Episode 79 – Clean Show Innovations

Jason Risley: I’m Jason Risley, the host of TRSA’s Linen, Uniform and Facility Services Podcast. On today’s episode, we’ll hear about the innovations that were on display at this year’s Clean Show in Orlando, Florida. A group of industry veterans that also serve as TRSA’s Hygienically Clean Certification Auditors, including John Highsmith, Dan Sanchez, Doug Story and TJ Peterson, talked about the highlights from the show floor during an education session titled “Innovation, Automation and Digitalization: What’s New and Important on The Clean Show Floor.” Let’s listen to their thoughts, with TJ Peterson kicking things off.

TJ Peterson: One of the big conversations going around the floor right now is the dark laundry running without operators. JENSEN, I spent some time with them. Their plans and their goals. It’s going to change our industry. I mean, soil sort, let’s be honest, is the hardest position to fill in any healthcare or any plant at all.

And if we can eliminate that labor. Those bodies keeping people out of healthcare, especially with the needle exposure, the BBP exposure, we are finally where we need to be and headed in this industry. And I have no manufacturer bias, but I am super impressed where those companies are going. We always talk about the future.

I think we’re in the future now. That’s the best way to put it. The automation is just leaps and bounds. So one of my questions was, you know. Everybody’s got RFID out there. There’s, I don’t even know how many companies are. All these systems that are running off of RFID, they’re looking for the high frequency chips that are in the linen.

I’m not too familiar with it, because you know, maintenance, we just make sure the linen gets through the machine. These machines are capable of. It doesn’t matter where your chips are coming from, as long as they’re high frequency. So if you already have RFID implemented in your systems, these systems will adapt to it and use your current RFID chips so you don’t have to go and buy all their chips, and re-chip, all your linen.

Because we already know what kind of cost that is to do initially, having to do it again. It’s very capable and compatible. They’re building this stuff with that in mind. Kannegiess has a system where you dump the linen into a picker and it will send it right off to their folders. It, I mean, it’s FTE removal. That’s what we’re looking for with this innovation and automation.

We want FTEs gone. This one will do it. Seeing about. I’d say they said somewhere around 600 to 650 per hour out of the items. You know, that’s pretty good for nobody getting paid to stand there and do it. You also [00:03:00] eliminated, of course, the comp and everything that could be related to running equipment.

You know, they, they also have a lot of other things, but I’m going through the list here and hitting the bullet points. JENSEN was my next visit. I got to sit in on their press conference yesterday with all the textile magazines. 13 innovations they brought into the Clean Show this year. I’m not going through every one of them, but the one that caught me and you’re going to see a trend on this is their hybrid-sorting system. It works off of RFID and cameras from the maintenance side. I looked it over. It’s rigid. It’s looking good. I would love to work on one of these in the future. It’s a beautiful machine. They also are introducing a two-lane feeder.

Up to 2,400 pieces an hour. I want to see one of those in action. Because I know everybody here that runs sheet folders are now thinking, how can I implement that? I mean, that’s doubling your operation even on the best ones. Then I got to visit with Braun. They have some new software going into their equipment.

They’re making upgrades. It’s Braun with their program. You can now scan a QR code right off your screen for your dryer, your washer that will pull up the entire information. All the equipment that it’s associated with you. So you’re working on a PT dryer. You got your book, your schematics, and even can order parts from your phone right at that machine.

It’s two buttons. You’re right there at that screen. It also has improved troubleshooting capabilities. What that means is you push one button and it will walk you right through everything and show you pictures on the PLC display. Quite nice from a maintenance perspective. Also got to visit with the folks over at Girbau North America.

They also have an RFID-based sorting system. This thing is built, I mean they 3D print the claws. It’s a tough looking machine. I watched it do about 900 pieces an hour just in demo mode. The capabilities of that. It’s looking really, really good. Then I closed out with Colmac. We all have dealt with Colmac over the years, they’ve got the tried-and-true system, the steam tunnel.

