A Second Look at LVP, an Early EIC Accelerator Winner

LVP Engineering & Constructions, a machine builder in Temse in East Flanders, was the only Belgian company among the bottom-up winners of the EIC Accelerator pilot's March 2020 cut-off. The European Commission's list of selected companies names it with the project OPTAINER, grant only, and no partner company. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,813,619.50 towards a total cost of €2,590,885 for the project, which ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 October 2022, according to the CORDIS fact sheet. The grant paid for Optainer, an automated station that washes and dries the insulated containers supermarket chains use to carry chilled food from their distribution centres to their shops.

Six years on, LVP is still trading, still profitable and still the same size it was before the grant. Its accounts for 2025, filed on 24 June 2026, show a profit of €146,569 and an average of 14.4 full-time staff, according to the National Bank of Belgium's Central Balance Sheet Office, figures matched by Companyweb. The application had promised 123 new jobs.

A Profitable Family Workshop, Not a Scale-up

The Belgian company register lists LVP as active and in a normal legal situation, with two establishment units and employer registration since July 2006, according to KBO/BCE Public Search. The Belgian Official Gazette holds 17 notices for the company, from its incorporation notice of 16 June 2006 to a change of directors and articles published on 10 March 2023; none concerns insolvency, liquidation or a change of name. KBO names Benjamin and Erik Van Pottelbergh as directors since 27 February 2023, the date the company also took the new BV legal form.

The company's own site says its team's experience "dates back to 1980" and that it has its own engineering department, workshops and assembly teams for the whole of Europe, according to LVP Engineering. Its container washing division, LVP Cleantec, says it has built washing lines for refrigerated containers since 2005, from Finland to Gran Canaria, and that by the end of 2024 there were 314 LVP washing lines in 150 logistics centres in Europe, according to the LVP Cleantec page. No outside source confirms that count. The legal entity is younger than both claims: it was registered in June 2006, and the Gazette shows restructuring notices in 2007, and the public records checked for this article do not show which entity carried the earlier activity.

LVP is not in the EIC Fund's portfolio: none of the 326 companies on the list of EIC Fund investee companies, fetched page by page for this article, is LVP. That fits the award, which was grant only. No outside funding round, investor or acquisition could be found.

The Technology: One Arm That Washes and Dries

Supermarket chains move chilled food to their shops in reusable insulated containers that come back to a distribution centre to be cleaned, often by hand. LVP's Phase 1 feasibility study described existing machines as able to wash only the outside well, as neglecting drying, and as using "over 46L per container", with hot water at 65°C to kill bacteria, according to the CORDIS fact sheet of the Phase 1 project, a €50,000 SME Instrument grant from August to November 2019.

Optainer's answer is a robot arm that washes and dries the container in a single movement, using cold, recycled water. The project objective promised a cycle of 1 minute 40 seconds, about €0.5 and 1 kWh per container, and less than 4 litres of fresh water, a cut in water use of more than 97%, according to CORDIS. The CORDIS results page lists three patent applications behind the system, filed in 2015, 2017 and 2019. The 2017 one, published by the European Patent Office as EP3479904 in May 2019, covers a valve that lets one water line feed both the washing and rinsing nozzles of a washing arm, with Erik Van Pottelbergh and Wouter Van Troos as inventors.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The award was announced locally in June 2020, when Made in Oost-Vlaanderen reported a score of 14.5 out of 15 and quoted the consultancy Inspiralia as saying that LVP was the only Belgian company among 72 winners. The Commission's list partly contradicts this: it does name LVP as the only Belgian bottom-up winner of the March 2020 cut-off, but the same cut-off also selected the Brussels company moveUP in its separate COVID-19 track.

LVP's final report on CORDIS says the project built three prototypes where one had been planned. The first cleaned Type E containers; the second, installed for long-term testing at a customer's logistics centre, handled Type C containers and added a door opener, a label remover and camera software that reads container numbers and flags dirty or broken containers; a third, mobile unit was shown at the IFFA trade fair in Frankfurt in May 2022, according to the CORDIS report. The report says the company "already managed to sell Optainers to a new customer for a total amount of € 1.539.000" and holds a framework contract worth €260,000 for 10 double units that can be upgraded to Optainer, and that "all our critical milestones were achieved" despite Covid travel limits and part shortages. Neither customer is named, and no third party has reported either deal.

1. Working Optainer at TRL 8DeliveredThree prototypes, one tested at a customer site, per the CORDIS report; product now marketed on the LVP Cleantec site.
2. 1'40" cycle, 1 kWh, under 4 litres of fresh waterPartly shownRepeated as fact in the final report; no measured test results published.
3. First Optainer salesCompany claim€1.539M sale and €260,000 framework contract reported by LVP; customers not named.
4. €109.1M turnover in year 5 of salesNot achievedNo turnover figure published; gross margin of €1.62M in 2025.
5. 123 new jobsNot achievedStaff fell from 16.8 FTE in 2020 to 14.4 FTE in 2025.

The EU's money bought a product that exists: the LVP Cleantec site sells Optainer in a Type C version for containers on rollers and a Type E version for containers on a fixed chassis, credits the Horizon 2020 grant agreement 961203, and claims savings of 156,000 kg of CO₂ and 5,352,000 litres of drinking water a year compared with manual washing, according to the product page. The page does not say for how many containers or sites that figure holds.

The Accounts: Steady, Not Growing

As a small company, LVP files abbreviated accounts, which give gross margin but not turnover, so the €109.1 million target cannot be checked directly. What the filings do show is a business of the same size before, during and after the grant. Gross margin was €1,519,741 in 2019, €1,728,813 in 2022 and €1,619,689 in 2025; total assets fell from €4,724,599 at the end of 2021 to €4,075,003 at the end of 2025, according to the NBB filings. The company has been profitable in every year from 2021 to 2025, with results between €4,805 (2024) and €252,729 (2023).

Equity peaked at €1,865,121 at the end of 2023. It then fell to €1,739,294 and €1,659,197 because the company paid out €130,632 to its shareholders for 2024 and €226,666 for 2025, more than its profit in either year, according to the same filings. Average staff peaked at 19.1 full-time equivalents in 2021, in the middle of the EIC project, and has fallen every year since.

LVP's undated jobs page, checked in October 2026, seeks a technician-fitter in mechanics or electromechanics and accepts applications from service technicians and design engineers. Whether these posts are new or replacements is not stated.

Why It Matters for Europe

Optainer's selling point is water. In June 2025 the Commission adopted a Water Resilience Strategy that asks for water efficiency in the EU to improve "by at least 10% until 2030", according to the Euro-Mediterranean Information System on water; ANSA reported that critics, among them a Maltese MEP, called the target too weak because it is not binding. Reusable transport packaging is also gaining legal weight: the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40, in force since 11 February 2025 and applying from 12 August 2026, sets binding reuse targets, according to the European Commission. More reuse means more washing, and a washer that saves water and heat fits both policies. LVP's CORDIS report also links Optainer to the European Green Deal through lower energy use. None of that has yet shown up as growth in the company's accounts.

The Verdict