Vaess

About Vaess

Vaess is a Dutch food engineering company focused on functional ingredients, concepts, and application support for food producers. Founded in 1946 as Vaessen-Schoemaker, it describes itself as a company of “Dutch food engineers” that helps customers create products with the right balance of texture, juiciness, taste, mouthfeel, binding, and fat perception.

The company serves a broad set of food categories, including meat, sausage, fish and seafood, bakery, plant-based products, vegan cheese, and pet food. Its market position is built around innovation, practical product development, and tailored solutions that fit customers’ production setups and help them differentiate in competitive markets.

Core Values

• Connectivity: Vaess emphasizes strong connections and collaboration, both internally and with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Partnerships are presented as essential to creating sustainable innovations.
• Eagerness: The company values enthusiasm, learning, and adaptability when facing new challenges. It presents curiosity and a willingness to grow as part of its culture.
• Efficiency: Vaess aims to streamline processes and use resources effectively. Efficiency is framed as a way to deliver strong results and exceptional value to customers.
• Innovation: Creativity and new ideas are central to the company’s identity. Vaess links innovation to progress, boundary-pushing, and staying ahead in a changing food industry.
• Quality: Reliability and consistency are presented as foundational. The company says quality guides its actions, decisions, and interactions to ensure excellence.
• Responsibility: Vaess stresses ownership of its actions and decisions. Responsibility includes making choices that positively affect stakeholders and the environment.

Unique Aspects

• Long heritage in functional food engineering: Vaess traces its roots to 1946 and says its innovative spirit has continued since the founding of Vaessen-Schoemaker. The company highlights decades of experience in translating technical developments into market-ready concepts.
• Building-block approach: Rather than selling only complete systems, Vaess says it supplies the specific blocks where it adds value. Customers can combine these blocks into tailored concepts that fit their own recipes and production needs.
• Food Technology Centres: Vaess offers semi-industrial testing, innovation sessions, and on-site support through its technology centres. This gives customers a practical development environment for injection, tumbling, alginate, bakery co-extrusion, and plant-based applications.
• Global production footprint: The company says it is headquartered in the Netherlands and has production sites in Poland, Mexico, and Australia, plus sales offices in several other countries. This supports local and international customer service.
• Recent expansion in Poland: Vaess states that it opened a new production facility in Poland in 2024 and describes it as the world’s largest alginate gel production site. This is a notable capacity and scale differentiator.
• Acquisition of Alsa Ingredientes: Vaess says it acquired Alsa Ingredientes in Mexico in 2025 to expand its joint offering of functional solutions for the meat processing industry. This adds to its meat-focused capabilities and geographic reach.