Wisconsin Roots: Talking Archery, Bee Keeping, & Bio-Manufacturing Diapers

Introduction

Adam: Back around the holidays, we had
my friend Tom Mand stop in for a WiLL Cast. What’d you think?

Becca: What a guy. He was so
interesting. He kind of does it all. The whole biochemistry thing — obviously
not my background in the slightest. I didn’t know a lot about it, but he is so
passionate about what he does and he did such a nice job explaining it. There’s
a lot of excitement there.

Adam: He shot me a text when he was
back visiting family, got a tour of Wisconsin Lighting Lab, and I’m like, man,
he’d be a great guest. We came in on a Friday when everything was shut down and
hammered out a WiLL Cast. He’s still connected to his Wisconsin roots and
credits working in his dad’s construction company with the hands-on approach to
what he does. What I really liked is he’s in biomanufacturing. It’s interesting
to think about engineering and manufacturing at different scales. We make
medium-sized products, but they’re making products at the microscopic scale.
The parallels of their process versus ours — the prototyping, the adjusting,
the evolving — are neat. And it’s also for a diaper.

Becca: Even talking about his hobbies
— beekeeping — there are so many parallels. It’s funny how all of his interests
align.

Adam: Understanding the business and
startup and science culture in the Bay Area where him and his wife and son
live, some of the differences, some of the similarities — enjoy this WiLL Cast
with my friend Tom Mand.

Archery: A New Obsession

Tom: Did we talk about archery when I
was here before? I’ve gotten into archery recently. Recurve. There’s an indoor
range right down the road from where I work. 20 yards is the furthest distance.
My wife’s mother is like “prepper light.” Last holiday season, she got us a
gift certificate for an archery lesson. We went and it was a lot of fun. Then
Naomi has some co-workers that have their own bows and they go shoot at this
outdoor range not far from our house. The outdoor range has a course that’s
like a golf course but with targets. You walk along, shooting from different
angles, different elevations.

Adam: Have you heard of the Ledge
Games?

Tom: I participated like five or six
years ago.

Tom: I’m starting out with bare-bow
recurve — no sights, no counterweights, no stabilizer poles. I want to be able
to pick up a recurve, look down the tip of the arrow, line it up, and shoot. My
draw is just 24 pounds right now, but holding 24 pounds for 10 seconds while
you’re lining it up and doing that 45 times in a row — the last few rounds I’m
shaking. I’ve started doing something called string walking, where you walk
your fingers down beneath the nock depending on how far away you are. At 20
yards, I know I need to go down five notches on my tab. It’s all about doing
the exact same thing the exact same way every single time for accuracy.

Beekeeping: From Tennessee to California

Adam: You’re nice enough to bring us
in some of your honey. How did you get into beekeeping?

Tom: I’ve always been into biology and
nature. When I was working in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Oak Ridge National Lab,
I came across a flyer for a bee club’s annual beginners beekeeping course. My
wife and I were long-distance — she was finishing her graduate degree in
Illinois, I was in Tennessee. I had nothing else to do, so I went and thought
it was really cool. That was November. Then that spring — spring of 2020 — I
won a raffle at their club meeting that included a hive box, a veil, the gear
you need to get started. So I was like, well, I guess I’ve got to find some
bees now. No time like the pandemic.

Tom: When Naomi and I drove from
Tennessee to where we live now in the Bay Area, we were in a U-Haul pulling my
car behind on a trailer with a hive of bees in the back. It was a pretty decent
investment — several hundred in hive equipment and bees. I didn’t want to give
them away.

Tom: I try to be treatment-free.
There’s a significant parasite called the Varroa mite — if you thought about a
similarly sized parasite relative to humans, it would be like a frisbee-sized
mite that attaches onto us and sucks stuff out of our liver. There are harsh
chemical treatments, organic acid treatments like oxalic acid, but what I’m
trying to do is let the bees take care of it themselves. I select colonies that
deal well with the mites — if they make it through winter, they’re strong,
healthy, great egg-laying pattern, making lots of honey. I try to only select
that queen and propagate her genetics.

The Science of Honey

Adam: What is honey to the bee?

Tom: Honey is nectar that they’ve
processed. They’re one of the few insects that live in large colonies with
stores to get them through winter. Foragers go out getting nectar, pollen,
water, and sap. For honey, they bring back nectar, evaporate it, and there’s an
enzymatic process — they eat it and spit it back out, pass it bee to bee. That
converts nectar into honey. Honey is super concentrated sugar. It’s so
concentrated that nothing can grow in it — bacteria, fungus can’t access the
sugars. The water activity is really low. That’s why honey is the only food
that never goes bad. They have to rehydrate it with water to actually consume
it. They have a separate honey gut for transport.

Zymochem: Replacing Petroleum with Biology

Adam: What is Zymochem? What do you
guys do?

Tom: We’re a biomanufacturing company.
We’re basically trying to develop microbes and processes to replace materials
that are traditionally made with petroleum with bio-based materials. The big
project I work on is a super absorbent polymer — SAP. Super absorbent polymers
are in things like diapers. It’s what allows a diaper to hold liquids. Our best
material right now can hold about 60 times its weight in water. We’re putting
10 to 15 grams of our SAP in a diaper and it can hold 300-plus grams.

Tom: What we’re trying to do is
replace the super absorbent polymer that’s already in diapers. The current one
is made from polyacrylic acid — petroleum-based. It goes into a landfill and
doesn’t degrade for hundreds of years. About 8% of landfill waste is diapers.
We want to make the world’s first fully compostable diaper.

