With close proximity to the company’s Agricultural Research Center, the IQ builds upon Olam SVI’s command of the full supply chain by linking seed breeding and product development with its operational base for sourcing raw materials and maintaining quality assurance.

“Through the IQ center, we can fully integrate product lines and elevate our offering from high-quality commodity ingredients to value-added formulations that include finished sauces and salsas,” said Siva Subramanian, vice president of Innovation and Quality. “It is specially designed to facilitate learning and collaboration with our clients’ R&D and quality teams, external laboratories and universities engaged in research and processing applications.”

The IQ center consists of a product development kitchen, food chemistry laboratory and microbiology laboratory. The commercial kitchen allows for prototype development based on customer requirements and bench-scale testing of ingredients through baking, cooking, freezing and batch pasteurization. Measurement capabilities within the food chemistry lab include physical and chemical analysis, and chromatographic techniques to analyze color, texture, taste and quality parameters, ranging from simple moisture to complex flavor component analysis. The bio-safety level-2 microbiology laboratory is a central preventive and cause analysis resource for the mitigation of potential hazards in products.