Wax Tolling Keeps Your Manufacturing Process Rolling

The old saying that time is money applies to manufacturing at every level. And buying key ingredients for your signature products already blended can save you valuable time. Koster Keunen offers custom wax blending and wax tolling that meet exacting product specifications for a wide variety of industries.

With in-house wax chemists and process engineers, Koster Keunen manages blending and manufacturing on site at our Watertown, Connecticut facility. Our capabilities include custom blending, reaction chemistry, flexible packaging, and various finished forms. If you are looking for a bespoke blend, we offer various run sizes to accommodate customer requirements. Is cost consciousness the byword for your brand’s blends? Koster Keunen not only offers highly competitive pricing on individual waxes, our chemists can also work with your formulators to devise new combinations that stay on budget, while maintaining the quality your brand is known for.

Form matters, and we deliver wax in the usual solid forms, from slabs to granules, in addition to bulk liquids. But did you know that Koster Keunen also offers manufacturing of specialty products and formulations? Indeed, Koster Keunen takes pride in creating high-quality example formulations, which we showcase in our quarterly online magazine, The Buzz, and blog articles. If you are looking for end-to-end manufacturing, from anhydrous liquids to solid formulations, our team recognizes that quality and meticulous processes are necessary to meeting your goals.

In modern industry, beeswax is not limited to candles and seals. From cosmetics to ink, beeswax sports a uniquely useful profile. Beeswax contains a wide variety of components, from the cuticular wax and scale wax that the bees make themselves, to the propolis that consists of resins, oils, and other substances that the bees gather from the plants that they visit in the process of collecting nectar and providing the essential service of pollination. When the bees chew the waxes and propolis together, the enzymatic action adds yet another layer of chemical modification to the mixture. This is one of the reasons that it is so difficult to produce direct beeswax substitutes. For a breakdown of the chemical composition of beeswax and its physical and chemical properties, check out this article by Koster Keunen chemists.

Connecting the historical importance of beeswax to modern cosmetic chemistry, we can see why beeswax has never gone out of style. What other wax can be a structurant, a plasticizer, and a thickener in emulsions? What can go from oil-in-water to water-in-oil formulations and, with a comparatively low level of modification offer a firm, stable stick or a smooth, creamy butter? Take a look at our example formulations for some on-trend ideas that showcase beeswax.

Waxes may be the recognizable base for a product or an almost invisible staple component. But either way, choosing a supplier for such essential ingredients is of paramount importance. We offer FDA and USDA organic options in a variety of waxes. We also maintain GMPc certification for manufacturing. Quality may begin with the base ingredients, but at Koster Keunen we maintain that commitment right through shipment.

(Caption: Our Watertown, CT facility is powered by a 660kw solar array, offsetting almost 900 tons of carbon emissions per year.)

Besides offering the highest quality custom wax production, our environmentally friendly processes support sustainability commitments end to end.  Koster Keunen takes pride in producing the world’s best waxes in a facility that produces nearly all of the power we require with our solar array, and further supports the environment by processing with recycled water.

From cosmetic chemistry to food safety and packaging and industrial processing, Koster Keunen has the experience to produce the custom blending and tolling to suit your brand. Whether you have specific tolling or custom blend needs or would like to explore how Koster Keunen could save you manufacturing time and money, contact us to start a conversation.