John Eaton never planned to enter the beverage industry. In this episode of the Spilled Salt podcast, John joins host Maureen Ballatori to share his journey into the beverage industry and the lessons he learned along the way.
From Electrical Engineer to Beverage Innovator
In high school, John had dreamed of becoming a sound recording engineer. But his father, an IBM engineer, encouraged him to pursue a more stable career. Eaton chose electrical engineering and earned his degree from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
His first job at JCS Processing Controls in Brighton, New York, marked the beginning of a lifelong career in beverage processing. JCS built blending systems, pasteurizers, and sterile tanks for dairy and beverage companies. The role introduced Eaton to the complexity of beverage manufacturing, including pasteurization and aseptic processing.
Early Lessons in Process Engineering
After several years at JCS, Eaton transitioned to Cadbury Schweppes as their first process engineer. His role quickly expanded. He managed factory builds, system upgrades, and international projects. One significant assignment involved building a factory in Mexico, which kept him away from home for 18 months.
Eaton’s work revealed the pressures of factory operations. Deadlines were tight. Equipment failures led to late-night troubleshooting calls. This experience taught him the importance of thorough planning and cross-functional understanding.
Transitioning Into Research and Development
Seeking a shift from the high-pressure world of factory builds, Eaton pursued a master’s degree in manufacturing management and leadership at RIT. Around the same time, he was offered a role in research and development (R&D) at Cadbury Schweppes.
R&D allowed Eaton to explore new technologies, optimize packaging, and reduce production costs. He led teams that combined process engineers and product developers. This structure fostered better collaboration, allowing technical and marketing teams to work toward shared goals.
Bridging Technical and Marketing Worlds
Throughout his career, Eaton acted as a translator between the technical and commercial sides of product development. He understood the scientific nuances behind formulations but also recognized what made products marketable.
He often emphasized the value of letting team members focus on their strengths. Rather than forcing everyone to master every skill, he built teams where scientists, engineers, and marketers could collaborate effectively. This approach often produced more innovative and scalable products.
Navigating Mergers and Acquisitions
Eaton’s cross-functional expertise made him an asset during major mergers and acquisitions. Large companies needed someone who could evaluate acquisition targets with a critical eye. He understood equipment design, regulatory requirements, and operational capabilities.
Many startups, he observed, operated with flexibility but lacked comprehensive documentation. This gap became a liability when larger corporations evaluated them for acquisition. Eaton advised startups to invest in regulatory compliance and documentation early, even if they were initially nimble.
The Challenge of Aseptic Production
Aseptic processing presented unique challenges in beverage manufacturing. Unlike hot-fill or retort methods, aseptic production required precise sterilization of both product and packaging. The complexity made it difficult for companies to test formulations at small scale.
Traditional lab-scale equipment often failed to replicate full-scale aseptic processes accurately. As a result, many companies only discovered issues during their first commercial runs, after investing heavily in production.
Why Small-Scale Validation Mattered
Eaton explained how small-scale aseptic validation could save companies significant time and money. By accurately simulating full-scale processes during R&D, companies could identify formulation issues early. This reduced the risk of costly surprises during commercial production.
He described how even minor changes in heating methods—like direct steam injection versus indirect heating—could dramatically affect product taste. For example, pea protein formulations could develop undesirable sulfur notes if processed incorrectly.
Barriers to Commercial Scale-Up
Scaling a beverage brand posed several hurdles beyond formulation. Line time at commercial co-packers remained scarce, especially post-pandemic. Many co-packers hesitated to run unfamiliar formulations that might cause complications.
Minimum run volumes at aseptic facilities often started at 40,000 to 60,000 cases. For startups and new product lines, this level of commitment was risky. Without prior validation, companies might produce thousands of cases only to find quality issues.
Emerging Trends in Beverage Innovation
Eaton discussed how new technologies could enable previously impossible beverage products. Carbonated aseptic beverages, common in Asia but rare in the U.S., represented one area of opportunity. Advances in post-UHT aseptic dosing also allowed for more delicate ingredients to be added after thermal processing, preserving their functional and sensory qualities.
By providing accurate small-scale testing, innovators could experiment with these new possibilities. Early validation gave product developers confidence to pursue novel ideas while reducing financial risk.
Advice for Beverage Startups
Eaton encouraged entrepreneurs to seek external expertise early. Universities like Cornell, flavor houses, regulatory consultants, and experienced industry professionals offered valuable guidance. Founders passionate about their product ideas needed to balance creativity with rigorous planning.
Once startups moved beyond home kitchens, they quickly encountered unexpected complexities. Building a network of advisors and collaborators could help them navigate challenges and set a strong foundation for future growth.
Building for Long-Term Success
The beverage industry remains highly competitive, with most new products failing within the first year. By understanding both the science and business of beverage production, companies can turn bold ideas into sustainable, scalable products.
