Croda has recently completed several laboratory expansions around the world to deliver innovation and inspiration to its customers.
2015 has seen three new laboratory investments from the company, including a major expansion of its North American Headquarters and Innovation Centre in Edison, New Jersey. A leading capability at this facility is the creation of new ingredients that deliver unique performance benefits with consumer-perceivable results. Croda provides its customers faster access to innovation by increasing the resources devoted to substantiating performance benefits for its ingredients and offering unique claim opportunities. The $3.5 million investment has increased the company’s innovation laboratory space at the facility by over 50% and overall space by more than 30%.
As part of this renovation, Croda’s North America Applications, Product Validation and Claims Substantiation (PVCS) and Synthesis laboratories for its Personal Care, Home Care and Health Care business areas were fully remodeled, expanded and updated to meet the demand for innovation and support for its customers. The expansion of this facility, one of Croda’s Global Innovation Centres of Excellence for hair care, included a dedicated laboratory for hair colour and doubling the size of the hair salon used to confirm the consumer benefits of new ingredients. Croda has undergone a global market restructure to enable them to be more agile, responsive and critical to customers’ success and growth in all market sectors and to ensure the delivery of ambitious growth plans. This expansion of the Edison facility supports these plans and will deliver increased product innovation enabling Croda’s customers to better meet or exceed the unmet needs and wants of consumers around the world. Many of these capabilities can be used across multiple business areas, and also enable all regions within the business to benefit from the expansion.
Erik Gunderman, synthesis manager and lead on the construction project explained: “This project has effectively doubled the overall work area devoted to innovation with existing laboratories gaining additional space and the creation of new, dedicated laboratories for our hair color and home care teams.” The North American headquarters in Edison is now 45,000 square feet and currently employment has expanded to around 100 employees.
As part of Croda’s approach to providing innovation for its Personal Care customers, integrated teams gather consumer insight and research consumer perception to deliver products and performance data that is perceivable and relevant to consumers. Renovation and expansion of the site’s in-house testing salon allows the company to accelerate the generation of important consumer data to corroborate laboratory-generated performance claims for new innovative hair care ingredients.
Committed to sustainability, the new facility contains enhancements, such as upgrades to high efficiency hoods, and installation of high efficiency lighting throughout the facility. New efficient HVAC units will result in a measurable reduction in energy consumption in the months ahead. The facility already derives 50% of its energy requirements from solar panels installed on the facility’s roof in 2011.
In addition to the laboratory renovations, Croda has installed an all-new Media Lab and recording studio, which the company will use to generate a variety of audio and video-based educational content for customers and internal teams.
This expansion project is one of several investments Croda is making around the world in order to provide customers with the best, most relevant and innovative innovation sourcing and support. The company has recently established new and expanded laboratory spaces at its facilities in Singapore and South Africa and is settling plans for expansion in Brazil.
