Neil Dudley: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Pederson Natural Farms podcast. We’re so excited you’re here. We look forward to sharing all about this beautiful industry of better-for-you food, meat, protein. We call the podcast the Pederson Natural Farms Podcast Powered by Protein because we’re going to talk all things bacon, sausage, ham, consumers, customers, vendors that support our business, employees that make us what we are, and peers, people that are in the industry competing for your attention and your dollar. And we think that’s healthy, and we’re proud of them, so we want to share about them as well. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure you tune in, don’t tune out, and remember, grab life by the bacon.

Oh boy. Here we are. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Pederson Natural Farms podcast. As always, I’m super stoked, excited to have a vendor of our company, a guy that helps us be all we can be through well equipment. Hey, Mr. Storey, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Hi, everybody out on YouTube. We’re glad you’re watching. We appreciate you paying attention to what we’re talking about here because we want to be a resource to you. We want you to have a better understanding of where your food comes from, how you get it, and all those things. Oh, and we’ve got the peanut gallery here again. Mr. Bert Walton, our Director of Maintenance here at Pederson Natural Farms. He does the most interaction with, well, Jason and Jason’s company, Scan America. Jason, tell us a little bit about yourself and Scan America. We’re not going to be here for hours so quickly, how’d you get in the sales business, equipment sales specifically? And why is your company called Scan America?

Jason Storey: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Scan America is a conglomeration, it’s a food manufacturing distributor, and the name came from the founder Charlie Parker travels extensively looking for unique products all over the world. And a lot of it comes out of Scandinavia. So, Norway, Denmark manufacture a lot of unique products. So, Charlie would travel and find these unique products and then bring them to the North America market. So that’s where the name-

Neil Dudley: When you say products, you are talking about equipment, right, mainly? 

Jason Storey: Capital equipment, Scan America produces or offers everything from tempering units, freezers, everything from front to back on a production line for food manufacturing equipment. So, whether it’s belt grills, spiral freezers, emulsifiers, pumps, everything you can think of from start to back on the food manufacturing equipment, we are a distributor for. Multiple different vendors all throughout Europe and Scandinavia, Italy, Germany, and Denmark, Norway, we are a distributor for those companies here in North America. 

Neil Dudley: Awesome. Well, I want to illustrate, or I think you illustrate what I appreciate in a salesperson, and that is the truth that we’re doing this interview in the conference room at Pederson Natural Farms, which is nowhere close to where you live. Right? And the other fact is we don’t buy every single piece of equipment that we use from you. Matter of fact, we might not buy very many pieces of equipment from you, but you are doing the work and the relationship building that I think all salesmen and women out there should think about doing. This podcast is very important to me. I think it’s a way our brand and our company becomes a resource to people. You saw that, you made the effort, spent the money to fly here and be a part of it. And to me, I just want to paint that picture for everybody out there. If you want to be in sales, RN sales, want to be a part of selling into this business as a guy who makes a lot of decisions about different things, that kind of service, that kind of commitment to being here for us is highly valued. So, thank you for showing up. And I hope that has some value for everybody listening. 

Jason Storey: I hope so as well. 

Neil Dudley: What’s that shirt you’re wearing again? Bert, what’d you call his shirt? 

Bert Walton: That’s argyle. 

Neil Dudley: Oh yeah. Okay. So, you came in an argyle sweater, you look nice. You’re going to be- definitely just came prepared and that’s another thing. You showed up 15 minutes early. I call it cowboy time. All these things, I’m just thinking you’re such a good example. Now, I’m not saying all this so Charlie gives you a raise. I truly believe it. I’m saying it because I value it. I want to run that through my own process. Am I doing those things for my customers, the people that buy product from Pederson’s? So, all of that’s really cool and good. Touch real quickly on how you got into sales. That’s a piece of the puzzle I think will be important. 