You know, they’ve improved the knocks coming out of the emissions. It’s 15%, I think, reduced, more efficient. You know, they’re taking a great machine and improving it. More safety standards implemented on it. It’s hard to improve on a good machine. They’re bringing it back up another level.

That’s who I was able to see. So I’ll pass it over to Dan.

Dan Sanchez: Fantastic. Yeah, that’s good stuff. I’m Dan Sanchez and I’m one of the auditors and really enjoy getting to see a lot of different plants across the country and the United States. I traditionally worked with healthcare, but now I’m getting a chance to see food safety plants, hospitality, et cetera, which is fantastic.

I reviewed five companies. One of the announcements you may have heard was just this past week before The Clean Show started, and that was a merger between a company called, now it’s called TEXO, and it’s a merger of LinenMaster, Infinite Laundry and Alliant Systems. I think it’s pretty significant.

LinenMaster has been strong in the healthcare industry for a long, long time. I was with Medline for 34 years, and I’m very familiar with utilizing their linen helper system and LinenMaster. And then Alliant has been well established as well, covering healthcare plus food-and-beverage plants, uniform plants, et cetera.

So it’s a pretty strong merger. And then what makes them unique is they’ve also got that marketing piece on the front end of it as well. So just a couple of highlights. Alliant Systems goes back to 1970. LinenMaster was founded in 1995. Infinite Laundry was launched in 2013 as a marketing component.

They’re combining decades of experience to create a unified platform, is what they say with a tagline. Powering laundry forward, emphasizing ongoing evolution. So it’s not just about consolidation, they say it’s driving real innovations across laundry operations. It’s a comprehensive suite that covers every step from lead generation to IT support.

So I think it’s pretty significant and worth stopping by their booth and taking a look at what their systems can do. And with the advent of AI and what’s going on so much with AI, I see the LMS systems, the route-accounting systems really getting better and better and kind of helping that little laundry industry be more efficient, having more information readily available for their clients, et cetera.

So I talked to Beck’s Classic. They manufacture reusable underpads and they’ve got something pretty unique. So I think we, maybe all of us, have encountered maybe walking into a nursing home or laundry and soil sort. And there’s an unpleasant odor a lot of times that could be coming from the reusable underpads.

And one of the things that they’ve done is they’ve added cupron into the fibers in the soaker permanently. So they’re there for the life of the product itself. And what you, you may be familiar with cupron, it’s a copper-based product, so it helps to in this situation, it’s reducing odor.

They’ve got a test going on at their booth. If you want to stop by, get your nose ready, because that’s a strong odor. But they could prove with this little test, you know, that they’re capturing, or the gas that’s released is significantly, the odor is significantly reduced.

So it’s quite, it’s night and day, so it kills bacteria that causes the odor, but it also neutralizes the pH. And that’s something for healthcare that’s pretty important because with pH, one of the reasons some people have gone away from reusable underpads is if somebody urinates in the pad that urine, it turns into ammonia that can excoriate the skin and cause ultimately a bedsore.

If you can neutralize the pH, that’s a pretty significant factor. And hopefully for our industry and in healthcare, we can get some of that business back. And the reusable side, because a lot of it’s gone disposable and disposable pads can’t do that. So that’s pretty unique, pretty inventive. I also talked to American Dawn.

I’ve got a textile background, so that’s one of the reasons I talked to these companies, you know, American Dawn’s been around for a long, long time, but one of the things they’ve done is they’ve launched a scrub line, a 55, 45 product, as well as a polyester product, a higher-end product. What makes it unique is that, it’s a good product in and of itself, but they’ve also added RFID technology chips to it.

So right off the shelf, they’ve all got RFID chips, so they’re RFID ready for your plant if you are renting scrubs. Tracking them with RFID technology or if you want to make that jump to it, I don’t think anybody else is doing that in the scrub world today. I think it’s typically, you know, a made-to-order situation.

