Cargill R&D Assessing New Sustainable Texturizers, Expands European R&D Facility

14 Mar 2014 --- The creation of new sustainable texturizers from side streams of plant cell walls is one area being addressed at Cargill’s newly expanded European R&D Centre in Vilvoorde, Belgium. Other areas of high innovation for the company will include prebiotic wheat fibers and hydrolyzed wheat proteins.

Cargill officially inaugurated its newly expanded European Research and Development Centre in Vilvoorde, Belgium yesterday. The expansion is the result of an €8 million investment in line with the highest technological and food safety standards. The R&D Centre now features a new state-of-the-art pilot plant, adding 5,000m² of innovation space where Cargill’s 145 scientists and technologists can develop new ingredients, perfect reformulations and test new manufacturing processes. The newly expanded center will help meet the ever-changing needs of Cargill’s customers, across different applications covering the entire spectrum of food and feed ingredients science as well as non-food applications such as personal care and fermentation technology.

Didier Bonnet, Global Food Research Leader at Cargill told FoodIngredientsFirst: “The new investment that has just been made is not so much focused on novel application or specific new products, but it is a way to bridge between the lab scale and the full scale, so a major part of the investment was focused on the processing pilot plant.”

Another area of focus is to ensure that all products that leave the pilot plant are food safe, which means that they are produced according to best standards. “This is because we want to taste it in the final application and then we also use them to test the benefits in the final product to the customer” says Bonnet. 
 
Cargill paid special attention to food safety principles during the expansion. Therefore the first big part of the investment has been the building, where they have applied the zoning principle, where separate areas have been dedicated to different kinds of processing. For example, a food high hygiene zone [red] and an industrial zone [grey] are reflected in the design of the pilot plant.
 
“Food safety is one of our most important goals at Cargill. This is why we implemented the zoning model in our new pilot plant, to not only meet today’s standards in food safety, but also to anticipate future needs,” says Marijana Petrovic, Cargill’s R&D Centre Food Safety Leader. “The prevention of contamination is a fast-moving discipline, and Cargill wants to be at the forefront in this field, so that we can provide safe food every time, everywhere. This includes the products produced in our research and development facilities and product samples provided to our customers.”

A new spray drier that has been installed at the facility but there are also new ingredient areas being addressed in the Cargill R&D front too. “We are working typically on the valorization of some of our side streams, such as plant cell walls. We do that in the most natural way, in order to provide nature-derived texture,” says Bonnet. “One of the big focuses here is to use what we call ‘clean technology’ and to use the functionality of the ingredient using those technologies; whether it is texturizers, oil & fats or cocoa and cocoa butter,” he explains.
 
Another ingredient being developed further for applications at the pilot plant will be ProwLiz, a clear, neutral-tasting wheat-based protein, offering a high source of protein with a significantly reduced CO2 footprint. It is low in all forms of fat, including saturated fat, and because it is not a dairy-based protein, it is suitable for those intolerant to lactose, and offers greater price stability. The ingredient will allow manufacturers to make on-pack consumer claims around maintaining muscle mass and feeling fuller for longer.
 
The company will also be assessing wheat fiber to address fiber deficiency demands, as well as assessing the role of fibers in benefiting the good bacteria in the gut area. Further studies will be conducted into the prebiotic potential of a wheat bran prebiotic ingredient technology purchased from Fugeia last year.
 
Fugeia developed a proprietary method for extraction and purification of the fibre and antioxidant source of wheat bran. The resulting product is a neutral smooth tasting product consisting of arabinoxylan-oligosaccharides (AXOS). AXOS is highly soluble in water and can be mixed in any food or beverage product, including dairy and non-dairy beverages, ready-to-eat cereals, cookies and biscuits, bread and pastry, as well as dietary supplements and therapeutics, so delivering the health benefit potential of wheat bran across a range of products.

By Robin Wyers