After a year of planning and building, Danisco Cultor’s new confectionery and fruit prep laboratories in Kansas City are open for business. The new labs give Danisco Cultor’s confectionery and fruit prep group approximately four times more lab space than they previously occupied. Included in these new labs is a 450-square foot temperature and humidity controlled dry lab which allows Danisco Cultor to work with low-moisture products, such as chocolate and panned confections, year round.
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“Now more than ever, customers can take advantage of our labs, our ingredients and our experience,” said Mike Regan, Confection Industry Manager with Danisco Cultor. “We can work with our customers in their plant, or they can come in and work side-by-side with us in our labs. In addition to the confectionery labs experience, we can tap into our technical personnel worldwide who specialize in emulsifiers, textural ingredients, flavors, sweeteners and antioxidants.”
The combined fruit-preparation and confectionery lab will see a variety of work ranging from chocolate, chewy candy and hard-boils on the candy side, to jams, jellies, bakery fillings and yogurt fruit preps on the fruit side. In many ways, Danisco Cultor’s labs function as an extended R&D department for their major customers, often delivering turnkey products. “Let’s say we’re working on a fruit-based bakery filling – we’d do the development work in the fruit prep labs, then go into the bakery lab and work with them to create a complete product. By using all of our capabilities we can often help our customers shorten their development times,” said Regan.
The new labs have been equipped with state-of-the-art equipment which includes both atmospheric-type and vacuum kettles, equipped with extremely precise temperature controls, which can be used for 1 to 50 pound test batches. Texture and profile analyses of gels and confections can be done with a TAXT2 analyzer, which gives detailed information on textural attributes such as viscosity, gel strength, chewiness and adhesiveness. “Additionally, with our Newport Scientific RVA, we can create gelling profiles by measuring viscosity throughout the programmed heating and cooling cycles,” adds Jim Skidmore, Technical Manager, Confectionery and Fruit Prep.
Danisco is one of the world’s leading developers and producers of food ingredients. Last year, Danisco reported net sales of $3.4 billion USD and the group employed nearly 18,000 people in more than 40 countries. Danisco’s broad product portfolio includes emulsifiers, stabilizers, flavorings, various types of fat replacers, and sweeteners such as xylitol and fructose. Most of these ingredients are produced from natural raw materials and contribute, for instance, to improving the texture of products such as bread, ice cream and yogurt. Danisco is also one of the largest and most efficient sugar producers in Europe.
