May/June 2024 - 7

SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS
A
pair of public health crises spurred two
transportation industry veterans and startup
company co-founders to take action aimed at making
the produce supply chain safer.
In 2006, more than 170 people were sickened by E.
coli-tainted spinach traced to California's Salinas Valley.
Five years later, in 2011, 147 were sickened by a Listeria
monocytogenes outbreak traced to cantaloupes from a
Colorado farm, with 33 outbreak-associated deaths reported
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those incidents led Tom Madden, president of SaniSafe
Transportation Solutions, and Mark O'Reilly, managing
partner at chemical formulating and manufacturing
company BioSyn, to put their heads together. The two men
co-founded SaniSafe, where O'Reilly serves as director of
operations, in 2017.
The company's genesis was work the pair did swabbing
transportation containers in Salinas after the E. Coli outbreak.
" We could tell that yes, there is bacteria growth on the
interior surfaces of these containers - refrigerated and dry, "
O'Reilly said.
Their hunch - and their motivation to find a solution-
was reinforced when Sweet Rocky Ford cantaloupes shipped
from Colorado in 2011 led to a listeria outbreak in at least
24 states.
The result of their efforts is SaniSafe's Sanitary
Transportation Antimicrobial Treatment System (STAT), an
EPA-registered solution specifically formulated for foodborne
pathogens and applied with electrostatic spray equipment.
STAT completely covers interior surfaces while reducing
standing water that can breed bacteria, Madden and
O'Reilly said. It also reduces water usage, saves money and
can be tracked via an auditing system developed with
logistics partner CargoSense.
" You don't even miss a molecule, " Madden said.
THE SCIENCE OF STAT
Electrostatics is a branch of physics that deals with the
phenomena and properties of stationary or slow-moving
electric charges. STAT, applied with a regular-looking spray
gun, harnesses its power with a secret weapon inside its
bulbous nozzle.
" In the hollow inside, it's an electrostatic field, " O'Reilly
said. " When the droplets are forced out through it, each
tiny little droplet (grabs) a negative charge as they're
pushed out from the nozzle. Not only do they scatter
because they're all negatively charged, they also look for a
surface to attach to.
" It's the same system used to paint cars. They put a
negative charge on the metal and then they'll have a
positive charge on the paint, and then when they spray it,
it just gets a nice, even coating. "
The charges are about 40 to 60 microns in size, O'Reilly said.
Micron is a term representing a unit of measure in the
SaniSafe touts the ability of its STAT system to save companies money by
reducing the amount of time a driver has to spend waiting for a washout and
for containers to dry. Photo courtesy of Port of Oakland.
PRODUCE PROCESS ING
7
May/June 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of May/June 2024
