Building a brand for locally produced food
by: Sofia Lennströnm Lokalproducerat i Väst
Fishermen at Spiken by lake Vänern, made an important decision building a business compound where seventeen small-scale fishing companies cooperated in building a stronger brand for regional whitefish roe.
It takes a lot of effort, hours and skills to build a new brand. Fishermen are often sole proprietor companies and are each other competitors. When being organized together under the name Vänerlöjrom they used Kalixrom as a benchmark. They had made a similar journey and gave inspiration to the Fishermen från Spiken. To agree upon common guidelines for product quality was a mayor issue. Today after almost four years these guidelines are an important tool to keep high and even quality for the product. This together with the brand Vänerlöjrom has given the group conditions to increase profitability. The whitefish roe from Vänerlöjrom is today something that star-chefs demands and pay extra for since they have learned it has a good, stable quality.
The business compound is also a more professional client when it comes to marketing initiatives. Together they have a better economic basis for building their brand stronger with choosing packaging solutions, customer processing and marketing material.
Together they have made the region for small-scale fishing more known, they have quality controls to keep up the high quality and they have a product increasing in demand from the market. This couldn´t have been done if they had kept on being sole proprietors.
Using the Smaka på Västsverige network as a part of their marketing strategy has taken them to the next level. In cooperation with chefs attending together at food fairs to show their product has given them a good market share. Lokalproducerat i Väst has supported Vänerlöjrom by doing a market research for widening the assortment of products from Lake Vänern. This is currently under evaluation and will be further processed for continuous growth and strengthen of the brand Vänerlöjrom.
Contact information
Sofia Lennströnm Lokalproducerat i Väst
E-mail: sofia@lpiv.se