Danone Research
Profile
Danone is a multinational food and beverage corporation headquartered in Paris, France, with four different product categories: Essential Dairy and Plant-based Products, Waters, Early Life Nutrition, and Advanced Medical Nutrition, and employs over 110,000 people worldwide. Danone Nutricia Research, the Research and Innovation organisation within Danone, is at the heart of Danone’s strategy: innovating to bring health through food to as many people as possible.
Worldwide Danone Nutricia Research builds bridges between science and food according to our company vision “One Planet, One Health”. Our teams of 1,700 R&I employees work from 2 main research centers in France & Netherlands & 6 specialised centers (France, Spain, Russia, USA, Singapore and China) and in 55 Business units. They partner with recognized scientific communities, suppliers and innovators and through these collaborations, create unique consumer experiences and bring health and well-being at every stage in life.
Competences & Capabilities
Main areas of specialization and technological expertise are:
- Food and nutrition and health
- Healthy eating and drinking practices
- Food processing and product development
- Fermentation, Pro/prebiotics & Microbiome
- Hydration & health
- Food quality and food safety
- Consumer & behavior science
- Innovative Food products
- Packaging & new materials
- Plant-based alternatives
- Clinical studies
- Data quality
- Personalised food & digital solutions
- Market research (trend watching, consumer needs and wants, concept testing, product testing)
Expertise related to the EIT Food Strategic Pillars
The innovations we develop are embodied in our company statement “One Planet, one Health”: new products and services to improve consumer’s health whilst respecting the environment.
- Our Research teams have technical expertise in several areas: Nutrition and Health (microbiome, pro/prebiotics, immunity, hydration, clinical studies, nutrition…), Consumer & Behavior science, Packaging & material science, Food Safety & Analytics….
- Product development, Formulation, and Food and Drink processing are our core competencies which we apply to develop innovative food and drink products in our various pilot & production facilities worldwide. • Innovation also embraces new business models & channels, digitalization, and going beyond products to provide added value services to our consumers.
Contact: Artem Khlebnikov, R&I Strategic Partnership Director
Openness is a core value of Danone. We interact with a broad diversity of our innovation ecosystem stakeholders; consumers, patients, NGOs, scientific and medical societies...
Consumers are at the heart of our business. We interact with them during the innovation process via various market research and design thinking approaches. Information and transparency to our consumers is key and we communicate with them via several media (brand websites, Facebook, magazines).
Thanks to our evidence-based activity, we share and co-build with scientists and healthcare professionals. We organize scientific events, and our scientists regularly give international lectures. Our latest scientific results are communicated via Linkedin & Twitter.
Contact: Laurent Le Bellego, Scientific Relations Director
Danone supports business creation via both intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial programmes, working with start-ups at early stage and supporting several joint ventures worldwide.
Within the Danone Group, Danone is involved in business creation via its Corporate Venture arm, Manifesto Ventures, which offers mentorship and support to help companies grow and scale. Danone also supports Health for Life Capital, an investment fund dedicated to nutrition and microbiome managed by Seventure Partners.
Our experience in working with start-ups allows us to offer tailored business development and go-to-market capabilities.
Contact: Damien Jourdan, Open Innovation manager
Through collaborations with education centers and universities we offer young people the opportunity to acquire experience in the food sector through our internship programme.
We support several Chairs with Dutch and French universities in the areas of Nutrition, Microbiology & Immunology for example, who include education within their mission.
We conduct an internal training programme for our 100,000 employees via e-learning on various scientific & technical topics.
Contact: Sara Thompson, Strategic Partnership manager,