In the conclusion of our conversation of the first episode of the Zochem Podcast, Certainty Starts Here: Seeing Beyond the Furnace, Mo dives into why Zochem treats zinc oxide as a specialty chemical rather than a commodity. We discuss the aggressive capital expenditures behind their state-of-the-art muffle furnaces and how new technology improves operator safety and environmental performance. Mo also shares the “Dream Team” culture and the complex science of recyclability, explaining why “Certainty Starts Here” is more than just a slogan, it’s a commitment to a cleaner, more reliable supply chain.
Jill – You called your product a specialty chemical. How does that change the way you look at information systems and burner technology?
Mo – So really, you know, when we think about our our product and and I do call it a specialty chemical, and that’s exactly what it is. You know, we take a zinc metal and we convert it in our own proprietary way to make a very consistent quality zinc oxide. And then when you’re asking about, okay, it’s a specialty chemical that goes into pharma and agriculture, rubber chemicals, specialty chemicals, motor oils, construction materials, how does that look at in terms of uh information systems and uh and burners? It’s the the burner technology comes with us wanting to be lean and responsible. So lean no lie if you can use less utilities it does help the cost factor right let’s start there but more importantly you know Zochem is ecoatis gold or silver rated over the past 3 four years what does that mean it means that we believe in sustainable procurement we believe in labor and ethics we have we have those pillars we have the pillar of environment so a low knockox burner for example that we’ve recently put in more of our recent h furnaces that just makes us better in terms of again predictability on using lower natural gas right having a little less uh uh reliance on natural gas on a per ton basis if you will now on the information systems I think what’s important there is we have all these different applications as I mentioned so when you think about a GMP facility for pharmaceuticals when you think about selling to multinational tire customers or multinational chemical companies fortune 500 companies they have certain expectations underlying perhaps but they have certain expectations that you see in their annual reports. So again, we just kind of want to be analogous with them. So to be a specialty chemical with a specialty application, you can’t just talk the talk, if you will. You got to walk the walk. And that’s where I think the burners come in and where information systems are are more applicable in terms of information passing directly from the customer right to the floor back to the customer.
Jill – Yeah.
Mo – You know, so it’s just as important for us and our great customer service team to confirm an order and make sure the customer knows we got it.
Jill – Yeah.
Mo – And it’s just as important for them to know we’re shipping it, right? It’s the in between. As much as they want to know, we’re happy to tell them.
Jill – Yeah.
Mo – But it’s the in between that we just want them to know it’s just happening the same way. The wheels going to turn, right? And it’s going to be solid.
Jill – How does a new furnace design actually make life easier and safer for the operators on the floor?
Mo – You know, pretty simple answer. When every time we’ve been iterating our furnaces, we try and reduce the amount of handling an operator needs to do and the amount of exposure they have to any heat source. So really what we’ve been doing now is the operator really never actually gets close to the molten metal bath and they never actually need to get close to the zinc vapor port which is what’s coming out at let’s say 12,300° C 2500 F. So really that the furnace design is more about keeping it more of an enclosed process to give them less exposure to the heat elements, needing less mobile traffic. That’s where the material handling comes in as well. So there’s less forklifts around them. There’s less actual zinc handling in terms of weight. Um and then the furnace design goes all the way through to material movement. So after it comes out of the furnace, it’s got to get to the packaging operator. And even that conveyance system is an enclosed process which has again less emission points completely closed. We use very um high intense filters to make sure that they’re uh basically not passing through anything that wouldn’t be we wouldn’t want someone to breathe in.
Jill – Right.
Mo – So all that to say um the the design really is more of an iteration almost like again using the car analogy adding another safety airbag, adding… adding another uh safety belt restraint and so on so forth. It’s one of those things and and really we just want to focus more on what do they see as their pain point and usually it’s ergonomics and it’s heat and it’s mater uh material movement. Okay, those are usually the three pain points in a in a zinc oxide manufacturing facility. So that’s really where the iterations help more than anything.
Jill – Okay, speaking of, Certainty Starts Here is a strong mantra. We hear slogans all the time. What makes yours more than just words on a wall?
