A new chapter of meat science begins at Colorado State University
Sitting in the shadow of the stunning Colorado Rocky Mountains in Fort Collins, Colo. is Colorado State University, with a current enrollment of 33,877 students. While tradition runs deep at Colorado State University, founded in 1870 as Colorado’s land grant institution, innovation is a constant driving force throughout the College of Agricultural Sciences. The JBS Global Food Innovation Center in honor of Gary and Kay Smith is among the most recently completed projects in a modern building boom that has spanned a decade and has transformed Colorado State University with nearly $1.5 billion in new and upgraded facilities for teaching, research, student housing, and engagement. The Center is a critical new asset building on the legacy of CSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences Animal Sciences department.
A new, beautifully renovated Animal Sciences building in 2014 overlooking the Monfort Quadrangle was certainly an upgrade for the department, but more recently, the addition of the state-of-the-art JBS Global Food Innovation Center in Honor of Gary and Kay Smith brings the land-grant mission of CSU into the 21st century and beyond. The center officially opened in April 2019 and is the new hub for all things Animal Science at CSU. At its heart, the new building is a teaching, demonstration and research facility, where students in the Animal Sciences department get hands-on learning experience within fields of meat safety and quality, animal well- being, meat processing, meat chemistry, product development, sensory evaluation, culinary science, as well as other concentrations.