Jason Storey: Yeah, for me, I don’t know exactly when it started. I started off young playing golf. A couple of my dad’s friends were sales reps, and I think somewhere in my mind it stuck. I went into college as an economist and always going into the track of sales. I was in the pharmaceutical sales track with a recruiter. I worked two jobs in college as an intern. I worked for Minolta doing outside sales and then for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which is a very robust sales program. When I left college with my BSBA in economics, I was always going into sales. I was in pharmaceuticals, had a bunch of offers, but the pharmaceutical industry kind of went away. And my dad was always in construction. So, I’ve grown up on a construction site as free labor, and I enjoy that side of it – the construction side, hands on. So I went, I interviewed with a bunch of different companies, got a bunch of offers, but started my career at Sherwin-Williams. So, I live in Orlando. I was fortunate enough to have the hotel and theme park territory for Sherwin-Williams in Orlando. So, I had customers like Disney, Universal Studios, all of the hotels, which are robust in Orlando. And that’s where I started in sales. And kind of like where we’re at now, it’s a very personal relationship. So, customers buy from who they see and who they know. Products are secondary to relationships in my opinion, and having the invite here is more valuable to me, in my opinion, because seeing what people do in their own environment is the best way to understand how you can help them. So, this information, somebody may tell you one thing, but their physical actions are secondary and more important. And this is a really a powerful tool for me to understand. Thankfully, Bert answers the phone when I call, and we discuss how he’s working and what he’s doing and what challenges he has with my equipment. And I’m very proactive that way. I like to call the customers after we sold to them, check on them, making sure everything’s going well, because even if there is a negative, I’d rather address the negative quickly and solve that problem and move on.

Neil Dudley: To me, relationship might be even more important for you then a lot of people, because I can’t imagine, what is it? Something like 16 different brands of equipment you guys pedal, how are you going to know intimately every single one of those pieces of equipment. Now you might, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. It just seems to me like you have to have a good enough relationship with your customer that you can say I don’t know that answer, but I’ll be back.

Bert Walton: That’s right.

Jason Storey: I think being confident enough to say that is very important. Most people will fill the void with words. And if you don’t know, the most powerful thing you can say is I do not know. That way when I say I know, Bert has the confidence to trust me that I’m saying what I know to be true. And I will not do that. I will not say something that I do not know for fact to be true. And it’s the best way to go to business for me. 

Neil Dudley: Right. Or you might, but we’ll figure it out. I mean, they will always figure it out if your BSing them. I mean, you might get away with it for ten years, but someday, somewhere along the line, people will figure it out. All right, so let’s talk specifically now, because I think really this is probably the biggest value in this whole conversation, about- now, Bert, you may have to help me here because I don’t know the actual name of the equipment, but we have some equipment that helps us sanitize. It’s helped us throughout the pandemic make sure we are killing COVID all over our production facility. Bert, why don’t you tell the people a little bit about that piece of equipment and maybe let’s just explore the whole lifecycle of why we ever first bought the piece of equipment, then how surprising it was, if it was surprising, that it killed COVID. So just here you go. Tell us about it. 

Bert Walton: Yes, sir. Well, the FLO-D max, the machine that we use from Scan America, that was our first foray into ozone disinfection. So, we knew very little about it. So, the first step was just to educate us as the consumer of their product. And Jimmy and Jason both came in, spent the first day, I think, just telling us what it does, why it does what it does, and how it can help us. After that, it was just a matter of us implementing it properly. But that initial education was huge because it’s one thing to be handed a perfectly adequate piece of equipment, but if you don’t use it properly, then you’re going to have unrealistic expectations and they’ll never perform to the standard that you set.

Neil Dudley: Right. Now, Jason, who’s the company that makes this thing? Is it Scan America?

Jason Storey: No. So Jimco is Danish company. Jimmy Larson is the founder of Jimco. They’ve been manufacturing UV and ozone equipment for over 30 years for the purposes of air purification and surface disinfection. So, ozone is well known in the scientific community, but very unknown in say food manufacturing, pharmaceutical. There’s a lot of different applications for it. It is very well known as an oxidizer. In comparison, for people who don’t know, chlorine is an oxidizer. So, ozone is 50 times stronger than chlorine, but it’s non-toxic, it’s organic, and when we use it, you can still be organic. So Jimco is the manufacturer of this equipment out of Denmark. And the particular equipment that Pederson is using is FLO-D, which stands for photolytic oxidation. It’s the process by which we use UV light and a combination of oxygen split into ozone. And those two combinations of systems disinfects everything from rooms to equipment.

Neil Dudley: It goes everywhere. Like it gets- it just fills the room up.

