 Well, good morning, everyone, and I'd like to welcome you to the CPA, the Association for Contract Packagers and Manufacturers in the CPC, Cold Pressure Council's webinar on Cold Pressure Technology, Taking Food into the Future. I am Ron Puvak, the Managing Director of the CPA. Allow me just a quick minute to give you an overview of the CPA, and Joyce Longfield, who will be our presenter later today, will give you a review of the CPC later on. The CPA has a voice since 1992 for contract packaging and manufacturing. Our mission is to help the industry grow, expand, and share the knowledge that other contract packages and manufacturers have gained, and also make people aware of the industry itself. We have several opportunities to interact with members, non-members, and CPGs, various trade shows. We have an annual meeting for networking. We have educational events, such as this webinar that you are attending today. And we have an interesting tool called the Request for Quotation tool, which we get over a thousand of those annually, and as well as 4,000 hits to our website a month, people looking for contract packaging services. Now, transitioning to the webinar itself, all attendees, a little housekeeping, all attendees are on mute. If you have any questions, please use the question box and we will respond to as many as we can in the timeframe allotted. The webinar is being recorded and will be posted on the CPA website at contractpackaging.org. At the end of the webinar, as you log off, you will see a link for a very brief seminar. We really welcome your feedback, so please take just about a minute to give us your feedback. Let me introduce today's presenter. Joyce Longfeld is the VP of Product Innovation, Good Foods Group, and is also the chairperson of the Cold Pressure Council. Since 2010, Joyce has been guiding companies on the applications and validation of using HPP to treat food and beverages. Currently, she is the chairperson for the Cold Pressure Council, where she continues to expand her knowledge of food safety validation and meeting regulatory requirements when using HPP. Along with CPC, Joyce is co-chairing the Juice Task Force, which is a collaboration of academia, government, and industry experts to approve upon the validation requirements for juices. It's now my pleasure to hand the presentation over to Joyce. And again, if you have questions, please put them in the question block and we will respond to them as soon as we can. Joyce, take it away. Hi. Thank you very much. Good morning to everyone. Can everyone hear me okay, or should I speak louder? Sounds good, Joyce. Yeah, okay, okay, great. So in terms of moving the slides, just so I know, am I clicking on the next ones, or do you click on the next one? Joyce, you have control. Just go ahead and click through. Okay, perfect. So I'm going to take you through a little bit of background on HPP first, and then kind of move into the applications of it, and then I'll talk a little bit about the Cold Pressure Council. And so maybe we, I'm fine if anybody has questions in between, but if you want to wait to the end as well, we can do that too. Okay, I'm clicking on the slide. Oh, wait, okay, there we go, there we go. Okay, so for those of you who are new to the technology, if you haven't heard of it, or if you've never seen what a piece of equipment looks like, you know, a slide doesn't really do this equipment justice. I mean, this particular unit that's on this slide right now weighs about 90 tons. So they are quite massive pieces of equipment, so they can get up to very large pieces of equipment. But in the picture, you can kind of see in the bottom right hand corner a person. And so really that person essentially, you know, just gives you a little bit of perspective of how tall these machines are. And so she were to kind of walk over to, you know, where those other blue carriers are that are kind of coming out of the machine. You can see that the mezzanine that's above is well above the height of her, right? So just to kind of give you a little bit of perspective. And I might just kind of put back and forth between the two machines, or between the machine in the next slide, just to kind of help you sort of understand and visualize what's happening. You know, I've heard and had questions from everyone in terms of what's going on inside of that machine. And, you know, some people have even thought that you just throw all your ingredients into one of those blue baskets and put it into the machine and out comes your food. And unfortunately, that is not as miraculous as the technology works. I mean, that would be amazing. But what it does do is pretty phenomenal in itself in terms of, you know, killing bacteria. So I'm going to just go to the next slide. Just using kind of understand sort of what's going on inside of that machine. So over on the left hand side, where number one is, you'll see a picture of what looks like bottles kind of stacked in something. And essentially that is supposed to represent those blue carriers that were in the previous slide. So I'll just go back for a second and just so you can imagine those blue carriers if they were filled with some kind of finished packaged product, right? So it could be those bottles and it could be other things as long as it's some kind of in packaged food. So in that package has to be flexible. So typically it's often plastic of some sort. But this could be deli meats in like a skin pack or a vacuum pack. It could be matte packaging. You know, it could be a whole leg of like prosciutto ham could be an entire like, you know, bar ball, like the whole sort of chub of slices of pre-sliced turkey meat. So really kind of what fits into that carrier is what can go into the machine, essentially. And so the carrier sizes are going to vary based on the machine size. And this is one of the largest carriers that you would see. I can do or I should say they could hold probably anywhere between like three to 5,000 pounds of product depending on like what that shape and size of that package is, right? Because you can just imagine you've got this cylinder and so depending on what your package is, not everything is going to fit so great into a cylinder. Whereas other things like, you know, if it's in a pouch or if it's in that skin pack would fit really, really nicely into that carrier compared to like a tub or some kind of awkwardly shaped container. But really at the end of the day, the machine doesn't necessarily have a preference as to, you know, the size, how big or small, as long as everything kind of fits into that