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Mionix
Wins Silver Award
Comstock's
Business Magazine in conjunction with the John P. Carlson Vanguard
Awards selected Mionix as its Silver Award winner for the 2001 Companies
on the Leading Edge of Life Sciences, September 2001 (volume 13
Number 9)
It's a sweltering
Sacramento Indian summer late afternoon. You fire up the barbie,
open a package of hot dogs, then get distracted; half an hour goes
by before you get them on the grill. Waiting for your order at the
drive-through window, you wish you hadn't glimpsed that barehanded
staffer handling chicken parts. It's always a tossup whether you
or the mold gets more cheese. Finally, consider this- 27 million
kids a day eat school lunches. Do you know where those hamburgers
patties have been?
It's
a bacteria-ridden world. Handwashing, refrigeration, even irradiation
barely keep them at bay. But very soon, a powerful new product from
a local corporation will become a potent weapon in the war against
food spoilage.
Privately-held
Mionix Corporation of Roseville has researched and developed Safe20,
a proprietary formulation of allnatural, blended food-approved chemicals.
Safe20 is odorless, colorless and tasteless and can be liquid or
granular. It is intended to be applied to or blended into ready-to-eat
and fast foods, dairy products, pork, beef, poultry, seafood, grains,
fruits and vegetables and pet foods. Safe20 kills bacteria on contact
at levels nearly equal to irradiation but, unlike radiation, it
has no harmful effects. Finally, its very low pH creates a long-lasting
"glove effect" that inhibits E. coli, samonella, listeria
and campylobacter from "reattaching." the product is now
close to the end of the testing necessary for full FDA approval.
Mionix's stated
goal of making food safer, longer-lasting and more nutritious has
attracted intense interest from several major U.S. Food companies
and their support through strategic alliances, reports Michael Cunha,
Mionix CEO. "Our goal is to have at least 10 global strategic
partners in manufacturing and marketing" in the next five years,
he says. The corporation estimates $3 million in revenue this year
from safe20 applications. "For certain applications, we are approved
to go into the market right now. Other applications [beef, pork, poultry]
require more in-plant studies" currently under way and due to
be completed in a few months, Cunha adds.
With the help
of Director of Research and Development Maurice Kemp, Ph.D., and
Naperville, Illinois, native COO, David Teat, the three-year-old
corporation (formerly Morningstar Diagnostics) is currently in talks
with Asian food producers and anticipates pursuing niche markets
worldwide in the future.
Valerie Vento,
president and general manger of Mering and Associates, visited Cunha
and his team as a judge and proclaimed, "Mionix is a company
we should be proud to have in our region. They have a solid business
strategy, impressive products whose applications and use opportunities
seem endless and a generous altruistic mission to address basic
human challenges related to hunger and health."
Jackie
Thayer
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