Dairy capabilities: Enhanced expertise

In Europe, Cargill has a long-standing expertise in everything dairy – from fermented dairy, through to creams, drinks, ice cream & desserts and processed cheese. 

Our R&D teams support our customers from across two locations (Baupte (France) and Vilvoorde (Belgium)) which have fully equipped pilot plant facilities (including UHT, freezers, aerators, and fermentation tanks) and specific control methods (e.g., viscosity measurement, texture analysis, melting kinetics, and accelerated shelf-life). In this way, we can provide both technical assistance as well as co-create new concepts and/or reformulate existing recipes for cost, health or indulgence, and this across dairy, hybrid and plant-based alternatives to dairy.

In the spotlight: Anne-Laure Rouger, R&D Application Team Leader Dairy & Dairy Alternatives

Anne-Laure has 15 years of experience in the dairy & dairy alternative world in both B2C and B2B. In her first 9 years at Cargill, Anne-Laure was the R&D Application Specialist Dairy & Dairy Alternatives, where she was heavily involved in texturizers, and then adding progressively the use of vegetable proteins, fats & oils and cocoa & chocolate developments in those applications/in the formulations. For the last 3 years, Anne-Laure has been leading the Application team to provide technical application assistance to our customer and manage the pipeline of application projects to answer the current & future needs of our customers, across the full Cargill Food portfolio of ingredients.

Anne-Laure is based in our Baupte facility, in Normandy, France, from where she steers one application team for dairy and dairy alternatives, based in Baupte (France) and Vilvoorde (Belgium). Having team members in two locations enables high flexibility, agility, strong pilot scale production capacity (application pilot plant in each location), ingredient expertise and capacity for cross-applications work and customer and events support.

At Cargill, we truly understand dairy formulations, ingredient interactions & processes. This is why our dairy & dairy alternatives application team is able to produce finished product prototypes. We offer know-how to control and characterize (rheology & panel tasting) and design specific ranges of solutions per sub-application. A part of their time is focused on broader R&D, with the bulk of the time dedicated to customer projects and support.

“There is never a dull day in the life of R&D Application. We can be working on a specific customer project in the morning, discussing application trial results with a product line manager for an upcoming product launch after lunch and working on knowledge management late afternoon. The common denominator to all our activities is that it always serves our customers.”

How customers benefit from our enhanced expertise:

We have been working with a customer on new formulations for a dairy dessert and dairy cream. The first trials for the chocolate-based dessert have shown great results. However, when discussing the trials for the cream, it became apparent our customer could not conduct these on their pilot plants as they are not equipped with an UHT steam injection. 

Our solution:
We proposed to run these pilot trials in our Baupte facility where we are equipped for these types of trials. This prevented our customer from having to opt immediately for industrial trials.