Unilever Skin Care Research

By: Maurice

Today we were expected at the Unilever Skin Care Research center in Trumbull, CT. Our visit was not going to start until 12:30, and it was only about 1,5 hours of travel. Therefore everybody was really happy they could stay in bed a little longer. The faces of all the participants were not looking that tired anymore after a long night of sleep. Well most of the people had some much needed sleep, some people took the opportunity to stay out later than the previous day.

We left around 10 o'clock and thankfully the traffic was not very heavy and we managed to arrive before noon. We arrived at a nice modern looking building and we were welcomed by our contact person who is also one of the leaders of the R&D center Badro Ahtchi. The welcome was very friendly and we even started with a visit to the well stocked cafeteria for an excellent lunch.

Badro started the session with an interesting presentation about Unilever, it's history, market-position and other general information. He went into more detail with some slides about past innovations like the role of glycerol in soap and it's affect on the wetting and penetration of the soap. Another innovation he mentioned was the Pureit system which brings cheap clean water to places like India where safe water is hard to get. He finished his presentation with some information about all kinds of career opportunities for students, PhD's and post-docs within the Unilever corporation.

Remko followed as the next presenter with his presentation about our group and the research we do. Thomas was next and he did a good job talking about his project on droplet-coalescence. His presentation generated some questions from the Unilever audience. Martijntje was up next and she also did an excellent job talking about some complicated modeling work that she is working on. Nirmal had the job to finish the presentations of the day. He talked about the development of the Ideal Cascade System which he is working on. This presentation also generated a lot of questions among the Unilever employees that were present.
After giving the presents to show our appreciation for the hospitality we went on a short tour around the pilot-facility. They showed us clean and spacious facilities that they use for research and development. Amongst those was a very impressive pilot-scale reactor which is used for improvement of the synthesis of a special surfactant that only Unilever uses. This surfactant is specific for their Dove soapbars and very special. To finish the tour we all received a bar of this soap and so everybody will smell really nice when we travel to our next visit.

The way back to the hostel was troubled by several trafficjams and we arrived back around 19:00. Time for some diner and for the second time Anja and Elsbeth took it upon themselves to feed a large portion of the group. Mjam, Mjam....