I took a look at the product again, I come from textiles. So one is a 55, 45, 4.6 ounces per square yard. It’s a nice, heavy, durable product. And the other one is a polyester with some stretch to it. If you’ve got RFID technology, maybe you can afford to buy the polyester ones because you’re not going to lose those as often and convince somebody to upgrade the product and maybe get some more money up from a rental standpoint.

Another software company, I also have a software background I talked to is Laundris. So Laundris is relatively new to the industry. Some of you may know Leonard McCullough. He used to be the owner of Linen King, so they brought Leonard on because obviously Leonard knows how to run a plant and what software’s good for.

And what makes them unique is again, a link with RFID technology. They can track product in their software from the manufacturer all the way to the end user. By utilizing the software and RFID technology, so that’s pretty impressive. So that helps to, and it spreads across hospitality, healthcare, any industry.

They can take all that data, use some AI to run predictive analysis, so to help pre-order as opposed to ordering, because we’ve realized we’re short a thousand pillow cases on a Friday afternoon. So they can help with streamlining the inventory control and communicate back to the manufacturer what’s needed.

But outside of that, you know, it’s a full-fledged LMS so we can do the invoicing, you know, all the other things that a software running the laundry should do. Then my last one is ABS. Many people have heard of ABS. They’ve got over 750 laundries across the world. Their big jump, which I think is significant, is they’re moving to a cloud-based system.

They’ve typically been a PC only. You literally download it, put it on a PC, and run the software that way. So let’s say you’re running, running the software in the plant and you’ve got to attach to your scale. You’d have a PC on a table. Well, now it’s cloud-based. So you can use a tablet if you want to, you can walk around the plant and use technology to communicate with your RFID equipment.

And that’s a big jump because you get away from servers, it’s up in the cloud and typically it’s protected in there, et cetera. Those are the main ones. Thank you.

Doug Story: My name’s Doug Story. I don’t know if I should tell them how long I’ve been in the business or not. It kind of hurts over 40 years. I’m a chemist by education.

I also have a business degree as well. I had the opportunity and the honor to talk to five different companies that provided some very, very interesting innovations on stuff that we wouldn’t think about. The first one was a company called Unitex International, and ever since I saw the movie Uncle Buck that somebody reminded me of it. John Candy was in there and he was washing his underwear and stuff in the sink, and he was taking, putting them in the microwave to dry the underwear.

I don’t know if any of you’ve seen that movie or not, but it was a hilarious scene. And then the other stuff he had was hanging on the fan above the bed and let that swing. Well, these gentlemen actually have a microwave dryer that has been tested and run. It’s a very small dryer right at the moment, but he does have the ability to scale that thing up to larger sizes and is something I’ve thought about for many years and thought it would be a great thing to do to have microwave dry.

Cut the electricity in half of what you would use for the normal. I think it’s a 20 kg load and timewise, your reduction of about 40% of the time on this. And I thought this was a very, very interesting innovation for our industry. And I always wondered when the day would come when we get microwave ironers, and I know everybody and I had the same question.

I said, well, what about if somebody throws a dollar, a dollar worth of change in there? What’s going to happen to the microwave? He’s got some electronics that are built into the system. It can handle things like blue jean buttons and shirt buttons and things like that. But if the metal concentration gets above a certain point, it picks up and the unit will turn itself off and lets you know that the metal concentration is too high.

Someone needs to look in there and find out what kind of stuff’s in there that could cause damage to the microwave system. So I think it’s a very, very interesting innovation. I’m looking forward to seeing that thing evolve for the next few years. I’m sure we’ll get better, better with it.

So we’ll see. We’ll just see. But again, that’s Unitex International. Next company I looked at was Ecolab with, with the TRASAR unit. Very, very interesting. This is a plug-and-play system and I was most impressed with it because I, at first when they started talking to me about it, I said, well, what exactly does it do?

