History of PIFTIFU. The road led through TOFU

PÂTIFU is another healthy product of our company VETO ECO s.r.o., which has been producing tofu for almost 20 years. The path to creating PÂTIFU led through the production of tofu itself and many products based on it.

“We have continued in the footsteps of Pavel Petráček with our tofu production; in 1992 he founded the company Pavel Petráček VETO. When he founded the company he had one primary goal –  to promote soy as a food that is largely beneficial for human health and produce and sell a food completely unknown in our country at the time – tofu,” says one of the current owners, Marek Petráček.

Since then, we have been actively engaged in tofu production.

“When the dream of producing tofu came true in 1992, my uncle built a production facility and purchased high-end Japanese tofu production technology. The actual start of production took place under the supervision of a Japanese expert who had the task of adjusting the technology and introducing us to the secrets of traditional Japanese tofu processes, ” says Marek Petráček, recalling the time 20 years ago.

This was followed by a period of learning, new experiences, successes, and setbacks. “We also had to fight prejudice; for Czech people, tofu was something new, often a white substance that they didn’t know how to prepare. We encountered lots of prejudice, but we were patient and didn’t give up.”

The situation today is very different; tofu is seen as a healthy food that is a suitable meat substitute for many. Today people are more interested in their health and how they live. They are going back to their roots, refusing to eat food packed with chemicals and artificial dyes. The vegetarian and vegan community is also growing.

Veto Eco was the first company in the Czech Republic to produce plant-based salami. “Back then it was unique and new; we started to innovate even more, and today we offer 50 different products. Some of them are manufactured with unique production processes and are among the top products in this category in Europe. According to our survey, customers mostly appreciate that most of our products require minimum effort for their preparation.”

How PÂTIFU was born – tofu pâté

„It’s the customers that inspire us to keep creating new products. People’s interest in tofu increased, and we started making patties, cheese nuggets, other flavored tofu variations and spreads,” he recalls.

One new product was the VETO Tofu gluten-free pâté. We could say that it was the great-grandmother of today’s PÂTIFU.

We struggled with the consistency in flavor and shelf life of the product, but the enthusiasm of the people at the time helped them tolerate the imperfections of the product, which would probably not succeed today. It was then that the long improvement process began, which will probably never end. The great challenge and inspiration were products from the West, which were perfect in our eyes at the time, in their flavor, appearance and packaging,” remembers Marek Petráček.

“Sometimes we even mixed new flavor variations at home, inventing new unusual flavors, experimenting, and then giving them to family members, friends and acquaintances to taste.

One more type of pâté was added to the original one, and a few years later we developed a new generation of tofu spreads called Pochoutka, with a new recipe in six flavors and in a better package, which quickly gained popularity among customers. These can still be found on cold shelves in stores today and continue to be very popular.

Many customers have asked if the Pochoutka spreads would keep unchilled when traveling. We always had to honestly reply that they won’t, and so we began a journey of improvement in another direction – shelf life.

So we were faced with a new goal – to create a healthy product that will keep on our customers’ trips, outings and vacations. This goal was complicated by our policy that we never use any preservatives or chemicals. Technologically, we were left with sterilization, during which products are heated to 125 °C.

But the recipes of the Pochoutka spread were not suited to this kind of processing. These temperatures greatly affect the flavor of natural ingredients and their stability, and after sterilization the Pochoutka spreads did not taste good.

We gradually managed to find a combination of ingredients and a process for processing them to produce a delicate, durable, purely vegetable pâté based on tofu. This is where the name PÂTIFU came from (pâté + tofu), which describes the essence of the product.

The story of PÂTIFU continues well. It quickly became popular among customers who care about what they eat, and within a few months it gained popularity in both the Czech Republic and several other European countries such as Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and even faraway Norway.

Now we deliver our tofu products to small health stores as well as large retail chains. Customers can buy our products in Tesco and Globus, as well as all DM drugstores throughout the Czech Republic.

This is certainly not the end of our development; we have more ideas on how to improve the tofu pâtés. But that’s another story…

It’s a lot of work, but we do it all for the joy of health.”

We have 3 important principles:

Our ingredients are not genetically modified

• Careful selection of ingredients is a prerequisite for maintaining the high quality of our products.
• We naturally exclusively use soybeans that are not genetically modified

No preservatives

• We use as many ingredients as we can in their natural state to avoid complex manufacturing processes in order to preserve as many natural substances as possible in our products.
• We never use preservatives, artificial dyes and aromas, or other substances that would burden our body.
• We try to combine soy with other exceptional plant ingredients, most often with buckwheat, which complements it perfectly.

We honor honest tradition, but we go with the times

• We combine thousands of years of knowledge and skills with modern technology, building an operation that meets demanding European standards.
• Production is carried out under the HACCP system, which has been certified under IAF guidelines since 2011 and is subject to an independent audit.
• KEZ, which has granted us a certificate for organic production, supervises our adherence to the rules of organic production.