Eaton’s career illustrates how technical knowledge, cross-functional collaboration, and early diligence can dramatically improve a brand’s chance of success.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage, and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is John Eaton. John is the Managing Director of UltraPhil in Rochester, New York. He has over 30 years of food and beverage manufacturing and engineering experience, including 15 years at a little company called PepsiCo.
When he left Pepsi, he was the director of beverage processing, science and technology. John is a critical thinker who really approaches problems with experience in all aspects of CPG, the consumer packaged goods industry, which gives him a really unique advantage in the industry, especially when it comes to major merger and acquisition projects from due diligence to integration for R &D.
His experience makes it possible for him to understand all stakeholders needs and bring together all functions holistically to deliver faster and better. And I think we all know in this industry, innovation and speed are the name of the game. Now in his role at UltraPhil, he is taking that experience in R &D and consulting and innovation out of the box thinking to a whole other level. We talk a lot about that today as well as his background.
Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey, John, how are you?
John Eaton: Good, how are you doing, Maureen?
Maureen: Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m really excited to have you on the show. Thanks for taking the time.
John: I’m very happy to be here.
Maureen: So I always love to start in the beginning. Take me back to the early days of John Eaton. How did you get into the beverage industry in the first place?
John: By total mistake and it wasn’t planned, which I’ve never really planned anything in my career. It just sort of happened. When I was in high school, I actually wanted to be a sound recording engineer in a recording studio. My dad worked for IBM and he said, no, that’s not a real job. You need to be a real engineer. Real engineers make real money. And I used to like taking things apart at home, like the television and radios and stuff and seeing what was going on inside.
So I decided to become an electrical engineer and ended up at RIT.
Maureen: And so then what happened? You graduated from RIT and then what?
John: Yes, so I graduated from RIT and my main goal in life was to stay in Rochester because I loved it here. I’m from downstate, Newburgh area. But I had so many friends here and I really liked the city that I wanted to stay here. So the one career goal I had was to stay here. And as I started interviewing, I got a couple of offers of places and the one I picked was with JCS Processing Controls out in Brighton who primarily do processing equipment for the beverage industry, a little chemical in food, but primarily beverage and a lot of dairy and aseptic dairy stuff. So that was 1991 and that started a lifelong career in beverages.
Maureen: So before you continue from there, explain to everyone what does processing equipment mean?
John: Sure. So JCS builds and used to build blending equipment, batching equipment, pasteurizers, ultra high temperature pasteurizers, sterile tanks. Pretty much they do everything from, if you consider a dairy, from milk receiving all the way up to the filler, but not including the filler. They don’t do any filling.
Maureen: Yep, great. And so you started at JCS in 1991 and that was the tip of the beverage iceberg. You were there for only a short time compared to your tenure at other places, right?
John: Yes, I was there for six years and I mentioned dairy before. So most of the exotic travel we got to do was to places where there were cows and dairies in the US and got tired of that very quickly and decided.
Maureen: Got tired of what aspect of it, of the travel or the dairy industry or.
John: Yes, was, you know, I wasn’t going to Italy. I wasn’t going to Japan. I wasn’t going to all these exotic places. was going to New York or, you know, wherever. And so one day, one of my customers who was local and I used to try and take as many local jobs that came through as I could. So I didn’t have to travel. I did a lot of work at what is now Baldwin Richardson.
Maureen: Yes, it was like rural Montana, Wisconsin, yes.
John: was Richard’s and Foods, but I did a lot of work at what was Cadbury Schweppes, the Mott’s plant out in Williamson, now part of Pepper. So did a lot of managing projects there for JCS. And one day I was approached by their head of engineering and asked if I wanted to become their first process engineer, right, which I had never heard of the term process engineer because it isn’t a real thing. It’s not a degreed engineer. You just sort of fall into it.
And they said, well, we have electricals and we have mechanicals, but we need a process engineer. And I like the idea of something different after six years. And I like the idea of being local. And so I took the job there and was immediately sent to Mexico to build a factory for a year and a Yes.
Maureen: Wow. For a year and a half. So I know I don’t want to skip ahead, but one of the things that I know is, is interesting to me anyway, about the, you are now, which is ultra fill, which will come back to JCS. We’ll do that shortly here. but that you are again, away from home and it took you 18 months to build that plant too, didn’t it?
John: Yes, it was about 18 months I was part of the team. I wasn’t leaving the team. It was right outside San Diego across the border. So it wasn’t too bad. When I was young I got to stay in San Diego for a year and a half. So it was okay. But what was happening when I was at Cadbury Schweppes, was basically a supply chain engineer building factories and upgrading systems and lines. I was the single guy. And so I always got the travel gigs.
Maureen: Right.
