All-natural Stock Each Week in Its Factory in Ireland
In 2005, Simply Soups bet on a technology startup that promised to slash the soup maker’s cleaning and disinfection costs with little more than sodium chloride (the main ingredient in table salt) and water. The pitch: Install the startup’s machine onsite and use the solutions it generates to sanitize the factory’s lines and tanks rather than truck in chemicals.
The startup, called Trustwater, produces a detergent and a disinfectant powerful enough to destroy any microbe. Its devices build on a decades-old invention involving passing electricity through a salt solution. The process, known as electrochemical activation, was developed by Russian scientists in the 1970s to treat drilling fluids in the oil and gas industries in Uzbekistan.
For Simply Soups, which produces 150,000 liters of all-natural stock each week in its factory in Ireland, near Dublin, installing Trustwater’s unit meant it could forego the expensive chemical it had relied on for sanitizing its equipment. And because Trustwater’s solutions work at ambient temperatures, Simply Soups didn’t need to spend time or money heating them. Another bonus: Trustwater’s disinfectant doesn’t need to be rinsed off. “We have cut our production costs by reducing the water consumption and chemical use,” says Barry Brophy, Simply Soups’ plant manager.
As concern about water and energy consumption captures executives’ attention, Trustwater, based 50 miles outside Cork, Ireland, and a handful of competitors, including MIOX in Albuquerque, N.M., and Radical Waters, which manufactures its equipment in Johannesburg, South Africa, are championing technologies that use the Russian invention to generate cleaning solutions onsite. Trustwater has 260 machines - its smallest is about the size of a shoebox - installed around the world.