Corporate Perspectives on Culinology®

When Kerry Ingredients & Flavours broke ground on the company’s new Kerry Centre in Beloit, WI, they had a lot to be proud of. The 250,000-sq.-ft. facility will feature a state-of-the-art Center of Excellence to help customers leverage Kerry’s technology and market application expertise. The new Kerry Centre will also serve as the regional headquarters for Kerry in the Americas.

Slated for full operability in early 2009, the Kerry Centre is, in many ways, a reflection of the global food giant’s recent growth spurt. After expanding and opening a few centers here and there, Kerry hopes to consolidate its technology and application expertise in the new location, which will house an application center, research and development labs, and dedicated culinary facilities to help develop new solutions for its customers.

“For the first time in Kerry’s history, even from a global perspective, we’re making this commitment to bring together all of our technologies in a way that helps our customers develop and produce new consumer-preferred products,” says Danny Bruns, CRC, CCA, senior corporate chef, Kerry Ingredients & Flavours. But more than that, he says, “the real vision is to have the Culinology® team put in place so that the strength of our team can bring integrated solutions to any customer base, from any business unit, and be able to supply them with the whole package.”

In fact, Culinology is at the heart of the new center, which will bring together the technologists, market application experts, sensory teams and chefs, notes Sally Gaffney, manager, research & development, Kerry Ingredients & Flavours. “We’ll have a whole team that can work as a collective unit to bring unique solutions to our customers.”

The Kerry Centre includes three applications suites devoted to specific industry categories, from foodservice to industrial, including a bakery/coffeehouse/bar to serve the needs of that segment.

Perhaps more than anything else, Bruns is excited about the site’s exposition kitchen, which he’s named the “culinary theatre”—a spot that will provide access for customer demonstrations, as well as internal training, he notes, “to really push the culinary aspect through in a modern kitchen layout—a state-of-the-art facility—similar to what they have at Greystone,” referring to the CIA’s satellite campus in Northern California’s wine country.

“The suppliers, the customers, the manufacturers,” Bruns says, “they got on board with this whole thing 10 years ago and said, ‘Well, we’ll hire a chef so he can speak to your chef.’”

However, it’s not about chefs thinking like traditional restaurant chefs in traditional kitchens. In fact, at Kerry, the idea of a culinary-driven gold-standard recipe that technologists then interpret for formulation and production is something of a relic. “Danny is using our ingredients to make the gold standard,” says Gaffney. He has calibrated his mind and palate to the technologist’s industrial toolkit.

It seems almost counterintuitive to think that a company like Kerry—with its broad offerings for a wide range of markets—once upon a time didn’t have a prominent culinary component. But it’s only been within the past 10 years or so that any industry player, not just Kerry, started paying serious attention to this new breed, the research chef. “A lot of these companies weren’t even sure why they needed a chef,” he notes.

Decision-makers appreciated Culinology’s power to bring together disparate communities. “We’re not just going to be locked into our corners, or we’re not just going to be put in labs and kept quiet,” says Bruns. “We’re going to team with these suppliers and their chefs and build products, and that’s really how it came about.”

Granted, everyone wasn’t locked in happy rounds of “Kumbaya” from the start. When Bruns joined Kerry in the mid 1990s: “It was two camps. And sometimes the camps were battling, other times we were a servant to the other camp, and other times the scientists were put in a situation where they reacted, ‘Well, why do we need to rely on the chefs?’ But, over time, the realization on the part of each party that it could work with and, in the end, benefit from the other, sowed the seeds for mutual respect.”

Bruns, a self-declared “closet food scientist,” was always open to the idea of food technology. He says that he “could not wait to get into a lab” upon his arrival at Kerry. “When they said that there were 80 food scientists on one floor at this company in Beloit, I said, ‘I’m taking the job today.’”

What’s more, understanding and accepting that he’s only one cog in a larger wheel helped smooth the transition. “There’s no way that anybody could come into this company and have a finger on all the various units,” he says. “So you prove yourself with your personality and your humility. Because you don’t know it all, and you’re relying on your colleagues... They know that I’m only as good as the tools they put in my box.”

Gaffney notes that “when you come to work for a company like Kerry, you have to understand their ingredients, their flavors, their products.” And, while some candidates couldn’t fill that bill no matter how hard they tried, overall, she, too, understands the research chef’s presence is indispensable. “What the chefs have done with this industry is they have challenged the people developing the products to make better products,” she says.

For example, something as simple as a roux flavor was a rarity in the past, she points out. Enter the research chef with an appreciation of what a roux can bring to a product’s profile, and it’s now a staple in nearly every savory development lab. “Years ago, if you wanted a basil flavor, you added dried basil leaves,” she says. “Now you can go to flavor companies and get a fresh-picked basil flavor, as opposed to something dried. It’s things like that where the chefs have challenged you to create products that are more like fresh, more identifiable.”

Gaffney, by nature, comes at her job with a scientist’s perspective. But, where Bruns calls himself a closet food scientist, she readily admits to being an out-and-out foodie. She’s completed the coursework to become a Certified Culinary Scientist and just needs to take the test.

When Gaffney began at Kerry six years ago, the culture of Culinology was already up and running, and its melding of technology with culinary aesthetics was instrumental in bringing her there. “It was kind of a driving force in that decision because of my interest in the culinary side of things,” she says.

Such mutual respect between culinary arts and food technology informs and sustains every aspect of the product-development process at Kerry—a process that both Bruns and Gaffney readily describe as a true collaboration. “It really has been a blended kind of concoction,” says Bruns. Once the company adopted an individual business-unit model, devoting teams to savory, sweet and other applications, “people started to realize what group they fell under and then started to use the culinary piece that we had. And ever since, it’s always been this kind of blended development, because you knew you needed each other—the ideas and the technologies.”

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net.