Corbion’s R&D Lab Opening Expands Research Capabilities
11 Feb 2016 | Corbion
This is Rob Wires at Corbion's facilities here in Horkum in the Netherlands, and I'm here with Anika Bina from Corbian Puric.
And Anika, can you tell me a bit about the expansions of your labs here and what some of the areas of research are going to be.
OK, welcome to our new labs.
We, where you are today, this is the kitchen of our new lab facilities.
The lab facilities are actually home to our central R&D, the RDA, our research development and application labs of our PLA group, our biochem group, and the food group.
And so the food group is where you are today.
We, we actually, we were already based here in Gorkham.
Already 80 years.
Pure has been here for 80 years and we had, we had lab facilities here as which.
Which were home to our food group, but over the years we found that those facilities were just not up to to to speed anymore with what we needed.
In particular, we see that in the markets we see more and more need from our customers but also from suppliers to really collaborate with us in our labs, so really test our products in their application in in our lab.
On lab scale or on pilot plant scale so that we can taste together we can do microbiological evaluation on these products together we can do we can check the the the color of the the meat we can check the color of the the sweets, all these, these type of things we see that there's more and more needs to do that side by side so we needed to expand and that's also why we have this big kitchen with a, a brainstorm room with cost for.
Work with customers and also what we see is that we need where we used to be able to serve the market with a few blockbuster products we see much more need for differentiation so we also invested into product development laboratories where we can do much more work on developing powders, developing liquid blends with specific pH with different mixtures of acids, sometimes also with other functional ingredients in.
And so that's, that's why we expanded.
One of the key areas you're researching here is into confectionery.
Can you explain a bit about some of the innovation taking place within that space and what you're kind of working on at the moment?
Yeah, so, so just, just to put it in place, we have, in Corby on food we have 3 key areas.
We've, our bakery application which we primarily do in our lab in the United States in Lenexa in Kansas.
But then we also, we have meats and we have what we call food and beverages, and on the food and beverages, a large part is indeed in confectionery.
In confectionery, we, we launched, last year already, a technology we call.
PPMA, so it's a coated Malik product, and that's a product that you can use to coat to acid sand, , candies like you see here and.
The nice thing about this invention which the patent was granted in September last year is that actually this asset sending stays stable over time because of the specific technology that we use where we use the acid salt to coat.
The core of acids.
And so if you would not coat the acids, so these are 3 samples, if you would not coat the acids, over time, within a couple of weeks, your candies start to look like this.
They're still candies, you can still eat them, but the nice the nice look and feel and also taste of that's really Acidic, sour layer around it disappears, whereas if you coat them with armalic acid products, it's much more stable.
Another application of that acid is, for instance, if you put it into soft band candies where we make the acid really part of the sugar coating, if you if you try them, they're really.
Yeah, they really give that acid boost once you once you put them into it because it's quite a big trend in the industry right now, really looking for the sourness and acidity and confectionery.
We see it in particular in Europe, we see a huge trend towards more and more real sourness or real zing or you know all these type of more intense tastes.
Thank you very much.
