A Chat with Mark Poole, CEO at CleanTech Start-Up: Ozo Innovations

Ozo Innovations is a cleantech start up and our aim is to deliver sustainability and productivity benefits that enable organisations to achieve their carbon net zero ambitions through the deployment of innovative electrochemical solutions. Our approach simplifies the current cleaning and hygiene processes used within food manufacturing and in doing so reduces the water and energy consumption.

The team at Ozo are passionate about sustainability and helping organisations on their net zero journeys so we like to collaborate with like minded organisations to help both parties achieve the business ambitions.
 
 

 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 
The food hygiene process typically utilises a 4-5 step cleaning and disinfection process with multiple rinse stages using hot water (40-65°C). The process consumes significant amounts of water and energy to heat water with the cost of energy currently exacerbated by the rising cost of gas.

The incumbent chemical suppliers have built long standing businesses around the current process and supply of bulk concentrate chemicals. They reinforce the traditional approaches to hygiene to preserve these business models. Innovation and the ability to deliver sustainability benefits is both challenging technically and also commercially.

Deployment of eloclear can not only reduce the resources required for hygiene but, given the in-situ manufacturing process, provide supply chain resilience. Our process requires only one raw material, food grade salt, thereby significantly disrupting the traditional chemical supply chain and the associated scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. Hence switching to eloclear can significantly reduce the use of harmful chemicals whose discharge has an impact on the environment and their manufacture, transportation and the plastic packaging all have a significant carbon footprint.

We have demonstrated that our product, eloclear, is capable of both cleaning and disinfection and this combination of stages reduces the hygiene cycle. The elimination of process steps and ease of rinsing, shortens the hygiene cleaning time reducing both energy and water consumption and releases valuable production capacity and labour in the manufacturing process.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Ozo has started to focus on the commercialisation of its technology, ensuring the regulatory compliance of the solution and broadening the scope of customer engagements from the UK to a broader European and global audience.

Our safe, smart, sustainable hygiene solutions, align strongly with the carbon net zero agenda and the capabilities of the team have evolved to be able to demonstrate the benefits we can deliver in support the deployment of our technology
 

What can we hope to see from Ozo Innovations in the future?

 
In a post COVID environment, Ozo has been able to regain access to food sites and gain significant traction with major organisations across a range of food categories. We are building a strong platform for international growth and will be looking to continue to build out our team and build on the culture of passion to deliver sustainability and the strong desire to meet customer needs.

The potential to deploy our technology in other market sectors is only just being explored and we will continue to develop solutions that will enable access to other cleaning methodologies within food and other non-food sectors. We expect to be supporting customers with enhanced data and trends for their hygiene processes to support their daily business requirement and audit requirements