Today, Danone Research & Innovation opened several new facilities in its innovation center: the Nutrition Clinical Research Unit (NCRU), a Packaging Lab, a Design Kitchen for medical nutrition and early life nutrition products and packaging innovations and the Early Life Nutrition Quality & Food Safety Reference Laboratory.
The new facilities will strengthen our ability to develop high quality, innovative products and processes. They will also provide new opportunities to connect to consumers and gather the insights to pioneer nutritional discoveries.
NCRU
The NCRU is a new organization that will conduct clinical studies with food and nutrients in volunteers. This is an important step in investigating how nutrition works in the human body. The NCRU facility and expertise complements the existing research capabilities elsewhere on Utrecht Science Park.
Design Kitchen
The Design Kitchen is a place where we can prototype, co-create with our main stakeholders and chefs and get early consumer feedback on the innovative concepts and their experience with products. It is to be used by trained Product and Packaging developers, Nutritionists, and Scientists to explore prototypes for new concepts. The Design Kitchen will accelerate and strengthen the innovation process through a design thinking approach in the scoping phase of development.
Early Life Nutrition Quality & Food Safety Reference Laboratory
Quality and Food Safety are crucial for vulnerable groups. We have opened an in-house Quality and Food Safety Reference Laboratory to help strengthen our processes to ensure that we continue to meet high standards in our work. The lab’s mission is to develop internationally recognized and harmonized methods for use in our factory laboratories. The goal is to support the design of our labs, Good Laboratories Practices and develop rapid methods to speed up testing. The lab team will engage with our external stakeholders, such as authorities, methods recognition committees and external labs, on analytical expertise matters.
Packaging Lab
The new packaging lab is a facility with state of the art technologies to support the packaging development process from design and prototyping up to market launch. The packaging lab is able to measure material properties, logistic validation, quality integrity and consumer mimicry. The lab has been optimized in design to ensure an efficient and safe way of working to deliver convenience and quality in the packaging designs.