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Danone has today (2 November 2026) inaugurated its brand-new Research & Innovation (R&I) Center in Shanghai, China. FoodBev spoke to Danone’s Isabelle Esser, chief human resources, R&I, quality and food safety officer; and Taous Lassel, VP of R&I Asia-Pacific and China, and global R&I digital and AI, ahead of the opening. Read on to discover some of the key technologies and trends shaping research at the site, and how the move toward ‘food as medicine’ is bringing opportunities to integrate product development across key nutritional disciplines.
The opening of Danone’s new Shanghai R&I Center, officially announced today, marks a major step forward in the dairy and nutrition specialist’s functional F&B development capabilities.
It will become a hub for more than 130 multidisciplinary experts, serving specialised nutrition categories such as early-life nutrition, medical nutrition and healthy ageing. Bringing microbiome research, digital health solutions and pilot-scale capabilities under one roof, the 5,200-square-metre facility aims to strengthen the connection between China’s dynamic health ecosystem and Danone’s global nutrition network.
Taous Lassel, VP of R&I Asia-Pacific and China, and global R&I digital and AI, noted the importance of China – and Asia more widely – as a critical market for Danone across early-life and medical nutrition, as well as dairy and plant-based.
“Particularly in China, there is an amazing scientific ecosystem,” she told FoodBev. “We would like to be at the centre of it, so that we can really accelerate our innovation with the teams we already have here in the region.”
Unlocking new microbiome insights
Alongside a 300-square-metre science experience and customer engagement hub, and a 700-square-metre pilot plant, one major focus of the Shanghai facility will be a 900-square-metre Danone OneBiome lab dedicated to microbiome research – the third of its kind across the company’s R&I network.
Danone opened its first OneBiome labs in France and Singapore in 2025, with FoodBev’s Rafaela Sousa having attended the inauguration of the France facility, located in the Paris-Saclay innovation cluster, last October.
The third OneBiome lab at the Shanghai R&I Center expands the international scope of the company’s existing work in this space – with Danone’s R&I Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, also playing a major role in specialised nutrition and microbiome R&D.
Isabelle Esser, chief human resources, R&I, quality and food safety officer at Danone, explained how the ambition is to develop a more intricate understanding of gut health, sequencing of bacteria and the relationship between the diverse inhabitants of consumers’ gut microbiomes.
“China is very advanced in terms of sequencing and genomics,” she said, adding that linking this specific expertise with the company’s work at the labs in Paris, Utrecht and Singapore allows the company to benefit from a strong international network.
Danone has a longstanding history of working with biotics and gut health – but this scientific landscape has made substantial strides forward over the last decade. Esser emphasised how in the last 10-15 years, the advances of science in sequencing, genomics and metabolomics and artificial intelligence, unlocking hugely vast datasets, enables the reduction of what were previously ten-year sequencing processes to matters of days or even minutes.
Innovating for longevity
The growing trend of longevity and the concept of extending your ‘healthspan’ – the number of years of your life spent in good health – is having a major influence on functional food and beverage development. At the new Shanghai facility, Danone’s microbiome research will further fuel innovation in this emerging segment.
“We want to go much further into quality of life, healthspan, longevity, and how the gut microbiome is linked with biomarkers of ageing,” Esser explained. She noted that the growing understanding of how this relates to health and quality of life has opened “a vast new area of possibilities” in terms of product and solution development.
Advanced digital health technologies, such as those Danone’s labs are equipped with, are bridging historical knowledge gaps and increasingly “making the invisible visible,” she enthused.
One such technology included at the new Shanghai laboratory allows for a full-body muscle scan, enabling insights into how certain nutrition solutions impact the quality of the muscle as it changes with age. This can help shape the development of new multi-functional products, such as those combining biotics, proteins and amino acids, that can ensure consumers have the right lean quality of muscle to age healthfully, Esser added.
Meanwhile, Lassel pointed out that when this data is combined with data on brain and gut activity, the company is able to “leverage our science [to be] at the service of our brands in a way that is quite integrated…this is quite creative because we have [many] different types of experts, so what used to be linear or sequential processes become much more accelerated.”
China, where more than 20% of the country’s population is aged over 60, is a particularly relevant market for this research. And looking broadly at the global picture, Esser noted the significance of the ageing population’s focus on healthspan.
“In the late 1990s and early 2000s it was all about living longer,” she told FoodBev. “Now, more and more, people realise that just living longer is not good enough…people don’t want to live longer in pain, in hospital, or in not being able to be autonomous, in the community and doing things they enjoy.”
GLP-1 and the ‘food as medicine’ movement
Healthy ageing innovation is being powered by a broader trend impacting the food and beverage industry: the rising awareness of the impact food has on health, with Esser commenting: “While we knew it for hundreds of years before, we’d maybe forgotten it a bit – that food isn’t just about getting calories in and not being hungry, it’s about the impact on health both in the short-term and long-term, and I think we are going back to that.”
“This is what we see as a huge trend…affecting the food and beverage industry, and [within it] you’ve got elements like protein, the fibre gap, GLP-1 use for weight management…but it all comes from this trend of food becoming, again, the medicine it was before,” she continued.
The use of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications for weight loss has continued to surge this year, with new oral formats further amplifying this trajectory. The US remains the leading market, with Gallup research stating that 11% of US adults nationwide were taking the medications for weight management purposes as of mid-2026.
In addition to unlocking new opportunities in development of protein products – due to users frequently losing muscle mass rapidly alongside the intended fat loss – the GLP-1 surge is a driving force behind Danone’s innovation in gut health too.
The company acquired The Akkermansia Company last year, a Belgian company that developed the proprietary biotic strain Akkermansia muciniphila MucT.
“This biotic is absolutely key in maintaining muscle mass from people who are going through GLP-1 [treatment] or weight management,” said Esser. “This has been clinically proven in a publication in Nature, but it’s not just about Akkermansia per se, it’s about how you use it to have an impact on the microbiome and support muscle protection…all of that is part of the products we want to bring to market.”
In China and beyond
The new Shanghai hub builds on Danone’s local expertise and forms part of the company’s longstanding presence in China. Since 2020, the company has published 56 scientific papers, filed 27 patents and conducted nearly 30 local studies.
The new hub’s approach, bringing together complementary expertise from academia, healthcare and innovation partners, aims to help Danone respond faster to evolving health and nutrition needs across China and the wider APAC region.
Its end-to-end capabilities, from research through to industrialisation, are designed to ‘create a two-way bridge’ between China and the rest of the world, bringing ‘global science closer to local needs’ while expanding innovations developed in China across Danone’s network worldwide.
“This is very important, the ability to exchange and communicate with our academia network and suppliers – we really want to become a kind of lighthouse when it comes to nutrition, gut microbiome… and how much nutrition can make a difference,” concluded Lassel.
“We’re enthusiastic about the impact and the difference we can make here in China, and leveraging and working closely with our colleagues all over the world.”
FoodBev Events is hosting its first ever Specialised Nutrition World Congress in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, taking place from 17-18 March 2027. Find out more about the event, which will cover topics such as healthy ageing, gut health, early-life nutrition and more, here.
