Croda lab investment aims to give customers faster response times and more claims
The company’s American Headquarters and Innovation Center is located in Edison, New Jersey, where a significant expansion and improvement program is highlighted by an enhanced ability to create new ingredients with perceivable performance benefits for consumers.
This expansion also emphasizes faster access to innovation by increasing the resources devoted to substantiating benefit claims for newly developed ingredients.
Investment of $3.5 million
Croda says that the investment at the facility totalled $3.5m in turn helping to increase the company’s innovation laboratory space by 50%, while expanding the overall space of the facilities by 30% to 45,000 square feet, and now provides jobs for a total of 100 people.
The investment saw the company’s North America Applications, Product Validation and Claims Substantiation and Synthesis laboratories for personal care and home care all fully remodelled, expanded and updated.
The facility is also a center of excellence for hair care, and in line with this, the investment has also included a dedicated facility for hair coloring, as well as a doubling of the size of its hair salon.
Investment supports restructuring efforts
Behind the scenes, Croda has undergone a significant restructuring in recent years, aimed at making it a more agile business, empowering it employees by enabling them to react faster to customer needs.
Croda executives say that the investment in the new facility mirrors and supports the restructuring and will also help the staff to deliver product innovation at a faster rate.
“This project has effectively doubled the overall work area devoted to innovation with existing laboratories gaining additional space and the creation of new, dedicated laboratories for our hair color and home care teams,” said Erik Gunderman, Synthesis Manager and lead on the construction project.
The upgrades also include a number of sustainability initiatives, including the installation of high efficiency lighting and a lower energy consumption HVAC system throughout the facility, adding to solar panels that were installed in 2011.
Finally, the money spent has also gone into a new media center, which will be used to develop educational multi-media content for both customers and internal teams.
