Overview & Background

It all started in back October 1991, when Val-U-Flavours was born in the McKaiser's double garage, with a phone, a fax machine and a one-ton bakkie.

In the late 1980’s Unilever formed one of the worlds largest flavour houses by forming Quest International. At the time Val McKaiser was employed by Naarden International – a then Dutch owned flavour multinational that became part of modern day Quest International. The birth of Quest International resulted in the Cape Town plant being shut down over time, and the LIFO principle being applied, effectively meant that she would be one of the first to be retrenched. Part of the Quest strategy was to “chop their tail”, thus only focusing on the global key accounts and regional key accounts. This left a basket of local customers effectively without a flavour source. Val then registered herself as a key account, and then started supplying the smaller Cape Town accounts.

In 1996 when Quest finally shut down its Cape Town operations, more accounts were handed to Val-U-Flavours to service. In 1999, the company started servicing National Starch and Chemical, now trading under the National Starch Food Innovation banner. National Starch is a sister company of Quest.

In 2004, we also started doing the Western Cape Logistics for National Starch – this entails the off-loading of their containers, and delivery of stock to the National Starch key accounts in this region. A year later, we started distributing for Kerry Bio Science.