Symrise joins KitchenTown Berlin, supporting food start-ups with expert knowledge
Symrise announces its partnership with KitchenTown Berlin, a food and foodtech innovation network set up to positively impact the food system: Special focus lies on the development, commercialization, and launch of impact driven and transformational food products. To achieve this, KitchenTown creates an active global community of food entrepreneurs and innovators. With KitchenTown providing the infrastructure and network in EMEA, Symrise contributes expert guidance, to jointly deploy the right tools at the right time.
Kitchen Town uses innovation sprints to help drive new market ideas from ideation to market testing at fast pace. Special focus lies on the development, commercialization, and launch of impact driven and transformational food products. To achieve this, KitchenTown creates an active global community of food entrepreneurs and innovators to support one another and create a new sustainable food system. Interested parties can join KitchenTown through memberships and use its facilities and know-how. Additionally, KitchenTown offers an accelerator program where startups can apply for funding and venture development.
Symrise leverages the state of the art food facility and co-working spaces to facilitate collaboration and co-creation between its taste experts, foodies, entrepreneurs and their customers, the manufacturers of food and beverage products. Ideas developed and fast-tracked in KitchenTown can easily be reviewed with consumers. Through a rapid prototyping approach and compressed creation the collaboration enables critical project acceleration.
As the world around is changing quickly, we’re here to help feed it, says Lukas Neuß, Co-Founder of KitchenTown Berlin. Providing new perspectives for the food and beverage retail landscape through often impact driven brands is KitchenTown’s mandate.
“We have entered the innovation network to ideate, create, and grow new food and beverage ideas in the smartest way possible. We are one of the founders of the flavor industry and a leading provider of taste with innovative food ingredients expertise with strong product development capabilities, and we look forward to partnering with KitchenTown Berlin and its startup ecosystem”, says Heinrich Schaper, President Flavor at Symrise. Founders gain access to 1,000 m2 of innovation space, tailored to the needs of food and foodtech thought leaders, including a development lab, small batch production facilities, as well as a co-working and event space located in the heart of Berlin, amidst the capital’s startup scene.
“KitchenTown Berlin is a great partner for agile development projects” continues Schaper. “At Symrise we regard collaboration in open eco-systems and strategic partnerships as important enablers for long-term business success. It is our pleasure to connect our customers and taste industry experts with innovators and thought leaders, while accelerating their innovation cycle.” The company has a long heritage of external collaborations, incl. strategic Research & Technology partnerships as well as their Califormulations end-to-end rapid innovation approach in the US. Both Califormulations and KitchenTown are prepared to quickly develop shelf-ready, scalable products by replacing the traditional and often time-consuming “stage gate” innovation funnel through creative innovation sprints.
Founded in 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area, KitchenTown is a global innovation platform that helps develop, commercialize and launch, impact-driven and transformational food products. The second location in Berlin is amplifying the European food startup scene. KitchenTown supports startups from initial product concept, to scaling and market fit. In a highly flexible production facility, founders can develop, test and launch their product ideas to market. Fueled with industry know how, KitchenTown offers startups access to all relevant topics to gear up for growth – everything under one roof.