Bayn’s founder about the company’s birth

Lucy Dahlgren cel­e­brates her 50th birth­day on November 25. On the same day, Bayn Solutions cel­e­brates its 10th anniver­sary. Bayn’s founder can be described as a vision­ary and an entre­pre­neur, but she are more com­fort­able by iden­ti­fy­ing her­self as a project man­ag­er. It is with this back­ground that the foun­da­tion is laid for Bayn as a com­pa­ny and an organisation.

Realising visions

Almost a year ago, Lucy Dahlgren left the post as the CEO of Bayn, and instead she took up a posi­tion on the board of direc­tors. Today she works as a busi­ness and project devel­op­er in sug­ar reduc­tion, and in this she is able realise her visions.

Lucy Dahlgren tells us that Bayn’s vision of sug­ar reduc­tion, for many years and dur­ing her time, was made with small invest­ments and lim­it­ed abil­i­ty to grow.

– I have always believed in inno­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els in order to dri­ve change. But these are cost­ly process­es that Bayn haven’t had the resources for, says Lucy Dahlgren.

This was also the rea­son why she left the CEO post, a posi­tion tak­en over by Patrik Edström.

– I want­ed to realise inno­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els with an e-com­merce plat­form, which can pro­vide clear infor­ma­tion and guid­ance on health­i­er sweet prod­ucts for the con­sumers and health­i­er sweet­ness for the pro­duc­ers. I also want­ed more fund­ing and trans­ac­tions from play­ers in the area of sug­ar reduc­tion. The aim was to cre­ate sus­tain­able sug­ar reduc­tion busi­ness­es, and to allow Bayn to become a prod­uct com­pa­ny for pro­duc­ers of lifestyle prod­ucts, says Lucy Dahlgren.

Interest in stevia was awakened early

Lucy Dahlgren is pas­sion­ate about sug­ar reduc­tion, and so she has been for more than ten years. Her inter­est in sug­ar reduc­tion was awak­ened long before she found­ed Bayn Solutions in Stockholm, and long before ste­via and ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides were approved as sweet­en­ers in the EU.

Prior to that, she worked as a con­sul­tant and project man­ag­er at a Swedish com­pa­ny in real estate devel­op­ment and con­struc­tion. The flame was lit when she was giv­en the task of project man­age­ment of the con­struc­tion of new ste­via refiner­ies in China and Paraguay.

Pretty soon an idea was raised to work in-depth with ste­via and ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides. Lucy Dahlgren under­stood that ste­via could be rev­o­lu­tion­ary in the food and bev­er­age indus­try. During this time, the glob­al obe­si­ty and dia­betes epi­dem­ic was a hot top­ic. Over-con­sump­tion of sweet­ened bev­er­ages and oth­er prod­ucts with sug­ar was get­ting out of con­trol and was result­ing in sub­stan­tial health problems.

– As a project man­ag­er, I always start from my three P’s, which are short for peo­ple, plan­et, prof­it. I realised that ste­via and ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides could be part of the solu­tion for peo­ple, for our plan­et but also for brand new busi­ness areas. The food and bev­er­age indus­try need­ed knowl­edge, she says.

Met with resistance at first

Lucy Dahlgren talked the mat­ter over with her father, Yan Li, pro­fes­sor and dean of the Department of Food Science and Technology at Jinan University in China. He was not as enthu­si­as­tic as his daugh­ter, but believed that the intro­duc­tion of ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides would mean a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent kind of rev­o­lu­tion than the one Lucy Dahlgren envi­sioned. Stevia as a sweet­en­er would not only change people’s taste expe­ri­ence of sweet­ness. Stevia would also com­pete with an already thriv­ing and well-estab­lished sug­ar industry.

Some peo­ple close to Lucy Dahlgren met the idea with some resis­tance, but was at the same time she was strength­ened in her vision. Her father also believed that if ste­via as a sweet­en­er were to have a break­through, inno­va­tion and prod­uct devel­op­ment were required.

Accepted by the academy

Lucy Dahlgren went on with her idea of cre­at­ing a knowl­edge com­pa­ny for the food and bev­er­age indus­try, and she was sup­port­ed in her vision by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and the Chamber of Commerce of China. She began dis­cus­sions with lead­ing Chinese ste­via man­u­fac­tur­ers and refiner­ies. She con­tact­ed researchers who were deeply involved in the research field of ste­via, and she built up a sol­id net­work with­in the academy.

In 2009, she found­ed Bayn Solutions AB in Stockholm togeth­er with a busi­ness partner.

– The busi­ness con­cept was based on the sale of high qual­i­ty pure ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides, and to sell knowl­edge and prod­ucts with the help of tech­ni­cal and sen­so­ry appli­ca­tions. The tar­get group was the European food and bev­er­age indus­try, says Lucy Dahlgren.

