BELOIT, WIS. — Kerry today opened its new 250,000-square-foot Kerry Center in Beloit. The $50 million innovation and commercial center is expected to help the company spearhead future customer product commercialization.

The Kerry Center will provide industry access to all Kerry ingredients and flavor technologies through customer application suites, culinary theaters, sensory services and customer application pilot production facilities.

"Our new customer-focused center of excellence builds on the Group’s ‘go-to-market’ strategy — leveraging Kerry’s unrivalled range of technology-based ingredients, flavors and integrated solutions in food and beverage growth markets," said Stan McCarthy, chief executive officer for Kerry. "Today’s consumer markets and changing food and beverage consumption trends call for renewed vigor in product innovation and development of cost-effective product solutions and menu offerings.

"Kerry’s systems approach to innovation capitalizes on our breadth of ingredients and flavors technologies and unique end-use-market applications capability — working in collaboration with our customers to derive maximum synergies from this industry leading expertise.

"This creates real value for our customers by way of quick delivery of consumer-relevant product development, product improvements, cost reduction or process enhancement. Our new Wisconsin-based Kerry Center will be a key differentiator in meeting the product development needs of all major food and beverage processors and food service providers in American markets. It will also provide for scalable growth of Kerry’s ingredients and flavors business model and facilitate acquisition integration into the future."