Nutkao, an Italian international contract manufacturing company that has been producing creams and chocolates for 40 years, has opened its new research and development facility at its headquarters in Canove di Govone.
The project, conceived in 2020, required an initial investment of 3 million euros from the company, is part of an innovative, production and distribution expansion plan launched in 2015. With the opening of the first plant in North Carolina, followed by the one in Accra in 2018, where prime Ghanaian cocoa beans are processed, and the latest acquisitions of Belgium’s Boerinneke and Sicily’s Antichi Sapori dell’Etna.
‘House of Dreamers’ has been conceived as the centre of research, development and application of Nutkao’s products, which will be able to offer an increasingly complete and ‘on time’ service to its clients: creation of tailor-made formulations, applicable in a timely manner to each client’s production processes, controlling and monitoring every single phase.
Technological and advanced analysis solutions have been installed inside the laboratory, capable of simulating the production and logistics chain, from the creation of the solution, to packaging and shelf-life analysis.
Another novelty destined to improve the performance of the offered solutions is a new bean to bar production line designed by the company. A total of seven systems closely connected to each other that, starting from the cocoa beans, allow the creation of customised roasts in order to maximise the quality of the Ghanian bean. The Application Centre will also be equipped with an innovative cylinder refining line, an exact scale replica of Nutkao’s production facilities, to perfectly simulate the result of the tests as if they were carried out on its own production lines.
“Investing in R&D means for us to believe in growth and the future,” says the Group’s R&D Director, Barbara Dellapiana. “Thanks to this investment, Nutkao takes another decisive step towards technological innovation applied to food, in order to offer customers an experience of collaboration and technical dialogue absent in the market to date. Our ambition is to enable our partners to arrive in the morning with the problem and leave in the evening with the solution. This will allow our customers a time-to-market service that is unmatched.”
With an area of 1,000 square meters, in the new R&D facility and laboratories, Nutkao’s experts will have new and advanced tools to actively follow the process of product development, customisation and creation.
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