Business View Magazine
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Deepwater is also going to invest a new pilot plant
that Wachnowsky says is going to give the company
greater R & D and process development capabilities.
“If there’s a new product that someone wants us to do,
right now, our smallest reactor is 500 gallons. It’s very
difficult to do process development when someone
says, ‘How small a batch can you make?’ People don’t
want 500 gallons, so we’re putting 50 gallon reactors
in. And in a scale-up situation, if you go ten to one, it
works pretty well. The other thing that it will do – the
Sales Team gets a lot of requests for small-quantity,
iodine derivative products. And we’re getting a lot of
requests for high-purity products. Those tend to be
smaller volumes, so we’ll be able to utilize that pilot
plant for the production of small-volume, high-purity
products. Our goal is to have the plot plant operational
in first quarter 2017.”
Wachnowsky also stresses Deepwater’s commitment
to its current clients and customers in the niche mar-
ket that iodine chemistry is important to. “We’ve ac-
tually developed and introduced an improved product
quality for one our business segments that is leading
to increased performance for customers,” he says, cit-
ing an example. “We had a large customer come to us
and say, ‘Could you do this?’ And we said, ‘Well, let’s
see.’ And over the last six months, we developed an
extended, higher-quality product that is ending up in a
better performance for them. And that is exactly what
we want to do.”
