Laminar (Formerly H2Ok Innovations)

One of the most overlooked steps in deploying technology into a plant isn't the integration, it's engaging the right people in conversation. Mahde Alchab explains that when introducing new technology into a facility, the first thing he does is talk to the quality team. The people on the floor. The ones running the tests and writing the reports. Because building trust with quality team isn't a nice-to-have — it's what determines whether a new technology will be deployed successfully. Mahde explains the importance of quality sign off for Laminar deployments. A technology that quality teams will utilize day-to-day. "Laminar is not just a quality tool. To quality, Laminar IS the tool." Watch the full conversation with Mahde Alchab and Sanjay Rajan → https://lnkd.in/eeqcAaFM

Quality assurance teams in food and beverage manufacturing are the final sign-off on everything and one of the most important voices in any technology implementation on the factory floor. → Quality holds the final sign-off. No process change happens without their authorization, which means getting quality aligned early is not optional. → The quality team understands their facility's operational reality better than any outside team and that context speeds up deployment and enables scalability. → AI/ML is giving quality teams a new edge on hard problems like emulsification breakdown, identifying the patterns before split event occurs, taking facilities from multiple breakdown events to near zero. Sanjay Rajan and Mahde Alchab dig into the role of quality teams in successful technology implementation and what AI/ML means for longstanding production challenges like emulsification in Episode 5 of On The Line with Laminar. 🎬 Watch the full conversation → https://lnkd.in/eNwV9xHP

Laminar co-founders Annie L. and David Lu grew up on factory floors, and that experience is what drove them to ask a question the food and beverage industry had largely stopped asking: why are we still cleaning until the timer runs out, instead of to the actual clean conditions of the pipes? When they started building the answer in 2021, some of the biggest players in the space told them self-optimizing Clean-In-Place (CIP) and changeovers were impossible. Grounded in first principles and foundational chemistry, Annie and David quietly proved it in full industrial-grade environments, over and over again. Five years later, Laminar is the most widely deployed self-driving CIP and changeover optimization solution in the world. We work with six of the ten largest food and beverage companies globally, span six continents, and have helped customers cut chemical use by 40% and water consumption by up to 25% with our AI-powered sensors. Along the way we were named Unilever's 2023 Startup of the Year, helped one of our customers get named to the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network, and closed a $12.4M Series A — all while growing from a 100-square-foot prototype space at North America’s largest climatetech incubator GreenTown Labs into a 35+ person team with a global footprint. We're charting the future of global manufacturing. Our team is customer-obsessed, highly technical, and relentless about pushing new approaches to manufacturing problems that have stayed unsolved for decades. Thank you Greentown Labs for being part of this journey and for the incredible #GreentownAt15 feature. 💚

Timer-based Clean-in-Place (CIP) recipes in many flavors and fragrances plants were set decades ago — often by operators who no longer work there. As experts retire and manufacturing expertise walks out the door, the context behind certain cleaning processes and settings disappears. Here’s why that matters: → Nothing is visibly failing, so inefficiency gets absorbed into operating costs and forgotten → Recipes are built with quality guardrails for worst-case scenarios, but most cleans don't require the worst case and end up wasting good product, time, water, and chemicals → With F&F plants running thousands of flavors daily, even modest overcleaning compounds into a real capacity problem The instinct to leave validated processes alone makes sense. But as SKU counts climb and lines run at capacity nearly every day, absorbing inefficiency is no longer an option. Lulu Smith breaks down why F&F manufacturers are finally rethinking clean-in-place — and how self-driving CIP works within existing quality frameworks without revalidating from scratch. Full post here: https://lnkd.in/eNXzXMaC