carrier and the packaging is flexible is what is the most important piece to what goes in there. So then once you've loaded your carrier with your product, it's going to move inside of a vessel. And so then what's going to happen is once that vessel is filled with all of the necessary carriers, it's going to be plugged on both ends. And so then once it's plugged on both ends, it's going to start to fill up with water. So if I go back to this one, when we look at that mezzanine and we see those things on top that kind of look like barbecue lids, right up there, those are pumps. And so those pumps, they're pumping in water. And essentially what's going to happen is inside of that vessel, it's going to fill with water at atmospheric pressure. Well, once it's filled with water, then the pumps are actually going to force more water into the vessel. And, you know, physics tells us that water is virtually incompressible. So when the pumps force in 15% more water into the vessel, it forces water to compress, which builds pressure. And that pressure builds, the highest commercial pressure is 87,000 PSI. There's some non-commercial technologies that can probably reach up to 100,000 PSI. But typically within the industry, it's capped at 87,000 PSI. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you always have to go up that high. And I'll get into some examples later in the presentation for products that don't necessarily have to use such an extreme level of pressure. But how you determine the level of pressure is really based off of your needs. And so a majority of the industry is using it for inactivating microbial activity. And so different types of, you know, microbes, so bacteria versus yeast and molds, parasites, they're going to all inactivate at various levels of pressure. And so you're going to do the necessary studies in order to determine what pressure and how long am I holding that pressure will kill the targeted bacteria that I'm going after in my product. And so then once you've determined that through a validation study and you start to use a technology to whatever desired time and pressure has been determined, the machine will program the machine to hold the pressure for that length of time. And then after that, decompression, the pressure will be released within 15 seconds. So it'll come back up to atmospheric pressure within 15 seconds. And so it's essentially just, you know, cold water that's being applied to the exterior of these finished package products. And there's really nothing else that's going on. But, you know, I'll get into a little bit more detail of what's actually happening to the bacteria to kind of help you understand why the pressure is so lethal. So if any of you are, you know, scuba divers or just familiar with, you know, the depth of the ocean, if we look at where the deepest part of the ocean is, that would be Marianna's trench. And so when you achieve 87,000 pounds of pressure, that's six times the depth of Marianna's trench. And so, you know, if you're familiar with scuba diving or just how pressure works, that when you are at such extreme pressures in order to then come back up to atmospheric pressure, you typically have to come back slowly in order to make sure that everything equilibrates correctly. So you can imagine that if you are at 87,000 psi and you come back up to atmospheric pressure within 15 seconds, it's quite lethal. And so I'll explain in a couple more slides just what it's doing to the cell so you can have a better picture. But what's going on inside of the chamber is a uniform pressure. So this picture beside with the styrofoam cup gives you a really good example because oftentimes when we think of pressure, we think of one directional pressure, but inside that vessel, it's uniform. So every single part of the package in there is experiencing the same amount of pressure on all sides. So in this styrofoam cup, what you just see is that it kind of shrinks down. It shrinks down because as we know, styrofoam is mainly air and the pressure is going to push out any type of air. So if I were to put a whole strawberry in there, a strawberry typically has a little pocket inside of it. And so that strawberry will collapse. And then if I put a grape in there, the grape will just come out still looking like the grape, but be a little bit softer and more malleable. But because there's no air pocket inside of the grape, it holds its structure. So with the cup that you see to the right there, essentially it doesn't crush the cup. It just pushes all the air and in a way kind of just shrinks it down. And the nice thing about that is because it's all uniform 100 percent of the time, you don't have any gradients, right? So there's like, you know, it's not like that one part of it is experiencing a different type of pressure at another part. So as the pressure is building, everything is experiencing the same level of pressure at the same time. So for microorganisms, what that means is a lot of times people envision the microorganisms sort of exploding at such severe pressures. But that's not really what happens. In fact, they more kind of implode. And you can see like in this microscopic picture, or if you can kind of just visualize, if you remember your days of biology, when you think of a membrane in a cell, it's kind of, you know, sort of held together like a cheesecloth, right? Sort of got this membrane that kind of woven together. And essentially what the lethality of the pressure is doing is almost poking holes in that membrane. And it's really challenging the integrity of the membrane. And so then when you go through the decompression, it's quite harsh and severe to the integrity of the membrane to keep it intact. And so essentially you start to see these cells that just kind of are imploding there because their membrane is now leaking and allowing in exterior fluid. So they can't really keep it together for lack of better way of describing it. And this gets to be a really important piece in determining that whole pressure and time combination that I was mentioning early on in the beginning. So if we look at this other visual here, there's a, you know, this is a great slide to kind of give you a nice, easy depiction of what's happening. But there's actually a lot going on here in terms of determining what is the right pressure and hold time for you. So first of all, you know, we have this single celled organism, got its membrane helping to keep this organism alive. And then as it's exposed to various levels of pressure, different types of organisms can withstand pressure better than