FDBusiness.com

Nestlé has extended its strategic innovation partnership with the Singapore Government’s Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) to provide a new base for Nestlé’s regional centre for research with a strong focus on Healthy Ageing. The Nestlé Research Centre Asia will concentrate on supporting the unmet nutritional needs of Asia’s growing older population.

The expansion of the partnership will create an estimated 25 new full time jobs in Singapore over the next 3 to 5 years.

Longer life expectancy and a marked decline in fertility rates have resulted in a rapidly ageing global population, with significant economic, healthcare and societal repercussions. In particular, Asia’s ageing population is expected to reach 1.2 billion and account for 60 per cent of the world’s population of older people by 20501.

Nestlé has identified a strategic need for a research footprint within Asia to study the role of nutrition and early development in health and disease, so as to better address the needs of the region’s ageing population. NRC Asia’s strong focus on Healthy Ageing leverages Singapore’s strong biomedical research capabilities and diverse ethnic population to enrich the wellbeing, health and longevity of Asia’s aged. The regional insights gleaned on geriatric nutrition could also lead to nutritional interventions across the globe.

The establishment of NRC Asia builds on the success of Nestlé’s strategic innovation partnership with A*STAR, Singapore’s lead public sector research agency driving economic-oriented research. The origins of Nestlé’s partnership with A*STAR date back to 2011, when NRC began collaborative projects in clinical nutrition research with A*STAR’s Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS).

Since then, the partnership has gone from strength to strength, giving Nestlé the confidence to anchor NRC Asia in Singapore. NRC Asia’s scope of research encompasses both new and existing platforms which have been jointly developed with A*STAR.

For Nestlé, the appeal of A*STAR comes from its spectrum of research capabilities and ability to integrate these expertise together with that of the wider innovation ecosystem in Singapore.

Since the signing of a Framework Research Agreement with A*STAR in Jan 2014, Nestlé Research has set up strategic platforms around food science and technology, materials science and packaging, nutrition, health and behaviour. The collaboration will also increasingly expand on biotransformation – the use of natural processes, such as fermentation, to transform raw materials into ingredients with nutritional or functional benefits.