Zachary Cartwright (00:00):
I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is water and food.

Kent Keller (00:02):
You know, lactose is a sugar. Lactose comes from milk, water, and lactose is a little bit like water and table sugar out, especially if it's molding. Now it's a hazardous material. Of course, with that, the company's reputation goes down the drain huge number of application for water.

Zachary Cartwright (00:21):
Yeah, buddy. Welcome back to another episode of water in food today, I'm joined by Kent Keller from Keller technologies, Inc. Kent is a lactose specialist who has been educating people in the lactose industry and upgrading lactose systems around the world for over 40 years. And the year 2000 Kent was honored with the American dairy product institutes prestigious award of merit for his lifetime contributions to the lactose processing industry. And has he has even been referred to as Mr. Lactose. So today I'm honored to have kink Keller on the water and food podcast. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Kent Keller (00:59):
I am fine. Thank you, Zach. It's a pleasure to be with you. We've had a good working relationship with your company and it's a pleasure to do this.

Zachary Cartwright (01:10):
Well, I've been trying to get you on the show for quite some time. You're, you're a hard guy to track down.

Kent Keller (01:18):
Well yeah, I don't know. I guess I still have many, many opportunities to contribute, so I, I try to do that.

Zachary Cartwright (01:32):
Well, Mr. Lactose, that's a really big title and I'm interested to know, you know, kind of your journey into the lactose industry. So how did you become interested in lactose? I'm sure it's not a short story, but we have plenty of time.

Kent Keller (01:46):
Okay. It's not, I tell people my main qualification is as a farmer. I grew up on a farm and was blessed there with a work ethic. My father owned a farm as well as a farm equipment store. So I spent almost every day on my childhood, either driving farm equipment or working on farm equipment and cars. So that, that gave me some mechanical aptitude. And then once I got out of grade school, I had the good fortune to go to a private Christian high school that had very high academic standards. It was virtually a conveyor belt into a university. So almost all of us went on to the university. I went on and got a degree in chemical engineering. And after that, I took a job with Dow chemical company that was in Midland, Michigan. And at the time that place was reported to be the largest chemical complex in the world. So that was a fantastic opportunity. I was to work there for four years and that gave me a lot of opportunities to be creative. Only six weeks out of the university. I was given the opportunity to develop a new photochemical process for making a settling Tetra row by it. And that became a new process for Dow

Kent Keller (03:20):
Chemical process and patented it. And it also became a commercial process.

Zachary Cartwright (03:26):
So four years at Dow chemical. And then what did you do after that?

Kent Keller (03:31):
Well, that kind of sounded like probably like I was tooting my own horn, but that experience proved to me that I could dream and that those dreams could become a reality. Now, there aren't many companies that give that kind of latitude to new employees after Dow where I, I may, I was promoted to production assistant production manager of the bromine products department. While working there, the Vietnam war was going on and every year Dow gave me a paper to sign and it happened to be for a drafty firm because our company's employees were considered to have critical skills. The department was nice, but many other men, my age were going off to Vietnam and my conscience started bothering me. I had it pretty nice compared to that, but I wasn't brave enough to fall into fear for the army, rather my wife and I volunteered for the Peace Corps.

Zachary Cartwright (04:48):
And where did that take you?

Kent Keller (04:50):
Well, we ended up at the end of the road in the jungle back in a Mayan Indian village in what was then called British Honduras. Today i's called Belize. And my responsibilities, there was an ag extension agent and for this country's government and I helped reorganize a rice marketing co-op and, and had some demonstrations to the Indians for raising better pigs and chickens with fewer costs.

Zachary Cartwright (05:22):
And how long were you there for?

Kent Keller (05:25):
Two and a half years? Two and a half years. And we got so used to it, but all of the children in our village had protein, malnutrition because their diet, you know, being Indians was corn-based and that protein malnutrition is called Kwashiorkor because of that, I decided to go back to school when I got out of the peace Corps and try to work on some new, cheaper methods for making protein single-cell protein was getting considerable attention at the time. So I focused on food science and microbiology, and my thesis was on the fermentation of cheese way to produce a high protein cattle

Zachary Cartwright (06:12):
Feed supplement, eventually that project or that process was built commercially built and to utilize the process I worked on. And w where did you receive your education for food science and who were you working with there?