other organisms. So remember Harry's just mentioning that that membrane kind of starts to have holes poked into it. So if you look at the little bubble that says sublethal injury. So just imagine now, you know, you're starting to have some damage done to this membrane. So the question always becomes, well, is there enough damage that's been done to get to the point of irreversible damage, which then the cell will actually die? Or is there not enough damage done? And then the cell actually after the process could repair itself and recover and start to grow again and actually even potentially be a little bit more robust now because it's been through this sort of environmental conditioning. And so, you know, to the left side of the picture there, you've got an example of different organisms and their tolerances to different levels of pressure. And it's reading in bar, but essentially 6,000 bars, 87,000 PSI. So 3,000 bars, about half of that. And it's accurate and it's correct. The interesting thing is that, you know, when we get down to, like, lyceria and lactic acid, they're a part of the gram-positive family. And things like salmonella and E. coli, they're a part of the gram-negative family. So if you remember, you used to do that purple staining back in high school and that would tell you if the bacteria is gram-positive or gram-negative. And the gram-positive bacteria, they have a much more stronger membrane. They have more peptidoglycan, essentially kind of like a gel or a glue to keep it together. So they have a better, you know, possibility to recover even at really high levels of pressure. And all that is going to be determined based on kind of the chemistry of the food that's going on. You know, just how long now do I have to expose those bacteria to the pressure in order to make sure that we get irreversible damage and they start to die? And in majority of the cases, we know that it's very unlikely we're ever going to have 100% lethal kill for lactic acid-producing bacteria. So this is why we typically do not refer to HVP as a method of sterilization. If you are trying to achieve sterilization, you typically have to do some kind of combination of either heat and pressure or a highly acidic environment for the pressure to be lethal enough to create a sterile shelf-stable product. And it's mainly, it just comes down to the fact that typically with lactic acid bacteria, there's such an abundance of it in the environment going into HVP. And then it just has such a high tolerance for pressure. So it's very rare that you would ever find a sterile product using HVP on its own and therefore all products need to be refrigerated after the fact. But going back to the Listeria piece versus the other pathogens, we all know that Listeria is one of the most concerning pathogens within the food industry, in particular for meat and even also for ready-to-eat food. And so oftentimes when we're doing validation, validation studies can get quite expensive and a lot of times we try and use something like Listeria monocytogenase is almost like a marker or a target pathogen that we know we can achieve the kill that we're looking for in that particular pathogen. If there's a very high probability that we're going to also achieve the same kill for salmonella and E. coli with the same pressure that's being applied. But we can talk about that more at the end if anybody has any questions on how you validate the process. In terms of yeast and mold, they typically are much more susceptible. However, the one thing about mold sometimes is that there can be spore-forming molds. Now, as I mentioned that HPP is not a method of sterility. It does not address spore-forming organisms. So it does not address Listeria and botulinum in a spore state or the Phyllis Sirius in a spore state. If they were in a vegetative state, then it would be addressed. But any type of spore-forming state, the technology does not address that unless you're up at the 100,000 PSI, which commercially those machines aren't available, or if you're doing a combination of pressure and heat, that's how you achieve spore destruction. And so with something like mold spores, most of them are pretty well addressed by HPP, but it can just be a little bit more challenging. I've seen some products like apple juices that have asco spores in them that would need a little bit more longer whole time than, say, what a normal apple juice might need, just because you have the acidity combination with the pressure, which tends to be very lethal for vegetative cells. So just to kind of give you a little comparison between HPP and other traditional thermal types of shelf-life extensions. So we do refer to HPP as a non-thermal technology, and that's typically with the understanding that that piece of machinery is going to be in a cold environment. It's going to be using cold water. It's going to have that temperature monitored. That's not to say that it couldn't be in a cold environment. And that's kind of why there is an area of research for high pressure thermal sterilization, is to have that combination of pressure and heat to address things like spores. But in most commercial cases, you will find that it is referred to as a non-thermal because people are using it under cold conditions. At the end of the day, though, it is a hunk of metal and it will absorb heat. So you do have to ensure that you have the right temperature monitoring programs within your production facility. We often think of the technology as innovative and that, you know, like it's barely new for a lot of people and a lot of people have heard of it. The technology itself is over 100 years old. However, commercially, it's only been used for about 25 years. It is calm. Eric sort of came about 25 years ago because of the avocado industry. You know, you have this very delicate, high premium product that was at that point in time really just being frozen. And yet then that would change, you know, the texture and the flavor and the consistency of the product. And it also, as we know, freeing does not deliver on lethality. So HPP really sort of changed the dynamic in the platform for shelf life extension of avocado based products. And then in 2004, you know, with the zero listeria tolerance policy that came in from the USDA, HPP really was and kind of is today the only technology that allows ready to each meet manufacturers to clean up their labels, have lower sodium levels, get the preservatives out and deliver on the full lethal kill for listeria while maintaining all the taste in the organoleptic. And, you know, so it's just been