Food Industry Turns to New Technology to Make Spaces Covid-Free - Bloomberg

Food Industry Turns to New Technology to Make Spaces Covid-Free - Bloomberg 

Startups Race to Develop Tech That
Can Clear Workplaces of Covid

Companies are desperate for ways to sanitize offices,
factories and stores. But surfaces are one thing—air is another.

By Larissa Zimberoff

September 18, 2020, 9:00 AM GMT+1

Smithfield Foods Inc. thought it was doing great. In the
first quarter of this year, the pork giant’s earnings were up 190% over the
same period in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and the close quarters of
meatpacking plants made them ideal places for the coronavirus to spread.

Employee infection rates spiked, forcing temporary closures
and sudden shortages in supermarket meat aisles. After its revenue plummeted in
the second quarter, Smithfield and other meat processors started looking around
for strategies to make sure the same thing didn’t happen again.

While the industry has in some cases installed plastic
shields between workstations and made other coronavirus-related changes, some
executives contend social distancing isn’t feasible in such a labor-intensive
environment. Smithfield, the largest pork company in the world with 42,000
employees in 40 U.S. locations, decided to invest in some relatively new
technology to deal with the threat of contagion.

Howard Anderson, the company’s chief engineer, said he
reviewed a range of novel approaches, but is most hopeful when it comes to
ionized hydrogen peroxide vapor—and a machine to spread it built by Dayton,
Ohio-based Extreme Microbial Technologies (EMT).

“What we liked about [EMT] is that it’s a proactive
solution,” said Anderson. Many other options are passive, requiring that air be
pulled through a unit to be treated. Smithfield, owned by Hong Kong-based WH
Group, said it has installed EMT’s units in six locations, including a plant in
Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with three more locations
soon to follow.

According to data collected by Food & Environment
Reporting Network (FERN), some 42,567 meatpacking workers have tested positive
for Covid-19 and 203 have died.

In the spring, the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls became
the number one virus hotspot in America, with a cluster of 644 confirmed cases
among employees and people they were in contact with. In May, 76 workers at the
largest of the Smithfield Foods plants in Tar Heel, North Carolina, became
infected, according to local health officials.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the
federal agency responsible for the safety of workers, recently fined Smithfield
$13,494. The company is fighting the penalty. Smithfield declined to comment on
how many of its employees have been infected or died in the pandemic.

EMT, which was started in 2016, contends its technology is
an environmentally safe way to help reduce coronavirus in the workplace. But
experts say it’s a long way from being able to clear pathogens from the air.

The backbone of EMT’s technology is a “coated honeycomb
matrix” that, when hit by ultraviolet light, pulls moisture from the air and
forms hydrogen peroxide. Particles are pushed out of the machine, spreading
through a room and landing on surfaces. According to EMT, when the particles
come into contact with pathogens, a chemical reaction neutralizes them.

The company makes standalone units for office spaces (which
are the size of a waste-paper basket) or uses a building’s heating and cooling
(HVAC) system for bigger areas.

According to the Trump administration, hydrogen peroxide is
active against a wide range of microorganisms, including bacteria, yeasts,
fungi, viruses and spores. But at high concentrations, the molecule can be
harmful to humans. EMT contends the limited amount of vapor produced by its
machines makes them safe for humans as well as food production.

“This technology would not work fast enough, nor penetrate a
droplet traveling through the air in time to inactivate it before hitting a
person’s face.”

In a study done by the University of Florida in August,
ionized hydrogen peroxide was found to be 99.7% successful at reducing
microbial contamination levels of the coronavirus on stainless steel surfaces.
But the technology is only a first step toward total indoor protection, since
most coronavirus transmission is believed to take place through airborne
droplets.

“Surfaces are responsible for maybe 5% of all transmissions.
Likely much lower,” said Dr. Erin Bromage, an associate professor at University
of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and an infectious disease expert. “This technology
would not work fast enough, nor penetrate a droplet traveling through the air
in time to inactivate it before hitting a person’s face.”

Still, EMT’s tech has been shown to work against a long list
of contaminants that food companies were already worried about, including E.
coli, Salmonella, Listeria and the norovirus.

Dr. David Acheson, a food safety expert and former official
with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said that if a vapor mechanism can
kill the norovirus, it can kill the coronavirus. The FDA granted an Emergency
Use Authorization for vaporized hydrogen peroxide to decontaminate N95 respirators,
a process used by 6,300 hospitals across the U.S.