Kent Keller (06:34):
That was at Michigan State. And from there, I'll have to say, you know, working on whey, as I said, it was a fermentation of cheese whey. That was my introduction to wey before that, the only thing I knew about whey came from little miss Muffet while working with it in the university, I realized that you could not, you could not only make high protein, cattle feed supplement that I was making, which was a fermentation process, but actually the way was a very good source of quality proteins. Cargill was interested in the work that I was doing. So I took a job with them at their research center in the Minneapolis area, but unfortunately, Cargill was already in the process of patenting, another process for non-protein nitrogen. And so my process never took traction there. And here's where the experience from Dow Chemical comes in. All I was doing at Cargill was doing research, writing reports, putting them in the library and nothing was coming of it. It was just kind of meaningless work. So that's why I said earlier, I, I learned that I could accomplish things certainly more than putting reports in the library.

Zachary Cartwright (08:11):
And so at Cargill, is this where you were working on one of the very first whey fractioning plants?

Kent Keller (08:17):
No, that came later. One of the companies I interviewed with when I was getting out of graduate school, came back every year and said, you know, yourself, you're still satisfied you made the right decision. And by the third year, I said, well, what do you have in mind? And they offered me a production manager job at one of the first plants to make whey protein concentrate. So finally I thought, ha ha, here's a chance to work on proteins. And, and probably even more importantly to do it in a commercial setting. So that was that's where I got into whey proteins.

Zachary Cartwright (08:59):
And what did you learn from that experience? You know, what, what were the pros and cons from working with whey and where did that lead you next?

Kent Keller (09:11):
Our plant was probably the first plant to make significant quantities of whey proteins using ultra-filtration. And as I said, whey proteins are very high quality, but there's only about 20% of the melt protein in the way the rest of the protein goes into the cheese, but we could recover those whey proteins. And then what was leftover because it went through a membrane, we called it permeate and that permeates about 80% lactose on a dry basis. So we recovered the lactose and that's used an infant formula like Similac and Enfamil.

Zachary Cartwright (10:00):
And then along the way you started waste systems, Inc. Is that correct?

Kent Keller (10:06):
And how did that? The way that happened was that plant that was processing way was actually owned by a chemical company. And that chemical company finally decided that food ingredients just didn't really fit into their company list of products. And so they shut that plant down and they shut down a sister plant in California. And so they offered me jobs at several different plant locations, but of course, you always have the opportunity to do something else. So that's when I decided to try consulting, you know, being my own boss.

Zachary Cartwright (10:55):
And how has that been? I'm sure it has some ups. And downs.

Kent Keller (11:00):
That was a misconception a little bit. I realized that I'd be trading one boss for many boss bosses.

Zachary Cartwright (11:08):
Everyone's your boss now? Right.

Kent Keller (11:10):
All my clients are my bosses. So now I got a whole bunch of bosses. After working on that process for whey proteins, I was really convinced that those were quality proteins and that we could produce some more efficiently if we could process the way at the cheese plant, rather than trucking it into a central Plaza processing plant like we had. So I started the company called it Whey Systems Incorporated. No, that sounds, that sounds big time, but I had no clients,

Zachary Cartwright (11:57):
Well, you got to start, got to start somewhere, right?

Kent Keller (12:00):
Yeah. Started someplace. So I started cold calling cheese plants to see if they'd be interested in making whey protein concentrate. And we call that whey protein, concentrate, WPC for short. And some of those chiefs plant owners said, well, we've heard about WPC, but they ask if I knew how to make lactose. And I said, yeah, but my professional interests, you know, going back to the Peace Corps and that my professional interests are in the whey proteins. But one day coming back from one of those plants, I said, dummy, you don't have any work, maybe you better help them with the lactose. So, so I signed an agreement with them to help them design like those processing plant. And that was the start of my getting into lactose. I didn't realize at that time that when we shut down that production plant and you know, here where I live and the one in California, we shut down about 50% of the lactose production in the US so the price of lactose went up by a factor of five. I, you know, as engineers, we're not too smart, we don't pay attention to markets like that. We just pay attention to processes. And I didn't realize that it had gone up that high. And that's the reason all these cheese plants wanted to make lactose rather than weight protein concentrate. That's how I got into lactose.

Zachary Cartwright (13:41):
Okay. So that was the shift from whey to lactose. And then how long did you own Whey Systems, Inc. And, and focus on lactose?

Kent Keller (13:50):
I owned Whey systems for 20 years. And we put in about 40 lactose plants. We put them in various countries, you know, obviously, in the United States, we put three in Finland, three in New Zealand, a couple in Australia, three in India one up in Canada. So my little, my being forced into lactose. It's not what I plan, but that's what it ended up being.

Zachary Cartwright (14:27):
Sometimes you can't help it, Kent. Sometimes you just life takes you where you need to go. So you've been all over. It sounds like I was looking at your portfolio online. And like you said, the United States, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada, what are the size of these production facilities? I'm sure they range, but what are some of the larger facilities that you've worked with?

