Everybody knows that powder flavors are inferior to liquid flavors in terms of the delivery of taste and aroma. Our technology has changed that paradigm. We’re able to deliver the same taste and aroma profiles. Our technology doesn’t evaporate them, doesn’t change them and so when we look at going forward, we’re looking at CoolZoom® as the form of the future and we’re able to compete in applications with liquids very effectively because we can deliver more flavor actives, more concentrated taste, for lower use rates and lower cost.

The dryer behind us was built in October of 2008, and it was the first attempt to provide proof of concept that if you formulated the slurry correctly that you could dry it at room temperature. And I think for us that was a real aha moment because it didn’t take us long to do the proof of concept. It did take us a while to scale. If you look at the spray dry industry or the delivery system world, there’s been no real development for a long time. I mean spray drying is from 1872 and the way it worked is you bought a piece of equipment, just like you buy a car and then you learn how to drive it.  And so the whole industry had learned how to spray dry (the same way) because they all bought the same piece of equipment. So everybody knew how to write a spray dry formula, and they pretty much got the same output from the 400-degree heat of a spray dryer. 

What we did (differently) was we took a specific view of flavor and fragrance. We weren’t trying to dry everything in the world. What we built in our technology and conceptually is a process specifically to dry flavors and fragrances.  And so it’s an end in opportunity. It required us to reinvent how you make slurries, how do you make encapsulated oils in a carrier matrix. We ended up making high solid slurries, if you don’t put the water in, you don’t have to evaporate it out. And that required that we invent proprietary atomization techniques. And from that, we were able to dry the material in an environment, in the dryer that 110 degrees versus 400 degrees from a regular spray dryer. And that allows us to retain all those volatiles that allow you to deliver taste and aroma. 

We did a taste-off essentially, against a powder that they had, we had used the same flavor, is that they provided a flavor to us, and to a standard spray dryer. And the powders were now being compared at that meeting. And what I distinctly remember was Craig Haeglin’s comment, he tasted the normally spray-dried powder in the form of a drink. And he says, “not bad.” And then he tasted the Zoom powder in the form of a drink and the, he said, “wow.” He said, and that stuck in my mind. It’s the Zoom wow, I call it the Zoom wow effect, because the powders were outstandingly different. 

What makes ZoomEssence so special? It’s our technology. The technology is unsurpassed from the point of view of its ability to present to the end-user the flavor experience they’re expecting and or we exceed what they’re expecting. The other thing about ZoomEssence that makes us so special is our ability to think out of the box. That has been a key thing for us. That’s why we’re a fully integrated manufacturer from the raw materials to the final product and we build all the equipment in between.  It’s our ability to question why are things done this way? Why are flavors made this way? Why are powders made this way? What can we do differently to make them better? As you start to peel the onion, you start to go through those questions, solutions start to pop right out at you. Bob’s been told, he’s been on a number times, how many times have you’ve been told that what we do is not impossible? 

 Right. I mean, that’s true. I mean, we’ve heard that a number of times because it’s different and nobody’s thought that you could actually dry something without heat, and that’s a pretty common theme, at least it was for a long time. Yeah. We were accused of having a little man behind the green curtain, so to speak, but we don’t, and that’s the beauty of it. So we bring a totally different viewpoint to solving these problems and that’s permeated through our organization. I mean, some of the young scientists and engineers that we’ve brought into the company over time, we’ve kind of impressed on them that, you have to go back and rethink things. I mean, don’t take for granted the way it’s done in that industry is the way we need to do it. Don’t think that way. You have to rethink everything because what we do is quite different when you get to the fundamentals of it.”  

“We definitely have utilized physics in this low-temperature drying process. The fact that other spray dry design-builders haven’t yet done it, and that companies that do spray dry and haven’t done it, just speaks volumes to me that they’re not doing any research, and they’re not really pushing the edge of our understanding of drying processes. And if you look around, I think what ZoomEssence has uncovered is really kind of a tip of an iceberg in a way, in that there are lots of places where this type of thinking and type of technology development could have an impact outside of the flavor and fragrance industry. “

“My number one belief is aroma. I think the aroma is the most important thing you can do when you’re trying to deliver an expectation or an experience to the consumer. Nobody eats stuff that doesn’t smell appetizing, or interesting. And so, one of the push is, because we can retain stuff, is to be able to deliver aroma from a powder form, which really was hard to do before. And the taste is the completion of that experience. So when consumers are promised an experience, buy a product with the branding around it and the marketing around it, if you don’t deliver against that promise, if it’s supposed to be apple, and it sort of tastes like apple, or it has an aftertaste, or it’s bitter, then at the end of the day, they’re going to throw that to the side and say, “Well, that was disappointing.” And really, in this world today, you get one shot. And so for me, if we can deliver on aroma and taste, we’re really comfortable that the consumer will get more than they expected in terms of the experience. “

” The more and more that we work with our Zooming@ process, the more and more we uncover interesting ideas. One of the first being that we did retain such high levels of the flavor into powder, maybe being well above 90% more in the bracket of 90 to 99% of flavor retention in the powder, which is unheard of in this industry, but as you move forward, what does that lead to? Well, we discovered that it leads to less utilization, less powder utilization in applications where the powders used to flavor a product. Our use rates are much lower than typical spray-dried powders.  

 That’s an economic benefit for the end-user or for the manufacturer of that food product, but also, it’s a double win because we’re delivering a better flavor at the same time and utilization rate has gone down, so it’s kind of a win-win for the end customer. The other thing that was a big “aha” on Bob’s behalf was the recognition that as we’ve matured in this business, in this business of manufacturing these powders, we have discovered that formulating flavors in the usual manner is really not beneficial to our process. We’ve been re-thinking ways to present powder to our process.  

 We’ve been removing things from those flavors that are not necessary for us and what that leads to is us providing flavors, which have much higher active ingredients in them than a liquid of the same type. That’s where the slogan powder is the new liquid comes from. In fact, our powders can outperform liquids across the board because we can increase the concentrations, we can remove a lot of the diluents that aren’t necessary. We don’t have, we don’t require them for our process. In fact, they’re detrimental in some cases. I think that is going to be a huge paradigm shift for this business.  “

But we get a lot of feedback from our customers. If we can teach them how to use the product, I mean Chuck was talking about the use rate issue. We were beside ourselves that when we first started that, for the first year or two we didn’t realize that we were that much stronger. We just didn’t realize it, and we didn’t realize that people who we called on would actually take the product and, “Looks like a powder, must be a powder. I’m going to use it like a powder”, and they put it in there at probably two to three times the use rate and they get this really not a very nice experience. And as Chuck said, we realized we needed some better skill sets and we hired people with better skill sets. If a project and an opportunity are set up correctly, we will win, almost close to 100%, it’s that big of a delta in terms of performance capability.