such a win-win for that industry. As I mentioned before, you know, the transmission is immediate. It's continuous. You know, there's no gradient. Everything is completely homogeneous all of the time. Oftentimes with passuration, there can be fluctuations or gradients or a slow rise. So, you know, there's there's definitely a difference between that. So if anybody has some questions about other non-thermal technologies after, we could, you know, talk a little bit about UV or PEF and just see if you have any questions around that. And then the last little bullet there that they have on, you know, no modifications for chemical compounds. So that's, you know, kind of a new area that I keep getting a lot of questions about. And if that is kind of confusing to you, do you think of, you know, there's oftentimes compounds like purine and acrylamide that are created through heat, you know, that caramelization, you know, those those types of compounds are not created with HPP. So again, you know, it's just kind of leading into that cleaner product that is created with or sort of maintained with this technology. So I'm just going to go over a little bit of an industry overview. So as I mentioned, you know, the technology is relatively new in terms of our commercial application. And we it's kind of been a bit of a sleeper technology because it has been growing quite rapidly behind the scenes, primarily, you know, for the interest of food safety and shelf life extension. And so you have, you know, avocado and ready to eat meat really making up like 60 percent of the market that was using the technology for a long time. Well, those applications, you know, they don't really need to talk about it and explain to the consumer that they're using it. But in 2012, we had a lot of growth in the juice category using the technology. And, you know, with that, it started to actually grow the demand for like more outsourcing because not everybody can afford this technology, right? It's very expensive. A lot of times these startups that have juice companies, you know, they just they can't afford the technology. So we really started to see a growth in outsourcing. So in third party tolling facilities, so companies that were, you know, offering the service like without having to actually buy your own machine. So I think the combination of, you know, products using the technology that are bringing more consumer awareness and starting to demand the desire for their products to go through HPP, along with then this increased growth in accessibility and availability of the technology that we started to see quite an exponential growth going on in the industry over the last five, six years. And as I mentioned before, these are just some of the major reasons why companies look at using HPP over other technologies. And probably the number one is food safety, you know, just to be able to deliver that lethal kill to the product and still maintain the integrity of the product is just so important to companies, you know, for brand protection, you know, preventing recalls. You know, it's one of the only technologies that, you know, if you have a validated five-long reduction and if you have any present or positive in your environment, you don't have to do a recall of that product because you've got this validated five-long reduction for in-package process depth, where you can't, you know, that's not the case with preservatives, right? Because preservatives aren't a lethality treatment, right? So, yes, they may prevent bacteria from growing, but they're not going to kill it right there in that instant. And so therefore, you know, you still have a chance to have a recall, even if you are using preservatives. But with HPP, your chances of recalls go down significantly, if at all. And so then the Better For You Clean label, as I mentioned with the meat industry, this technology has allowed meat companies to reduce sodium levels tremendously. In some cases, even make products for very specialized, you know, hospitals or geriatric homes, you know, compromised immune systems to have meat products available that don't even have any added sodium whatsoever. And they couldn't do that before without this type of technology. So it's really allowing, you know, to create some products that weren't even possible to create before, you know, in the whole movement of, you know, clean labels, no artificial dis, you know, that's one of the beauties of HPP is that if you are using fresh ingredients, it really sustains and maintains those flavor profiles. So, you know, you kind of essentially get to experience the benefits or the bounty of mother nature in your packaged product. Shelf life extension. So this definitely there is, you know, a huge increase in shelf life. Just how huge that can get is variable to the specificity of the product. You know, if we're looking at something that has 100 percent raw ingredients like a juice, that's not going to have quite as long of a shelf life as, say, a ready to eat deli meat. You know, when you think of how a deli meat is prepared, it's already cooked and then, you know, sliced and packaged. And so using HPP for a shelf life extension can last quite a long time. And depending on, you know, still you might have some particularly high salt levels or maybe even a combination of some clean natural preservatives. You know, something that in some cases, you know, products could be still good for a year. Now, not that you would ever see one of those products on the shelf for that long, but that's the reality of what you could potentially achieve. When you look at a raw product, that's highly unlikely. Most likely with something like a completely raw juice, you're going to have maybe about a 60 day shelf life refrigerated. So it really just varies. But, you know, that raw juice originally only had a three to five day shelf life. So going to 60 days, that is a really big significance for that type of product. So it just kind of depends, you know, on what the product is and what's the recipe and the chemistry that's going on in there. Anything with more acid is definitely going to help get you a longer shelf life. And this area also is, you know, kind of a new talking piece for the HPP community. With that, with the advent of shelf life extension and, you know, that example that I was just giving for juice, your product traditionally only has a three to five day shelf life, or even if it's a ready to prepared food that only has, you know, say like a two week shelf life, then you potentially have quite a bit of shrink that's going on and a lot of