Olam Cocoa opens innovation center, unveils new brand

Olam Cocoa opened a new Cocoa Innovation Center in Willowbrook, Ill., last week to service North American customers. The facility includes an applications laboratory equipped for production of bakery, beverage, confectionery, dairy, and cereal product concepts as well as an adjacent auditorium for customer presentations.

Olam’s sixth innovation center worldwide, the Willowbrook site has four R&D specialists on staff and is equipped to provide customers with a full range of product development, reformulation, and analytical services. Olam plans to host regular seminars for customers at the center; topics will range from applications to global market trends to pricing issues, said Matthias Richter, vice-president of cocoa for North America.

The integrated cocoa products supplier also announced the launch of a new cocoa brand called Huysman for the North American and Asian Pacific markets. It’s designed to provide customers with a cost-effective cocoa powder option. “We want to be the supplier that customers look at as the go-to group,” said William Pearce, head of sales for Olam’s North American cocoa business. A new production facility will begin supplying the Huysman brand in early 2018, Pearce said. Olam also unveiled new looks for its current portfolio of cocoa brands last week; the updated brands include deZaan, Unicao, Macao, and Joanes.

Sugar reduction, clean label, and cost savings lead the list of product developers’ priorities, and cocoa powder can help deliver all of those benefits, said Norris Sun, Olam Cocoa’s head of product development and innovation. Olam’s R&D team is working to educate customers about the role cocoa powder can play as a cost-effective, clean label bulking agent in product formulations where sugar is reduced. “We’re trying to get them to look at cocoa powder in a different way,” said Sun. Team members in Willowbrook last week served up an array of product prototypes formulated with cocoa powder, including ice cream, muffins, cookies, chocolate milk, and compound coating.

Olam’s product portfolio includes nearly 200 varieties of cocoa powder, so offering its customers the opportunity to work on product formulations on-site at the innovation center can shorten time to market by allowing them to tap into the expertise of the R&D team there, reducing the need for long-distance discussions and repeated mailings of cocoa samples. Thus a process that might take weeks or more can be compressed into a single day, the R&D staffers noted.

Olam’s new initiatives come in the wake of its October 2015 acquisition of Archer Daniels Midland’s global cocoa business.

Press release