Collaboration
What does it take to drive food innovation while making an impact on the climate and nutrition challenge? A shared vision. That’s exactly what has led to a growing partnership between Bühler and Givaudan. In this interview, Givaudan Head of Science and Technology, Fabio Campanile, and Bühler Chief Technology Officer, Ian Roberts, reveal the deep roots that run between the two companies and explain their ambitions to accelerate change in the food industry.
Michèle Bodmer, March 25, 2021
Fabio, before we dive in, could you explain what Givaudan does and about your role in the company?
Fabio Campanile: I am responsible for innovation around new products and new technologies. The area we mainly focus on is foods. Our traditional legacy business has been in flavors, but over the last two years, we have been moving into new areas around natural ingredients, colors, preservatives, and also functional ingredients, such as health functionality. Some of these ingredients come with authorized health claims, while others are intuitively associated with positive health benefits.
So, is wellbeing a key market for you?
Campanile: Yes, it is about improving the consumer experience, which could be about pleasing the palate, adding visual appeal – the qualities that allow food to make people happy. It’s also about the positive health benefits, because we believe that through food, we can help people live longer, better, and healthier lives.
Can you expand on this idea of developing new flavors?
Campanile: It’s not just about flavors, it’s about developing a much more complex range of food ingredients. Beyond producing a flavor for a product, it’s also about shaping or formulating a food to resolve a particular challenge. One example is the challenge of formulating foods with a clean label. There are many new food categories in the market. For example, there has been a huge surge in meat alternatives over the past three or four years that did not exist before. From taste to texture and nutrition, these products also present specific formulation challenges.
We can’t resolve the existing global challenges on our own. I’m very excited about creating an ecosystem with more partners.
Fabio Campanile,
Head of Science and Technology at Givaudan
Ian, how did the partnership with Givaudan come about?
Ian Roberts: We have been physical neighbors for years. We are in Uzwil and Givaudan is in Dübendorf, which is less than an hour away. Proximity has always helped us in our partnership. We have been working together on and off for decades, which means we have a history based on trust. Secondly, we have many of the same customers. They come to us looking for technology and to Givaudan for flavors and ingredients. It makes perfect sense to harness these synergies and work together to provide better solutions for our customers. On top of that, we’ve both been playing a very strong role in building a Swiss collaboration ecosystem and establishing Switzerland as a hotbed for food innovation and sustainable food systems in the future.
You are both on the board of the start-up accelerator MassChallenge Switzerland. What impact has that had on the partnership?
Roberts: The work we’ve done with start-up ecosystems has really brought us together as companies. By bringing MassChallenge to Switzerland and by developing that ecosystem, we’ve built a relationship where we jointly support young entrepreneurs in building their businesses more successfully.
Both companies benefit from having the opportunity to change our internal cultures as we learn from the start-ups and exchange ideas on how to best support them. We openly support start-ups that might be looking at a type of technology from Bühler and also getting help with formulations from Givaudan. This way we build trust and partnership, which is a good foundation for future projects. For example, we have complimentary capabilities around alternative proteins, where we not only offer support to start-ups, but also to major corporations globally.
What do big companies like Givaudan and Bühler expect to learn from start-ups in return?
Campanile: Start-ups allow us to expand our ideas around innovation because they offer the sort of solutions that we are looking for. They also challenge our ideas about what we should be offering in the future. We should not forget that many of these start-ups are also potential new customers. In many cases, the journey that they embark on may lead them to become the big customers of tomorrow. They also have the ability to challenge organizations and get inspired in a much more agile way. Many of these start-ups can teach us how to innovate faster.
What can you achieve together in addressing the climate and nutrition challenge?
Roberts: Bühler and Givaudan have an enormous commitment to sustainability – it is embedded in the core of what we do. We must unite behind the common goal of creating sustainable food systems that can feed 10 billion people in 2050. We must also be able to deliver accessible and affordable food that tastes great and is highly nutritious without causing a massive drain on the planet’s resources.