And then they walk through the process and I said, I understand. They actually, if you have a wastewater-treatment system, especially in healthcare and in industrial uniform and some of the plants where we have a lot of different colored goods going through a plant, this system actually has the ability to take a system, say, okay, if the water’s got dye in it.

It makes sure that dye water does not end up going back into your washer. Because one of the things I look at most healthcare plants, especially those with tunnels in them, but even the batch plants where they’ve got washer/extractors, is you walk through and you look at the stack and you see blue, red, green.

It’s all supposed to be white, but you see a whole stratification of the linen stat. This system has the actual capability of diverting water that has dye in it, which until now, no one had that capability so it can divert water away and dump that water. In today’s world, most of us, if we end up having a bunch of red dye go into our reclamation system, usually what you have to do is dump the whole reclamation system and all the water, and so you’re wasting tons and tons of water.

So this here catches it almost immediately, so it kind of shortens the amount of water. You still got to dump some water, but at least you’re not dumping and having to clean out your whole system. So the Ecolab system was very, very interesting. And then the next system comes from Energenics.

Energenics had another, it’s one of those things you kind of slap yourself in the head. Why didn’t I think of that? It was a UV light cart sanitizer, and you can scale this thing from a single cart to multiple carts to dozens of carts. Just depends on how big and how much you want to do and how many carts you have to sanitize.

Basically spray the cart down. You still have to use some water to spray the carts down to get the solids and things like that off the carts. But then you roll the carts into the UV light chamber, close the door, and boom, you’re sanitized in about, I think they keep it in there for two minutes or 30 seconds.

So, considering that we’re doing the day, you eliminate a ton of chemicals, you eliminate all the other things that you have to do. The efficacy, timing. Sometimes you have to let the cart set for 10 minutes so that the bacteria that you put on there does its job. In this case, you eliminate all that.

So you speed up the time of the production in your plant and you’re reducing a lot of watering as well. The lights last for, it was 120,000 hours or something. An unbelievable number that nobody would ever, you know, I mean, the only way those light bulbs would burn out is if somebody walks in there and smashes them.

But I asked that question and they actually have screens in there and security areas where nobody can get to. So that UV light cleaning the carts, I thought was another great innovation. The next one is, and I thought this one was really cool, and it’s another one of those where you bump the front of your forehead and go, dang, why didn’t I think of that?

This is a cart, it’s by Meese. It’s called the 45, which what that means is half the size of a normal linen cart. It has shelving in it. If you have a lot of clinics, and most of us do now in our businesses, clinics sometimes make up a big chunk of the amount of linens that we supply. This thing is designed for the small clinics, small operations, small places where you can dump it, where you can deliver it.

You can actually get two or three on the truck, for every one cart that you normally load on the truck. So now if you’ve got routes that run the clinic where to deliver in healthcare linen, you take these and put those smaller carts on there, load them to what the clinic needs, send it to them. And what is really cool about it is then.

If they have the dirty linen, it has to come back the shelves on the cart, flip it to the front, and it makes a giant like a little tube, and you throw the linen. The soil linen bags inside this cart and you ship them back to your plant ready to be loaded on the soil sort. So it’s a great utility. I think it’s going to increase the number of carts you can put on a delivery so that you don’t have to ship a full large cart to a small account.

You can now cvustomize some of your deliveries to the size of your customers. Maybe even customize your route deliveries, where you got one guy whose job it is all day is to deliver small accounts. So it’s going to give you some more versatility in your ability to deliver products. So that’s an exciting, I think it’s a very cool thing too.

And last but not least. And this again, here’s another one of those guys, where all of us in this room’s going to slap the forehead and go, dang, why didn’t I think of this one? The patient. Yeah. How many of us enjoy wearing a normal patient gown? None of us like walking around, showing our moon every time we go to the doctor now to be checked out, what they have done with this very simple innovation.

