Unilever Invests $270 Million in Global Innovation Center in Connecticut

Happi International Top 30 Company Unilever has unveiled plans to develop a new Global Innovation Center in New Haven, CT, slated for opening in spring 2029.

The center will be a leading hub for the company’s research and development for its personal care, beauty and wellbeing businesses in the US and globally.

Officials said the center propels Unilever’s growth strategy in the US market, raising the bar for research and development in the consumer goods industry and powering the company’s portfolio of innovative and desirable brands. Centrally located in one of the world’s fastest-growing biosciences innovation clusters, the digital-first and AI-powered center will deliver deeper insights to fuel Unilever’s ambition of reshaping product categories. The center will advance how Unilever’s teams of scientists and experts push the boundaries of the fundamental differentiators that make the company’s brands distinct and products desirable: superior science, aesthetics and sensorials.

“New Haven gets us to the future faster. Our Global Innovation Center is where we’ll innovate at the intersection of science, technology and culture—for the US and for the world,” Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA and CEO of Personal Care North America. “We will build on our deep heritage of innovation to develop the next generation of brands and products that people love. As part of Unilever’s global network of innovation hubs, the center will connect closely with our other leading locations worldwide, sharing technology, insights, and breakthrough ideas to accelerate innovation at scale. As the US becomes a center of gravity for Unilever, we’re harnessing the best of American innovation to match our growth ambition here in the US and around the world.”

Accelerating the Next Generation of Market-Making Beauty

The center brings together a new and differentiated combination of assets and capabilities that officials say will accelerate breakthroughs and enable Unilever’s brands to bring the next generation of market-making beauty, wellbeing and personal care products to people faster.

Powered by AI and emerging quantum capabilities, the center purportedly positions Unilever to be a leading innovator in the consumer goods sector. Fueled by the State of Connecticut and private investment, the computational power of quantum will accelerate advanced materials discovery in the coming decades, unlocking new possibilities for market-making products that drive desire by scale.

All R&D capabilities—including formulation, fragrance creation, packaging design and consumer insights—will be housed under one roof. By co-locating every stage of the innovation cycle, the center will enable deeper collaboration to further accelerate product development.

With access to dozens of world-class universities, hundreds of companies and some of the brightest minds in the world, the center places Unilever’s US R&D at the heart of innovation in bioscience, building on the company’s expertise in understanding skin biology, the microbiome and the skin-brain axis. The center will enhance Unilever scientists’ use of cutting-edge neuroscience to create the next generation of desirable products, connecting sensory attributes like texture, fragrance and bio-actives with emotional, behavioral and wellness responses.

The center advances Unilever’s strategy to become a sharper, focused personal care, beauty and wellbeing company, built upon shared capabilities across science-led innovation, demand creation and operational execution, officials say. Unilever will invest $270 million in the project over the long term, including $50 million in capital expenditure. The total combined investment of public and private funds in the center will exceed $300 million. This investment builds on nearly $15 billion invested in Unilever’s US business over the past decade, across both acquisitions and capital projects, officials say.

The center will house approximately 300 employees. It will succeed Unilever’s existing R&D facility in Trumbull, which has operated since 1972.

Advanced Capabilities

The global center for skin care and cleansing will anchor the site and power the future of Unilever’s skin care and cleansing business through advanced capabilities, according to the company.

Polycultural skin and hair center of excellence specializes in creating ingredients and products that address the unmet needs of millions of consumers.

A human performance lab generating “unprecedented” new data and insights into human physiology will enable on-site testing of ingestibles and accelerate growth across Unilever’s wellbeing brands.

Unilever Fragrance House will comprise perfumists, chemists and packaging designers to work together from the earliest stages of development, placing fragrance at the heart of product creation and sensory experience.

A packaging innovation studio incorporating real-time consumer feedback to accelerate the development of prototypes will perform across physical and digital shelves.

Said Richard Slater, Unilever chief research and development officer, “Behind every Unilever product is world-leading science that delivers superior performance, combined with design, fragrance and sensory experiences that make our brands distinctive. Our new Global Innovation Center will bring these capabilities together to develop new, category-defining innovations in the US, and scale globally. The real shift here is integration and speed: science, design and sensorials working as one, with AI and partnerships accelerating every stage of innovation.”

Check out Unilever’s financial results for Q1 2026 here.