Inside Glanbia innovation: Where science, flavour, and formulation come together
Glanbia Innovation and Collaboration Centre profile with Alice Wilkinson
The science and expertise inside Glanbia’s Innovation and Collaboration Centres help shape products consumed by millions of people every day. This is where premix formulas are developed, nutrients are optimised and better nutrition solutions are co-created with customers across our network, including in our centre in West Haven, Connecticut.
Behind the scenes, but core to success
Alice Wilkinson, VP R&D Premix, has spent more than 26 years with the business. A food scientist by training, Alice has worn many hats over the decades - from R&D to quality and operations. Today, her focus is leading a global network of premix R&D teams spanning West Haven; Carlsbad, California; Suzhou, China and Orsingen, Germany.
Alice leads the Functionally Optimised Nutrient (FON) team in Glanbia’s Health & Nutrition business. The team's role is to take ingredients that present formulation challenges and optimise them to perform in specific customer applications. An ingredient may impact taste, colour or formulation stability. The FON team applies technologies such as taste masking, encapsulation and stability engineering to help ingredients function effectively in the final product.
The team's toolbox has since been extended across Glanbia's entire North American premix network, meaning capabilities developed in one centre can be scaled across the business and applied to customer challenges globally.
"Premix is behind the scenes," Alice acknowledges. "But the FON team is almost behind the scenes at another level." It is a significant differentiator and contributes to much of what makes Glanbia’s offering unique.
Where innovation is evolving
With over 3,500 unique formulas developed annually and more than 80 years of premix experience, Glanbia's Health & Nutrition business might appear to have covered the territory. But innovation, Alice says, comes from two directions: new guardrails, and new formats.
Regulatory requirements shift constantly - regulatory updates, retailer-specific ingredient standards and international market rules. On the format side, gummies have been a category-defining challenge. People take them every day because they enjoy them, but delivering effective nutrient doses through gummies is more complex than a tablet or capsule. The FON team developed a complete line of ingredients designed to withstand the demands of gummy processing. Early folic acid gummies required overdosing the ingredient by 900%. The first encapsulated folic developed by Glanbia reduced that to 200% and the latest formulation designs require only 30% overdosing.
"There’s a constant drive to make products better," Alice says. "Then it becomes about how we adapt and optimise them for different markets – whether that’s Europe, Asia Pacific or beyond.”
GLP-1 medications are another big trend significantly reshaping customer briefs right now. US adoption has moved from around 8-9% of the population a year ago to an estimated 12-13% by the end of 2025 (1), and the nutritional implications are still unfolding.
“It is not just slower gut motility,” Alice explains. “People are not as hungry, so they are not getting all their nutrients. And there are specific nutrients – vitamin B12, iron, magnesium – that they do not absorb as well.” Glanbia has already developed a GLP-1 support premix available in gummy, tablet, and beverage formats. When a leading food brand approached the team about incorporating it into bone broth, a colour interaction emerged. A new formulation designed specifically for bone broth processing is now in development. “Those types of opportunities come forward all the time,” Alice adds.
Delivering stronger results together
What sets the centre apart is not just what individual teams can do, but how they work together. The premix, FON, bakery, film and glitter, and flavour teams operate as one connected unit, meeting weekly, sharing a live group channel and combining expertise.
A clear example is the collaboration between the FON and flavour teams on taste and odour masking. The FON team can create a physical barrier on an ingredient, so taste buds do not detect it. The flavour team can place a chemical receptor on a taste bud to prevent binding altogether. Together, the two technologies cover the full spectrum of masking challenges, from bitter blocking to odour elimination. "It is something that has given us a competitive advantage in the marketplace," Alice says.
That culture of knowledge-sharing extends globally. A colleague in another location recently shared observations where they identified an ingredient that could absorb water, thus keeping a powdered premix from becoming clumpy or hard. The FON team picked it up, and it is now running across four different applications, with strong commercial potential for a key customer. "It was just someone willing to say, I tried this and I think it might make something better," Alice reflects. "That collaboration across teams is just wonderful to see."
Innovation driven by changing consumer needs
The team’s capabilities help create stronger customer partnerships, bringing together expertise to solve challenges and support innovation. When customers arrive with a challenge rather than a finished specification, the conversation shifts to understanding the application: the manufacturing environment, shelf-life requirements, product format, and target market.
Two difficult nutrients illustrate the impact. Choline is critical for brain health but often underused in supplements. It absorbs moisture, discolours and develops a distinctive odour at effective doses. Glanbia's encapsulation technology solves all of that, allowing customers to add choline at meaningful levels. Potassium can also be challenging to work with, due to taste considerations and the potential for gastrointestinal irritation at the levels required. These are among the challenges the team has addressed to provide effective supplementation for populations with specific nutritional needs, including GLP-1 users. "We learn just as much from our challenges as we do from our successes," Alice says. "When customers share challenges they are seeing in their products, it helps us refine our solutions, improve products faster and strengthen the partnership. Those insights are often what drives the next innovation."
Across every application, market and customer challenge, the common thread is a shared commitment to making complex nutrition solutions work in the real world. Spanning continents and responding to evolving consumer trends in real time, Glanbia's teams combine scientific expertise, collaboration and deep application knowledge to help customers bring better products to market with greater speed and confidence.
References
(1) https://www.rand.org/news/press/2025/08/nearly-12-percent-of-americans-have-used-glp-1-weight.html
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