Kent Keller (14:51):
That's a good question. You know, lactose is a sugar, lactose comes from milk, and we don't really think that much about sugar being in milk. But when we design these plants and they're spitting out five tons of 99.8% pure lactose every hour, 20 hours a day, 365 days a year, you say, wow, there is a lot of lactose in milk. They're big. They make, most of them are big. I would say the smallest ones make today make maybe one ton or a couple of thousand pounds an hour, but five, six tons are, are getting pretty common.

Zachary Cartwright (15:42):
And so you did Whey Systems Inc for about 20 years. And then how did Keller Technologies come to be

Kent Keller (15:51):
I was 57 at the time and I thought, well, you know, if I'm ever going to sell this company, I should do it when I'm young enough that I can help the new owners. Cause that's all I had to sell was help for somebody. So I sold the name of waste systems to a company called Roco and had a ten-year agreement to work with them as a consultant and to non-compete for 10 years on lactose. And part of that agreement was I had to change the name of my company to something else. So they could use the name waste systems because it had, it had gotten a good reputation in the industry and that's what they wanted as well as my help. So I changed the name of my company to Keller technologies incorporated

Zachary Cartwright (16:40):
And let's jump into the good stuff, Ken. So along the way, I'm sure you've realized that water is really important to lactose. And why is that? So caking and clumping molding, maybe you can start to touch on those points and discuss water in this specific sugar.

Kent Keller (17:00):
Yeah. Water and lactose are a little bit like water and table sugar. If there's too much in there, everybody has seen sacks five-pound, 10-pound sacks of sugar that are as hard as a rock. And that comes from too much free moisture floating around in the bag. And lactose is exactly the same except more so because lactose is not as soluble as sucrose. And so it's even more prone to caking. So we have to get lactose very, very dry if we don't the first indication of too much moisture as it starts caking or clumping in the bag. If we got even more moisture in there, then there's enough for a mold to start growing, and not a good thing. Okay.

Zachary Cartwright (17:55):
Definitely not. And what are the economic impacts of caking and molting? Do you have any sense of that?

Kent Keller (18:05):
Yeah, the quantities we're talking about, you know, if it's put on a ship and it shipped over to Asia, an Asian customer finds it's caked or mold molded moly, they're not going to accept it. And especially if it's molding, now it's a hazardous material and it has to be disposed of over there. So that becomes very expensive for the company that made and shipped the lactose. So that's, those are big consequences of it. So rejected getting rejected after shipment is a loss, not only our loss of revenue, but it's a cost of, for disposal, of course, with that, the company's reputation goes down the drain and they lose future sales. So it's a huge economic impact of water activity is very important to like those.

Zachary Cartwright (19:04):
And how has your company utilized water activity measurements, to improve the lactose industry?

Kent Keller (19:13):
My first introduction to the concept of water activity came from a colleague that I worked with back at Cargill and he had been in graduate school and so that colleague introduced me to his work and just basically tuned me into this whole concept of water activity. I don't know that there were any water activity meters at that time. And that was back in the say, mid-seventies. And when I was having trouble with lactose, I remembered this, and I thought, well, if I can measure the humidity of the air that's between the lactose crystals, that might be a more sensitive indicator of lactose moisture than trying to measure the free moisture in lactose. So I started using a humidity gauge in a thermometer, and I set some specs and communicated to these, to my clients. And we use that for a number of years. And then in about 2000, I ran into one of your meters being used in New Zealand. And so I started checking that out and started moving towards water activity meters then rather than my jury rigged system.

Zachary Cartwright (20:57):
And maybe you can touch on this a little bit more, but why do you put emphasis on water activity measurements over moisture content methods? As you said, free moisture is usually less than is it 0.1% that it's really low. So what does water activity give over moisture content specifically for lactose?

Kent Keller (21:17):
You can imagine this lactose comes in such high volume. A lot of it gets packaged in 2000 pound bags, bulk bags, or a thousand kgs in a bulk bag. And we're interested in about 0.1% free moisture. If it goes up to 0.2, that's a hundred percent air, and trying to find a difference of between 0.1 and 0.2 in is really difficult for a production laboratory to do. It's very unreliable in that large bag. There's about one kg. Let's say it's a thousand kilograms. There's about one kilogram of air in there. And 0.1% free. Moisture's also about one kilogram of free moisture. So if you have one kilogram of air in one kilogram of moisture, that's, that's you know, 50, 50, or if you go to 0.2, you've doubled it. So it's very sensitive. It's a lot easier measuring those small amounts in that small amount of air than it is in a thousand kgs of lactose. That's where water activity comes in. I can say that that moisture measurement in lactose is complicated by another factor. The lactose that we sell is not really lactose it's a lactose monohydrate and lactose monohydrate has 5.0% bound moisture with each crystal. So if you're trying to run a moisture analysis and you knock off just a small little bit of that 5% moisture, you've completely blown your moisture analysis. Again, water activity doesn't measure that bound moisture. We're getting only the free moisture.