One step ahead

Lucy Dahlgren kept an eye on the devel­op­ment and con­stant­ly fol­lowed what hap­pened. During Bayn’s first year, ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides were not approved as sweet­en­ers in the EU. But the European ste­via organ­i­sa­tion EUSTAS had sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion to EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority.

Bayn became active mem­ber of EUSTAS.

– Together we worked for the approval of ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides as an ingre­di­ent in food and bev­er­age. The appli­ca­tion to EFSA was based on the Belgian pro­fes­sor Jan Geun’s data­base with over twen­ty years of research on ste­via, one of many hun­dreds of knowl­edge­able peo­ple I had come to know dur­ing my jour­ney, says Lucy Dahlgren.

Commercialisation and to share knowl­edge is impor­tant for Lucy Dahlgren. She organ­ised a project, spon­sored by Chinese ste­via refiner­ies, to trans­late and pub­lish a book on ste­via research, writ­ten by Professor Jan Geuns.

– Today, the book is used as lec­ture lit­er­a­ture at Chinese uni­ver­si­ties on top­ics relat­ed to indus­try, food sci­ence and food tech­nol­o­gy, says Lucy Dahlgren.

The approval came in 2011

Lucy Dahlgren ini­ti­at­ed in-depth con­tacts with ste­via grow­ers and refiner­ies in China. When EFSA approved ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides as a sweet­en­er in the end of 2011, Bayn was ready to go ahead.

– Shortly there­after, we signed dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ments with Barentz International – one of the world’s lead­ing dis­trib­u­tors in the food and bev­er­age indus­try. We also reg­is­tered our trade­mark Eureba, says Lucy Dahlgren.

Brand new market

Bayn’s first year was about seiz­ing the right moment. The next three years were about enter­ing a whole new mar­ket – as a con­sul­tant in a research-dri­ven knowl­edge company.

– We deliv­ered ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides in small vol­umes to food pro­duc­ers who want­ed to try it. We helped cus­tomers to devel­op recipes with the desired flavour pro­file and tex­ture. And we devel­oped gener­ic recipes for a num­ber of appli­ca­tions. Our prod­ucts, sold under the name Eureba, were well received, says Lucy Dahlgren.

Bayn gets listed

An agree­ment with R2 Group, a major dis­trib­u­tor in food and bev­er­age indus­try, for the Nordic mar­ket was signed.

– Then it was time to grow. In order to do that ven­ture cap­i­tal and investors inter­est­ed in our oper­a­tions where need­ed. We were first list­ed on Nasdaq First North in Stockholm, which I chose for the sake of our brand and our inter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion, she says.

During the years of 2015 to 2017, Bayn built the foun­da­tion of today’s organ­i­sa­tion. The com­pa­ny grew from three to eight employ­ees. Lucy Dahlgren hand-picked each per­son, cre­at­ed an inno­va­tion cen­ter in Gävle, and switched the organ­i­sa­tion to a mar­ket-dri­ven company.

The trade­mark Eureba was fur­ther devel­oped – a prod­uct that today is an easy solu­tion for food and bev­er­age com­pa­nies who want to replace sug­ar with­out hav­ing to dri­ve advanced prod­uct devel­op­ment internally.

Time to move on

In 2018, after nine years of hard work, founder Lucy Dahlgren hand­ed over the role as CEO to Patrik Edström. Lucy Dahlgren took a seat on Bayn’s board and also took on new busi­ness challenges.

– When I left Bayn, it was not the end of my com­mit­ment to the com­pa­ny. Today, my involve­ment is based on a dis­rup­tive syn­er­gy strat­e­gy, in which I chal­lenge old busi­ness mod­els and cre­ate new mar­ket­ing chan­nels for already exist­ing sug­ar reduced prod­ucts. In this way, I pro­mote Bayn, but also oth­er com­pa­nies’ prod­ucts. I am still focused on the chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with sug­ar reduc­tion and there­fore con­tin­ue to work on flavour struc­tures and cost, she says.

Designing platform and packaging

During the years 2015 to 2017, Lucy Dahlgren ini­ti­at­ed, among oth­er things, a cloud plat­form for sug­ar reduction.

– The project was excit­ing and led to my deci­sion to go ahead and build an inno­v­a­tive dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel to speed up sug­ar reduc­tion in the mar­ket. The cloud plat­form received a Seal of Excellence from the European Commission. I’m real­ly proud of that and it’s proof that Bayn is doing the right thing and going in the right direc­tion, she says.

One of the lat­est projects is about intro­duc­ing pre-exist­ing lifestyle prod­ucts to larg­er mar­kets. In November, Lucy Dahlgren trav­eled to China togeth­er with Bayn’s sales and mar­ket­ing man­ag­er Mats Källqvist, to, among oth­er things, present Eureba in a new pack­ag­ing, aimed at health-con­scious cus­tomer seg­ments in China.

– I designed the pack­ag­ings, with peo­ple, health and lifestyle as cen­tral points. Another thing that I am also very proud of. Bayn and Eureba will always be close to my heart – much like it’s my child, says Lucy Dahlgren.