Jason Storey: So, we like to say it’s homogenously filling the room. Gas is the most efficient way to fill any room. Comparingly, you can have a company come in and spray a chemical on- they call it atomizing it, that has what we call the umbrella effect. So, when you atomize a liquid, it still falls like a liquid. So, if you have a table or a chair or some kind of obstruction above, anything underneath is going to have the umbrella effect, nothing underneath is going to get wet. With a gas, it’s going to fill the room homogenously. So, whether it’s inside the electronics, whether it’s under a table, inside metal, inside of an outlet on top of a light fixture, ozone as a gas is going to fill the room completely. So, we can disinfect a complete room or a piece of equipment. So, our most success is equipment that’s difficult to clean, whether it’s a spiral freezer or a slicer or a stuffer. Because they’re intricate and because they’re a combination of electronics and equipment, with most disinfections, you have to disassemble the equipment very robustly to be able to separate-

Neil Dudley: Oh my gosh, I wish you would have had this- well, you probably did, like you said, they’d been making it for 30 years or something. I wish I would’ve known about it back when I was the cleaning crew here. We used to wear them green scrubbies out like you wouldn’t believe, cleaning all this stainless steel around here. And we still do. I mean, to me, it’s a great solution. I was wondering, just as you’re talking, does every food manufacturing company in the county own one of these pieces of equipment? 

Jason Storey: No, unfortunately.

Neil Dudley: Geeze, they should. Do you have any competition? 

Jason Storey: Not in the way we do it. So typically, a food manufacturing company will do a three-step process, solid, soap, and disinfection. So we replace the disinfection cycle. Plants will use either a liquid chemical, or some plants that are a little bit more advanced will use a gas chlorine, so a chlorinated gas. Chlorinated gas is much more efficient than a liquid chemical. There’s no labor involved. So, when you have labor, you have to worry that that person is touching every surface and they’re leaving the product on, which is a dwell time, long enough to disinfect whatever you’re disinfecting. So, there’s a human component that unfortunately is generally the most missed of every step.

Neil Dudley: Don’t lose that thought. I see Bert nodding his head. What do you agree with in there? 

Bert Walton: All of that, especially when it comes down to the way that the gas is able to permeate something as intricate as a spiral oven or spiral chiller to where you can’t really ensure that a liquid’s going to get there. You can spray it to the best of your ability, but there’s no way to really know if it’s hitting all of those spots, first of all. The distribution of the disinfectant is terrific using the gas form. The other thing is, like you touched on with the person that’s applying it, not just their proficiency with whatever disinfectant that they’re using, the persistence of the chemical is also going to be an issue. So, the same diligence with which they apply that chemical needs to be used whenever they remove it, whether it’s rinsing it, otherwise, especially in the fully cooked environment, then you’ve got leftover disinfectant that is on food surface- food contact surfaces. 

Neil Dudley: And I think- well, keep going. 

Bert Walton: Going back to the half-life that we spoke of before, you just turn it off, it’ll cease production or generation of ozone, and then gradually, it’ll be gone. It’ll be back to its original oxygenated state.

Neil Dudley: It’s such a beautiful concept. I mean, it’s just you do the thing, and you disappear, and the world is all exactly the same as it was when you showed up. To me, that’s just really cool. There’s something, I don’t know. Is it way more expensive than any of these other systems? I mean, where is the adoption? And this is starting to sound like a sales pitch for these JIMCO- 

Bert Walton: It should be. 

Neil Dudley: Well, okay then. I’m not necessary interested in selling the thing, but it’s sensible, just logically.

Jason Storey: Yeah. So, cost of ownership is reasonably low. We have no maintenance on the equipment other than lamp changes. So, the lamps that we use produce two wavelengths, and we’ll do a little bit after this about the actual science. So, the lamps’ replacement and the ozone sensor replacement. So, the lamps have a 10,000-hour lifespan and the unit itself is calculating that so you don’t have to remember. So, the only maintenance on the equipment is a lamp change and an ozone sensor change. And typically, if you run the unit 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which you don’t, but if you did, you get about 13, 14 months out of them. But if you use them like most plants, you probably get two to two and a half years out of the lamps. So, A, there’s no labor, B, there’s no water, and C, there’s no storage of chemicals. So, it is completely organic. We work in a lot of fields like flour and chai and flax. We disinfect eggs for hatcheries instead of using formaldehyde gas. And ozone is completely organic. What we like to say is that the earth cleans itself with two main components that we don’t have inside. We have UV light and ozone. So, both of those components are non-existent inside. We filter out the light through the building and the ceiling and the windows, and ozone is not produced. So that’s what we’re recreating. We’re recreating what the environment does to clean itself. 

Neil Dudley: Is this why everybody’s so worried about our ozone layer?

Jason Storey: The ozone layer is kind of a yin and yang effect with UV and ozone. So, the ozone layer actually protects us against UV light. The sun produces four wavelengths of UV – UV-A, UV-B is what we experience outside, UV-C and UV-V are the more powerful wavelengths of light that we are not exposed to thanks to the ozone layer. So, if the ozone layer wasn’t there, it would be like a really bad vampire movie. We would walk outside, and we would disintegrate. The light is very powerful. 