It’s the only problem with it is it’s going to be easy to copy, is instead of having the tie down’s, the back of the gown, they tie down the side, the tie down is just on the side of the gown. You sit there and go, whoa, that’s pretty cool. Yes ma’am.

Audience Member: What company?

Doug Story: KSE. My apologies. So that’s an amazing, I’m sitting there looking at it going.

A great thought from an economics point of view. I don’t know if the cost or anything like that that you’re saving, but I know that some customers and your, and the patients and things like that, it’d be one of those things that people will appreciate more and it’s probably a product that you offer to the hospital.

Say, look, we know some of your patients don’t like those showing their bums all over the place, or having to wear two gowns, because some people put one across the back and one across the front. So with this gown, you could actually maybe cut some of your gown usages down because they only have to use one.

But I thought it was kind of an interesting innovation where they just basically moved the ties to the side rather than down the back of the gown. There’s a lot of cool things going on out there in the industry. Our industry’s a little slow to change sometimes, but you know what? We’re moving that boat pretty hard and a lot of companies are doing a lot of great things.

Thank you for listening.

John Highsmith: How y’all doing today? I’m John Highsmith with Highsmith Consulting. I do healthcare and hospitality. I’ve been around almost as long as Doug, ran plants for about 19 years and been consulting for about 20. So I took off yesterday afternoon or yesterday morning and started looking at folks.

I went to Tingue and saw Patrick Robertson and Tingue has opened up and improved their new website. They’re doing things, you guys know what NAPA is? OK, y’all from up North. So NAPA is N-A-P-A. My daddy always told me, that’s from the folks up North, they called it NAPA, but down here we call it the N-A-P-A store.

They have developed their website, like an N-A-P-A store and they have added a little over 7,500 SKUs that covers all major manufacturer’s equipment. You can go into their website and type in your make and model. And it’ll come up for you. It’s just like, “Hey, I need parts for a ’62 Chevy, and then my Ford Fairlane needs parts.”

Those guys have a tremendous amount of it. Like I said, all the major manufacturers and one good part, if you have a mixed plant, you don’t have to go and get a dozen POs. You can order all those different parts. Just one PO from Tingue. They’re at booth 2537 if you need iron parts, folded parts, dryer parts, everything laundry. Go check those folks out. I went by the Sea lion America booth. Ed (Kirejczyjk), his innovation is a Titanium series washer, extractor and dryer. And my first question was, is it really titanium or is it just a name and it’s just a name. What their machine does, and this is washer/extractors only. It uses an algorithm and it uses absolutely no water for extract.

So after you’ve put your chemicals, your sour and your softener in, and it mixes, it drains. And this algorithm balances your load and spins out. And if it doesn’t quite do it, the algorithm goes over again. Absolutely no water. Number one, you’re saving water. Number two, it’s always been a problem in our industry when we’re searching for the correct pH and the load doesn’t balance.

What are we doing? We’re filling it up with water and we’re crushing our titration, and the more times it won’t balance your pH is gone. So this gives you the integrity and holds the integrity of the pH of that machine, plus saving water. So I thought that was pretty neat. It comes standard with all these lights and whistles.

It’s just not a Clean Show machine, so you can actually look inside with those LED lights, it’s like somebody’s got a headlight on the inside of it. It’s pretty neat to watch, you know, watch the load go through. It’s neat to watch. Watch that load spin out without any water in it. That’s an innovation.

Their dryer also has the algorithms that change speed and airflow according to the moisture content. So therefore you’re getting a quicker drying load. That was Sea lion. Next up was Gurtler and I met with Jake (Gurtler). And they have developed a UV system for the tunnel wrench, liquor, and basically what that does is, they take the rinse water that would either go to the front end or other chambers, or you know, according to the tunnel, goes in a lot of different directions.