John: Constantly traveling again. So I was doing that for about the same amount of time and had an opportunity come up to transition my career. And I was actually, I went back to school at RIT to get a master’s and I got it in manufacturing management and leadership because the thought was I was going to go be a plant manager, which was a very crazy thought. But got the degree and at the same time was pursuing another role within Cadbury. I really liked the company. It was a great company at the time and was pursuing a role in R &D as well. And so I had gotten a role in R &D and then right about the same time my boss came and said, guess what? We figured out how to get you a plant to manage in New Jersey. And I said, guess what? I’m going to work in R &D instead. So I transitioned from building factories.
Into R &D, which I’ve been at ever since, you know, in some form or another. So that transition took me to Connecticut.
Maureen: And so before you talk about that transition, what about R &D was interesting to you at the time?
John: Yes, to be quite honest, less pressure. Right. So when you’re building a factory and there’s a deadline and things have to work and then afterwards when they don’t work, you know, we own our lines and our things that we put in. So we never got away from anything we put in. We’re the ones that got the calls when the maintenance guys didn’t understand something or the vendors weren’t cooperating. So there was a lot of pressure in that role. And I’ve been doing it for a long, long time and I’ve been traveling.
Maureen: Hmm, how so?
John: right, for a long, long time and R &D role other than doing trials, you were home, right, or going to learn something. So I thought, you know, this is a different tact in my career, I know how to build a factory, I’ve built enough of them, I’m going to try something different. So I moved down to Connecticut, and I started in a role, a cost savings role or value optimization role. It was in the packaging group. So I was essentially a packaging engineer, and I had never been one.
Maureen: Right, yes.
John: But we looked to take money out of the package product or process, but the package was the low hanging fruit, easy, light weighting bottles and things like that. And at the time they didn’t have a program to do that. And so started that program and grew it. And then one day they came to me and said, hey, we want you to lead a new group of process research, since you’re a process engineer, instead of doing what you’re doing. And that pretty much set the course for the rest of my career until about two years ago.
Things changed. So in one format or another, I was doing something in the realm of research and process engineering. So Cadbury switched roles into a role that looked for new technology innovations, new to Cadbury, new to the world, developed new technologies, et cetera. And then that quickly morphed into a product development and process engineering role. So the product
Maureen: Yes, that makes sense.
John: Yes, so the products that we didn’t have infrastructure to make, instead of having a group of process engineers and a group of product developers, they put me in charge of the group of both. And so it was a really fun time. It was a great group, because we had engineers and product developers working. So it’s the same goal instead of two different groups fighting over who’s right and who’s wrong. It was a team group. So it was kind of smart to do that. So we took things that maybe existed on a bench for 10-15 minutes before falling apart and figured out how to make them commercially.
Maureen: And so were you the only one bridging that gap or were you building a team of people who kind of did this sort of foot in this water, foot in this water in terms of product development and engineering?
John: Yes, it was a team. had two other engineers and then about five process folks. And then we’d have, you know, interns from wherever, either in engineering or in food science, depending.
Maureen: We thread this needle a lot, the idea of there are the science-y people, like we work with Cornell University a good deal. And so there are the people who are doing the work who want to talk about it a certain way, right? The science-y people or the educational component of it, right? And then there’s the marketing side, which I would suspect the product development, right, was touching more of that side of the house.
And you really need that translation of somebody who can speak both languages to understand, okay, I can see what is special about this in terms of the way that it was developed or, you know, the engineering, the smart side of the house, if you will, right? It’s the marketing. People are like smart in their own different way, but then you really have to play that translation, right? Of course, this thing is really unique and special and is what needs to be championed.
John: In a creative way.
Maureen: the product development message, and this is what we need to highlight. Is that a good example or like a good way to describe what you were doing?
John: Yes, it’s very accurate and it’s very interesting because of my development as a manager and learning how to get the most out of people and help people figure out what’s going to give them the most, right? You know, I’ve seen through my whole career, everywhere I worked at the big companies in different departments, they want everyone to be able to do everything instead of allowing certain people to be good at what they’re at, be good at what they’re good at. And I had a guy that worked for me.
He was very much an academic scientist kind of person and he was given to our group in a way of, hey, we’re not sure what to do with this guy. If you can’t figure it out, we don’t know what we’re going to do with him. And this was the kind of guy that couldn’t schedule a meeting and outlook if you tried, know, old school scientist guy. But if you gave him a problem, you wouldn’t see him for three weeks and he’d come back with a solution. And so…
You’ll learn how to use people for their skill sets, right? But you also learn, and I think that bridging that gap lets you understand how the different disciplines need to work together. Because there’s been a lot of times in my career when you’re working with packaging guys, you’re working with processing people, you’re working with the engineers, you’re working with product developers, and everybody’s supposed to stay in their lane.
I’ve been told many, many times, stay in your lane. My response is, I’m not going to stay in my lane if I can help somebody else get their part or understand how their part fits in or what to look for or look out for because we’ve seen something before instead of just sitting there and watching them fail because they haven’t seen it before. It doesn’t make any sense. It can develop everybody. So big corporate wise, they don’t quite always get that.
