Glanbia Nutritionals, Fitchburg, WI, has nearly doubled the size of its customer-focused Collaboration Center in Twin Falls, ID, adding a new bakery lab and a culinary applications kitchen. The Glanbia Collaboration Center is a codevelopment and process optimization facility designed to accelerate successful product introductions for customers, from initial ideation to product completion.

The first Glanbia Collaboration Center building opened in April 2009 in Twin Falls with extensive pilot and lab capabilities for bar, beverage and dairy application development. A second Collaboration Center building with comprehensive baking, kitchen and lab capabilities for bakery development and culinary applications development has now opened adjacent to the first building.

At the Collaboration Center, customers are able to work side-by-side with Glanbia scientists and commercialization professionals in developing, producing and testing of new product prototypes that use Glanbia’s portfolio of whey and milk proteins, whey peptides, functional ingredients, flavors and next-generation grain ingredients to provide a range of functional and nutritional solutions.

“From basic science to applications expertise, Glanbia has steadily made significant investments in people, facilities and equipment that provide the scientific and creative backbone our customers seek in a product development partner,” says Eric Bastian, vice president of R&D. “The new addition to our Collaboration Center demonstrates our commitment to helping bakery customers and prepared foods customers achieve the same benefits already available to our bar, beverage and dairy product customers, with solutions tailored to customers’ individual needs.”

The new Collaboration Center building is part of the newly named Glanbia Research Campus, a three-building R&D site in Twin Falls hosting basic research labs, application labs, analytical labs, pilot processing facilities and offices.