Dive Brief:
- Tetra Pak broke ground on a $22 million innovation facility in Denton, Texas, at the campus where its U.S. and Canada headquarters is located. The building will be adjacent to, and expand the capabilities at, the existing product development center on campus.
- The new space will double the campus’ current innovation capacity, with the product development center taking up 12,000 square feet. An additional 3,000 square feet of space will be dedicated to a customer innovation center.
- The cartons specialist expects to open the site in the first quarter of 2027 and add eight new jobs. It intends to primarily work with food and beverage customers — as well as co-manufacturers — who own Tetra Pak’s equipment on projects from ideation to product launch.
Dive Insight:
The food and beverage industries are generating product reformulations at a rate that some consider unprecedented. Many producers are innovating as part of the protein-packed product craze accompanying the GLP-1 drug use boom. Others are thinking outside the box to appeal to consumers who increasingly have sought adventurous flavor experiences, like mixing sweet and tangy flavors in what’s called a “swangy” product.
These are the types of food and beverage customers Tetra Pak is targeting for collaboration at the Denton innovation site.
The facility will be a place where Tetra Pak can team up with customers to “go from a blank sheet of paper, looking at what are the white spaces where categories or products aren't being served,” said Julia Luscher, vice president of marketing at Tetra Pak. This collaboration will allow customers to identify opportunities for their products to be more appealing to consumers.
“Then, moving that through into how that might look in a formula, in a prototype for a product, then moving it all the way through to testing and seeing if we can actually make a formula that tastes good,” Luscher said. The R&D work also will involve “validating it to scale” so customers ultimately can launch the new or redesigned product onto the market.
Offering broad examples, Luscher said this could be a juice manufacturer aiming to expand its product consumption beyond just the traditional breakfast timeframe and exploring the use in cocktails or mocktails. Or a protein shake producer might want to expand its flavors beyond the traditional chocolate and vanilla.
Regardless of the product, processors and packaging producers are trying to keep up with changing consumer demands, Luscher said. That’s where the Denton R&D facility comes in.
“In order for our customers to not stop production in their own facility, it's very helpful to have a small pilot plant where they can run these different formulations, test the different flavors, and then launch those products in their own facility when they have the exact flavor profile and viscosity pinpointed,” she said. “We have the processing expertise, the application expertise to make sure that whatever is in the package is best in quality.”
The work at Denton isn’t solely about the food or beverage product, it is also to develop packaging of best match. That not only could be the shape of the packaging, “but it's also an opportunity for us to help when they need it with design, with looking at the artistry of the package, and helping to draw consumers’ attention to what goes out on the shelf.”
Design is an area where Tetra Pak can leverage artificial intelligence capabilities. For instance, the company’s AI technologies can help to pinpoint where consumers look on a package, which can guide decisions on design elements for marketing the product.
Tetra Pak’s campus in Denton also provides other opportunities for customer collaboration, including at the technical training center that expanded a couple years ago. It provides virtual and in-person learning sessions for both customers and employees on Tetra Pak equipment, such as machinery for processing and for filling packaging. That’s the company’s main training center in North America.
Tetra Pak considers the new Denton innovation facility an expansion of its existing product development center there, which is one of 11 globally. Denton is the only one in the United States, and the others are located in Brazil, China, Denmark, France, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Thailand. Its other customer innovation centers are located in Brazil, Dubai, Italy, Sweden and Thailand.
These two types of facilities support different stages of innovation. The CICs are for a project’s early stage such as examining trends, consumer insights, ideation, packaging design and overall product concept. The PDCs help manufacturers test product formulations, validate processes and prepare products for commercial production.
Tetra Pak decided to double the capacity in Denton due to the popularity of these services, Luscher said. Keeping the existing facility in operation while opening a new one will also allow the company to serve customers who compete with each other at the same time while maintaining privacy. “It’s absolutely separate, so they can run these separate trials,” she said.