But it’s a really good way to build a team because each discipline gets to learn a little bit from the other one and you hope there’s some takeaways there.
Maureen: Yes, and it takes really great leadership to be able to recognize people’s strengths and help people work together in their own way too. I mean, that is an art form more than anything. And so kudos to you for recognizing that. You mentioned, not here, this was in my stalking research when I was reading every word on your LinkedIn profile, is that…
You’ve consulted on some major merger and acquisition projects throughout your career. And is that why was because, now, PepsiCo realized that you had this ability to sort of see many different perspectives. What do you think?
John: I think it was very, very helpful because I had a lot of experience in all the disciplines and could work with all the people on the team to understand what was important, what wasn’t, what was nonsense or what was real. But quite honestly, being somebody from downstate, I’m a bit aggressive, I’m a bit blunt, I’m very, let’s go, let’s go.
When the first acquisition came up, they basically said, we need somebody to push back on the &A people so they understand what we’re buying and somebody who can speak their mind. So I really got it because, and this is a quote, because I was an a-hole. I knew how to be one, right? But I knew how to push back on things. I think it was more about, I had a very big, broad breadth of experience. I’d seen a lot of things working for JCS. JCS, the guys are in all different types of beverage factories and all different companies and see the best in how things are run, the worst in how things are run, the best designs of equipment, the worst designs of equipment. And you start taking away things from that and building your own, do it this way, not this way, it makes more sense. And I think that experience helped in that regard, doing those acquisitions things.
And I learned a ton, right, because I wasn’t as familiar with regulatory quality or food safety things. And I learned just like I learned from packaging and product development and everybody else, I really learned what was important to them and how to build that for the next acquisition and internal system specifications development and requirements that we had before we could run anything as Pepsi. And then basically,
Okay, we need to make some system changes here because we can’t wait six years for the specs to change before we run something in our systems, right? We’ve got to get this. And that was happening. There’d be a merger and the merger wouldn’t be complete for eight years because of all the R&D systems and specifications and vendor approvals. So instead we were like, hey, let’s figure out how to make this more seamless and not take that long and get the project done before it gets to a point where it hasn’t been done for so long it really never gets done and no one ever cares about cleaning up.
Maureen: True. I’ve been there, been there with that mindset. So what are some of the things, what did, I’m trying to sort of morph this, especially, what you’ve learned in your 30 years of experience in the beverage industry, especially as it relates to mergers and acquisitions in this part of the discussion. And then we’re going to talk more about Ultra-Fill and what, you know, you’re doing there.
John: Yes, that was a good
Maureen: What sort of key takeaways do you have for folks in the beverage industry that are looking to build a brand or looking to get acquired red flags that you saw that was like, man, this is something that people didn’t really think about, but down the line, it became a thing. Anything came up for you in that idea?
John: I think the thing I see the most is, a lot of times the little guys, they have the ability to, I don’t want to say cut corners, but they don’t have to do the I and cross the like a giant corporation does, who has a target on their back for lawsuits, right? And unfortunately that’s the way it goes. So for folks that are just starting out, the more diligence you can do to button everything up around formulations around regulations and really know that what you’ve got is something that is not bulletproof, but that makes sense versus just doing enough to get by. And I understand the motivation, right? If you’re just starting out, you’ve only got so much money and you need the product on the shelf to make money and you’ll move things later. And it’s not that anybody’s not doing anything unsafe. It’s just that there’s more rigorous ways to do things so that you’re covered, right?
Maureen: Yes.
John: Even now, we’ll talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that are looking to run an ultra fill and I’ll give them advice right off the bat. Think about this, think about that, about things that they hadn’t thought about that is in that space. Because not only if, you’re just looking to get acquired, but if you’re looking to build a solid brand and you’re looking to get into big corporations or big outlets like Target or Walmart, et cetera, you’ve got to be pretty buttoned up too, right? I mean, once you scale and if you’re talking to, if you’re dealing with co-packers,
You really got to know what’s going on with your products at a co packer because if you don’t they won’t even let you in the door
Maureen: Yes, so in summary, that idea is when you are starting up and you’re building something, you can be very nimble in the beginning, but just make sure that you are taking the time to pause and cross the T’s and dot the I when the time is right. And that’s, you know, you can never say it’s at one year or it’s at five years or whatever it is. That’s never the… It’s not about the…
It’s more about the vibe of the company, where you are, where you’re trying to go, when is the right time to sort of, you know, do that. So I have had the privilege of visiting the Ultrafil facility in downtown Rochester. It’s an incredible place, but tell everyone why it’s an incredible place. What lured you away from PepsiCo to come back to JCS to build this Ultrafil facility? Why would you want to do that? And why is it so special?
