Solvay has opened its new Vanil’Expert Center (VEC) in North America, located at its headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. The company’s latest innovation center will provide customers with technical and product development support across its full range of vanillin-based solutions, with a particular focus on natural trends.

Drawing on Solvay’s 100+ years’ of experience, the Vanil’Expert Center is the third expertise center to be installed globally and home to senior food technologists. Featuring dedicated food laboratory and sensory analysis room, the center is designed to help solve customers’ technical and formulation challenges, as well as to inspire tasty product creations that meet real consumer needs.

“The new Vanil’Expert Center highlights our commitment to drive the industry forward and helping our customers overcome their technical challenges quickly. In today’s competitive markets, accelerating product development and getting to market first is more important than ever before. The new center will provide valuable support for some of the common technical challenges in food applications, such as switching to natural, and off-note masking in high protein products,” explains Edouard Janssen, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Solvay Aroma Performance, Americas.

Solvay’s portfolio of vanillin based solutions and ingredients offers a wide range of high-performance solutions for bakery, confectionery and nutrition applications, satisfying to the highest food safety standards and addressing the needs for those looking for both artificial and natural requirements, according to the company.

Solvay Aroma Performance now has a worldwide network of food application laboratories covering EMEA, Asia and the Americas.