Mo – You know, ours, not to sound cliche, it’s really what we call our dream team, right? You can put systems in place. I talked about the good manufacturing practices that make us uh FDA certified and Health Canada certified. Um, but you need people to actually affect that. You need people to actually implement that and apply it and again see the fruits of their labor and want the win out of it. So when I think about, you know, why we call ourselves the dream team, if you had Jordan, Pippen, Magic, Barkley, and Larry Bird on the floor, you feel pretty good, right? And that’s how I feel, right? It’s it’s really got nothing to do with me at that point. At that point, it’s really about the operators, uh, our production operators on the floor, our maintenance skill trades, whether it’s our Millerites, electricians, um, who are keeping the line moving because when you’re a continuous process, you don’t want to stop. And again, that goes to that predictive maintenance element, right? When you look at our management teams, when you look at our customer service that feeds it to our operations team and scheduling and uh converting from production to make sure that we get the product on time in full to our logistics, getting it out the door, you know, to the finance team invoicing that load to make sure our customer gets the paperwork they require. And not just the finance part of it, as much as we like to make money. No, it’s also the quality certification, right? right to make sure there’s a certificate of analysis that says it’s exactly what we said it should be. It’s in specification. Um and then when I say why Certainty Starts Here, one of our four C’s, certainty being one of them, the other ones are continuity, communication, and consultation. It’s that consultation element that I feel is our differentiator. If a customer’s got a question, they got a thought, they got a concern, they’re welcome to ask us, you know, because again, it’s kind of like as I mentioned those layered audits, you you learn something every time, right? You learn something new every day and it’s even better when you hear it from the person who’s using your product. So our consultation from our team is what provides certainty to that customer. They get an answer that they can take home and that they can use in their process to make sure their end user is satisfied.
Jill – Right. Yeah. Exactly. So the board talks about three pillars as you mentioned before. Hire right, be good Samaritans and take care of the customer.
Mo – Right.
Jill – How do these pillars affect your day-to-day decisions?
Mo – You know, the board’s always been very clear about those three pillars that you just mentioned. Uh, good homework, by the way. Um, so hiring the right people, being good Samaritans, and taking care of our customers. The day-to-day decisions where it comes to place is kind of the back end of that. When I when we say take care of our customers, we have the 1A internal customer, our team member, and 1B, our external customer, right? the one who’s putting who’s giving you the revenue, who’s paying the bills, who we value, you know, eternally to make sure we can keep being a repeatable, venerable supplier for years and decades and centuries to come. That’s what we want, right? So, when you ask me about the day-to-day, you got to funnel that back. If we want to be strong for 50 years and and the next 50 years, we need to take that back to the day-to-day and say when we’re hiring the right people, they should be taking care of each other. There needs to be a collaborative environment, right? I have to be included in that. If I’m not helping in that, then I’m the wrong person for this for this seat.
Jill – Yeah.
Mo – When when you’re being a good Samaritan, there’s a kindness and a compassion that comes with that. Our board is extremely uh philanthropic to say the least. They believe in giving. And they don’t believe in giving just to one cause. They believe in giving to causes that are important to the people they hire. So you start connecting those two things together. If you keep that energy positive as much as we try to, if you keep that energy positive and you’ve got good collaboration, you have the right people making the product, you have the right managers making the right decisions, the internal and external customer should win. But it’s it is a day-to-day just going back to your question, it’s a dayto-day element. Every day something new pops up. There’s a new order to make. There’s a new specification on the floor. Um, there’s a great change that meaning in our world there’s a recipe that needs to be toggled on a furnace because we’re now making customer B’s product instead of customer A.
Jill – Okay.
Mo – How we make those decisions, how we make the efficiency of that decision and the effectiveness of that decision really comes down to do we have the right people and are they energized? And that’s where the good Samaritan part comes in, right? And uh I think compassion, you know, it’s was one of the biggest things that I’ve been trying to push myself. Um, it’s not something I’ve always had. You kind of learn as you go. And having compassion for your team members generally then starts to uh be contagious and our suppliers who are important business partners and our customers who are important business partners, our neighbors, our local governments, so on. They start to feel it, right? And it that vibe makes the day-to-day decision-m that much easier.
Jill – Well, as you mentioned, the dream team. You call your staff the dream team. How does that team culture directly impact the certainty you’re promising to a customer in Europe or Asia? Mo – You know, from a global standpoint, you got to be adaptable. So again, uh when we have everyone collaborating and moving in unison in the right direction, if you’re shipping to a specific country or a specific continent, there will be different regulations. There’ll be different paperwork required. There’ll be some nuances even on labeling. Labeling that requires many different languages. um maybe a specific language. It might even be the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. Um and that is the type of detail that you you need your dream team to be on. They need to have their finger on it and they need to want it because it is a nuisance if you think about it from a ground level. you came in to work, you’re making nine orders exactly the same, and now you got this 10th one that requires an extra level, layer of care, change, uh, again, nuance, and with that detail can come the opportunity for error, right? So, which can, depending on personality traits, create paranoia, create stress. And I think what we are uh really what’s really important about our dream team is when they come to the table, they adapt to that order. And what I have noticed with the people uh in the plant environments both in Tennessee and Ontario, they do look forward. And I think that’s also key. You know, as much as sometimes there’s the whole uh stereotype that management looks forward and the middle management and the people in production maintenance and in the plant environment are the day-to-day. This is not entirely true. You know, our middle management and the people in our floor, they also look forward. There’s there I’ve seen our own shippers who are driving the forklift and loading the trucks looking at what’s shipping the next day, you know, and they see ah there’s an order that has a specific label that needs to go on it or there’s an order that has an extra u sets of documentation that need to go with a bill of lighting. That that’s part of their role as they see it and they do it well because they’re part of the dream team.