“It’s a reasonable assumption that it will work on
surfaces,” Acheson said. “But any evidence that it will prevent
person-to-person transmission [is] a big question mark,”

“It’s a way that buildings are going to help distinguish
themselves to get people back.”

Despite the questions, industry analysts are cautiously
optimistic about the technology.

“Let’s say we get a vaccine tomorrow that everyone wants to
take, I think that as these investments move forward, it’s about future
proofing [a building],” said John Walsh, an industry analyst at Credit Suisse.
“It’s a way that buildings are going to help distinguish themselves to get
people back into [office] spaces.”

But for Nick Santhanam, a senior partner at McKinsey &
Co., whether companies like EMT keep growing after the Covid-19 pandemic
recedes remains an “open question.”

“People are thinking about it, and clients are asking about
it. You’re going to see a massive surge [in adoptions],” Santhanam said. “But
will it keep going? That’s tbd.”

Randy Mount, 51, chief executive of EMT, began his career in
real estate remediation, eradicating contaminants like mold from residential
homes. That was how he stumbled upon the use of vaporized hydrogen peroxide.
“We could decontaminate anything,” said Mount. “Restaurants, homes,
universities and schools—we started getting a reputation for being the guys to
call.”

In addition to Smithfield, his client list now includes
French-owned Bonduelle Fresh Americas, which he said installed units in one of its
four U.S. locations; sausage maker Glier’s Goetta, which has six units in its
Covington, Kentucky, production facility; and Graeter’s Ice Cream, a 1,500
employee-company that has installed seven machines in its production facility
in Mt. Auburn, Ohio.

EMT installation costs are calculated by cubic feet and
bio-load (the number or range of microorganisms in a facility). A machine for a
typical food production facility of 5,000 square feet with 12-foot ceilings
would cost about $11,000. Mount said the company is on track to make $10
million in sales this year.

The technology EMT uses isn’t new, however. Vapor
purification, or “nonthermal plasma,” was patented in 2014 by San Diego-based
Puradigm. While some businesses began taking steps to address airborne threats
long ago, most didn’t see the benefit, given the expense. The pandemic has
changed that, creating a huge opportunity for businesses already in the field
as more food-processing and food retail look for help.

Padraig Lawlor, Puradigm’s chief operating officer,
estimated his company’s 2020 sales will be $17 million. But next year, the
projection is $72 million, Lawlor said, adding that he’s mulling an IPO for
2022.

A Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. Restaurant Ahead Of Earnings
Figures

Customers place orders inside a Chipotle in Culver City,
California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

One retailer that put such precautions in place was Chipotle
Mexican Grill, a restaurant chain which grappled with norovirus outbreaks in
2015 and 2017.

In between those years, the company installed combination
ultraviolet/vapor hydrogen peroxide systems built by RGF Environmental Group
Inc. In 2018, Chipotle added separate restroom units to “address
microbiological contaminants, including viruses that originate there,” wrote
Kerry Bridges, Chipotle’s vice president of food safety, in an email.

The air-purification systems sold by RGF are similar to what
Puradigm and EMT sell, said Dr. James Marsden, RGF’s executive director of
science and technology. Marsden was a professor at Kansas State University and
led Chipotle’s food safety group after the norovirus outbreak.

RGF’s Reme Halo ionizer unit.Source: Ryan Murphy/RGF

Florida-based RGF said its sales grew by 500% this year, and
that it’s currently testing its product’s effectiveness against the
coronavirus.

At Chef’s Garden’s, a 350-acre vegetable farm in Huron,
Ohio, that sells to high-end restaurants, business vanished when Covid-19
arrived. As the company pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales, Chief Executive
Officer Bob Jones, Jr. looked for ways to protect his 140 employees. He
installed EMT units in April, both to keep staff healthy and “protect the
integrity of the product,” he said.

Mike Willing, chief executive officer of Aloha Seafood in
San Francisco, said his company’s biggest problem before the coronavirus was
that when someone got the flu, it would spread like wildfire through the staff.
In 2019, he installed machines from EMT. Since then, Willing said he hasn’t had
a single case of the coronavirus to report. “We feel more comfortable with it
and my guys are ecstatic,” he said.