New Centre Of Excellence In Italy

Unilever, the global consumer goods company, has opened the Centre of Excellence Assembled Foods, a global product development centre for composite food products such as meals, salads, snacks and bakery goods. It will bring together all Unilever’s know-how of complex food products, such as the selection and protection of high quality ingredients in products (fruits & vegetables, meats, fish, cereals), downstream product assembly and freezing technology. The R&D centre employs 50 R&D professionals in Cisterna, Italy.

The challenge for the technical centre is to develop convenient, tasty and healthy assembled food products. The approach will be to use exclusive ingredients and culinary techniques to deliver restaurant quality with convenient foods. The centre’s objective will be to achieve step changes in taste quality, naturalness and nutritional goodness through innovative products and process design.

To achieve this, the Unilever R&D centre in Cisterna will build towards a world-class technical capability in the assembled foods value chain – from raw materials to products. All the technical know-how needed to make assembled foods: from raw materials to creative product formulation and design, to manufacturing and distribution to the shelf – around the world.

Freezing and downstream product assembly and product and process design will also be featured at the centre.

Roberto Nardi, Director of the Centre of Excellence Assembled Foods, stated at the opening: “We celebrate our passion for food and for R&D excellence. These two ingredients allow us to bring restaurant quality to people’s plate at home, with convenient food products.”

The Centre of Excellence was opened by cutting a giant pasta ribbon.