Zachary Cartwright (23:41):
And generally, what is your target for water activity for lactose?

Kent Keller (23:46):
About a 0.2. Mm.

Zachary Cartwright (23:50):
And then when do you start to see kicking and clumping? And when do you start to see molding with respects to what activity?

Kent Keller (24:01):
I would say about 0.3, if it's sold domestically, you might get by with it, but if it goes overseas, by the time it gets over there, 0.3 is very, very iffy. It gets up to 0.5. I would say a 0.5 to 0.7. It's going to start molding. But those numbers aren't really, there's a whole new factor that figures in here that moisture is free, so it can migrate around the bag. And if there's much moisture in there, you'll actually see condensation on the plastic liner in the bag up at the top, actually water droplets up there. That's, that's a 1.0 or a hundred percent relative humidity up there. That's plenty good for mold to grow. So mold starts growing there. And of course, when it's, respiring, it's breaking the lactose down to carbon dioxide and water. Now we generating more water right from the lactose, and it's a snowball that goes downhill. Very important to stop that free moisture from moving around in there.

Zachary Cartwright (25:28):
Well, I know you've spent so much time in this industry, and I'm wondering if you think from your experience, if there are other industries that could benefit from what you've learned with lactose and water activity, do you see other applications or have you come across any

Kent Keller (25:44):
Yeah. Your, your company? I wish I had a graph that your company publishes. I wish I had that 20, 30 years ago. It does a beautiful job of showing the effect of water activity on things like caking and molding and crispness and bacterial growth and these kinds of things. And all those things are extremely important for dose, but they're, they're virtually important for almost any other food product, even things like crispness of of a cereal or something like that. So a huge number of applications for water activity meters.

Zachary Cartwright (26:27):
Well, if I if I figure out time travel, I will make sure to stop by and drop the graph off for you.

Kent Keller (26:36):
Well, I've got the graph and it's available in your website, I think it's available on your website or is published their fee dig someplace in there, but anybody is listening to this and has any interest in water activity certainly ought to get that graph.

Zachary Cartwright (26:55):
And Ken, what is next for you? I mean, you've been in this industry a long time. You've earned the, the Mr. Lactose title, you know, what's next

Kent Keller (27:06):
Well, three and a half years ago, I sold my company again and the new owners called the comp their company called their company Keller technologies incorporated. And they incorporated in the state of Wisconsin rather than the state of Minnesota where mine is. So for awhile, we had two Keller Technologies incorporated. I have now shut down my company. And so now Keller technologies is incorporated in Wisconsin. And again, part of my agreement with the gentleman that bought that name and, and my help is, is to consult with them and provide technology to them so that they can sell technology and equipment and the lactose industry. That's the main thing I got going now I, I do a lot of consulting for past customers. I've got customers that I haven't sold anything to for 25 years, and they still call me with questions and the meter doesn't run when they do that. So I, I just enjoy that part of it. I, I would like to continue serving the way processes industry is I mean, it's been good to me has been extremely good to me. And I'd like to return serve the industry as long as I'm physically and mentally able. I'm 78 years old now. And I, I think I'll know when I'm no longer physically able to do the work and mentally, well, I think there are enough people around me who will let me know.

Kent Keller (28:56):
It'll probably be about the same time they take the keys for the car.

Zachary Cartwright (29:01):
Well, I'm sure you have a while, Kent. I know that the industry, you know, they probably can't thank you enough for your input. So I want to take a moment just to thank you for being on the podcast. This is really interesting. And again, I've been looking forward to having you on the podcast for, quite some time, because I, I don't really know anyone else with your depth of knowledge, especially for this specific product. So thanks again, Kent. We really appreciate having you on the podcast today.

Kent Keller (29:32):
I'll have to say that there is nobody with my depth of knowledge, and there's a reason for that. You know, most people, when they do a job, they get a promotion in my company. I haven't gotten a promotion for 45 years. So I'm working on the same type of projects for the last 45 years. I'd never gotten promoted away from it. So during that time, you've got enough time to make enough mistakes and you'd have to be brain dead and not learn something from it.

Zachary Cartwright (30:05):
Well, well, we appreciate you Kent. Thanks again for being on the show.

Kent Keller (30:09):
Oh, thank you. And thank you for the help that your company has given us.

Zachary Cartwright (30:14):
Of course, have a good one, Kent.

Kent Keller (30:16):
Goodbye,

Zachary Cartwright (30:17):
I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is water and food. Find this podcast on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.