waste. And so there's been a lot of discussion in the industry around, well, how is HPP actually benefiting, you know, companies in terms of reducing waste, you know, the supply chain aspect of it and where are some new areas that we can start to talk to other companies about how the technology will benefit to the through shelf life extension to actually reduce their food waste. So this is just kind of a summary of the key advantage points. And as I mentioned, you know, the food safety is typically the number one, but you can see that all of these are relatively kind of close to each other within interest to the people that are buying the technology or looking into the technology. So, you know, food safety and shelf life extension kind of go hand in hand, clean labels, you know, nutrition, maintaining that, the organ elliptic, the brand protection. So they're all relatively, you know, close to each other. It's not like one far exceeds the other. And I think it just kind of demonstrates that all the main things that food manufacturers are looking for, HPP really delivers on all of them. And then this is just a graph to kind of help you like give you an example of how the categories are broken down. So as I mentioned, you know, avocado and deli meats, they tend to make up a large portion of the users for the technology. Other fruits and vegetables, you know, that could also be like purees or some kind of prepared food that is much more sensitive to heat, similar to avocado. You could also include any types of like, you know, dairy or I'm sorry, dips like salsas and dressings, hummuses, that kind of thing. Beverages, definitely over the last eight years we've seen beverages have quite a bit of growth for use of the technology. And because of that, we then saw the growth in the tolling facilities as well. And the tolling facilities, you know, one of the newer ones that a lot of people are reaching out to them for is pet food. You know, pet food is also kind of falls into that or it can fall into that premium category the amount of money that people are willing to spend on their pet food. Seafood is interesting. Seafood is probably one of the sort of sleeper areas that people don't really talk about with HPP and I'll explain why in a couple of slides going forward. Personally, you know, with prepared foods they're having such a small impact right now. I think that this is one of the categories that's going to jump leaps and bounds because we are seeing an increase in ready-to-eat foods, you know, growth of this category on the go, on the demand. And that also comes with high risk, you know, and that's something that preservatives can't necessarily address. So I think there will be quite an increase in that category for HPP. So it's especially with FISMA coming into place kind of the way that in 2004 when the USDA put in their zero-lusterity tolerance policies and it made everybody really take a look at this technology. I think that with things like genome sequencing and the technology is getting better at identifying and connecting the sources of where the bacteria is coming from and what food it's in. I think that the ready-to-eat food category is going to take a really close look at HPP. Dairy is definitely an area of potential. It's just that there typically is a lot of really strict dairy laws and regulations and, you know, HPP is not, hasn't been approved by the dairy industry for like the AAA certification I think is what it is. But there's other parts of the world that are looking to use the technology to treat raw milk. So there's a product that's in Mexico. There's a product in Australia. So it definitely thinks that there's a lot of potential. Again, if that type of product continues to grow in demand. And other R&D areas, there's even non-food applications for HPP. So looking at other areas where you might want to take out preservatives, whether that be vaccines or cosmetics, beauty products, you know, just other areas, there are some applications for it too. So going over just to some examples, I've kind of talked about a bit of these products along the way, you know, and as I mentioned before, in this picture kind of shows you different types of containers, you know, that can go through the machine. So you have tubs, you have little pods, you have cups, like anything that's plastic and flexible can go through the machine. Now I talked a little bit about kind of the chemistry and the matrix of the criteria that's going on inside of that cup, right? So the food chemistry and matrix. So since the pressure is moving through water, that's its conducive medium. Therefore that means that the food itself that's inside of the package also has to have a certain level of water activity. It can't be too dry. So, you know, people have tried to put things like peanut butter in there. Well, that doesn't work because peanut butter typically has a water activity below 0.5. And in most of the cases, you need to have a water activity above 0.8. So the best kind of example that I could give you is when you kind of look at the meat category. You know, something like most jelly meats are gonna have fairly high level of water activity, probably well into 0.9, close to one. But if you look at a perjudo, that can get pretty dry, right? That goes through the whole dry curing process. It can be in the 0.8 and very, in the low 0.8. So that gets to start to really challenge the efficacy of the technology. However, that product tends to have really high salt levels. So instead what you get is you kind of get a combination of the pressure and the salt working effectively to kill the bacteria. Whereas if I was looking at the juice category, the beverage category, where the water activity is almost that of water, it's virtually one, here you kind of have the combination of acid and pressure working together in order to deliver the efficacy that you're looking for. So when we look at on the right side there, when we talk about milk and we talk about these other innovative applications, colostrum, those tend to be things that don't necessarily have an acidic pH. They tend to be more alkaline. So in that case, while HPP could still work for those products, they're not gonna have as long of a shelf life as the juice. So those type of alkaline beverages could have maybe a 30 day shelf life, whereas a juice could have like a 60 day shelf life, if that makes sense. As I mentioned before, about seafood, so seafood is a little bit unique. It's kind of the one that doesn't have to go into a package prior being loaded into the carrier, as you can see in the