BEEF TOPS THE MENU AT ICEST 2000 AWARDS

For the second year running, Quest has won the ICI Award for Innovation, Creativity and Excellence in Science and Technology (ICEST).

The award is given to the project that demonstrates most clearly how outstanding science and technology can differentiate a business and achieve it significant benefit.

The winning team this year is from Quest Food in the Netherlands, represented by Wolfgang Fitz and Francis Scanlan . Last year, Quest Fragrances won the award.

Six teams from five businesses -National Starch, Quest, Synetix, Paints and Uniqema - had been short-listed for the award, which covers all aspects of science, technology and engineering arising from research, operations or customer service.

At the awards ceremony hosted by Paints at Slough in the UK, Carmine Iovine, chair, Technology Board, said the judges had been particularly impressed by the quality of the write-ups and the depth and the breadth of the science emerging from the teams. He said he was pleased to see the high degree of co-operation across the board, and remarked on the individual style of the presentations from all the teams.

New Beef Topnotes -Wolfgang Fitz, Francis Scanlan, Quest, the Netherlands.

The team was congratulated in developing high impact flavour ingredients for Beef Topnotes (flavour concentrates). By the use of highly skillful organic and analytical chemistry, the team isolated 40 new sulphur compounds in beef previously not known to be present. In addition, 25 of these compounds were new to the food industry and, to date, 12 have been patented.

Quest will fragrance and 'flavour' an edition of the French daily newspaper Libération to celebrate the first ever Paris Coffee Exposition. The Libération is a leading French paper founded by philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in 1968.

The distinct aroma of espresso coffee will rise from the pages as they are unfolded by the newspaper's 300,000 readers. It will be the first time ever that such a promotion has happened.

Quest perfumer Pierre Nuyens (Neuilly) created a new fragrance - Expresso - for the occasion. He was assisted by Quest flavourist Roger Arnaud (Naarden) who provided a coffee flavour.

A team from Quest made their first attempts at fragrancing the newspaper during a trial run in the print shop of Libération... "It was fun and frightening at the same time," says Diane Thalheimer, the project coordinator. "The spraying equipment splashed more than just the paper. At the end, not only the paper smelled of coffee but also everything around us for several kilometers."

The next day, Libération printed news on some sheets of the fragranced paper and the Quest team were able to sniff two samples, one sprayed with Roger's coffee flavour and the other with Pierre's espresso fragrance. "After smelling and re-smelling, we hit upon the idea of mixing the two in order to balance the qualities of aroma and flavour," says Diane. Pierre then revised and perfected his coffee creation.

The result is a remarkable example of Quest's synergy: the smell of coffee floating between the newspaper pages has been created by combining the flair of a perfumer with the skills of a flavourist. All in all, Quest manufactured 350 kilos of coffee expresso aroma.