite good enough”. However, it proved unpopular among Flora fans with 5,000 of them signing a petition against the change.

“We took buttermilk out three years ago, and then we put it back in, and now we’ve taken it out for good,” he says.

“Now obviously [adding dairy to the product] that was a difficult decision to make, because, of course we do take our responsibility to vegans and people with specific dietary needs very seriously, for example, those who have a lactose intolerance.”

“We’d always wanted to get to a position where Flora as a brand was entirely plant-based and dairy-free. I’m very pleased that we were able to do that last October, and Flora Buttery is for good.”

The success of this decision was instant, with Hepburn noting that the brand’s b+tter range has seen a 6.2% unit sale growth year-on-year to date.

In 2020, Flora changes the recipe of its Flora Buttery product to include buttermilk, before reversing the decision three years later.

Supermarket shelves have become inundated with plant-based alternatives and new products. In an increasingly crowded space, Flora is hoping to catch the attention of savvy shoppers with a refreshed image.

After relaunching the branding on all its spreads last year, Flora became the world’s first brand to debut paper tubs in April in a bid to cut down on plastic consumption.

It also caught the attention of consumers earlier this year with its witty ‘Skip the Cow’ campaign, based on the idea that the brand’s products are just as rich and creamy as “udder butter”.

“Taking a look at the at the world of butters and spreads and existing brand campaigns there are out there, we realized that there was a lack of distinctiveness,” says Hepburn.

“So we said, ‘We need to do something distinctive. We need to do something that’s going to get noticed, and not least because the whole campaign idea is to give people some light hearted provocation.’”

Showcased across digital and out-of-home (OOH), Flora’s ‘Skip the Cow’ campaign takes a different direction from its 2022 adverts, which focused on highlighting the brand’s health conscious image.

In contrast to other examples from plant-based brands in the industry, where there has been much work to reframe how consumers think about vegan butter, this campaign instead tries to reframe the way consumers think about dairy butter.

“There are plenty of occasions where you don’t need to default to a dairy product. You could equally as well use a Flora product. And that’s why we needed to do something that was going to disrupt people in a lighthearted way,” says Hepburn.

“We never wanted to preach. We just wanted to get people maybe out of that autopilot and start to think, you know, ‘do I really need dairy for all of these occasions?’. So that’s where skip the cow came from.”

Hepburn adds that the risk plant-based brands run is isolating themselves from consumers and becoming too “niche”.

To combat this, Hepburn suggest brands should market themselves as quality products in taste and performance, and only add in the vegan label as a “by the way”.

“My advice to heads of marketing in all businesses is, first of all, make sure you have the quality, but how to engage and reassure consumers about that? That’s where I think the plant-based sector has split,” says Hepburn.

These comments follow similar sentiments by plant-based brand Deliciously Ella chief executive Matthew Mills last month, who cautioned of split a in the plant-based community, leading to some brands in “substantial decline”.

However, Hepburn says, this is not the fate for Flora Food Group following its transformation and its new mission to instill confidence in its consumers that its products are “perfect” for cooking and baking occasions – whether they are vegan or not.

“In many ways, we’re only just beginning, I think it’s interesting because even two years ago our approach was still quite conventional. But since that time we’ve started to see success” Hepburn explains.

From innovation in how the business advertises to how it engages consumers with innovative products, Hepburn says the company goal for the future is to “stay bold” and continue to disrupt the market.

“The success we have got over the last 18 months is from being bold. It’s still early days, but I would say watch this space, there’s a lot more to come.”