John Gelley has a big job on his hands. As Arla Food Ingredients' European bakery sales manager, he's the man who has to persuade large-scale bakers to replace the egg in their products with his firm's Nutrilac product.
As a straight-talking Yorkshireman, Gelley is the first to admit that his job is far from being a stroll in the park.
"Bakers will tell you the only ingredients they need are butter, flour, sugar and egg," he says. "It's such a traditional industry and it can be very hard to change that mindset."
The challenge is so great that, when Gelley was originally approached about the role, his first instinct was to turn it down.
He'd been a baker for years and experienced plenty of problems with egg replacers before.
"There were some well-known egg replacers on the market, but they contained soya and all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff ̶ there was even eggs in some of them. We tried them purely because they were sold as a cost saving. The bakery industry is dominated by the supermarkets and if Mr Supermarket says jump you ask: 'How high?' So we tried them, but nothing worked."
Then he was faced with selling a 100% natural egg replacer derived from milk proteins in whey. There was only thing to do, he says: "I needed to know myself that these products worked, so the first thing I did was to go over to our site in Denmark, roll up my sleeves and bake with them. I have to tell you, when I baked with it and compared it with the same products that had egg in them, I couldn't believe it. And I couldn't believe that we weren't selling millions of tonnes of this stuff."
Convincing bakers in a conservative market, however, is a different matter. Gelley's advantage was that he was already well-known in the industry and had good relationships with many of the major players. It was this that helped take UK sales from zero in 2009 to £1M in the space of two years. "Even if they weren't sure about the product, they knew me, so it helped me to get a foot in the door," he adds.
"When we started selling in the UK, I was going into bakeries and showing them how it could work and actually making products. Because I had that technical bakery background it was easy for me to put my money where my mouth was because I knew it was going to work."
Gelley started in the industry at 16 when he got a summer job in a high street bakery in Leeds not because of any burning ambition to bake but because he wanted some cash.
"I'd got to the stage where it was A-Levels or university or work. I was a long-haired layabout into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and I thought I was going to be a great guitar player so it was a summer job that I ended up staying with.
"Back then, there were always these technical experts that came around bakeries to fix any formulation problems and I decided that was what I wanted to do. So, in-between working, I went to college part-time to learn the technical, physics and chemistry side of baking."
On to a winner
Having progressed through a variety of senior roles, Gelley spent 20 years in sales for Dawn before joining Arla Food Ingredients.
Once he'd convinced himself that the product could really work, he claims he knew that he was onto winner because: "Nutrilac can offer a range of benefits."
"Our milk proteins do exactly the same job as egg and there are three factors that make our products attractive. The first is a cost saving, whichever way you cut and paste it. Secondly, putting one of our products on top of yours increases its integrity because it makes your product firmer and reduces breakages in the mechanical baking process. Finally, there are some significant health benefits. If you compare like for like, we have around 98% less cholesterol and 90% less saturated fat than eggs."
Gelley adds that Nutrilac also has a labelling advantage over many other egg replacers.
"Because it is 100% natural, there are no E-numbers, so it is labelled as 'milk proteins'."
So far, the company has been able to isolate around 80 of these proteins through filtration and these have been used to make 20 different blends in the Nutrilac range.
"They are just like Lego bricks," Gelley explains. "They are all different shapes and colours and open up a whole world of opportunities of what we can do with them. We fractionate each one of the proteins individually depending on what we want it to do.
"For example, if we want to make a sponge cake you need to make sure the protein has the ability to whip, hold air in and also to emulsify, while you wouldn't really want a protein blend to whip if you were making a Christmas cake."
A key selling point for Nutrilac is its flexibility. Gelley explains that bakers can take an isolated milk protein, stir it in water and whip it and add sugar to make meringue, while mixing a different milk protein with water and heating it can make a foam, an emulsion or a gel.
Quality is key
Gelley says the firm is working both with manufacturers who want to remove egg from existing products and with those who are developing new products.
And, for customers with existing products ̶ "despite the cost advantages" ̶ there is nothing more important than proving quality won't take a tumble if they switch, he says.
"We promise all of our customers that we will create a cake that does not change the quality of their existing product. We're just replacing what the egg does. In some cases, too, there is a noticeable improvement in quality. We have a technical resource that, after all my time in bakery, is second to none."
After experiencing sales success in the UK, Nutrilac also quickly got a foothold in Spain and Italy ̶ not least because both countries have burgeoning own-label manufacturers ̶ a sector Gelley believes is more willing to try something new.
For 2013, France and eastern Europe are in his sights, with optimism bolstered by strong interest from these areas at last year's IBA bakery trade fair in Munich. And, further into the future, Gelley reveals that there could well be a use for blends of milk proteins in the bread and fermented products market.
Initial tests are showing that not only could they replace egg in certain products, but that they can also replace flour for gluten-free goods.
The challenge now is creating a product suitable for industry.
"In the bread and fermented side of the bakery industry we have already discovered some significant benefits, especially in terms of product stability," explains Gelley.
"There is nothing we can release yet, but we are seeing some significant changes. In terms of gluten-free, this is something we are now starting to work at and it is proving to be successful."
For now, though, Gelley's attention very much remains on the cake and sweet product markets.
"I'm now focusing on growing markets and that is all about us being proactive because no-one from France is going to come knocking on my door asking for this. It will get to that stage, as it has in Italy and it has in the UK.
"After all, our experience shows us that once we get a foothold in countries we get a snowball effect."