• Danisco USA Inc., New Century, Kan., has broken ground on its 19,200-square-foot facility expansion in Madison, Wis. The new expansion will house an ultra-cold storage facility and packaging operations for frozen dairy cultures. Attending the recent groundbreaking ceremony from the Danisco Cultures Division headquarters in Paris were all members of the Danisco Cultures Division management team.

• Philadelphia-based David Michael & Co. announces the opening of its new David Michael de Mexico S.A. de C.V. facility in Lerma, Mexico. The new location houses numerous laboratories, including applications, culinary, sensory, quality control, flavor creation and microbiology. The production facility includes the capability of manufacturing liquid and powder blends, emulsions, washed oils and beverage concentrates, among other flavor-related products.

• National Starch Food Innovation is building a state-of-the-art Texture Center of Excellence to support the company’s expanding texture efforts. Scheduled to be operational in 2008, the multimillion-dollar Texture Center of Excellence at National Starch’s global headquarters in Bridgewater, N.J., will support National Starch’s programs to meet the growing industry need for texture understanding and control, and will help accelerate innovation and new product development and provide for greater creative collaboration with customers. The center will include a focus-group room with observation area, a computerized descriptive analysis room, a culinary kitchen, isolated testing booths and client meeting rooms. The new facility will also be equipped with specialized instrumentation to conduct texture characterization and accelerate the pace of development.

• Dow Wolff Cellulosics, a newly formed specialty business unit of The Dow Chemical Co., announced new capacity and capabilities, as well as steady progress on previously announced expansions. Dow Wolff Cellulosics is expanding its capacity and capabilities to better serve cellulosics customers in key markets worldwide and plans to build a methylhydroxyethylcellulose production plant in Bitterfeld, Germany.