The Industrial Chocolate Competence Center

Over the past few years, we have observed a growing demand for chocolate usage in industrial application and finished goods. This follows the evolution of the chocolate market, continuously in motion. Therefore, staying contemporary while continuing to invest in chocolate’s strong heritage is crucial.

We are passionate about chocolate and are specialised in taste, providing a full rangeof products based on your needs. Throughout the years, this passion has evolved into expertise.
Our aim is to continuously share and provide our clients with assistance to innovate and optimize their process and recipes.

To do so, we have created the Chocolate Centers.

These premises offer you, our customers, the facilities and tools to develop specific chocolate solutions and to research, and test applications before moving to the final implementation on their production lines.
The Puratos Chocolate Centres in Belgium (Brussels) or in the US (Kenosha, Wisconsin) organise trainings and seminars, where you can learn from some of the greatest chocolate and pastry chefs.

In our chocolate centers, combining technical, taste and production expertise, our technical advisors for chocolate will collaborate with you to highlight this delicious ingredient in your finished goods at an even higher extent.
The combination of these services and resources enables us to provide you industry-leading support while gaining a piece of mind.

Our Technical advisors will accompany you from inspiration workshops (which allow product innovation) to improving your employee skills (through knowledge sharing) in managing the production process in industry lines .
Mastering chocolate application and industrial processes as well as providing latest insights and trends will help address the challenges we meet in the marketplace.

In addition to being a noble ingredient, chocolate is also very versatile and can be included in many bakery and patisserie applications.
Our technical advisors in chocolate are part of a network of  463 technical advisors worldwide which enables them to benefit of non-negligible inspiration resources that will serve you explore potential and/or untapped opportunities.

Stef Aerts is R&D application specialist for Chocolate

At first Pastry chef for the Belgian Market, he started working for Puratos in 1998 as a technical advisor for Belux (Belgium and Luxembourg). In 2002 he took on the challenge of becoming responsible of the activities of the “ Chocolate Center “ in Erembodegen .
There, he worked mainly on the internal promotion of Belcolade throughout trainings, presentations and How to work with chocolate tutorials. Then he focused on promoting the advantages of working with high quality real Belgian chocolate for international customers, traveling around the world.

During these years he worked closely with equipment suppliers which drove him to understand better the difficulties, needs and challenges of our customers.
He observed the evolution in the use of chocolate  allowing him to adapt to different customer situations and gathering knowledge and expertise in specialized chocolate equipment.