Forty-eight million people suffer from foodborne illnesses every year and 3000 people die. While the human cost is immense and tragic the cost to food companies can be equally steep. The average cost of a recall for food processors can be as much as $10 million in direct costs and even worse result in 50% drop in sales for the first year. Some food processing companies have been completely wiped out. The current sanitation protocols namely daily applications of short-lived disinfectants are clearly insufficient for today's complex food processing environment. Self-sanitizing coatings i.e. antimicrobial surfaces are an ideal theoretical solution for eliminating persistent pathogens; however there has been no commercially available antimicrobial material which can fulfill all requirements of high-efficacy against pathogens: easy to apply broad material compatibility no pathogen resistance development and cost-effective. That makes HaloFilm⢠a breakthrough product. HaloFilm is a spray-on product that when dried leaves a thin transparent film on a surface. The film is a polymer composed of one monomer to stick to the surface and another monomer that stabilizes chlorine i.e. N-halamine. HaloFilmturns the surface into a chlorine battery so using a chlorinated cleaning product will leave a surface covered with chlorine which can last days. HaloFilm essentially a chlorine extender relies on the efficacy of chlorine which has decades of use and broad-spectrum efficacy against pathogen without generating pathogens with resistance. The value proposition for HaloFilm in this context is clear. There are two major scenarios where HaloFilm can be of
Benefit: (1) errant pathogens and incomplete cleaning procedures that don'tkill all pathogens have a lower likelihood of resulting in tainted food products and (2) biofilms which are the bane of food processing plants have less of a chance to talk hold from the start. At the same time a formulation with zwitterion moieties in the polymer backbone may enhance the cleaning effort by reducing the likelihood of organic matter to stick to surfaces. Building on the successful results from our Phase I effort we will pursue three objectives with this Phase II. First we will perform additional product development to sufficiently characterize the base formulation of HaloFilm and a formulation that includes additional elements in the polymeric backbone that might contribute to a reduced need for cleaning. Secondly we will perform product performance studies to validate the anti-protein and anti-microbial function of HaloFilm on real food machine with controlled inoculation regimes. Thirdly we will assess the manufacturing efforts and perform limited scale-up efforts to validate our manufacturing approach. The results of these efforts should demonstrated HaloFilm's features performance and utility. HaloFilm is Halomine Inc.'s first product and is protected by exclusively licensed patents from Auburn University and Cornell University. Our business model is to make and sell HaloFilmwith revenue coming from sales of product. We believe the market for disinfectants related to food safety is likely between $600 and $800 million with several times that spent on the activity and believe we have a total available market of over $100 million. There are six initial target applications that encompass about 3000 out of the 27000 food manufacturing firms: frozen food frozen desserts seafood pet food cheese and breakfast cereal.