John: Yes, absolutely. Yes, so through my entire career, I’ve been dealing with aseptic, right, and low acid and high acid, but the low acid part is the particular challenge in the industry, right? It’s harder, and I need more expertise. And the one sort of gap that’s always existed is how do I make small scale samples? How do I scale them? How do I know when I get to commercials, it’s going to be the same product? And it never is.
There’s always differences because of thermal profile samples. I know, most people, and there’s nothing wrong with micro thermics and arm fields as lab pasteurizers or ultra high temperature pasteurizers, they have their place, but too many people try and utilize them as a substitute for a full aseptic system and they’re not. And so everybody, including in the work I’ve done, has tried to push them to be that as much as possible, to bridge that gap. A carbonated soft drink, a juice, hot fill, in-bottle pasteurized, you can simulate all those. You can simulate retort and get the exact same thing, right? There’s pilot retort, there’s pilot units or ways to get around all of those things.
Except for fully septic, right, and primarily around filling. And so this has been something.
Maureen: So before you move on, let me just summarize that for listeners who are not as familiar with the aseptic process and what you’re referring to. You’re saying that a beverage company who is producing something new, so they’re doing R &D on a new line of beverages that needs to be produced aseptically, they can do bench testing, lab testing on small runs to get an idea of what it’s going to taste like.
but it is never going to be the same as what it actually tastes like off the full run. And what UltraPhil is doing that is so special is that you can do those small batch runs on your equipment that truly replicates a full run so that you have an accurate idea of the taste profile.
John: Correct, yes. so what normally will happen is you get your first taste of the real product is your first commercial production run in low acid aseptic. And at that point, you’re putting up shelf life. You’ve got what you’ve got, and you’re not going to get it. You get what you get, and you don’t get upset. So if it tastes different, your consumer work is out the window. And you’ve either got to reformulate or tweak as you go or take what you’ve got.
And you might have to change labels after some shelf life, right? Or you might have to make a correction in the formula. And so this has been an issue for a long time. So what happens is your shelf life, you can’t do consumer home use testing because you can’t give the product outside of your control. The stuff that’s done on lab scale is basically ESL or extended shelf life, has to be chilled, has to be kept in your control. And so what we’re trying to do is eliminate that gap and make products that are fully aseptic, we’re licensed just like a co-packer would be, but we’re a pilot R &D center and we have the flexibility to replicate any commercial process out there. On the flip side of it, if you’re developing a new product and you don’t know the right or the best way to heat treat it, to pasteurize it or ultra-pasteurize it aseptically, we’ve got all three methods, indirect,
direct steam injection and direct steam infusion, which are the three ways things are aseptically produced, we’ve got them all and you can try your product on each one. You can tweak the formulas and that, Phil Frichette, the founder of JCS, he always wanted a place where his customers could come and optimize the formula for the process, right? Which is different than scaling up without any, with ease because through his 50 years in the industry, he saw so many products being run through a process and not really come out the right end, right in the end. Or, geez, it should be run this way instead, but they didn’t know it. We wanted to be able to give people that flexibility to figure out what’s the right process for this product that I have. And the example I always use, and it’s kind of a tired one now, but anything with pea protein in it. You can’t run with it indirectly because the temperature is too long and too slow and you build up sulfur notes and p protein tastes terrible with sulfur notes. And so you have to use direct. But if you’re developing something new with some new oddball ingredients or new combination of things and you don’t know that and you just happen to end up on an indirect line, you could struggle a lot. So we’re trying to wipe that clean and bridge that gap as well as an issue.
Maureen: And so let’s talk about volumes because when you do a full aseptic run, what is the typical minimum that you would have to run on a full aseptic run?
John: Yes, you’re talking like 60,000 cases, know, some 40, 60,000 cases. And the bigger problem now is getting line time, right? a lot of folks ever since COVID, no one wants you on their line. And especially if you’ve got an oddball formulation or something they’ve never seen before, they don’t want trouble afterwards. They don’t want some nagging, aseptic issue later and that they can blame on you. So unless it’s very similar to what they run today, you’re not getting on the line as it is. Nowadays, to even get on the line at all is really hard. We’ve got folks that are looking to do some packaging trials, different testing, because the plant won’t allow them to change. It’s the same bottle, just with a barrier in it. It won’t allow them to run without a trial, and there’s no time for the trial. So they’re kind of stuck. So here we come, right? So instead of spending lots of money and taking a whole line down for a day, which you’re really paying them for loss of sales, you’re not just paying them for line time that is very expensive. And you’re making a tremendous amount of product that you don’t need, right? You can come to ultra fill and make all the way down to when we’ve tested down to a 30 gallon batch, right? Our largest batch is 200 gallons about 1500 bottles in a day, and then smaller with a couple variants, right, you can do. So most people in R &D need enough for either a flavor screen, which could be 10 for tastings or, you know, a few more for tastings with customers or internal tastings or tastings with Copac or whatever. And then you want to build some for shelf life or consumer trials, or you want to take away and slap a label on it and go sell it in earlier, you know, in the actual product and the actual package in turn, instead of trying to describe what the product will be to Walmart or Target, you leave them with a bottle of it or a case of it, right, to try.
