With the culmination of the 2019 Stacy's Rise Project, the program has awarded more than $300,000 to women in the food and beverage industry to advance their business plans.

The AAK team uses the same or similar equipment a customer would use, enabling them to provide hands-on co-development.

Symrise is opening an application lab at Unilever’s Foods Innovation Centre in Wageningen in the Netherlands. The state of the art creative center will comprise a flavor creation lab, an application kitchen and collaboration rooms that cover 120 square meters.

The award was presented by Ryan Joy, senior director of research and development and Patti Dumars, senior vice president of purchasing at Checkers/Rally’s.

The $1.5 million investment was designed to inspire innovation within the bakery market, and includes all the equipment, capabilities and bakery support team needed for Kemin and its customer-partners to accelerate product development. 

In the fall edition of Talking Points, Rabobank offered advice to the CEOs of big food companies based on reader response to the question, “What single piece of advice would you give to the CEO of a big food company on how to respond better to today’s consumer?” 

IFF Taste CEO Matthias Haeni said, “With last year’s acquisition of Frutarom, our teams have been working to leverage the increased offerings, such as colors, inclusions, nutritional ingredients and natural food protection, to the benefit of our customers. The new site, with more space, state-of-the-art culinary equipment, and a beautiful customer co-creation space, will allow us to bring more of our resources to the fore and greatly expand innovation in this strategic area of growth.”

Learn more about every company’s winning product development story—as well as Prepared Foods’ product award program process and criteria.

Artisan Collection by Nestlé Toll House took 25% of the votes, while Del Monte Foods Bubble Fruit collected 23% and Joia Spirit Low-Sugar, Ready-to-Drink Premium Sparkling Cocktails came away with 20% to finish in third place.