Business View Magazine - November 2016

Business View Magazine - November 2016 157 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.”