Every Castle Ingredients' process,
available at low MOQ.
Food ingredient pilot plant in Belgium.
Are you thinking of testing a new product?
Castle Ingredients Pilot Lab is the pilot-scale arm of Castle Group, a Belgian contract manufacturer operating since 1868.
Every industrial process we run at our Lontzen and Hombourg facilities including heat treatment, milling, micronization, air classification, blending, and packaging has a matching pilot unit.
Brands, scale-ups and R&D teams can trial new ingredients and formulations at batch sizes from a few kilograms upward, then move to industrial production on the same site without switching partners.
STEP 1
Lab and Pilot Trial Small quantities, process
window defined
STEP 2
IndustrialTrial
Big bag scale on production lines
STEP 3
SeriesProduction
Repeatable, validated runs
Developed on real production lines
Our in-house food scientists design and test tailor-made ingredients and recipes so they perform at industrial scale. From first idea to launch, you move faster and with more confidence.
Ingredient Design
Develop tailor-made ingredients with defined parameters, functionalities and applications
Technical Partnership
Collaborate with food scientists who speak the same language as your R&D and production teams
Reformulation Projects
Clean label, Nutri-Score improvements, nutrition upgrades, or cost optimisation without losing taste or texture
Private Label Concepts
Support for retailers and brands to build private label concepts and line extensions, from idea to launch
Pilot unit matrix
Process
- Heat treatment — hot-air fluidised bed
- Heat treatment — roller dryer
- Heat treatment — thermal screw
- Milling
- Micronization
- Air classification
- Blending
- Packaging
- Product development
What's possible at pilot scale
- Sterilisation, roasting, toasting of whole grains, seeds, pulses, from 20 kg batches
- Drying of slurries, purees and viscous wet feeds into flakes or powders
- Gentle thermal treatment of flours, herbs and heat-sensitive powders with controlled residence time
- Five mill types: crusher, pin, hammer, jet, cryogenic — from coarse crushing to ultra-fine grinding
- Ultra-fine particle size reduction, D50 typically below 20 µm
- Dry fractionation to separate protein, starch and fibre without solvents
- Custom dry blends and premixes, including low-inclusion and allergen-managed runs
- Short-run trial and retail-ready packaging: paper bags, foil-lined bags, sachets, pouches
- Co-creation with the R&D team, from concept to industrial spec
You supply your own raw material, delivered to Lontzen
We process to your specification, on our own lines, from pilot to industrial volume
It returns to you the finished ingredient ships to you or directly to your customer