The first research on a direct cooled EFC system was published in the US by Stepakoff.

The first EFC crystallizers were developed at TU Delft. Indirect cooling was introduced and the first crystallizer was called the Cooled Disk Column Crystallizer (CDCC) followed by the Scraped Cooled Wall Crystallizer (SCWC).

The continuous EFC process was developed at TU Delft for the recovery of Magnesium Sulfate for an industrial Magnesium Sulphate stream.

The first skid-mounted EFC Pilot unit was tested successfully at Nedmag (Veendam, The Netherlands) on a waste Magnesium Sulfate stream followed by tests at AVR (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) on an industrial Sodium (Bi)Carbonate stream.

EFC Separations BV was founded as a spin-off company from TU Delft to develop and commercialise the EFC process.