Silab has pulled back the curtain on its Agronomic Studies and Research Centre (CREA), which cultivates and studies botanical raw materials the French company uses to produce natural active ingredients.
Located at Silab’s headquarters in Saint-Viance, near Brive-la-Gaillarde in Corrèze, the CREA spreads across five hectares and includes 6,000 m2 of farming tunnels.
Opened in 2024, its purpose is to provide technical support and regular follow-ups to producers collaborating with Silab in order to maximize and secure the quality of botanical raw materials used by the company to create and produce natural active ingredients.
Compliance with Silab’s specifications on botanical raw materials is increased thanks to these reinforced partnerships, thereby promoting the success of the initiated projects.
To this end, many actions are implemented such as mastering plant and seed production to provide producers with the species to cultivate, testing and acclimatizing new cultures on the territory, developing cultivation itineraries aiming to improve crop yield and their impact on the environment, or even exploring optimal transformation parameters (drying, grinding) of botanical raw materials.
“At Silab, we rely on our scientific expertise and our historical mastery of natural to secure, trace, and give value to botanical raw materials,” said chief executive Brigitte Closs-Gonthier.
“Since we have precise specifications, we initiated this project not to ensure our own botanical raw material production, but to provide our partners with sustainable support,” she added.
“We make sure that the methods and equipment used during our trials are representative of what our producers use daily so that cultivation itineraries can be reproduced”.
