As the race to bring products to market faster intensifies, Unilever is putting more of its science and technology muscle behind India. The company announced a €35 million ($38.9 million) investment to transform its R&D hubs in Mumbai and Bangalore into a next-generation research and innovation ecosystem by bringing consumer insight, scientific discovery, and prototyping into one connected environment.
This investment is in addition to the more than €20 million ($22.2 million) Unilever has invested in the Indian hubs over the past five years. That earlier spend funded the Liquids Lab of the Future, the Unilever Fragrance House, their Advanced Manufacturing Centre for soap bars, a Packaging and Flexibles Design Lab, and AI and digital modeling platforms.
In Mumbai, this new Product Innovation Centre will combine consumer insights, new measurement approaches, product and format science, packaging design, rapid prototyping, and scale-up within a single integrated environment. The site will also include collaboration spaces designed to bring Unilever’s teams closer to academics, technology companies, and innovators.
Bangalore will continue to evolve as a global science, technology, and partnership hub, combining application and foundational science, digital capabilities, and India Foods R&D. As part of the €35 million, Unilever will invest €5 million ($5.56 million) over the next five years to establish a Bio-Futures Partnership, focused on human biology, microbiome science, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing.
Across both sites, AI, automated experimentation, predictive modeling, and digital twins will let scientists and product developers explore more possibilities virtually before building them physically, with the goal of moving from concept to market faster.
Richard Slater, Unilever’s Chief Research & Development Officer, said in a company Q&A that India already plays a central role in the company’s global innovation network and that the investment will strengthen its position as one of Unilever’s largest R&D hubs. He also described India as one of the company’s most important growth markets, where consumer expectations are rising quickly. “We don’t want to just do today’s R&D faster,” Slater said, adding that the goal is to give scientists new ways to discover and develop products the company couldn’t create before.
Unilever pointed to two recent launches as examples of this work: Surf Excel Matic Express, a detergent developed to perform in short, cold wash cycles, and Dove Hair Care’s Peptide Bond Strength Technology, which the company says targets the bonds inside damaged hair.
The announcement follows other recent R&D moves by Unilever this year, including plans for a $270 million US-based global innovation center, and a new fragrance hub in Mumbai. As beauty and personal care companies race to shorten the path from consumer insight to shelf, the question is how much of that speed will come from investing in the labs and the technology behind them.