Subsequently, I bought jars for many friends, family, and loved ones for Christmas. I have yet to meet one of them who did not absolutely love the spread.
As we enter testing season and inevitably the MOST stressful time of year in our school buildings, I would like to take time for the little things in life worth appreciating and loving, even this Speculoos spread. Read more here:
A Cookie Paste Squeezed in the Middle of a Debate
By STEPHEN CASTLE
EEKLO, Belgium
WHAT happens when you take a classic cookie, give it the reality-TV treatment and market the result worldwide?
When Belgians did that, the results included a sugary, faintly cinnamon-flavored paste, two lawsuits and a debate over who should own the rights to a product tied to the traditions of rural Flanders.
The conflict began more than three years ago when a woman won a television contest for inventions with a spread made from speculoos, a caramelized cookie also known as biscoff or, thanks to its ubiquity on Delta Air Lines flights, the airline cookie.
One Belgian speculoos producer, Lotus Bakeries, went into business with the winner, but when two other competing companies produced their own spreads, Lotus sued, claiming it had obtained a patent that gave it the exclusive right to sell the paste. Last month a court in Ghent nullified the patent in a case in which one of the competitors argued that food could not be patented.
Lotus may yet appeal, but for now, it and the two competitors have been selling millions of pots of the sweet spread in Belgium, the Netherlands and France.
Lotus is preparing to introduce the spread to the United States, where it will be marketed as a nut-free alternative to peanut butter. One of its smaller rivals, Biscuiterie Willems, says it also wants to take its version across the Atlantic, and is toying with the trade name “the airline cookie spread.” (In New York City, the Wafels & Dinges truck sells its own version.) All the fuss has highlighted the enduring appeal of a local specialty that evolved into a supermarket favorite and turned the area around Eeklo, a small town not far from the medieval city of Ghent, into Belgium’s cookie capital.
Few foods are as rooted in Belgian tradition as speculoos, a staple in the northern, Dutch-speaking area.
“Traditionally, speculoos were always very popular here,” said Matthieu Boone, chief executive of Lotus and son of one of the brothers who, in 1932, founded the company, which is just outside Eeklo. “Every baker in every town had their own speculoos, which was spiced mainly with cinnamon.”
Lotus played a central role in popularizing the product. Mr. Boone’s father and uncles first reduced the cinnamon content, switching to a more caramelized sugar, then began selling cookies in large volume after World War II.
The next big break came in the late 1950s with the idea of wrapping cookies individually and persuading cafe owners to serve them with coffee. Initially Lotus sold them to cafes at cost, thereby building the brand.
The cookies grew globally for Lotus in the 1990s after Delta Air Lines began including them with in-flight meals. It says that it hands out more than 100 million of what it calls biscoff cookies each year on domestic flights.
The advent of the paste is the most recent development, but even that has a past. In an earlier era, blue-collar workers used speculoos as a sandwich filling (cheaper than cheese or meat) between pieces of buttered bread. By lunchtime the cookies would have softened into a paste.
So the idea of creating a speculoos paste to compete with hazelnut or chocolate spreads like Nutella struck a chord. It isn’t technologically difficult; the paste is made by grinding the cookies with oil and other ingredients, but typically it is 60 percent cookie.
In 2007, two speculoos pastes were entered on the television show “De Bedenkers” (“The Inventors”).
After that, Lotus began making the spread with the winner, Els Scheppers.
The news media exposure led to a supermarket stampede. “Before it was even launched, consumers were asking for it,” Mr. Boone said. “The retailers were eager to take it and, by the next day, it was sold out.”
Mr. Boone said the paste now represents around 5 percent of Lotus’s sales, which totaled about 265 million euros ($357 million) in 2010.
As his company sets its sights on the United States, it faces entrenched competition from peanut butter. Peanut butter may have more nutrients, but Mr. Boone said, “this is something new, with no nuts in it, at a time when more and more people have nut allergies.”
For some time, though, the speculoos spread was hampered by sticky legal issues. Another pair of contestants on the show, Danny De Maeyer and Dirk Desmet, had patented their spread before Lotus began producing its product. Lotus eventually bought their patent.
But Lotus sued two companies, Vermeiren Princeps and Biscuiterie Willems, charging patent infringement. A judge in the Biscuiterie Willems case nullified the patent. A ruling in the other case is expected later this month.
Steven Vavedin, commercial director of Vermeiren Princeps, said it has sold around one million euros worth of the spread annually. Marc Willems, the general manager and son of the founder of Biscuiterie Willems, said his company, headquartered near Eeklo, produces around five and a half tons of speculoos spread a week and Mr. Willems wants to expand that tenfold. But he said legal concerns over the patent had handicapped his business as distributors worried about risks of an adverse ruling.
“Now we have won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory and we have lost a lot of money in lost sales and legal fees,” he said in his office, the air filled with the scent of baking cookies. “Lotus had a one-year advantage.”
Still, Mr. Willems said he believed the final outcome would be an expanded market big enough for all of Belgium’s producers.
“People will always want to put something on their bread,” he said.
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