UNILEVER INNOVATION CENTRE WAGENINGEN BV

Their core work

Unilever's Wageningen Innovation Centre is the company's dedicated R&D hub for food and materials science, located in the heart of the Netherlands' Food Valley. They specialize in understanding and engineering soft matter systems — emulsions, colloids, gels, and dispersions — with direct application to consumer food products. Their H2020 work focuses on training early-stage researchers (via Marie Skłodowska-Curie networks) and advancing materials modelling platforms, bridging fundamental colloidal science with industrial food formulation.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their early H2020 work (2015–2018) centered on fundamental soft matter physics and materials modelling infrastructure — projects like DiStruc and NANOTRANS explored colloidal structure and nanoscale transport, while VIMMP built digital simulation tools and marketplaces. From 2018 onward, the focus shifted decisively toward plant-based food applications, with three projects (PlantOleogels, PlantEmulGel, PICKFOOD) applying colloidal science specifically to plant-derived emulsions and gels. This mirrors the broader industry pivot toward plant-based food formulation.

Unilever Wageningen is moving from fundamental soft matter research toward applied plant-based food structuring, aligning with industry demand for clean-label, plant-derived alternatives to traditional emulsifiers and fat systems.

How they like to work

Unilever Wageningen primarily participates as a partner rather than leading consortia — coordinating only 2 of 7 projects, both Marie Curie individual fellowships (PlantOleogels, PlantEmulGel) which hosted researchers at their facility. Their dominant funding scheme is MSCA training networks, meaning they function as an industrial training host that provides PhD/postdoc researchers with access to real-world R&D infrastructure. With 54 unique consortium partners across 18 countries, they maintain a broad but non-repeat network typical of a large corporate lab that joins diverse academic consortia.

Broad European network spanning 54 unique partners across 18 countries, reflecting their role as an industry partner in large MSCA training networks. No strong geographic clustering — the partnerships are distributed across the EU research landscape.

What sets them apart

Unilever Wageningen offers something rare in H2020 consortia: a major FMCG company's in-house R&D capability combined with genuine commitment to open research training. They bring industrial-scale formulation expertise and product development context that academic partners cannot replicate. For consortium builders, they are one of the few large corporate food labs willing to host researchers and co-develop pre-competitive science through EU frameworks.

Highlights from their portfolio

• VIMMP
  Largest funded project (EUR 484K) and their only manufacturing/digital project — built an open simulation platform and virtual materials marketplace, showing capacity beyond food science.
• PICKFOOD
  Most recent project (2021–2025) and clearest signal of their current direction: industrializing Pickering emulsion technology for food applications.
• PlantEmulGel
  One of two projects they coordinated — hosted a Marie Curie fellow working on plant-based cellulose microfibril gels, directly relevant to clean-label food trends.