Appreciation is an important internal driver of creativity in any successful culture of innovation. For this reason, Evonik reserves especially high honors for the work its employees do on promising new products and solutions. Each year, Evonik’s internal Innovation Award honors the outstanding research accomplishments of the company’s employees.

The GutCare® probiotic team and the team that developed a process for using FCC-C4 came out ahead of competing projects. Peter Freisler and his colleagues from the Nutrition & Care Segment won over the judges in the New Products/System Solutions category with GutCare®, a probiotic that improves intestinal health in chickens and increases productivity in poultry farming, while quelling the use of antiobiotics. The FCC-C4 team led by Dr. Markus Winterberg won in the New Methods category. These Performance Intermediates researchers successfully applied an ingenious combination of classic scale-up experiments with modern modeling techniques to avoid the costly construction of a pilot plant. A plant manufacturing a wide array of high-quality products from FCC-C4 has towered over the Marl site since 2015.