Acatris: Paving New Ground

The Royal Schouten Group’s beginnings can be traced back to a local bakery in The Netherlands 109 years ago. Throughout the years the company has evolved from a local, family-owned bakery, cementing itself in the grain business and acquiring several companies in the food, pharmaceutical and health ingredients industries along the way.

On June 1, 2002, The Royal Schouten Group, based in The Netherlands, merged four of its companies to form Acatris. In es­tablishing Acatris, whose name is derived from Acat, the Mayan God of life, longevity and good health, the merger consolidated the food and health activities of Daminco Inc., Oakville, Canada; Orffa Health & Nutrition, Londerzeel, Belgium; Schouten USA Inc., Minneapolis, MN and Soy­Life Nederland, Giessen, The Netherlands.

Business unit managers have been assigned in both Europe and North America to look after the worldwide food and health ingredient business of Acatris. On both continents the company has a food and health business unit manager. In North America Vern Wilson, located in Toronto, Canada, at the company’s Oakville facility, is president, North American food division, and Laurent Leduc, located at the company’s Minneapolis, MN facility, is president, North American health division.

Mr. Leduc discussed the desire for greater efficiency as a key motivation behind the merger that formed Acatris. “We were not utilizing the synergy be­tween all the companies we had acquired worldwide. As a result of the merger, we now have direct communication between the countries involved in the food and health ingredient sectors,” he explained. “Now we know each other much better. We still have a separate sales team for the food and health sectors, but we’re utilizing synergy. We can share leads, technical knowledge and we can help each other in a way we couldn’t before.”

The company is also benefiting from its new corporate strategy to synergize all its elements because it now has a central marketing and R&D department, which brings its people and know-how together in one place. “We’re already seeing some net benefit from this new strategy,” commented Mr. Leduc. “Rather than each division trying to develop ingredients in individual countries, now we have one large R&D and marketing department. However, you cannot promote an in­gredient or a company the exact same way in Europe, Asia or North America, so we have retained the flexibility of adapting some of the messages and advertising to local needs.”

Another important factor behind the merger was to promote one image of the company worldwide. According to the company, there have not been any difficulties with customers catching on to the name change. “We’ve made sure to inform them in advance of the name change. So far, services have improved for customers and they are getting a better value from us,” said Mr. Leduc.

Over the course of the past 12 months, preparing for the changes of the reorganization presented some challenges, mostly having to do with people shedding their old responsibilities to gain new ones. “I think it took about a year for every country and individual company to understand their new responsibility and where they fit in the organization,” commented Mr. Leduc, adding, “It was a very smooth transition and our management achieved that by informing people before the reorganization. Worldwide teams were put together to come up with suggestions on how to move forward, so a lot of decisions were proposed from the ground up as opposed to from the top down.”

Now that all is in place, Acatris’ strategy for its present and future role in the nutraceuticals industry is to offer solid, substantiated ingredients. “We really want to focus on what we call ‘life lines,’ which are unique ingredients with good science,” explained Mr. Leduc. “Our company is dedicated to financing clinical studies. In fact, we are already sponsoring some clinical studies with our new ingredient, LinumLife™. We are committed to using science to prove our ingredients are really doing what they claim to be doing.”—T.W.


Acatris, Inc.
3300 Edinborough Way
Minneapolis, MN 55435
Telephone: 952-920-7700
Fax: 952-920-7704
E-mail: laurent.leduc@us.acatris.com
Website: www.acatris.com