They’re taking it and treating it with UV and ozone. So they are re-energizing the water and with their study, it’s EPA registered and it has been titrated. Reduce the microbial loads in water and in your fabric. Actually, what they’re doing with putting the ozone back in, it’s bringing your bleaches back.

It’s bringing other chemicals you’re putting in there, what you would’ve flushed down the drain in the rinse zone or moved someplace else. It’s distributing back through the loads. This is going to give you brighter whites and enhanced stain removal. And enhanced microbial reduction. And he did have one customer’s testimonial, here in Florida, where it was hospitality, where their linen sat outside in the rain before processing.

And they ran this system with a boiler down and everything, it came out great and it even removed mold and mildew. Now, when I came up through, I was always told, I asked my chemical guys, how do you get mold and mildew out? Their answer was a pair of scissors. So this is an innovation. Next up is Felins. Their innovation is a TP 300 servo wrapper, and it’s a neat little machine.

Most standard wrappers will do 12 to 18 bundles per minute. This one, they have really, really sped up. They’ve done some different things on the conveyors, so it’s a 30% increase. They can do 20 to 24 bundles a minute. You can get stacks as high as 14 inches, so that way if you’re stacking towels, blankets, that type of thing, you can get a bigger bundle and you can get them wrapped a lot faster.

They’ve also developed a low friction film, which for putting the wrapped items in carts and for your delivery people. You know, I’ve seen guys walking with them stacked up on the shoulders. Regular film is slick and you have a hard time getting them to stay in a cart, especially if you turn a corner or if you’ve got loads and stacking them up.

So it’s a little bit tacky and it’s a no-slip film. They have banding systems, which are eco-friendly and they’ve got a lot going back in time. We’re going back to the cotton and the cardboard banding. They also have a banding machine that has rubber bands and it will wrap one around your little finger and it’ll wrap one around a big mat roll.

That’s the perfect size rubber band that comes off of there. The thing I like best about their innovations was a lift gate conveyor. I’ve been in plants that, you know, conveyors are great. Sometimes they’re just too long and you might come through a plant or have an emergency and got to get on the other side.

I’m a little old now, but in my younger days, I rode those conveyors a little bit because I had to quickly get a jam out or help somebody and get on the other side. This lift gate conveyor, you hit the button. And they can, and the one they have there is about four foot wide. That conveyor lifts up just like a drawbridge and it stops everything on the line so you don’t get it messed up.

And then when you can cross through and get your business done, and I know if I had something like that available to me in some of the plants I ran, I’d have got a side cutter and cut a hole in three or four places so I could get through. There’s a company out of the Netherlands called WSP, and what they do is they design laundries, they do new expansions and retrofits.

The innovative thing about them is they have the software that they can integrate a mixed plant with either their conveyor system or anybody else’s software can do either COG or rental and the thing innovative from there, they’ve designed it so that the call off system is on the clean loading side and not the soil sort or the tunnel side.

So after soil sort, you don’t have anybody at the rail system or at the tunnel. They’re all on the other side. So I thought that was quite an innovation there. And they have all the software that goes along with it to tell you, put in what your load needs to be and it automatically calls it off from that rail system.

They also have the laundry dashboard. It’ll monitor your production. It monitors the counts of both the employees and your equipment. It enhances employee performance, machine performance, and it also monitors your utilities. I had a great time looking at all this, and I hope you guys enjoy yourselves.

Joseph Ricci: Thank you, John. Thank you guys. Thank you Dan, TJ, Doug, John; I appreciate your help on this. I want to thank our panelists. Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate all your input, all your work.

Jason Risley: If you have any comments that you’d like to share about the recent Clean Show, the innovations highlighted on today’s episode, or suggestions for future podcast topics, please reach out.

Contact us through email at podcasts@trsa.org. That’s podcasts@trsa.org. We’ll be back soon with more episodes of the show. In the meantime, make sure you subscribe, rate and review us on Apple iTunes. Additionally, follow TRSA across social media on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and YouTube.