Neil Dudley: Wow. That powerful? 

Jason Storey: So that is what we are recreating. 

Neil Dudley: Time out. Disintegrate? Holy moly. Let’s never lose that ozone. 

Jason Storey: I’m a son of a contractor, so you put a tarp on something, you go outside and in six months, you touch the tarp and it literally just rips apart. So the sun is breaking down the molecules of that tarp like it does your skin. So, a sunburn is similar. So, you get a sunburn from UV-A and UV-B. So UV-C and UV-V are much more powerful wavelengths, and that’s what we reproduce. 

Neil Dudley: Well, hey, I take your word for it. I’m just giving you a little bit of a hard time there. But let’s see, what were we- we were exploring like why everybody doesn’t have one of these. To me, I just can’t figure it out. It doesn’t sound more expensive.  

Jason Storey: It’s not. 

Neil Dudley: Okay. Is it less effective?

Jason Storey: No. So, we’re as effective as any process. So, the most effective would be chlorinated gas. And like I said earlier, ozone is 50 times stronger than chlorine. So chlorinated gas, the negative is it’s toxic and it eats electronics and stainless steel. Ozone has zero effect on stainless steel, it has zero effect on electronics. So, it’s more powerful as an oxidizer and it has zero negative effect on equipment. The other most powerful thing about ozone is there’s no chance that a microorganism can become immune. So, with chemicals and any other chemical, an organism can be exposed to very little parts of it and it can become immune or can become a super strain. That’s not possible with ozone. Ozone is an oxidizer. So, it’s literally being burned. It’s called cold combustion. So, there’s no immunity and there’s no mutation against being burned. 

Neil Dudley: So, if a human got locked in a room with this machine going, and you couldn’t turn it off, that would be the end of days?  

Jason Storey: I don’t think there’s ever, that I know of, been a case, but it’s possible. So, we’re very cautious. The number one thing we say at Jimco is that if we can’t do it safely, we won’t do it. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter the reductions, we always do an onsite trial. Ozone works like water is wet. The science is getting it to work in your environment and do it safely. So, if we don’t feel you can be safe with it or you won’t be safe with it, we will not sell you the product. So, safety is key, but a reduction-

Neil Dudley: Well, that’s with anything. I mean, waking up every day requires a certain amount of safety, calculation and paying attention to what’s going on.

Jason Storey: So, the good thing about our equipment is it data logs. So it has safety features on there as a light. So once the ozone levels are above safe levels and there are safe levels of ozone – the FDA and the USDA, I’m sorry, the OSHA have levels of ozone that humans can be exposed to. Those levels are 0.05 to 0.1. When we disinfect, though, we create high levels of ozone. We’re trying to shoot for above 3 PPM up to 10 PPM. So, parts per million is PPM. So that’s what we’re shooting for. Much higher than humans are allowed to be exposed to, but the good thing is ozone is a very distinct smell, Bert can attest to that, and want to be in the room long enough to do any damages because the noticeable smell. And it’s similar to chlorine in a pool. If you’re exposed to it, it goes to your mucous membranes, which would be your eyes and your lungs. So you would cough and you would notice a burning in your eyes. So, you would notice it very well before any length of time it would take to do any damage. But Bert can tell us about the smell. It’s very distinct.

Bert Walton: It is. And it’s detectable at such low levels that the perception that there’s still ozone being generated in the room is often a misperception. Because the smell is so strong, people think, oh, there’s ozone in there, it’s going to be toxic. You could still smell it at a fraction of what the safe level is. 

Neil Dudley: Or even the level we’re trying to hit to do the disinfection. Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m almost wanting to chase a rabbit that is just my- I love the smell of rain, which just growing up in the country and being a rancher’s son and just that smell is great to me, and it’s ozone. And that’s got to be at such small levels. Maybe it’s just an example of the world doing its job with ozone.  

Jason Storey: Right. In science, it’s normally referred to as nature’s detergent. So, ozone and UV light is the way the earth maintains a clean environment. So between mold and mildew, generally when you see your house, the north side of your house that doesn’t get any direct sunlight is the side that grows mold or mildew on it. That’s because it’s not getting direct UV light and it gets less ozone. 