second picture where you have oysters going right in the carrier. So the seafood industry uses the technology a little differently. They typically use it for shucking. So the membrane, the protein that holds the membrane of the muscle to the shell in seafood, is very thick and it's very sensitive to pressure. So even something that like half of 87,000 PSI, so like 3,000 bar, is effective enough to denature that protein that's clinging to the side of the shell and release the meat from the shell. So you get 100% meat retention. So you can just imagine how this has benefited the seafood industry in terms of shucking. No injury prevention, the speeding up the rate of it, like so many benefits, 100% of the meat retention coming out, that you can kind of see in that lobster picture there, it shows just how it's like identical to the shell itself. It's not cut up or choppy or it hasn't been handled really roughly. They don't show it in that picture, but there's even like a gel in the antenna that can be pulled out of the lobster after HPP. So it really does get 100% of it. At those pressures, you even are addressing some viruses like the brule. So now you also have the industry looking at using the technology for food safety as well as shucking. So it's one of the more innovative ways to use the technology. And probably one of the new areas that we're seeing the technology get some attention is for baby food. Similar to the cold press juices. In 2012, there was a really big sort of trend, diet trend happening. Everybody was kind of doing juice cleanses and this is where the technology really got some attention from the industry because it was changing the shelf life from three days to 30 days. And it was also essentially providing the same benefit as that raw food. It was delivering on the nutrients, it was delivering on the taste. It doesn't necessarily denature the enzymes the same way that thermal pasteurization does. So with the same thought process, baby food has really looked to HPP to help deliver a superior product than what's on the shelf. And so we're seeing quite a rise and increase in this category. And I think that this will only continue to increase as well. But the thing here that I try and give a lot of advice to people is that this is a different audience. It's a very sensitive audience. And so I think we're always taking extreme cautions when it comes to food safety. And this is one area that definitely needs to be vetted out and needs a lot of testing and support. And so the council wants to be involved in helping these companies and guide them and make sure that they're considering all aspects. As I mentioned before, the technology is not a method of sterilization. So considering the audience of this product, we really want to be involved and help these companies make the best food safety decisions possible. So with that said, I'm going to just talk a little bit about how the council came together and what we're doing. So as this title implies, unifying the industry. So a couple of years ago, we'd been talking for a while, the manufacturers of the machine, the towing facilities. And just to clarify, when I say towing facility, that's the third-party facility that is offering the technology as a service. So companies don't have to buy the equipment themselves. They can take their finished product to one of those facilities. The facility will run it through the machine, and then the people either take it back with them or sometimes, depending on the dynamics of the facility, they might offer storage and distribution through their facility as well. So that's what I mean by a towing. It's a third-party service provider for the technology. So with those companies that were leading the category and the manufacturers and just other users, we realized there wasn't really one place, one resource that you could go to to kind of ask HPV questions that were non-bias, that weren't trying to sell a service or trying to sell a machine or something like that. So we really needed to have a body for people to go to, to ask the questions, learn about the technology, make educated decisions, and also be there as a conduit to the regulatory bodies, to how we start to build the relationships in order to have the right guidance and understanding on the regulatory piece of the technology. Up to this point, there's been directives on HPV from the USDA, not as much from the FDA. The FDA mentions it in certain asset plans, like in the juice assets, but not the specific directives that the USDA has delivered. So currently, myself, I'm also coach herring a position on the juice task force, which is an affiliation between the Institute of Food Safety and Health, IFISH, out of Illinois, and working with regulatory bodies to kind of help better decision-making models for inspectors when they are going into HPV juice facilities. So we just kind of really realized as an industry, we need something. We need a resource for everyone to go to, and that's kind of how the Council all came about, was bringing together our founding members, manufacturers, equipment, third-party facilities, and some key users of the technology in the industry, including good foods. And so with that, we realized that we also wanted to have a high pressure-certified mark in order to identify products that were using the technology. And the thought behind this was kind of twofold. So internally, when we thought of it for the industry, it really is kind of the first mark of its kind that focuses on the food safety aspect of it. So the criteria in order to get the mark really evaluates the company's food safety protocol that they have in place for validating the use of the technology. So on our high pressure-certified website, you can go there and you can see the guidelines for different categories that would qualify to use the mark. So what it basically comes down to is, if you write in your HACCP plan that you are achieving the technology to, let's say, deliver a five-log reduction of final juice companies, if I need it as a least-valid treatment, do I have the validation studies that support that? And so essentially, then, we are working with NSF Labs to take the criteria that these companies would provide, evaluate them, and let us know if they meet the criteria or not. This way, at the council, we never see anybody's proprietary documents or information. And there's never access to it from our end. And then from the industry, or I'm sorry, from the consumer side of it, if I pick up this package and it's got this mark on it, I want to know what that means because, obviously, you