National Starch Breaks Ground on ‘Texture Center of Excellence’

27/09/07 National Starch Food Innovation, a business unit of National Starch and Chemical Company, broke ground this past Friday on the building of a state-of-the-art Texture Center of Excellence that will support the company’s expanding efforts in the food texture arena.

Scheduled to be operational in 2008, the multimillion dollar Texture Center of Excellence will support National Starch’s programs to meet the growing industry need for texture understanding and control, and will help accelerate innovation and new product development and provide for greater creative collaboration with customers, according to Joseph Light, Senior Director, Customer Solutions and Product Innovation, National Starch Food Innovation.

“Our research shows that, compared to flavor, texture is clearly an under-exploited dimension in foods. We see tremendous opportunity to work with customers to optimize texture in food systems as a means of creating superior customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. Our goal, as a specialty ingredients company, is to create a unique group of capabilities that coalesce into what we call a ‘Texture Center of Excellence.’ This will be one of the best facilities available anywhere to refine the understanding of how texture is experienced by consumers and transform that understanding into product development action and consumer-winning food formulations,” said Light.

The Texture Center of Excellence will include a focus group room with observation area, a computerized descriptive analysis room, a culinary kitchen, isolated testing booths, and client meeting rooms. Clients unable to travel to the facility for sensory and/or consumer testing will be able to participate remotely via the Internet. The new facility, which will be built within an existing structure on the Bridgewater campus, will also be equipped with specialized instrumentation to conduct texture characterization and accelerate the pace of development.

Specialty starches, one of the most flexible groups of functional ingredients used in foods today, can provide texture properties in nearly all food systems, ranging from low to high moisture foods. Researchers in National’s Texture Center will delve into the understanding of nearly every starch raw material currently available.

The Texture Center will also support National’s leadership positions in clean label/organic ingredients, functional fibers and whole grain flours, three of the fastest-growing trends in the food industry. The company anticipates using its prototyping, consumer testing and pilot plant capabilities to help its customers create, scale up and introduce successful new products at a much faster pace to capitalize on these growing markets.

The Texture Center is one of several substantial investments National Starch has made in recent years to strengthen and expand its consumer understanding, sensory analysis, materials science, formulation, and ingredient development capabilities relating to texture.