UZWIL, SWITZERLAND — Bühler’s Food Creation Center in Uzwil, a part of its newly expanded innovation center for food, is offering product testing, production trials, training and education.

The Food Creation Center receives ingredients and processed raw materials such as flour, chocolate mass, nuts, oats, sugar, alternative proteins, and fruit — some of which also come from the other application and training centers — for processing.  

The center will help customers unlock opportunities in global food megatrends such as premiumization, healthy and sustainability, Bühler said.

“In concrete terms, this means that we’re developing products for and with customers that correspond to these megatrends,” said Stefanie Hardtmann, head of food creation center and consumer food technology. “For example, we created sugar-free protein bars made from pea protein.”

The exchange with Bühler’s experts extends across the entire network in Europe and beyond. In the Food Creation Center in Uzwil, customers from the traditional bakery sector will find a fully equipped bakery with an auditorium for courses, sufficient space for training and bakery equipment for testing in various batch sizes.  

“Through new combinations of process steps, we achieve results that deserve to be called sensations,” Ms. Hardtmann said.

Covering an area of 850 square meters, the Food Creation Center combines cutting-edge technology, analytical services, product, and process development, as well as workshops and training courses for Bühler's customer experts.

“Thanks to our market knowledge, gained from our businesses from field to consumer, we’re able to support our customers throughout the entire innovation process along their value chains, from the raw material to the finished consumer product,” Ms. Hardtmann said. “We also help with the detailed development of business cases, capital expenditure analyses, and return-on-investment estimates all the way through to the first sample production or the first finished product prototype.

“In Uzwil, we have the smallest scale industrial production line. This means we can not only offer our customers the opportunity to test small batch sizes of a product, assess process performance and scale up to higher production scales with confidence. Product quality and process stability are two decisive criteria here.”

The comprehensive range of applications, possibilities, and network benefits offered by Bühler’s center for food innovation at a single location is unique. Bühler said it is committed to supporting its customers in the food industry in feeding the world's growing population in a sustainable and healthy way.