ZERO2FIVE’s state-of-the-art facilities are available to help food and drink manufacturers develop, analyse and evaluate new and existing products. Our facilities can make it faster and cheaper for companies to undertake projects which might otherwise not be viable without significant investment.
Food processing areas
The ground floor of ZERO2FIVE houses four distinct food processing areas: low risk, high risk, bakery and confectionery.
These facilities allow food and drink companies to undertake trial production runs and minimise losses resulting from upscaling new products directly to the factory floor.
Our food processing areas house a range of processing equipment that cover a variety of food processing sectors e.g. ready meals, meat, fish and dairy, and include:
Retort and canning | Spray drying | Freeze drying | Packing | Powder and liquid blending | Encrusting and forming | Mixing and emulsifying | Blast chilling and freezing | Extraction | Size reduction | Pasteurisation | Bottling | Hot and cold filling | Smoking | Depositing | Colour grading | Viscosity meters
Bakery and confectionery
Our baking and confectionery facilities are available for a range of specialist support, including product development and reformulation, bespoke bakery training, and trial production runs. Our specialist bakery and confectionery equipment includes:
Mixers | Depositors | Texture analysers | Bread moulders | Pastry sheeters | Rack and deck ovens | Stone baked pizza oven | Chocolate tempering and enrobing machines | Doughnut frying line | Bread slicers
New product development kitchen
Our fully equipped new product development kitchen is the ideal location to create new product ranges. This facility links with our ground floor food processing areas to allow a seamless transition between new product development and trial production.
Find out more about the new product development services we offer.
Sensory evaluation suite
ZERO2FIVE hosts one of the largest sensory evaluation suites in the UK. Equipped with the latest sensory research software, this facility enables a more objective approach to product evaluation. With our support, partner companies can independently analyse their products as part of product development, reformulation and quality control processes.
Find out more about the sensory evaluation services we offer.
Training kitchen
Our training kitchen is used for the validation of cooking instructions and is also an ideal environment to evaluate new products through focus groups, all of which are facilitated by our technical experts on site.
Find out more about the thermal process validation services that we offer.
Perceptual Experience Laboratory
The Perceptual Experience Laboratory (PEL) uses high-resolution images on a large wrap-around screen, immersive sound, smell, air movement and temperature to create simulations of bespoke locations in a laboratory setting where close monitoring, recording and analysis is possible.
This enables the creation of immersive environments (e.g. supermarkets and factories) which are ordinarily difficult to access for consumer behaviour experiments. For example, we can conduct experiments to analyse the effectiveness of new food packaging designs on supermarket shelves.
Find out more about the research we can conduct in the Perceptual Experience Laboratory.
Consumer research kitchen
This innovative facility closely resembles a typical home kitchen, but it is equipped with surveillance cameras that discreetly capture the actions and behaviours of research participants as they engage in food preparation.
The consumer research kitchen allows us to gain invaluable insights into consumer food safety behaviours in a domestic setting. Unlike traditional methods where researchers may be present in the kitchen with participants, our unobtrusive camera system minimises the potential for behaviour changes caused by the presence of an observer.
Observation in the research kitchen using cameras not only reduces behavioural changes, but also enables us to review recorded footage repeatedly so we can analyse participant behaviour and ensure the consistency and reliability of our observations.
Get in touch with us
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business or have any questions about the support we can offer, then please get in touch.
