Newly Weds Foods sells around 3000 food coating and seasoning SKUs, the company develops hundreds of customised products a month for the food industry, and its corporate mission is to help its customers be equally creative and productive in the consumer food space.
The company, which turns 30 this year,
has to this end invested in facilities to take time and cost out of
the product innovation process so that its food industry customers
can increase their speed to market.
In Australia, Newly Weds Foods
is a joint venture between the US food group of the same name, and
George Weston Foods Australia.
It started out in 1983 in Australia specialising in Japanese-style bread crumbs, and though this remains its signature product, it acquired Heimann Foodmaker Group in 2008, which brought the company strong new expertise in manufactured meat products.
In addition to food coatings like batters and breadcrumbs, it makes a broad range of marinades and seasonings, and functional ingredients for processed meat products.
Newly Weds Foods’ brands include Heimann Foodmaker Group, Executive Chef, Quality Ingredients, Durant and EASYPACK and the company is also an agent for Wiberg in Australia and New Zealand.
First class facilities
According to Calvin Boyle, general manager of Newly Weds Foods Australia, the Heimann acquisition gave the business the scale to develop some slick new facilities to help it better cater to its customers’ commercial pressures.
Boyle points to a state-of-the-art R&D facility, and adjacent culinary centre comprising a contemporary kitchen and meeting space, which were built two years ago at the company’s 16,000 square metre Wetherill Park manufacturing facility.
Boyle says this is where most of the company’s creative work now takes place, and it has transformed Newly Weds Foods into a “one stop innovation shop”.
These facilities are headed by an executive chef who is supported by a team of around a dozen food technologists. The Culinary Centre is the place where the chef and R&D team can demonstrate and test early product concepts with customers, who can taste, view and interact as part of the development process.
“At the end of the day, creativity is what starts this process, and that’s what we feel is a specialty of this company. That’s what we pride ourselves in – the development that takes place in that culinary centre,” says Boyle.
The company conducts presentations on this topic to its customers in the culinary centre. According to Boyle, because of its global reach, the company also has a strong handle on market trends and consumer behaviour. In this region alone, Newly Weds Foods has over 40 food technologists who are supported by “innovation chefs”, who can provide customers with advice on trends.
Reality check
The company has also built a pilot plant where the products created by the R&D team can be developed and tested in an authentic manufacturing environment.
With the help of its technical meat experts, and the support of its food technologists, Boyle says, customers can create and develop a range of processed meats including fresh sausages, and smoked, fermented and cooked meats.
Some food companies have their own pilot plant, but others go straight from product concept to small-scale manufacture, which can be costly, and can also interrupt their usual manufacturing operations.
Newly Weds Foods’ pilot plant is equipped to put products through their paces before companies take this step. It takes them through typical manufacturing and packaging processes and it can even test their retail shelf life.
These early tests can, among other things, reveal if the concept is too difficult or too costly to manufacture using typical processing equipment.
Boyle says at this early stage of product development it’s common to make small changes, and it can sometimes take multiple iterations between the first concept and the product arriving perfectly on a manufacturer’s line.
“With the pilot plant, we aim to help customers reduce the number of iterations,” he says. “The pilot plant allows us to test functional ingredients for customers, which can reduce the delivery time between creating a product concept and having it out there in the marketplace.”
Tailor made
Newly Weds Foods specialists conduct the testing, and also training courses in the pilot plant, but the company also makes its pilot plant available to customers that want to come and conduct their own trials or run their own training courses.
“We have people here who are specialists, so we conduct training courses, but we also provide the facilities to customers that want to run their own training with external experts,” says Boyle.
He said even those companies that have similar sorts of facilities sometimes find it helps for Newly Weds Foods to conduct some of the testing work.
Boyle describes the company’s approach to product development as “bespoke”, as it is tailored to each customer.
And because it has other R&D and manufacturing facilities in the region in Perth, Bangkok and Manila, the company can service multinational customers.
Newly Weds Foods can, for instance, develop Australian versions of successful products that are manufactured by sister entities overseas, says Boyle.
“We can provide a local solution for the Australian arm of that company. We try to deliver a similar product, while taking into account the technical and regulatory differences. We seek to solve those issues for customers,” he says.
He says the ability to manage the level of complexity in this type of business comes down to the company’s fully integrated computer system.
All products, starting with incoming raw materials, are scanned at each step in the process to help the company manage production and enable it to inform customers where their product is at any point in time.
“Now we’ve reached a scale where we can offer these sorts of facilities and capabilities, and that makes us a supplier of choice for customers when it comes to developing new products,” says Boyle.
The Culinary Centre
Newly
Weds Foods’ recently established new R&D facilities and a
culinary centre, which are led by an executive chef and staffed by a
team of food technologists. The culinary centre has been designed as
a contemporary kitchen and meeting space where the chef and food
technologists can demonstrate and develop concepts with the customer,
according to GM Calvin Boyle.
“They can sit right where the cooking is happening, and it’s designed to give them a glimpse into the consumer experience,” he says.
Customers can use the space to workshop different flavours and concepts with the chef and chef works to formulate those products to meet the customer’s requirements.
“It’s no good, for instance, if a product looks
great but it splatters. The culinary centre gives us the ability to
experience products at that level and then take them through R&D
and the pilot plant,” says Boyle.
The Pilot Plant
The
pilot plant is equipped to provide the first small trial of a new
product concept developed by the R&D team in collaboration with
the customer. These facilities enable customers to test the
functional capabilities of products, and meat products in particular,
without the inconvenience and costs associated with conducting trials
on their own production lines.
The pilot plant is equipped with a smoke oven, an injector, a tumbler, a mixer, a blender, a cutter, a vacuum sealer and a sausage filler.
“It’s just like a food processor on speed. We can also do modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) trials and we have a freezer and dedicated cold room,” says Boyle.
“If, for example, we’ve developed a seasoning blend for a fresh meat product, and we want to ensure the product has a sustainable shelf life in the packaging, we can package the product and then test it in small retail fridges with UV light, to see whether the product remains stable micro-biologically,” he says.
“We also check visual characteristics to ensure there is no degrading of the colour.”