Neil Dudley: All right. So, man, this is so fun. I hope the listeners, I mean, even if all you do is eat Pederson’s sausage, bacon, ham, whatever it might be, you’re hearing some of what the intricate workings of this company are. I mean, there’s companies around the world, Jimco’s a good example, Jason and Scan America are a good example of people bringing us solutions all the time to get better, be more like what we want to be. I think as a guy that’s part of this company, I know we want to come and go and make change and nobody ever knew it, just leave the world the same or better than it was when we got here. So, to me, this ozone solution is a great one. What happened at the pandemic? So, I got to imagine nobody even knew COVID was coming two years ago. Was it a surprise to y’all how valuable this ozone technology turned out to be? 

Jason Storey: So, for me, it wasn’t a shock. COVID is part of the coronavirus family. There’s multiple viruses in that family, SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, and then MERS, which is the Middle Eastern respiratory virus in 2012. So, this is an evolution, and I think it’s going to be more of a stay. We typically get exposed of a couple of viruses every couple of years, whether it’s H2N1 or however many there are, swine flu, bird flu. I think our reaction to it was different this time. I don’t think anybody remembers when SARS-CoV-1 came around or MERS came around. So, I think this is just an evolution in how we are going to react to them. And I think air quality is going to be important. So, Pederson is on the cutting edge as far as technology. And being open to have this conversation about using technology is why there’s not more in the market. When I typically deal with a customer, they don’t want to have the conversation. They want to push everything away, put it in the closet, sweep it under the rug.

Neil Dudley: We’ve been doing it like this for 20 years and it works just fine. Why mess with it?

Jason Storey: Yeah, exactly. And you have to be willing to accept that there’s something that you may not know to be open to new ideas, and it takes a confident person to be able to be open to new ideas. So, I think that’s what we struggle with most is getting people to accept the fact that the tried-and-true chemical method may not be the best way to do it. Ozone is a mainstay in chemistry and science. 

Neil Dudley: I think people just get scared of the truth they can’t see it. You can see that chemical you put on, you can touch it, it can burn your finger when you touch it, all those things, like I know that must be working. Where if you don’t see it, it’s just doing the job, it’s hard to- I guess, what would you do? Swab just to make sure and do some of those kinds of things- 

Bert Walton: Plates and swabs is what we did, we did pre operation [inaudible 24:38]

Neil Dudley: -testimony that we tested this thing, people. 

Bert Walton: And the results were not surprising, but it was very impressive.

Neil Dudley: What we wanted, what we need. Did you immediately run out and start calling all your customers and saying this stuff kills COVID? That’s what I would have done.

Bert Walton: It kills everything. 

Jason Storey: So yeah, we do two- Let’s say we have two distinct, let’s say product lines. They’re not definitely product lines, but two different applications. High-level of ozone for disinfection and low level of ozone for air purification. So, air purification is viral transfer or viral reduction. So, we produce a unit called the MAC500 that produces FDA approved levels for human beings, which is 0.05. That 0.05 is literally the magic pill. I mean, it just is an amazing reduction in anything organic in the air. So, like a swimming pool, trying to keep it clean with a filter alone would never work. You have to use chlorine in the pool. Similarly, in a room, you can’t use like a HEPA filter or filtration on your HVAC only because it’s very reliant on the size of the particle, A, and B, air changes per hour. With ozone, we don’t worry about air changes per hour because we’re filling the given room with low-level of ozone. Ozone is highly reactive, and it attacks anything in the air. So, where we call HEPA catch and release or passive, ozone is dynamic. It’s attack and kill. So, it literally fills the room. So, if I walk into this room and I had SARS-CoV-1 or I had COVID and I cough, you would have to hope that it goes through a HEPA filter before it goes to your lungs. With ozone, that’s not the case. There’s a protective layer between us of 0.05 ozone that’s in the air. So, if I were to expel something out of my mouth, before it got into the air, ozone is going to attack it, break it down. It it’s already on it. So, you’re not worried about that. 

Neil Dudley: How long does it take ozone to do the job? 

Jason Storey: It’s seconds. 

Neil Dudley: I feel like we run the equipment for hours.

Jason Storey: Yeah. So, when we’re working in a room and we’re looking for, so the difference between air purification and surface disinfection is when the molecule is in the air, it’s very susceptible, you can get to it on all sides. When it hits a surface, you have multiple different contaminants that are already on the surface – oils from your skin, if you had suntan lotion on, there’s all kinds of things already on the surface, and the pathogen, whatever it is, listeria, salmonella, whatever it is, is touching the surface. It’s already starting to develop a biofilm. So, biofilm is a natural protective layer that all pathogens will start to develop. And so, you have a lot more difficulty disinfecting on surfaces than you do in air. So, when we’re doing air purification with the MAC500, which is by the way, safe for human occupation. So, everybody, in my opinion- 

Neil Dudley: We should just run one of these in every room, then you’ve got less chance of stuff falling on the surface.

