JDE Peet's Invests €8 Million in Innovation Hub in the Netherlands to accelerate new coffee products
October 22 - 2025
Coffee Geography Magazine
In the heart of Utrecht, the historic home of the beloved Douwe Egberts brand, a new era of coffee innovation is beginning. JDE Peet’s has officially unveiled its fully transformed and modular Innovation Laboratory, a state-of-the-art facility designed to accelerate the development of next-generation coffee breakthroughs. This significant investment underscores the company’s commitment to rapidly scaling customer-led innovations and solidifies the strategic importance of its global R&D centre in the Netherlands.
The pioneering, modular setup of the lab is its core strength, enabling research and development teams to swiftly prototype and refine new coffee products, processes, and packaging materials. This agility ensures that successful innovations can be quickly scaled across JDE Peet’s global manufacturing network, significantly shortening the time from concept to consumer. The €8 million revamp in Utrecht, which complements a recently opened facility in Joure focused on extraction and freeze-drying technologies, represents a major commitment to maintaining a competitive edge in the fast-evolving coffee market.
Key areas of focus within the lab’s flexible workspace include single-serve capsules, ready-to-drink formats, and instant coffee, all supported by state-of-the-art equipment. This includes high-precision grinders, capsule fillers, and advanced freeze-drying systems capable of reaching -40°C. The facility is also engineered with sustainability at its core, featuring new processing systems designed to recycle heat and reduce overall energy consumption, directly supporting JDE Peet’s Common Grounds sustainability program.
Carolyn Adams, Chief R&D Officer at JDE Peet’s
Carolyn Adams, Chief R&D Officer at JDE Peet’s, connected the lab's future-focused mission with its rich heritage, stating, “Coffee is one of the most exciting and fast-evolving consumer categories, with new flavors and formats emerging almost every week. The agile, modular setup of our Innovation Lab enables us to rapidly respond to consumer insights and quickly scale new flavors and formats to full factory production.” She emphasized that this investment is a key driver of the company’s ‘Reignite the Amazing’ strategy, allowing it to significantly accelerate the time-to-market for new breakthroughs.
The Utrecht lab is already proving its value with a series of tangible successes. Recent breakthroughs include the development of new non-dairy creamers with improved nutritional profiles and energy-efficient roasting methods that reduce environmental impact while keeping coffee affordable for consumers. In packaging, the team has launched home-recyclable paper refill packs for instant coffee in the UK and is advancing the development of mono-material packaging to simplify recycling processes. These achievements demonstrate the lab’s potent combination of consumer insight, technological prowess, and a firm commitment to a more sustainable future for coffee.