Unilever R&D Opens First Global Product Development Centre in Central & Eastern Europe

The challenge for the technical centre is to provide tasty, healthy and convenient liquid foods on a large scale, using techniques that are very similar to the cooking methods used at home.

12/02/09 Unilever has opened the Centre of Excellence Liquid Foods in Poznan, Poland, the first global foods product development centre in the Central & Eastern European region.The R&D Centre is responsible for product, process and packaging development for food products such as soups, sauces and ketchup. The R&D centre employs 65 R&D professionals from 13 countries. Unilever has invested 16 million Euros in the new building and its cutting edge R&D facilities.

The challenge for the technical centre is to provide tasty, healthy and convenient liquid foods on a large scale, using techniques that are very similar to the cooking methods used at home. The food preservation methods, for instance, have been used in kitchens around the world for decades: thermal processing (heat) in combination with naturally acidic ingredients such as tomatoes. These methods minimize the need to add preservatives to these products.

To be able to develop the best quality liquid foods, the Centre of Excellence has state of the art facilities:

• Professional kitchen - for chefs to develop new recipes for food products
• Development kitchen – for food developers work on scaling up recipes for large amounts.
• Pilot plant – a mini factory to develop and test new products before upscaling to the factory.
• Packaging studio - to develop the packaging materials used in liquid food processing such as aseptic and retort, to keep products safe on the shelf.
• Sensory lab - for consumers to taste and approve products before they go into full production.
• Laboratories - to test the safety and quality of products.

Tony Natt, Director of the new Centre of Excellence Liquid Foods, stated at the opening: "It's great to see how fast we've been able to build this new R&D team and these new R&D facilities here in Poznan. It takes the best R&D experts to be able to deliver the most natural, home-cooked quality foods on a large scale. We now have the expertise to deliver the best quality for our consumers around the world".