Flavour and fragrance ingredients company Treatt has launched a new facility at its Bury St Edmunds headquarters to help it work more closely with its customers on new products.

The applications centre will support work to develop new flavour combinations, formulate blends and conduct taste trials, with the space designed to offer a completely neutral environment in which odour, temperature and lighting are maintained at constant levels.

It includes a new sensory and brewing centre, with the brewing equipment featuring high levels of automation and control in order to minimise the inherent variability within the process. A tasting panel has also been established to test concepts in-house and provide data, so saving customers time and money in researching new beverage flavours.

Daemmon Reeve, group chief executive at Treatt, said: “By investing in this facility, we are able to partner with our customers and add further value to their products, with the goal of exceeding expectations.

“Building collaborative commercial and technical platforms that help our customers to achieve long-term success in a competitive marketplace is an important part of our strategy. Our extended capabilities give our customers’ teams direct access to our expertise, helping to further support innovation.”

He added: “Our increased capacity to create demonstration beverages enables our customer success teams to readily demonstrate the ‘wow’ factor in our ingredient solutions. Together with our passion and expertise, this means that we are even better positioned to deliver products that customers can be excited about.

“It is motivating to see the satisfaction on our customers’ faces when we exceed their expectations. With the introduction of the new applications centre, we have increased our ability to do just that – delivering solutions to create great tasting beverages with consistent, high quality flavour, whilst catering to the very latest consumer trends.”