put it on here for a reason. So I, as a consumer, now go to the website. The website is separate from the Coal Pressure Council website because this is the website for the consumer. It's consumer education. It's not about selling an HPP machine. It's a non-competitive website. It's easy to digest language. It's not too scientific. So really just explaining the benefit of the technology for different product categories. And our hope is that it will actually drive consumers to want to look for products that have the mark on it and that they understand that company is investing millions of dollars in order to use this technology to make a product that's better for me. And so this is just kind of a summary of what I was just mentioning. What the High Pressure Certified really represents to the company. So brand protection, food safety, non-thermal, clean label, preservative free potentially, just the quality of their product, the organoleptics, really maintaining the best possible flavor profile as if you made it that day with any type of changing of the product as you might get with some other technologies like with traditional thermal pasteurization. And so with that, kind of left it out open to Q&A, and I've seen some questions come up. Yeah, Joyce, this is Ron and back on. Yeah, there's some interesting questions. Looks like one of them is pretty interesting. Is this only useful for rigid packaging like bottles, cartons, and less useful for flexible film packaging? Well, so when you say flexible film, just so we understand, because again, flexible packaging is what you want with this. But it kind of depends on what you're talking about. So there's anything from those deli meat packages, which is incredibly flexible, pouches, very flexible. When you look at a container like, say, salsa, that has a rigid component, and then it has a film seal on top. But still both pieces to that are quite flexible. So I think it just depends on what they mean by what type of flexible packaging. Because flexible packaging is desirable for this technology. Is there a follow-up question on that? It might be, what packaging is not acceptable? They said rigid. So what is not acceptable? So glass traditionally does not work. There was a company in Japan that was successful with doing a glass bowl. But that's because they had a flexible film top. And so when the 15% compression was occurring, that flexible film top was absorbing all of that 15%. And I can't say firsthand if every single bowl went through and never broke. I'm sure there was. But they are the only one that I'm aware of that was ever successful with glass. But typically we try and encourage people to avoid glass. Sure. Well, here's a simple one. Why doesn't the meat cell break also during the pressure? Right. Right. So it's not that they're not experiencing the same type of, I guess, changes or damage that would occur. A couple of things are happening here. In a meat cell, it already is fully cooked. We kind of have this product that has already gone through a denatured process in itself. And then essentially it's been reformed and compacted and put back together. And it has multi-layers. And so similar to that grape example that I was giving, that the grape itself doesn't completely dissolve or break down or anything like that. It's multi-cellular, right? So you've got layers upon layers upon layers. So yes, all of the cells are experiencing some damage to create weakness. And so that grape will come out and it will reap, right? As if you had put it in the freezer and taken it out. And it'll be kind of very soft and malleable. But it's not disintegrated. With bacteria, they're single-celled organisms, right? So they're not multi-cellular. So they're essentially their own house. And they just can't survive on their own. Sorry, that is how they survive, is on their own. So once they're membrane is compromised, that's it. They're just kind of their debt. OK. I guess on the follow-up, are the cells and meats and vegetables affected? Do they burst thereby affecting flavor and taste? I think that's the key question right there. Yes, so that's a really interesting question. And it kind of goes back to what is similar with the discussion. When you're looking at ingredients that are 100% raw versus something that's already cooked. So in most cases with your cooked product, how it tastes at that point in time is how it will continue to taste for the remainder of the shelf life. Now with a raw product, that's a little bit different because if you are thinking of the way that that cell could be containing certain compounds that actually do have flavor profiles to them and stuff. And then if you put holes into those cells and some of those flavor profiles release, then it could change the taste of the product post-HPP, if that makes sense. And so with everybody, I always try and educate them, you have to do a sensory shelf life on your product. So making up samples, run it through the technology and store over X amount of weeks of shelf life and taste it every single week and see if you notice a change in the flavor profile of that product. Because nine times out of 10, you're going to say that an HPP product has, or you're going to base the shelf life off of the sensory and not really the microbial, because the microbial oftentimes just keeps on going. You usually determine your shelf life of your product based on the taste of it. Got it. This is interesting. What is the impact of pressure technology on the micelles or the emotions? Yes. And that's another key benefit to the innovation side of the technology. As we know with something like thermal, you de-mature things, right? So you kind of break them down to their primary structure. The thing that gets really interesting with pressure, let's take proteins, for example. Proteins are held together by a strong bond and a weak bond. Now we know the strong bonds are incredibly stable under pressure. We know it's the weak bonds that are always questionable, kind of like what you saw with the shellfish, right? And how they're questionable really depends on the overall chemistry in the matrix. If I'm a cucumber juice, I could do one thing going through HPP. If I am in acidified cucumber juice, I could give you a completely different result in how my enzymes behave post-HPP, right? And so that combination of acid and pressure can really impact the behavior of those weak bonded proteins. So in terms of food development, what gets really interesting with proteins is that they can start to coagulate. And they can start to thicken, essentially, due