Jason Storey: And then when I sleep at night, I have one in my room. So, when I sleep, kind of like I use a Navage, if you’ve ever heard of Navage, it’s like a neti pot, but it flushes out your sinus cavity. So, when I’m sleeping at night, I have low level of ozone in the room. So, when I’m breathing in, if I had encountered something out in the world and I brought it back, as it starts to incubate inside my body, the ozone will go inside my sinus cavity and attack it inside there. So, it’s a second stage. As opposed to air purification, you’re actually breathing it in and it’s safe for you, but it’s healthy for you as well. 

Neil Dudley: Dang man, you are getting me wanting to buy one of these things. Listen, everybody, this stuff is just so fascinating. Jason, tell everybody where they could learn some more about this. Because there’s a good chance there’s a person just like me who has no clue about it, but thinks that all makes good sense to me, I want to learn more, or I want to have one in my house, or there’s people like Bert who are running maintenance departments in companies that could see the value of this. Where would somebody learn more about what we’re talking about?

Jason Storey: Yeah. So, www.jimco.dk is our website that you can get the best information on. Scanamerican.com – www.scanamcorp. 

Neil Dudley: I wanted everybody to hear that and go to the show notes in case they don’t know or don’t remember that – Johnny, be sure and put this information in the show notes so everybody can click on these companies and go learn more about this ozone thing that’s been around forever that just seems to be kind of like no brainer, like– 

Jason Storey: We should probably cover it that most of the time, when I talk about ozone, there’s two ways to make ozone. There’s electricity or Corona discharge and there’s UV light. When you use electricity, and a lot of people will probably give you some negative comments that say ozone is dangerous, when you use electricity to generate ozone, you’re also splitting nitrogen. And when you split nitrogen, it creates one of seven compounds called NOx. NOx is a stable acid gas. So, when you use electricity to generate ozone, which is the most common way to do it, you also generate your own stable acid gas.

Bert Walton: Not good for plants by the way.

Jason Storey: So, we just did a test with a company in the Kansas City area, and they had both one of my pieces of equipment that uses UV light to split oxygen, and then they had an ozone generator. That’s what they’re generally called is ozone generators. Dime a dozen on Amazon. Do not buy one because they’re very dangerous.

Neil Dudley: Using electricity for the process. 

Jason Storey: And they normally say industrial use only or non-occupied spaces.  

Neil Dudley: What’s somebody that works for one of those companies going to rebuttal that with? I mean, I just almost want- because anybody listening is going to think, well, of course that’s what Jason’s going to say. He doesn’t sell that thing. What are they going to rebuttal that, when you say that’s dangerous, what would their rebuttal be? 

Jason Storey: They’re going to say ozone is dangerous. 

Neil Dudley: Oh, okay. No, not the- The company that makes an ozone generator and sells them every day, a dime a dozen, wherever, they’re not going to like you saying don’t go buy one of those. So, what would their rebuttal be?

Jason Storey: I would have to hear one because they don’t want to have the conversation. So, they would not want to have that conversation. Generally speaking, they don’t want to discuss the creation of ozone. Most of the time they call it activated oxygen because they want to get away from the word ozone. We don’t shy away from ozone because we know exactly what we’re doing. We’re creating only ozone. When we split oxygen, we’re only splitting oxygen. We’re not splitting nitrogen. So that is why we’re not afraid to have the conversation. 

Neil Dudley: Awesome. I feel the same way with Pederson’s. Like if somebody- animal cruelty and humane treatment of animals, that’s a really touchy subject. Everybody has a strong opinion and a different opinion. I love just the way you put it – they don’t want to have the conversation. Maybe they do. Maybe we’ll get somebody on, maybe somebody will chime in and say I’d love to have that conversation because I think it’d be a valuable one. It only paints more insight for the consumers. And don’t shy away from the real words. To me that always builds a little bit of distrust in me personally. If somebody is like, oh, let’s don’t call it ozone, let’s call it activated area or whatever you mentioned that it was like, uh-oh, that sounds like a little way of just skating around the truth. So, I think that’s really cool. I’m glad that you’re willing to just shoot it like that. You had a great path you were going there and I kind of cut it off, talking about, oh, how you make it. Tell us how, let’s get back to that. How does the UV light make the ozone?  

