Our history

The beginning
It all started around 25 years ago when Bram van Leeuwen and Pieter Pekelharing first launched Spencer Food Industrial. Spencer Food Industrial is a trading company in raw materials for feed, food and nutraceuticals. In 1987 they came across the concept of probiotics, and with their technological and scientific background, they were immediately interested in the potential of these beneficial bacteria. Their background furthermore enabled them to understand the long term potential of investing in know-how and research of probiotics. In those days, the technology, the understanding of the mode of action of probiotics, and the market all had to be build from scratch. Nevertheless they started investing in probiotics, using Spencer Food Industrial as financing source.

Despite the insecure future, the first probiotic powder was successfully delivered to specialized health clinics in the UK in 1988. Because of the position in the market of Spencer Food, Winclove started with, and still has, a strict business to business approach. This made it possible not to invest in consumer marketing and branding, but to invest all efforts in research and product innovation. To suit customers and to enable them to invest in their brands, Winclove developed a strategy to produce tailor-made formulations. This has led to more than 60 different formulations using more than 30 different bacterial strains.

   
Multispecies innovation
The multispecies product concept, which is the basis of Winclove's probiotic products, was surely not common in the 1980s. Winclove started investing, already in those days, in the know-how of symbiotic effects between strains. 
The results in the market proved that these choices were right; since the year 2000 Winclove has been growing all years between 20 and 40% per annum, resulting in a total production of over 60.000.000 daily dosages produced in 2012. Today, Winclove supplies over 60 customers in more than 30 different countries all over the world. Most of our customers sell these products in a medical-endorsed setting.

The future
In 1999 Winclove started co-operations with several universities and academic hospitals all over Europe. This has led to a constant flow of publications. Up to now 6 products are supported by scientific evidence. This is the way we continue: science-based, medical endorsed medical-endorsed, multispecies, customer specific products, sold in a business to business market.

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