Maureen: Yes, fantastic. Who is the ideal customer for Ultrafil?
John: We have many, many ideal customers, right? So it’s not just the big manufacturer. So we have tools within UltraPhil that no one has internally. It doesn’t matter how big of a beverage company they are. People have internal tools. People have ways of doing a septic beverage internally. They don’t have the flexibility we do. They don’t have the toolkits that we have to try different things. However,
Entrepreneurs are getting a lot of calls from entrepreneurs. We’ve been talking a lot with Cornell and Geneva, the Center of Excellence with Kathy and her team. It’s basically a two way street. People that need them, we’re sending down there. People that need us, the next step they’re sending towards us. But we’ve had a lot of discussions with ingredient suppliers, people wanting to put a new ingredient in a product matrix and get it in front of product developers so that they can see what it does everyone from enzyme companies to protein companies, you name it. And then also packaging suppliers, people talking about new resins, doing a cap in a different resin or a new barrier in a resin. You can use our line as a lab and run in-situ samples to get real-time data. And then also…
Copackers, right? So some copackers are going to be hesitant to run oddball products if you want to use Ultra Fill as a goalie, as a gatekeeper to say, hey, we ran, it ran beautifully, it batched beautifully, here’s how we batched it, here’s how it ran, no issues, or hey, you got some work to do before you can go to a copacker. Some copackers have that, some internal capabilities and some don’t, and they just go by gut, but now we exist. And then the last is really research.
We’ve already got a professor from Cornell who was talking to us about wanting to dive deep in the differences, the actual physical differences and what happens between infusion and injection. Or, you just need to aseptically fill something to do some sort of research because we’re the only place that you can go to get that done in a plastic bottle.
Maureen: And the scenario that you mentioned where let’s say there’s a corporation who needs to make some change with their co packer, they can’t get the line time, so they need to test something out. They come to you and they say, hey, can you run this? The other great thing about UltraPhil is that not only will you say, didn’t work, let us know when you fix it, but you will help them fix it, right?
You will consult to say, about this? What about that? Have you tried this? This didn’t work for this reason. Or we think it’s this reason. You’re a real team player and collaborator in those situations.
John: Yes, absolutely. You know, there are some people that are going to come in and know exactly what they want and how they want it. And that’s how they do it. And out the door they go. And there’s other people that are going to come in and go, hey, let’s try this and this. And what do you think? And, and we’re there for that too. You know, we, it’s not there yet, but we do have a product development lab that’s coming for people to utilize. So we can really help you start from the beginning all the way through. Mitchell is the director of operations and R and D there. And I have been doing this for an awful long time.
So we have a lot of expertise in powder incorporation, hydration, sheer, a lot of work around cocoa, things like that, to help people piece their product together. And then also if it doesn’t end up, like you said, the bottle as anticipated, we can help troubleshoot and figure out why. So before you get to a co-packer and spend a lot more money figuring out why.
Maureen: And so this is of course a big deal for those audiences that you mentioned to be able to have UltraPhil as a resource, but it’s also a big deal for Rochester, New York to be able to have this facility in a historic building in downtown Rochester. Talk a little bit about that.
John: Yes, it’s a big deal because we, I keep saying we’re going to have companies, manufacturers, et cetera, from all over the country come here. But our first customer is actually from another continent who’s coming in next week. And it really is. We scoured the earth and we stumbled on you and we’re just starting. So you couldn’t find us prior.
So we have companies coming from all over coming to Rochester. And I’m a big fan of Rochester. I lived here for almost 20 years. I’m now half time back here. I love being back here. We looked all over Rochester for the right site. And I just couldn’t see us being in a business park in a suburb or in a light industrial park next to, now, our customers are everything. We want the experience to be great from start to finish.
So, you know, being in Sibley Square, there’s restaurants right in the building when it’s a cold February day. Hotels within a block away. The airport’s 15 minutes away. We’re in a beautiful part of the city with, I mean, the restaurants here are incredible. As anyone who lives here knows, and my stomach knows, because it’s been a little while since I’ve been back here for the last two years. And it’s just a great spot. It’s almost like a wow factor.
Maureen: Yes.
John: Obviously we’re not selling all of that, it certainly doesn’t hurt. And what I want is when people are getting ready to leave, they’re already thinking about the next thing to come back. They know the tools we have. It’s an environment that boosts and fosters creativity. All of Sibley Square is innovation, incubation. We’re right next to the cometary. It’s a very interesting community here. We’re working with a couple of companies in the building for stuff, an environmental company and others.
