This is our story, the story of the birth of the first muesli bar in the Czech and Slovak Republics.
The beginning of food production in USOVSKO a.s. company is connected with September 1991 when the production of muesli bars started on the premises originally built for drying fruit.
But let us put it in apple-pie order…
Our first intention was really to dry fruit, especially apples, and to sell them in ground form into milling and baking products. At that time USOVSKO a.s. was a typical agricultural cooperative in the middle of the beautiful countryside of Haná region, which grew, apart from corn, also apples on c 80 hectares.
And believe us, there were times when making use of picked apples was quite a problem. We hoped that drying of this commodity would considerably increase potential sales. This plan eventually fell through due to soaring prices of energy, especially natural gas. This price increase made preserving fruit by drying one of the most expensive methods of fruit processing, so the project was abandoned.
But what to do with the already built fruit dryer? New projects and alternative solutions were given their chance. And the idea to start, as first in the Czech Republic, the production of muesli bars won over the other tabled proposals. We managed to get the production technology from Holland and in September 1991 came into the world the first muesli bar produced by the company USOVSKO a.s. It was the juicy bar, most widely sold till today.
The cereal bars and the nut ones followed.
Due to broadened chances of buying new kinds of dried fruit, the product range started broadening as well. There appeared apricot, plum, tropical bars…Growing interest in new flavours made us cultivate also other kinds of fruit. Apart from our own corn and apples, we gradually started to supplement the muesli bars with other homegrown fruit: black currents and morello cherries.
Great progress was achieved when it became possible to buy coatings; first cocoa, later yoghurt. And this fact called for purchase of new technologies – coating equipment and another tunnel freezer to facilitate production of muesli bars dipped in cocoa and yoghurt coating.
The sales of muesli bars kept increasing and just one technology was not enough to meet the growing demands of the market. So we bought another one, which was installed in 1996, and which has been used for production till today. When it is fully occupied and the production is optimally organized, we are able to manufacture as many as 360 000 bars in 24 hours.