Jill – Yeah, for sure. And knowing you can count on all those people to do all the things and look for all those details and care enough about the finishing product.
Mo – Absolutely.
Jill – So, everyone wants a cleaner environment. And you mentioned increasing recyclability content. Can’t you just throw some old zinc into the furnace and call it a day?
Mo – You know, we can’t. And it’s mainly for a safety reason more than anything. you know, I um our plant manager in Tennessee, Jimmy Kite, he’s uh he’s probably the best educator of it, but we are very riskaverse to ensure that we have a competency on what we’re going to load cuz once we do, then we can get comfortable, right? And so why we do it the way we do it is we’ll compare the different impurities that might be in that zinc. So to your point, we don’t have to use the same recyclable or reusable zinc all the time. There are other forms of it, but we want to understand is there a little bit more lead, is there a little bit more copper, uh, aluminum, iron, magnesium, manganese? There’s all these different elements that can come in other scrap materials. And we want to understand what each and every one of them do.
Jill – Right?
Mo – We’ll read chemical phase diagrams to understand if you put certain metals together, what inner metallic compound will you create? Will you create one that the furnace doesn’t like, which can create a safety issue, or will it create one that’s actually um accommodating to our process in terms of how we skim maintenance the furnace and ensure that we won’t have any buildup of pressure and so on so forth. Why I mentioned we’ll never put our supreme clientele in danger is because that’s first and foremost. That sounds obvious, but if we were to have issues with reliability, I just talked about how reliable our furnaces are, right? how predictable they are. Well, if we’re throwing different ingredients in there that we don’t understand, that takes away the robustness of our process. Our process is extremely robust as long as you understand what you’re working with. We we don’t pretend to know it all. We do work with some PhDs um who we work with kind of on a monthtomonth or a project by project. Um they’ve been partners with ZOKIM and why we use them is we want a responsible objective third party, right? We we trust ourselves, but we don’t want to get too comfortable. So, we if we see an element that we’re not too familiar with, we definitely bring those PhDs in, whether they’re in metallurgy or a specific chemical, and we make sure that we’re understanding the dynamics around it. And then we can go, right? Then we can turn the key. The operators know, we know what we’re dealing with. They know how to deal with it, and then it’s almost as comfortable as the zinc behind you.
Jill – Right.
Mo – Right. But if it’s not, we’re not going to introduce it. We’re not going to play with it. It might be cheaper. It might be readily available, but if it’s going to create any type of safety or environmental compliance issue, that’s not our bag.
Jill – So, you mentioned phase diagrams and mass balances. How geeky does the team have to get to ensure that the recycled material doesn’t bring in any unwanted guests?
Mo – You know, we geek it out. We do. And we and we have fun with it. And uh I you know I mentioned how we work with some external PhDs but internally it starts kind of with our procurement manager and our plant management and they talk first and foremost you know and they start to see what elements might be involved. Um they start to see what percentages those are coming in at. So then what we can do is through a mass balance as you just indicated we can basically say to ourselves this is how much of this element we’re going to introduce per day per week per month and is that an issue or not you know what what risk does that bring does it bring any risk at all and so we we try not to be too complacent with that. So even though we may have a reliable supplier of reusable recyclable materials, we will still see if it’s the same material from the same source, um if we feel like it’s a different source or if they’ve expressed as such, we will test it upon incoming and basically run another mass balance through to make sure we’ve got a nice match of different materials going in. But it’s done from a chemical composition mass balance technique which again starts right at the source and it really doesn’t get into the plant without having that preapproval of having that conversation between operations management and call it supply chain management.
Jill – Well, as you said certainty does start here in fact in this wonderful zinc plant. So thank you so much for doing this interview. I had no idea there were two different types of zinc oxide and about the French process and how it’s more reliable. So, thank you for sharing all of your knowledge and thank you for being here today.
Mo – I appreciate your time as well. Thank you.
Jill – Of course. Thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.