Snacks & cereals capabilities: Enhanced expertise

Turning Ingredient Expertise into Consumer-Relevant Innovation

Cargill brings decades of expertise to the European snacks and cereals market, helping customers develop products that deliver on taste, texture, nutrition and evolving consumer expectations.

Our specialized Snacks & Cereals R&D teams operate from innovation centers in Vilvoorde and Mouscron, Belgium, where application specialists, ingredient experts and food scientists support product development from concept through commercialization.

Our pilot facilities cover a broad range of applications, including cereal and protein bars, coated nuts, salty snacks, breakfast cereals and extruded snacks. Equipped with technologies such as mixing, sheeting, frying, baking and extrusion, they enable formulation development, process optimization and scale-up under realistic production conditions.

Combining application expertise with analytical capabilities - including texture analysis, water activity, viscosity measurement and sensory evaluation - we help customers optimize product performance, ingredient functionality and shelf-life quality.

Through knowledge sharing with partners such as Bühler and the addition of a new pilot-scale extrusion line in Vilvoorde in 2026, Cargill continues to expand its technical capabilities to support next-generation snacks and cereals.
Whether the goal is sugar or sodium reduction, protein or fiber enrichment, label-friendly reformulation, improved texture or entirely new product concepts, Cargill combines ingredient expertise, application know-how and pilot-scale capabilities to accelerate innovation and commercialization.

In the spotlight: Ann Van Meerbeeck, R&D Principal Application Specialist Snacks & Cereals

Ann is Cargill's Principal Application Specialist for the Culinary and Snacks & Cereals categories, based at the Vilvoorde R&D Centre in Belgium. She partners with customers to develop innovative snacks & cereal and culinary products that meet evolving consumer and market needs. Through innovation days, workshops, co-development projects, pilot trials and technical training, she helps translate ideas into commercially successful solutions. Ann also works closely with Cargill's commercial, marketing and technical teams to strengthen category expertise and accelerate innovation.

Ann has 37 years of experience at Cargill, including 30 years in Culinary and Convenience Foods before driving the establishment of the company's Snacks & Cereals R&D capabilities in Europe. Her expertise includes cereal and protein bars, salty snacks, breakfast cereals and extruded products, with a particular focus on ingredient functionality, fibre and protein fortification, texture optimization, and sugar, salt and calorie reduction. Today, she is leading the development of Cargill's extrusion capabilities to support the next generation of snack innovation. She graduated from KU Leuven (Belgium) with a Master of Science in Food Engineering Biochemistry and Food Technology.
 

"Innovation succeeds when ingredient expertise meets practical application. By collaborating closely with our customers, we develop solutions that turn ideas into differentiated products ready for commercial success."