Fresh Wave Grows With New Plant, Uses No Hot Water or Air Conditioning

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OAKLAND, Calif. -- What started as an all-natural way to keep odors from coming out of industrial facilities has turned into a ever-growing consumer business for Fresh Wave, leading it to build a new, green manufacturing plant.

The company, which makes biodegradable odor-eliminating products, has seen its consumer division double every eight months since 2003, said managing director Phil Coffey. To keep up with the expansion, the company needed a new plant, taking the opportunity to make the facility greener and more efficient than its other plants.

Fresh Wave is an offshoot of OMI Industries, founded in 1989 by investor and entrepreneur John Tsatsos. "His thinking was that because of urban sprawl, the need for something to remove odors from industrial plants was going to grow larger and larger," Coffey said. Tsatos found technology that removes, instead of just masking, odors and began selling it in the U.S.

The company's industrial product, Ecosorb, breaks up odors at the molecular level, using electrostatic charges to attract particles of unwanted odors, leaving no smell. In industrial plants, the product is commonly misted into the bases of stacks.

Coffey joined OMI shortly after it was founded, and in his first few years he guided the company in redeveloping its product to only use plant oils. "Over time it occurred to me we needed something that was completely natural," he said, adding that customers were not very interested in whether or not products were all-natural. “What they liked was that it worked."

To get companies on board, though, OMI had to prove its product actually broke up odors like it claimed to. OMI took Ecosorb to universities and labs to be tested by experts who wrote papers documenting what the product did. Once companies were interested in the product, they would trial it at plants. The best test, Coffey said, was for companies to try the product and see if complaints about smells from residents living nearby would stop.

After getting big names like Exxon Mobil and Weyerhaeuser on board, OMI was able to build up its client base, now made up of municipalities and Fortune 500 companies in 30 countries.

OMI eventually tried moving into the consumer realm, pitching its technology to companies making home care products. Although they were able to show the product effectively removed odors, Coffey said, they were rebuffed when the companies' marketing departments said the didn't like the product because it left no smell at all instead of replacing any unwanted smell with a masking scent.

Soon products like Febreze took off and OMI decided to go into the consumer business itself, creating Fresh Wave in 2003 as a separate company making the product of the same name. As with Ecosorb, they started off having to prove themselves, getting on the shelves of more and more stores to show that Fresh Wave could sell. The product is now in about 8,000 stores, Coffey said, and available in 10 versions. Fresh Wave uses plant extracts like lime, pine and clove in combination with different carriers, such as water for the spray version and soy for candles. The company's growth was part of the reason why it had to build a new production plant.

Fresh Wave took strides to make its plant efficient, hiring a construction manager with a background in green technology. The Rising Sun, Ind., facility uses a ventilation system to draw air from its cooler north side to its south side, with independently-operated louvers than can change the air flow. "That all cut down on the need for air conditioning," said Steve Lattis, director of operations.

The only hot water in the plant goes to the bathrooms. In the company's previous facility, some hot water was used to make the Fresh Wave product. Lattis said hot water is not required for production, but does make some ingredients blend quicker and easier. "I determined we could do away with it," he said.

Any water that is used gets captured and is funneled to irrigate plants in the facility's yard. The 16,000 square foot building is the first in an industrial park and sits on two acres the company owns. In developing the facility's footprint, Fresh Wave wanted to maximize green space, creating only one entrance and exit for all vehicles. Although Fresh Wave expects to expand the plant in the coming years, it has committed to leaving at least half of the site as green space.

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