Tetra Pak Accelerated Food Innovation Summary: Key Takeaways
- Tetra Pak stresses that faster, practical innovation is essential to address global food supply chain pressures.
- Logistics disruptions, food security risks and rising consumer demand for variety are driving the need for shorter development cycles.
- Global collaboration is highlighted as key to tackling supply chain and environmental challenges.
- Rapid innovation is becoming a mandatory requirement for food firms to meet consumer expectations for quality, safety and sustainability.
- Rayong’s role in Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor positions it as a regional hub for advanced food technology and innovation.
Speed was clearly the name of the game in Tetra Pak’s most recent facility launch, its new Product Development Centre (PDC) in Rayong, Thailand.
The twelfth in a series of such facilities globally — previous launches covering Brazil, the United States, Europe, Dubai and several more in Asia — this one has placed far more emphasis on accelerated innovation, scale-up and commercialisation than any other before it.
“The key we are looking for here is for innovation to be practical, not imagined, and this means ensuring products are able to be tested, validated and ready to scale in as short a time as possible,” Tetra Pak VP of Marketing Julia Lusher told us at the PDC launch event.
“Thailand and South East Asia are growing so rapidly in terms of economy and food production potential and is such a key location to not only have good access to food ingredients but also for food safety and business scalability — [but this need for] products to be market-ready faster is becoming more apparent all over the world.”
A key factor driving the need for faster innovation and scalability is the state of food supply chains, logistics and potential food security risks globally today, combined with consumer demands for novelty and choice when making purchasing decisions.
“As supply chain and value chain challenges intensify globally, there is ever more need today for different markets and players in the chain to work more closely together to overcome these. The combination of Swedish innovation and Thailand’s strong industrial base here is a very good example of this,” Swedish Ambassador to Thailand Her Excellency Anna Hammargren added.
“Major issues such as food security and plastic pollution [require more] rapid innovation of solutions to be overcome, and to more quickly show the world how it is possible to solve these so they can be more swiftly [accepted and implemented] worldwide.”
Tetra Pak Thailand MD Ratanasiri Tilokskulchai emphasised the role of speedier product development in keeping up with current consumer demands, especially in Asia.
“With more and more consumers becoming aware of their food choices, expectations of food and beverage products today are higher than ever before, making rapid innovation a compulsory, not optional, requirement for food firms to stay competitive and see sustainable growth,” she said.
“Importantly, they want choice when making their decisions in the supermarket, and manufacturers are already expected to balance the components of quality, food safety and sustainability when products reach consumers. This is no easy task, and is the reason there is a need to move towards shorter product development cycles in manufacturing to keep up.”
The Tetra Pak PDC is the first in the world to boast both a fully-integrated pilot plant for liquid food solutions on the ground floor and a kitchen-equipped food development facility above it with attached packaging equipment as well. All of this has been designed with faster, accelerated product development and practical testing in mind.
Local benefits
For the province of Rayong, the Tetra Pak PDC marks a crucial growth in not only advancing local technological growth, but also an opportunity for more local businesses to accelerate their own development.
“Small and medium businesses here in Thailand and indeed many parts of Asia often may have great and innovative ideas, but not the ability to put these into practice without affecting their daily operations,” Rayong Vice Governor Kanchai Thepvorachai said.
“Being able to more quickly test their ideas for market readiness is crucial to strengthen the long-term competitiveness of local businesses, as well as to attract more collaborations from across the region and beyond.”
Rayong province is the industrial hub of Thailand’s national Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) strategy, a billion-dollar initiative aiming to develop the entire eastern seaboard of Thailand with high-tech, sustainable, smart cities alongside industrial growth under the nation’s Thailand 4.0 economic policy.
EEC is expected to run until 2037, with food innovation and advanced technology at the heart of its growth.
