Speaking at its official opening earlier this week, Margaret Bath, Kellogg’s Senior Vice President of Research, Quality, and Technology, said setting up the lab, “Is a great example of industry-university cooperation and will help to drive the future of food innovation.”
The company has big plans for the facility and will soon begin recruiting more researchers from Leuven and abroad, Michael De Blauwe, Executive Director of the Leuven Bio-Incubator told Science|Business.
Renowned academic
Kellogg’s decision to base the R&D facility in Flanders stems in part from the renown of one KU Leuven academic, Jan Delcour, the scientist behind Uncle Ben’s ten minute boil-in-the-bag rice. Delcour, “Is a very well-known researcher in cereals discovery and knowledge,” said De Blauwe. “He has been very active both in Europe and in the US, and was a board member of the American Association of Cereal Chemists International.”
It is through this organisation - of which he is now President-elect – that Delcour and Bath met in 2006. This was the beginning of a long-standing relationship with Kellogg. In 2011, the company established the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Cereal Science and Nutrition at KU Leuven, a post which is jointly held by Delcour and Kristin Verbeke, a researcher in gastro-intestinal disorders.
There is another motive for going to KU Leuven, and that is proximity to the Pringles manufacturing plant in Mechelen, Belgium. Kellogg acquired the iconic snack brand from Proctor and Gamble in a US$2.695 million deal in May 2012, and part of the brief of the Leuven R&D facility is to conduct colour and taste R&D on Pringles.
“KU Leuven has a long tradition of collaboration with industry,” said De Blauwe. “The university also has a number of multi-disciplinary technology platforms, which will make it easy for Kellogg to gain access to medical doctors, bio-engineers, and so on.”
One such platform is LFoRCe - the Leuven Food Science and Nutrition Research Centre, where over 400 researchers across a variety of disciplines study the whole scope of the food chain, from food ingredients and food safety, to the sustainability of food production systems and the relationships between food and health.
Bath said, “Our presence here in Leuven will provide Kellogg with access to incredible talent, strong infrastructure and the right environment to nurture creative thinking and problem solving.”
The new R&D facility is based in a new 500 square meter unit within the Leuven Bio-Incubator, which contains three facilities for R&D- intensive life science companies. A significant additional investment from Kellogg customised the unit to its individual needs, with a large laboratory, offices, meeting rooms, and a tasting kitchen.
The acquisition of Pringles promoted Kellogg to being the world’s second largest producer of savoury snacks, and now underpins the company’s global expansion plans. In parallel with the opening of the Leuven facility, Kellogg announced it is setting up an R&D centre in Singapore, to focus on food flavouring, packaging, nutrition and sensory science research to support customisation of its products for the Asian market.
Seeding drug discovery
Also this week, KU Leuven announced it is joining forces with the pharmaceutical company Janssen to develop drugs for the prevention and treatment of dengue infection – a mosquito-transmitted virus that infects up to 390 million people each year. The collaboration builds on a three year drug discovery programme at KU Leuven, which was funded by the UK medical research charity The Wellcome Trust, through its Seeding Drug Discovery fund.
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