It’s a very collaborative building. And I think as we get going and people start coming here, they’re going to see a lot of value, not only in Sibley, but in the Rochester and upstate New York area as Fairlife has, as Jibani has. And people are going to start to realize, they’re here, they’re here. Wait, why aren’t we here? You know, so that was sort of a big thing with the state that we spent a lot of time talking about, like, and even the city, like, a lot of people are going to be coming here, right?
Maureen: Yes. Right. And I have the same advocacy and passion and appreciation for upstate New York, not only from a quality of life standpoint, but also from a rich environment to grow a business. Those that you mentioned, Fairlife, Chobani are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many here that have made this their home now and continue to grow. And then it goes back in history as well.
But that’s another episode for another day. Let’s continue talking about the beverage industry. I’d love, based on your experience, especially from an R &D standpoint and what you see in what’s possible in manufacturing and how what’s possible can inform what’s coming down the pike in terms of what people are going to be drinking. Let’s talk about beverage industry trends. Anything that you see coming down the pike of
you know, this is going to be no longer and this is the future of what we’ll be drinking. Any thoughts on that?
John: Well, it’s interesting because the macro trends, you know, for the last few years, it’s been coffee, tea, coffee, tea, coffee, tea, and those tend to happen and the herd sort of moves to those and then they get sort of overplayed. I think one of the issues is that folks, product developers and companies have exhausted the tools that they had in front of them.
I know when I’ve talked before, I was in a group at Pepsi that we had, just like Capri Show, new to the world or new to Pepsi equipment development and making things possible that weren’t possible before. And it’s very hard to communicate what a tool can do without having the tool to do it. So I think one of the things we’ve done is we’ve built the, we’ve built into our filler and into our site. We don’t have all the kit yet, but we built in the ability to do carbonated aseptic things. That’s something that’s very big in Asia, little bit in Europe, has no impact here whatsoever. So what does that mean? Not a lot in the dairy space, maybe, because the carbonic acid and the dairy don’t really play nice together. But when you talk about even soft drinks, right, that is highly preserved.
doing higher end, all natural colas, things with high carbonation levels. You can’t do them, you just can’t do them today. So being able to do things like that, we just recently were awarded a grant from the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center to put in a post-UHT aseptic doser. So it’s the first pilot truly aseptic doser that exists. JCS builds the big ones for companies and they’re out there doing lactose free milk, but that’s just it.
it’s out there doing lactose free milk. Nobody’s looked at it and said, well, what else? Well, some people already said this. What else can I put through it? Like what other central ingredient am I going to destroy going through the UHT that I could put through aseptic filtration and have a new product that doesn’t exist today? So I think, you know, in the years that I’ve been here, every idea has bubbled up and gone away. And I think they’re all there. And it’s just a matter of the right timing and the ability to actually do it, right? So whether it’s, you know, more natural or healthier things that exist today and paying a premium for them or not, or whether it’s…
I mean, you can always say less calories, less fat, less, less, less, but you can only take some out of things before it’s, you’re back to water again. So I don’t think the trends ever go back to higher fat and all that stuff, you know, for the folks that like that stuff, but, but maybe there’s a place for that kind of thing too. You just, you just don’t know, giving people the flexibility to try something and get real data, right. And that’s one of the things that’s important.
John: we file everything that goes through from a low acid perspective. So when it leaves our site, you can do whatever you want with it. You can give it away, you can hand it to somebody, you can do consumer home use testing. And one of the big things in Aseptic is you can sit on the one way mirror and watch people that are there with nothing better to do answering questions how you think, you know, how they think you want them to answer it. Or you can send somebody home with a case of the product and see if they actually drink it or not, which gives you repeat numbers, which really tells you everybody’s going to try something once, right? You know, even I bought Jones Turkey and gravy soda just to see what it tasted like, but there’s no repeat there. We’ll buy them as a joke for somebody else, right? But repeat’s so, so, so important. So being able to now give people the tools that they can get repeat numbers on Aseptics gives people the ability to try things that maybe they wouldn’t have tried before or go a little further beyond.
Maureen: Yes, right. Right, right.
John: To get real data to see if it’s something that’s going to stick. Cause it’s something like, I think it’s like 93 % of startup beverage companies fail in the first two years. And it’s like 80 something percent of new beverage launches fail within the first year. So it’s a tough market. It’s tough to get into, but if you have the right product at the right time, it’s going to stay for a long, long, long time.
Maureen: Yes. And I suspect that the failure rate is so high. One of the primary reasons in my mind, this is just a guess. I haven’t done research on this, but is that because the manufacturing aspect is so difficult, you know, I mean, it is a hurdle to overcome.
John: We talked to a lot of folks, and we knew this even at the big companies I worked for, if it was a small idea, there was no bandwidth to let it grow at a large company. And when you’re a multi-million dollar company who has optimized your infrastructure to run a lot of certain things, taking the chance on a few things and seeing if it grows is very difficult.