Jason Storey: So, what we do is with the FLO-D, and all of our equipment is very similar in how it applies the technology. So, we take the oxygen in the given air, which oxygen is about 20% of any given air. So, in that room, we bring that oxygen with a fan through the FLO-D unit. Inside that unit is a bank of lamps. The FLO-D max that Pederson’s uses has 30 lamps. That is a UV chamber for lack of a better term. So that is exposing the air to 254 nanometer wavelength. So that’s very powerful, that is called UV-C or it’s called germicidal UV. So that air that’s going through the box is being disinfected through the use of UV light. And then we also produce a wavelength 185, which is UV-V or vacuum UV. That wavelength is strong enough to separate oxygen temporarily. So, we take an oxygen molecule, which is O2, we pass it by the 185 wavelength, and it splits that bond. So that oxygen molecule is unstable. So, it wants to attach to something else. So, it attaches itself to an O2 molecule. So that in turn makes an O3 molecule. It’s a very unstable form of oxygen. And it goes into the environment, and it looks to separate. So, it’ll either attach itself to organic material in the air. So, what happens is the O3 molecule is flying around the room, it’s looking for something to do. So, the third molecule of oxygen is trying to break away from the other two. It breaks away and it attacks something organic, and it attacks it on the RNA. 

Neil Dudley: How close does it have to get to jump? 

Jason Storey: It’s almost like- it pulls it to it.

Neil Dudley: I mean, it could be a long ways, could be really close. It’s looking pretty hard to get away.

Jason Storey: When we do a PPM level, we’re filling the room with a PPM level, so very dense gas. So, that oxygen molecule is trying to separate off. If the room is completely clean, which Bert talked about earlier is the half-life of ozone. The reason ozone cannot be a pollutant, like some people will talk about in the market, is because it’s unstable, so it cannot stabilize itself. So, within 45 minutes, if the ozone doesn’t find something to attack, it will naturally separate. 

Neil Dudley: So, it would end up being two of those molecules of oxygen catching up to each other.  

Jason Storey: Right. It would just separate off. So the O2 would separate the O- the two O2 molecules would separate the third O2 molecule, and they would go about their merry way. So that’s the natural progression of ozone. What normally happens in the environment is there’s enough particulates in the air that it’s going to immediately attack. So, when we do a trial, like we did with Pederson, we bring the equipment along. We usually do a two-day trial because we want to prove it. The first day we do cleaning is the toughest day we’re ever going to have. We may never achieve the PPM level we want. And the reason is because there’s so much organic material in the room that the ozone is separating and attacking faster than it’s counting itself. 

Neil Dudley: The equipment will run until it feels that PPM reached, right? So, you might could, you just have to wait longer.

Jason Storey: It would take longer. So, like normally the last meeting, the first time we run a piece of equipment in a given plant, they’re going to say how long do I need to run? My answer is how long do I have? The first time I run, I’m going to run as long as possible. Now, generally, when you get to there, the Pederson’s stage of using the equipment, two hours is plenty. So, two hours at 10 PPM is a full disinfection. It may take two or three runs to get to that level, but the longer you run, the easier it becomes because cleaning clean is easy, cleaning dirty takes more time. 

Neil Dudley: Well, yeah, and I think, Bert, correct me if I’m wrong, but we rotate the machine. So, every room’s not getting that machine every day. It’s one way you can do what we’re talking about without- at a lower cost. Rotate that on some kind of specific schedule so you’re getting that great disinfection from the ozone. 

Bert Walton: And the mobility of our FLO-D max has also been integral to our success because we will roll it from one room to the next, rather than having to, and I’m not trying to take away from the sales portion here, but rather than putting one in each room, we use the same large generator and just rotate it. 

Neil Dudley: Yeah, we’re not trying to sell these for him. Jason’s got that job covered. But it’s worked well for us. I want to share that information. 

Jason Storey: And we do make portable units and we make fixed units. In America, the portability is very key because you can use it in a production room or you could use it in the offices over the weekend, if somebody broke out with the fly. So if somebody were to break out with the flu, over the weekend, you could run the disinfection. I go to listeria conferences all the time. The number one dirty thing in an office is a keyboard, much more dirtier than the toilet seat, actually. So, it’s always a wow factor at a listeria conference. When they do swabs around the room, the keyboard is always the dirtiest thing in the office and- 

Neil Dudley: Everybody thinks the bathroom is so dirty. It’s really not. Anybody that’s been in food production or anything that actually gets this real awakening to what’s dirty in your life, it’s your phone screen, it’s everything, your face, just all of really the things you touch all the time.

Bert Walton: Doorknobs and keyboards

Jason Storey:  Yeah, doorknobs and keyboards are key.

