National Starch Food Innovation’s Texture Centre of Excellence in Bridgewater, USA, supports the company’s commitment to meeting the growing industry need to understand texture. It also helps accelerate innovation and new product development, and enables greater creative collaboration with customers.

Our research shows that, compared to flavour, texture is an under-exploited dimension in foods. We see tremendous opportunity to optimise texture in partnership with our customers to help them gain competitive advantage and boost brand value.

Our goal as an ingredients specialist is to create a unique set of capabilities, products and tools that together we call the Texture Centre of Excellence. In this state-of-the-art facility, we employ and refine this new approach, to develop a deep understanding of how consumers experience texture and transform that knowledge into market-leading food formulations for our customers.

The US Texture Centre of Excellence includes:

• Descriptive / discrimination testing facilities
• Consumer focus group testing areas
• Culinary / Culinology kitchens and demonstration facilities
• Texture characterisation facilities
• Customer collaboration rooms

These comprehensive facilities are available to our customers for brainstorming, prototype development, comprehensive physical analysis and sensory and consumer testing – all the elements necessary to create consumer-winning propositions. Customers unable to travel to the facility for sensory and/or consumer testing can participate remotely via the Internet. The centre is complemented by pilot plant facilities that allow rapid scale-up ready for commercial manufacture.

Speciality starches are one of the most flexible groups of functional ingredients which form the backbone of texture in most low and high moisture foods. Researchers at our Texture Centre of Excellence develop and apply their in-depth understanding of starch and its interaction with other food ingredients to develop consumer-preferred products that are cost-effective and compatible with most commercial processes.