Caldic targets faster food formulation with new India Innovation Hub

India’s food and beverage industry is evolving rapidly, driven by changing consumer preferences, growing demand for healthier and more differentiated products, and an increasing focus on localized innovation. For companies operating across the food ingredients and solutions landscape, this is creating both significant opportunities and new demands for technical expertise, agility, and speed to market.

Against this backdrop, Caldic has strengthened its presence in the region with the opening of a new Food Innovation Hub in Taloja, near Mumbai. The facility serves as a Center of Excellence for Food & Nutrition, bringing together application laboratories, pilot plants, and blending capabilities with Caldic’s sourcing, regulatory, and technical expertise. 

The aim is to work more closely with manufacturers and partners to develop tailored solutions, accelerate innovation, and support faster commercialization across India, the Asia-Pacific, and beyond.

The investment also underlines the strategic importance Caldic places on India, both as a major growth market and as an increasingly important innovation and production hub for the global food industry. The new facility forms part of Caldic’s wider global Food Innovation Hub network, designed to move the company’s role beyond distribution toward deeper technical collaboration and co-creation.

To explore what the new hub means for Caldic, its customers, and the wider food industry, we spoke with Caldic’s APAC CEO, Knud Mohr, about the thinking behind the investment, the trends shaping food innovation in India, and how Caldic sees the market developing in the years ahead.

What are food and beverage customers in India asking you to solve today that they couldn’t solve as easily two or three years ago?

Mohr: Customers are increasingly coming to us with a complete formulation challenge rather than asking for a single ingredient. A few years ago, the conversation might have started with, “Which ingredient should I use?” Today, it is more often, “How do I achieve the right nutrition, taste, texture, and cost in one product?” There is also much more pressure to develop products faster, optimize costs, and adapt formulations to local preferences and manufacturing conditions. The India Food iHub helps us respond to that. By bringing application expertise, formulation know-how, and blending capabilities closer to the customer, we can work with them on the complete solution rather than one ingredient at a time.

You highlight nutritional fortification, texture, and taste as key focus areas. Which specific product categories or formulation challenges are generating the most demand from customers?

Mohr: We are seeing strong demand in areas such as beverages and nutrition mixes, dairy and dairy alternatives, bakery, health and wellness products, and other functional foods. What makes these projects interesting is that the challenge is rarely just about adding nutrition. If you add protein, vitamins, minerals, or fiber, for example, it can affect taste, mouthfeel, solubility, color, or stability. So, the real challenge is finding the right balance across all those parameters. We can look at the formulation as a whole and help customers arrive at a solution that works technically as well as commercially.

Can you give us an example of a product or formulation challenge where having the new hub in India could materially shorten the journey from concept to commercialization?

Mohr: A good example would be a high-protein, sugar-free ice cream with added fiber. With the new iHub, we can develop and optimize the formulation in our pilot plant, produce a prototype, and evaluate it with the customer. We can also generate technical data on important parameters such as viscosity and meltdown characteristic,s and compare the performance against a control. That means the customer is not just evaluating an ingredient or a blend on paper; they can assess the actual finished product, give us feedback, and make informed decisions much earlier in the development process. It allows us to make iterations more efficiently and move from an initial concept toward a commercially viable formulation much faster.

How much of the innovation coming out of Mumbai will be designed specifically for Indian consumers, and how much do you expect to be exported to other APAC or global markets?
Mohr: A significant part of the work will naturally be driven by the needs of customers in India, because formulations have to reflect local tastes, nutritional requirements, raw material availability, and manufacturing processes. At the same time, India has strong technical talent and a very broad raw-material base, so we see the iHub playing a wider role for Caldic across Asia-Pacific and potentially other regions as well. Globally, Caldic has more than 70 formulation and application laboratories and 47 production sites across both life sciences and material sciences, and we are already drawing on that network to exchange knowledge and accelerate development. The India iHub becomes another important part of that global innovation network.

What are you seeing in India that you think food and beverage companies in Europe or other mature markets should be paying more attention to?

Mohr: One of the most interesting things about India is the pace at which the market is evolving. Consumers are looking for better nutrition, and new experiences, but affordability remains extremely important. That forces manufacturers to innovate across nutrition, taste, texture, cost, and shelf life at the same time. India is also a highly diverse market, so companies have to respond to very different regional tastes and preferences while still developing products that can be produced efficiently at scale. That combination of speed, affordability, localization, and functionality makes India a very interesting market for food innovation. Some of the solutions being developed here can also provide useful ideas for other markets facing similar pressures around cost, nutrition, and changing consumer expectations.

Caldic talks about going beyond distribution into co-creation and custom solutions. What does that actually change for a food manufacturer when they work with you?

Mohr: Our customers come to us because we offer them greater flexibility and accelerated product development. By combining expertise across ingredients, application development, sourcing, and blending in one collaboration, we can work with them to develop a formulation around their specific product requirements, manufacturing conditions, and commercial objectives. This allows manufacturers to move much faster from an initial idea to a finished product that meets consumer expectations and works in their production environment. Ultimately, this gets the product to market faster. 

With application labs, pilot plants, blending, sourcing, and regulatory expertise under one roof, where do you expect the biggest gains in speed or flexibility to come from?

Mohr: The biggest gains come from bringing more of the development process closer together and giving customers a one-stop shop. Customers can explore a formulation in the application lab, test it at pilot scale, and work with our teams to refine the blend without having to coordinate each step with different partners. That makes it easier to test alternatives, respond to feedback, and identify potential formulation or processing issues earlier. Having sourcing and regulatory expertise involved also helps ensure that solutions are practical to produce and aligned with relevant requirements. The result is a more connected development process, with fewer handovers and greater flexibility to adapt as a project evolves.

If we come back to this hub three years from now, what would you like to be able to point to and say: “This is what has changed for the food and beverage industry”?

Mohr: We would like to see the India Food iHub recognized as a place where food manufacturers can turn complex product challenges into successful commercial solutions. That means helping customers bring more products to market, improve existing formulations, and respond to changing consumer needs, whether that is better nutrition, new textures and tastes, or more affordable products. We would also like to see ideas and solutions developed in India contributing to innovation across Caldic’s wider network. Ultimately, success will be measured not just by the capabilities we have built, but by the value they create for our customers and the products they bring to market.