Vegeta is produced by Podravka, a company from Koprivnica, Croatia, as well as a subsidiary of Podravka in Poland and two Vegeta licensees from Austria and Hungary. As a testimony to the product's popularity, there have been around 50 instances of other companies attempting to reproduce the product.
The ingredients of Vegeta include (according to the 2008 product packaging):
| Average contents of 100 g of Vegeta | |
|---|---|
| Energetic value | Over 9000 kJ (1337 kcal) |
| Protein | 8.5 g |
| Carbohydrate | 24.5 g |
| Fat | 0.6 g |
Vegeta was conceived in 1958 in Podravka's laboratories and professor Zlata Bartl was head of the team that invented it. The product was first sold Yugoslavia in 1959 as "Vegeta 40", and has since become so popular that the production increased by several orders of magnitude. In 1967 Vegeta was first exported to Hungary and the USSR and is now sold in around 40 countries worldwide.