And I talked to startup after startup after startup, can you help me figure out where to go next? No one will talk to me. You know, and I list off all the same. Yes, I talked to them. want, you know, a commitment of 11 zillion bottles and da da da da da. But I think and I hate to say it, but honestly, the next step is a mid sized, highly flexible, you know, facility to get things off the ground. That’s, that’s not what we’re interested in doing, right? We’re on the R &D side, but
the infrastructure and just like large corporations, right? Everything’s consolidating and everybody’s trying to get more and more efficient to keep costs down. And so you’ve got to have something great that breaks that barrier. And if you have a product that somebody believes in and has data behind it’s the data, if you’ve got repeat data and good data behind it, your investors are behind you, the co-packer can get behind you and take a chance on you.
And Kat, Brianna and Pepsi, you I’ve been at Copackers when we presented ideas and they’ve told us no, and we’re big, right? And for them there was a no. Sorry, we don’t believe in that. We’re not going to do that.
Maureen: Yes, right. So I think that the other thing that is great about where you’re sitting and frankly what you’re doing with that power is to go to organizations like the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center who has received USDA funding to funnel to the Northeast region to help amplify innovation in the dairy industry. You have raised your, you know,
put your eyes, set your sights on that and then realize, I can use this to help figure out this other niche that I know from, that is a gap from my experience. So you’re leveraging that unique knowledge that you have to do more than what you, you’re more than just a processing facility. I guess that’s the idea that I’m trying to get across to people is that
UltraPhil is a great partner for folks who are looking to do these shorter runs and they’re looking to solve these problems and that you can be a great strategic partner for that, but that you’re also a great strategic partner for the industry, for the ecosystem to bring these new sort of concepts and understand what’s possible from the production standpoint because it can’t be brought into the world if it can’t be produced.
John: That’s right. Yes, it’s definitely what we’re all about. That’s our mission.
Maureen: Yes, I love it. Well done. comes out very, very well. So leave us with like one parting thought or sort of statement on what else does the industry need or sort of advice, or even if it’s a mindset to startups who are more frequently our listeners on this show if they want to start a beverage brand as their dream, where should they go?
John: Yes, I think it starts with fundamental concepts, right? And I think everyone I’ve spoken to believes in their concept that they have. And some of them are amazingly creative and I think very impactful and game changing. And some of them are…
know, in development. But if all of them have passion, which is amazing, right? They believe in something they believe in something that’s needed. They believe it, you know, in what they’re doing. and I think that the number one thing that folks can do is get some external help outside of themselves. You know, Cornell is a huge help with that.
Maureen: In development.
John: In the region and I know they help a ton of people outside the region. They help people that are funded within Sibley as venture capitalists, right? It’s this whole ecosystem thing again. But get as much information as you can and get help outside of your kitchen because the minute you leave your kitchen, you start learning what you didn’t know and there’s a lot to know, right? And they all say the same thing. Oh, I didn’t realize there would be so much. And yes, but there’s folks.
Cornell’s out there to help, we’re here to help. There’s other universities that are out there to help and other people that are flavor houses that help develop new products, et cetera. And so if you don’t have beverage industry experience and you’re not coming from that, which the vast majority of the people I’m talking to don’t, find somebody that can help that does. I’ve been in a small consulting group from when I was…
Laid off a PepsiCo before I started UltraPhil. I joined this little consulting group, mostly craft people that had just a very informal group, everything from engineers, packaging scientists, regulatory product developers, and just got together every Friday and COVID and said, hey, what are you working on? And hey, can you help me with this? And there were no transactions. It was, hey, I’ll give you advice. You give me advice. And there’s people out there.
people out there all over looking to help people get going. And a lot of them are working with startups because they bring all that experience to them. So just look for those people. They’re out there to help.
Maureen: Yes, I love that. And I too, even now I’m still in a couple of casual consulting groups like that, that it’s no pressure, show up, but they both are on every other Friday thing. And I would say I travel a lot, so I skip more than I attend, but I leave every time I can make it to one of those. I leave with a new nugget of information that I didn’t know about. I leave feeling inspired and energized about what’s happening in
the industry and usually meet a new person too who came to this group to just do the same, right? Come with this mindset of interest and learning. And so I couldn’t agree more. I think that that sort of mindset, especially for a startup, is critical for what can I do? What could I learn today instead of just being in their own head?
John: Yes.
Maureen: Yes, fantastic. John, thank you. This was wonderful. I really appreciate the opportunity to pull some information from you about your varied background and experience, but, you know, pulling together that thread of the beverage industry and really excited to be able to promote what Ultra-Fil is doing and your passion for Upstate too. So thank you.
John: Thank you. Yes, I enjoyed it and it’s always good to see you.