To solve problems of this magnitude, it is vital to work with partners, as there is no way that one company has the capability to address all of these challenges alone. This is why partnerships are so attractive, whether the partnerships are with a great company like Givaudan, with customers, with universities, or with start-ups with key technologies capable of cutting our CO2 footprint. We need partners to scale up ideas and support customers. This is a common mission for both companies.
Campanile: I would like to add that we obviously also need to do our part as companies to cut CO2 emissions. But the biggest impact we can have is by changing the way we produce, process, and distribute food to customers.
You will soon open an Innovation Center dedicated to plant-based food in Singapore. How did that decision come about?
Campanile: I think it’s just the way the industry is evolving due to the need to address big challenges around food supply. Things are moving so fast that we need multiple partnerships to meet these challenges, whether around alternative proteins, sustainability, or health. There is also the issue of the speed with which innovations come to market.
How can we make them scalable faster? Scalability is a particular challenge for start-ups. Even our well-established customers, who have been making a certain type of product for the last 20 or even 100 years, are very interested in developing new products.
The hub in Singapore will help build the sort of ecosystem we have been dreaming of, facilitating the creation of new products.
Roberts: What Singapore is doing to build this ecosystem is extraordinary. There is financing, venture capital, and accelerators, and many regional headquarters of major companies. It’s a very attractive market. We always found customers would come to Givaudan and then they would come to us. The logical step was to join forces to provide customers with a one-stop shop for technology capability, product development, ingredient development, and flavor. It’s a fantastic experiment. You can count on one hand the number of joint facilities run by multiple companies around the world. If we get this to work, this is a lesson in how we can partner in the future.
Our combined expertise will allow for new ranges thet cater to the taste, texture expectations, and cooking techniques of Asia.
Fabio Campanile,
Head of Science and Technology at Givaudan
Why Singapore, and what can customers expect from the Innovation Center?
Campanile: Singapore is a diverse country at the heart of Southeast Asia with strong ambitions for the future of food. We see a lot of market potential for plant-based products in the coming years in Asia and in the alternative meat sector in particular.
Our combined expertise in the development and manufacturing of plant-based foods will allow for new ranges that cater to the taste, texture expectations, and cooking techniques found in Asia. The initial focus on extruded products is important, as this is a key technology for developing authentic meat alternatives.
Roberts: We will not only welcome food processing companies, but also start-ups and university researchers looking to develop novel, plant-based food products. They will benefit from our extrusion and processing know-how and Givaudan’s flavor, taste, ingredient, and product development expertise.
Do you plan on opening your collaboration model to more players from the food industry?
Campanile: It’s already happening. People want to join us and we’re delighted to welcome them to this constantly-evolving ecosystem. We need the complementary skills of various partners to resolve the existing challenges. It’s not something we can do on our own.
Roberts: Absolutely. Even when you combine knowledge to build something jointly, you still realize there are gaps. There are entire areas where other companies have a great deal more expertise than either of us. Inviting them in to strengthen our ecosystem would be a logical step.
It makes perfect sense to harness synergies and work together to provide better solutions to our customers.
Ian Roberts,
Chief Technology Officer at Bühler
You had planned to open the Innovation Center in summer 2020, but were delayed by the pandemic. Do you have new date in mind?
Roberts: We anticipate that it will be fully operational in March 2021. Of course, a few things are beyond our control due to the coronavirus. Depending on how things develop, the planned opening in March will either be physical or virtual.
What do you plan to do next in this partnership?
Campanile: I am sure there will be many more opportunities. I would love to replicate this project elsewhere. It would be a natural progression. There is more that we could do in North America or even here in Switzerland.
Roberts: I believe there are multiple opportunities. There are food innovation hotspots around the world where it would make sense to join forces. We will continue driving MassChallenge and the startup accelerators. We will keep driving the Future Food Initiative by pooling the academic prowess of Switzerland and continue to attract talent capable of tackling new challenges. We want to create a critical mass of know-how in Switzerland by creating a Swiss Food and Nutrition valley. As for the global market, the plan is to replicate collaborative partnerships around the world.
Future Food Initiative was launched by ETH Zurich and EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) together with Bühler, Givaudan, and Nestlé as the first partners on board. Its goal is to expand research and education in the area of food and nutrition sciences by bringing competences from academic and industrial research together.
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