2023-07-22 01:20:44
Since its establishment in Lebanon and Israel in the 90s, Lotus has continued to increase its success in the Middle East, in particular thanks to its spread.
From Gaza to Iraq, via the Emirates and Egypt, these little caramel-colored biscuits with red packaging, recognizable among a thousand, have become a product of choice in most countries of the Arab world.
Crumbled, spread, mixed, served in the form of ice cream, in cakes, on pancakes or in latte coffees, the Middle East has fallen in love with Belgian speculoos from the Lotus brand, or rather for biscoff, as it is marketed here, contraction, in English, of the words “biscuit” and “coffee”.
“Today, the majority of our customers order recipes with Lotus in them.”
At Ridha Alwan, Baghdad’s cult café located in the Kerrada district, grizzled intellectuals share the shaded terrace with students filming themselves on TikTok sipping iced coffee. Here, it’s been ten years already that we use biscoff in all saucesin pastries and in drinks.
“The first few times we worked with this product, it was hard to sell,” concedes Haider Mustafa Kareem, site manager. “But today, the majority of our customers order recipes with Lotus in them. I would say that it really started to explode in popularity from 2017“, explains the young man, specifying that his brand uses several hundred jars of spread and packets of these cinnamon-flavored cookies each month.
The spread: notoriety accelerator
“At the beginning, our speculoos was rather sold and perceived as an accompaniment for coffee. Then very quickly, and particularly in the Middle East, it has become an ingredient as sucha unique taste used to prepare desserts of all kinds”, explains Bart Bauwens, general manager international distributors of the Lotus Bakeries brand.
“For example, this year, during Ramadanwe marketed special packaging with a QR code that redirected to a page of our site offering recipes translated into Arabic“, reports Damien Heye, manager, in particular, the Middle Eastern market.
Today, Lotus Bakeries, which finds its origins in 1932 in the Flemish town of Lembeke, claims to benefit from a market penetration rate of 10 to 20% in some countries, and 5% on average throughout the Middle Eastor one in twenty consumers who would buy one of their products at least once a year.
“From 2015, the marketing of our spread has been a huge boost to notoriety“, specifies Damien Heye, also crediting the advent of social networks to explain the popularity of the Belgian brand in the Arab world, where it enjoys double-digit annual growth.
The two Nutellas run together
At the Al-Warda supermarket, located in the heart of Baghdad, they boast of having marketed Lotus products in preview: “Our country opened up to the rest of the world following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Lotus landed here, but I was already importing boxes of biscuits in the trunk of my car from Beirut and Amman long before that,” recalls Johnson Odisho, the general manager of this supermarket chain founded by his father 35 years ago.
Here, biscuits and spreads can be found on the shelves, but also in the window of the bakery located at the back of the store, in the form of huge cheesecakes or filled croissants. “As an ingredient, Lotus is used even more than Nutella. It’s really become a famous ingredient for three or four years,” explains the director.
After making a name for itself in Lebanon and Israel in the 90s, then in the Gulf in the 2000s, and more recently in Egypt and Jordan, Lotus Bakeries intends to continue its conquest of the Middle East. Since May, its speculoos biscuits are distributed with tea and coffee on all flights of the airline Qatar Airways.
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