WOMEN IN BUSINESS
“Women excel at building teams” Judith van Peij has been with Royal DSM for 10 years, and has been the Innovation Manager for Baking & Confectionery for the past three. She is a food technologist at heart, with a clear vision of managing innovation teams including R&D, operations and commercial.
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Catalina Mihu: You joined DSM 10 years ago. How has the approach for new product development evolved in this time and what are some of your favorite contributions in this regard? Judith van Peij: I was already working as a food technologist as a food technologist when I joined DSM. Coming from an ingredients company, I was already somewhat familiar with how the industry was working. In the 10 years that have passed since then, we have transitioned from being an ingredients company to being a solutions provider. In the beginning, I was more focused on applications (and not so much on innovation at that time). But, I felt that there was a need for us to do something in the shorter term, by adding not only focused R&D projects to our pipeline, but also making more use of our existing products in other types of applications, throughout the company. I like to work with people, and I think that there is added value that can be gained from working with ingredients that have been already developed to transform them into (a part of) a solution rather than simply offering them as an ingredient. Mihu: What is your favorite aspect of R&D? Judith van Peij: DSM is a biotechnology and nutrition-driven company in the food industry. When I was starting out in research, particularly enzymes, I remember being amazed at being able to model protein structures, for example. We could look through 3D glasses to understand our enzyme products better, which, in turn, would help to engineer new molecules themselves, but also make second- or third-generation of products. This is the next step to making the kind of improvements that are really needed in the industry. Subsequently, we look into interactions in the matrix. Food matrices are not always very easy to understand; we mostly start to analyze them from the physical perspective. Baking is the end goal, of course – but, the process is facilitated by using the right design, then using the resulting data to make an even smarter design, a process that helps to go into the market quicker. This is an ongoing evolution with iterative cycles. We have had a new research center for a few years now, where we work with automation and robots, for simple tasks. People can, in turn, focus on thinking and analyzing the data, rather than repetitive, day-to-day routine.
www.bakingbiscuit.com 04/2022
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