to pressure. And again, it all kind of depends on the chemistry that's going on for the product that you're creating. The best example I could give you, if anyone has ever had a nut milk, like an almond milk, right? So if I were to make an almond milk at home, if I strain it and then run it through HPP, essentially, it's really just kind of water with almond flavor, has very little protein in it or any type of pulp or fat left over. And that probably will still come out like a watery almond milk. However, if I want to make a more almost kind of similar to like a smoothie and I leave a lot of the almond pulp in my bottle that goes through HPP, I have seen products that come out like cream and mushroom soup. So they just completely thicken and congeal just because of the changes that are happening between the proteins and the fats, because the fats are also emulsifying at the same time. And so you're going to have a potential to make innovative products that you wouldn't necessarily be able to make with pasteurization. And same thing with starches, carbohydrates, they are going to, essentially, you're going to start to have thickening and gelling of those products, right? So oatmeal tend to get really, really sticky. You're making an overnight oats type of product and putting it through HPP. So all of that has some really interesting potential for innovation, in particular, if you're looking for different binders, if you want to get away from typical xanthum gum and guar gum and other things, and you want to use more natural starches, maybe you want to use citrus fiber, maybe you want to use chia or something like that, but it's a little bit more label friendly to have some potential new opportunities with HPP. OK, here's one that goes to the consumer. Do you have any research data on consumer attitudes towards HPP? Yeah, well, I have seen one paper. And not that I'm surprised at this. We kind of are a culture of consumers that doesn't necessarily want to know how our food is made. We just kind of want to sometimes turn a blind eye and, if anything, we just look at the nutritional panel on the back, and that's kind of enough for us. Now, things are changing, and we are definitely having younger generations now that are much more interested in understanding the manufacturing side of things. Ever since consumers started to become aware of food industries using things like processing aids and what really goes on to make their food, we are having a new area of interest. And that's why I think our timing is right. We're launching the high pressure certified mark because the millennials are starting to become the household shoppers. They're growing up. And these are the generation of tech kids that are fascinated by technology. They understand that these kind of processes. So historically, with Baby Boomers or Generation X, we stayed away from that word process. We don't want to think of our previous process. And probably even younger generations don't either. But they're more open-minded to understanding that this technology isn't necessarily a bad process. Like there's actually a benefit to it and stuff. So historically, I would say people are really interested and open to wanting to know about the technology. But I strongly believe that things are changing. Sure. Here's an interesting. What is the limitation hindering the industry going to high enough pressures to kill the microbes? I think it's more of the capabilities of the technology, the physics of it. So the machines all have to be approved by ASME. And I think at this point in time, I think the manufacturers just have not demonstrated the use of those levels of pressure, I guess, for a commercial application. So right now, the approved limitation has been 87,000 PSI. OK. Here's an interesting. Can you be used for raw meat, example, a whole bird in shrink bag, chopped meat tray? So it could. You just have to be open-minded to the fact that because of some protein changes, what ends up happening with raw meat, if they take on the appearance as if they were cooked, so a chicken would turn kind of a white color on the exterior. A shrimp would go kind of pink. Some kind of beef patty would go gray. But that isn't a cooked product. The food manufacturer still has to cook it. So there have been companies that have used HPP to make food service like hamburgers. And when they sell it to the restaurant, they have to educate the cook. This isn't cooked. You still have to cook it, but you don't have to cook it for as long of a cook time. So there is an education piece around that type of product. Excellent. Here's an interesting one. Would the high-pressure certified badge be available for just the packaging if proven to be HPP compliant? So it is kind of for that now. I made him just not understanding the question correctly. I think he's asking the packaging by itself. If someone was selling packaging, could they use the certified logo on the packaging itself? Oh, I see. That's not the way that it's currently set up, because right now, since we are basing the criteria off of understanding the company's safety side of how they're using the technology. So we just want to make sure that how they're writing, they're using it in their HACCP plan, that they have validated that appropriately. So we haven't really considered it for that. And even the HPCP, or I'm sorry, the CPC logo, our council logo, right now, we don't promote that to go on packaging either. That's just used for other material, like either on your website or marketing materials. But it's not a logo that's meant to go on packaged products. OK, excellent. Well, we've reached our time limit. I do appreciate there was a question about, will a copy of the presentation be available? The entire presentation has been recorded. It will be available in a couple of days on the CPA website at contractpackaging.org. I'd like to take a moment to thank Joyce so much for presenting today. Thank you, Joyce. It was a fantastic presentation. Thank you, all of you, for who participated. Joyce, any closing thoughts? No. I mean, I leave my email box open for people who have any follow-up questions that didn't get answered or they didn't feel comfortable asking. I'm more than happy to answer any question, because I know that this technology can seem really confusing, and I don't want anybody to feel intimidated by it. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you for that, Joyce. Thank you all for attending the CPA and the CPC webinar today on cold pressure technology. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you.