Neil Dudley: We have been, I hadn’t even qualified or quantified this value until just now. I think we’ve not- we have had people in our company get COVID, but I feel like we are a healthy company, generally, just pretty much because we do a lot of good manufacturing practice, but I would attribute some of it to this ozone machine running around, keeping our air clean. Because you mentioned flu. Nobody talks about the flu anymore, at least not in my circles. They’re all wanting to talk about COVID. Well, flu is still here, folks, allergies, all these different things are still here for us to deal with. Well, anyways, that’s another rabbit to chase. Man, what a cool conversation. Bert, Jason, what have we not covered? We’re running out of time. 

Bert Walton: One thing I’d definitely like to touch on is the cost of maintenance on it. Because like he said, some routine things are going to be your bulbs, your O3 sensor, maybe a ballast. But I can say with confidence we’ve spent less than $5,000 in the last going on-

Jason Storey: Five years.

Bert Walton: Five years. It just runs and runs and the things that you’re going to replace, you know ahead of time and you don’t replace them that often. Very, very low maintenance. 

Jason Storey: Yeah. I talked to Neil when I first walked in. Bert is such a gentleman. It’s tough to get customers to answer the phone. So, Bert always takes my phone call and a couple of years ago, I’d call him, trying to get them to buy – we’re sales guys, we want to sell more equipment – and Bert’s like Jason, it just works. So, it was just like, well, I have to accept that. It does work and there’s no reason to buy one that you need. Because it’s portable, you can use it all throughout the plant. And honestly, from five years ago where you may have wanted to buy one, now that you’ve got the plant under control and you have a good rotation, you just don’t need another one. It just works. So, the portability of it, the data logging is very important. I don’t think we covered that. One of the differences between us and everybody else is the unit data logs. So, what does that mean, data logging? When you disinfect a room, how do you know it’s disinfected? You’re hoping; you maybe do some swabs. That takes three days. So, the unit calculates and captures the amount of ozone being created and separating, and based on the half-life of ozone, we have a good representation of what that room did when you disinfected it. So how quickly it builds ozone and how quickly ozone separates tells you if the room is clean. You can use that data for customers. You can use it for the USDA. You can use it just for your own personal knowledge. 

Bert Walton: You can use it for scheduling, because if you know that this particular room only takes three hours to get to 9.5 parts per million, then you could run it to your heart’s content, but you know the job is done.

Neil Dudley: Yeah, there’s no reason to run it for five hours when the job’s done in two hours.

Bert Walton: Move it to another room. 

Jason Storey: And so that’s, I think data logging is probably our biggest technological other than very few people use ozone to do it this way. Because again, I think they stray away from the word ozone. But data logging is very important. It just allows you to be conscious of how your affect is being working on the room, and even if you walk away and you come back the next day, seeing the numbers gives you a comfort level. 

Neil Dudley: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody, thank you so much for listening to the Pederson Natural Farms podcast. I want to say this before we leave, Jason, man, I appreciate you. I appreciate the service you provide for this company, the equipment we use. I’m sure there’s other things we could use some day, but right now that one’s a great example of just solving a problem, and that’s what people get paid for. That’s what your company gets paid for; it’s what Pederson gets paid for. We have to solve a problem in somebody’s dietary desires, quality food, all these things. So, it’s just really awesome. I’m glad everybody listened. And for those of you out there, look, I’m uneducated about ozone. All I know is it works for this company. These two smart guys tell me it’s beautiful and awesome. If you totally disagree, I’m open to that conversation. If you’re scared of ozone and now you heard that Pederson’s has an ozone machine and you’re never going to eat our products again because it’s going to kill you, I want to hear that. I need to know your perspective. I can’t promise you I will agree with it, but we’ll certainly entertain that conversation. Thank you, Jason. Any parting shots? I don’t want to leave anything off the table.

Jason Storey: No, I think that’s very key. I think the conversation is important. We’re open to the conversation. If you have a negative opinion, if you have some ideas, we’d love to hear them. So, we’re open to that. 

Neil Dudley: Awesome. Great. Everybody, thanks for listening. We’ll catch you on the next episode. Everybody out there in YouTube land, thanks for watching. Tell a friend about us. Really, we just want to get the word out and make sure people know as much as they can about Pederson’s, the people we work with, the people that eat our products, and the people we compete with for business. I think those people are doing some great things too. I’m going to shut up. Later.

Hey everybody, thanks for listening to this episode of the Pederson Natural Farms podcast. If you don’t mind, go hit that subscribe button and check us out at pedersonsfarms.com. Thanks for listening.