One of the less-discussed costs in co-manufacturing is what happens to production capacity every time a production line switches between brands. Bobby McLaughlin explains in Episode 4 of On The Line with Laminar that when co-manufacturers take on customers with different allergen profiles, ingredient formulations, and viscosity levels, the CIP (Clean-in-Place) cycles get longer and changeovers get more complex. That means the line spends more time cleaning and transitioning, and less time producing. For co-manufacturers managing a diverse portfolio of food and beverage SKUs, that lost production time is a real operational cost that compounds with every new customer added. 🎬 Watch the full conversation with Bobby McLaughlin and Sanjay Rajan → https://lnkd.in/eGDTYR-Y

Yesterday, a plant manager at a mid-market beverage co-manufacturer started our call with a problem he'd clearly been thinking about for a while. Every time the co-man starts the pasteurizer up, water sits in the lines. When product hits, it flushes straight to the drain until the Brix reading on product sugar content is within spec. For a food and beverage plant running multiple changeovers a day, that's a lot of good product never making it to a bottle. He'd already done the math and knew exactly how much water was in the pipes. He had the fix conceptually mapped out. He just couldn't see where the product-water interface was in real time during the changeovers. One global beverage bottler we work with had the same changeover blind spot. Once their team implemented Laminar sensors, they could see exactly when their lines transitioned over to running pure product and started bottling earlier on every changeover — recapturing enough to bottle 2 million additional units a year. If you're still calling the all-clear on your product changeovers based on timers or visual cues, there are more time, yield, and utility savings in your lines than you think. Laminar (Formerly H2Ok Innovations)  

Chick-fil-A doesn't own production plants — yet their iconic brand of sauce flavors end up in your fridge thanks to co-manufacturing. The brand/co-man partnership enables food and beverage brands to stay agile and innovative in the age of SKU proliferation. But there's a real cost to that co-manufacturing flexibility: Every new flavor requires more time spent on changeovers and clean-in-place. Sanjay Rajan and Bobby McLaughlin break down this growing pressure on uptime in Episode 4 of On The Line. → Why co-manufacturing keeps growing and the critical role of co-mans in the era of SKU proliferation → The effect of razor-thin margins co-mans have to navigate → Why taking on a wider SKU portfolio directly drives more CIP and changeovers. → How co-mans can protect flexibility without giving up line utilization 🎬 Watch the full episode → https://lnkd.in/eGDTYR-Y

We started asking flavors and fragrances manufacturers a simple question: are you spending more time cleaning than producing? Almost always, the answer is yes. The F&F industry is growing fast — but SKU proliferation and rising customer demands are making plants harder to run. Clean-in-place and changeover inefficiency is where that pressure shows up first. Here's what we're hearing from plant floors: → Lead times have ballooned from 10 days to 8 weeks as demand for custom formulations grows → SKU portfolios now span hundreds of variations across spray dryers, blenders, and fermentation vessels → CIP and changeover sequences are still built for worst-case — so cleaning time compounds across every shift → Every minute saved in a cleaning or changeover cycle goes directly back into production and revenue

The shift from hero SKUs to hundreds of SKUs is a permanent structural change in food and beverage manufacturing. Product changeovers are where the explosion of SKUs is hitting brands and co-manufacturers hardest: → Product is lost twice per transition — on the tail of the outgoing run and the head of the next one → Timer-based flush cycles are built on worst-case assumptions, so every new SKU adds more buffer time → Fragmented time savings rarely consolidate into actual usable production windows Sanjay Rajan breaks down why rapid changeovers have become the biggest bottleneck in F&B manufacturing — and how self-optimizing changeovers tackle this industry trend head on. Get the full picture here: https://lnkd.in/ezFpvrYd

Consumers want fresh food with ingredients they can actually pronounce — and the more items on a label, the less likely they are to convert. But this shift goes beyond perception. Food and beverage manufacturers are now under increasing pressure to prove every claim on that label down to the lot number. "100% this," "free of that," "organic" — none of it can go on the label without the data to back it up. We talked about what this means for F&B manufacturers in Episode 3 of On The Line with Laminar featuring Sanjay Rajan and Bobby McLaughlin. 🎬 Watch the full conversation → https://lnkd.in/eG6-JzHt