Tom: The other side of the company is
making chemicals that can be used to make nylons and other materials. Zymochem
has a partnership with Lululemon and with Toyota Ventures. We’ve developed what
we call our C² — carbon-conserving microbes. Normally when organisms metabolize
sugar, they combine it with oxygen and breathe out CO₂. Our scientists have
developed a system to do that without releasing CO₂. All of the carbon that
comes in as sugar goes into making more cells or making the chemical we’re
interested in. There are cost savings in having all of the carbon going into
making your product.

Engineering the Microbe

Adam: What does “develop a microbe”
mean?

Tom: We’ve genetically engineered it.
When I was at Oak Ridge National Lab, I was working on developing genetic tools
to engineer microbes that are really difficult to work with. E. coli or
brewer’s yeast — any lab in the world knows how to engineer those. But there
are tons of microbes with very specific skill sets that are challenging to
genetically engineer. Our lab specialized in developing tools to cut out a
piece of DNA and put in a different piece, or just knock out genes that make a
byproduct we don’t like.

Tom: One of the first things I did
working with Zymochem was — they’d won a grant to work with the national labs
to develop their micro strain. I was the scientist that helped. I developed the
system to move DNA into the cell. We essentially camouflaged the DNA — microbes
have ways of saying “that DNA is not mine” and chewing it up. We developed a
companion strain of bacteria that would camouflage the DNA so the target strain
would accept it. Our carbon-conservation pathway is completely non-existent in
nature. We’ve taken genes from a handful of other microbes and combined them
into a cyclical pathway to metabolize things without producing CO₂.

From Fermentation to Super Absorbent Polymer

Tom: Our microbe eats sugar and makes
a biopolymer called polyglutamic acid, or PGA. It’s a really high molecular
weight biopolymer. When our microbe makes a lot of it, it gets really viscous —
we can fill a mug, hold it upside down, and it won’t flow out. Imagine mixing a
100,000-liter tank with peanut butter in it. That’s a big engineering
challenge.

Tom: We have a defined media — we know
the precise concentration of every single chemical in our growth media. The
major component is sugar. Beyond that, you need a buffer because PGA is an
acid, trace elements like nickel or cobalt for certain enzymes, magnesium,
salts. The output is a really thick viscous broth with our PGA, the microbes,
any byproducts, and residual chemicals. We then purify it through filtration
and centrifugation.

Tom: PGA itself is soluble in water. I
think of it like a bowl of spaghetti — a bunch of strands swirling around, not
connected to each other. We do a chemical conversion process that cross-links
those noodles together. Then when you put water on the dried polymer, it swells
up but doesn’t dissolve. The end product is the granule. In a diaper, if you
squeeze it, you can feel those granules. We need a very limited range of
particle size — too big and the baby can feel it, too small and it sifts
through the core material.

Scaling Up & Diaper Trials

Adam: How long from when someone
started working on that microbe to now running diapers at a major manufacturer?

Tom: I’ve been working with Zymochem
for six or seven years. I started at 250-milliliter flasks, then 2-liter
bioreactors, then worked with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s ABPDU facility
at their 300-liter reactor. Step by step. While we’re developing the growth
media and process, we’re also developing the microbes. We might notice a
byproduct at the 300-liter scale, go back, knock that gene out, and then start
all the way back down at a shake flask to see how it impacts growth and
production. There’s this back-and-forth process for years.

Tom: Over the past two-ish years,
we’ve been working with a contract manufacturing organization with 45,000-liter
tanks. We’ve locked in the microbe, iterated on the growth media, and now we’re
figuring out mixing speed, air flow at scale. We’re looking in the next year to
produce hundreds of metric tons of our super absorbent polymer. We’ve also had
line trials where we convinced diaper manufacturers to turn off their
petroleum-based SAP, put in ours, and produced a bunch of diapers. We’re hoping
to get those diapers tested on babies within the next couple months.

Adam: Our goal of building a powder
coat line felt like a long process at a couple years. Then you look at creating
microbes to create compostable diapers over six or seven years.

Tom: I started at 250 milliliters. Now
we’re at 45,000 liters. It’s been a challenge, but a great challenge.

Wisconsin Roots: Knowing You Can Build a Thing

Adam: Before we end, I know I’ve got
to get my Wisconsin pitch. When you guys go to build your big plant, maybe you
should look at Wisconsin.

Tom: I wanted to speak to that. I was
reading about the ethos of this podcast and it had me reflect on my past. My
dad owned a construction company — M&S Construction. They were largely
concrete construction. I basically grew up on a construction site. I lived in a
house my dad built that I helped build. One of the first things I remember
doing is holding the string line for my dad. I spent every summer in high
school and a lot of middle school wheeling wheelbarrows full of concrete.

Tom: Knowing that you can do a thing,
knowing that you can build a thing, seeing people actually build a house or
pour concrete — even if you don’t have all the information right away, get
started, figure it out. That instilled in me this nature of making. All of my
hobbies are about making things and growing things. It goes all the way back to
these roots of knowing you can do a thing. And if you don’t know right away,
you can look it up or ask somebody.

Tom: My first job out of college, I
worked for an engineering company called RMT in the SmartBurn division. They
looked at coal-burning power plants and figured out how to reroute air flow to
reduce emissions. I was working in a power plant with some older guys, and I
just intuited I needed to go hold a thing for the next step. The guy looked up
at me and said, “Oh, you know how to work.” That meant a lot to me.

Adam: That’s such a common theme.
You’ve seen the full scale in construction and then the microscopic level. The
guys on the floor always appreciate the engineers that will roll up their
sleeves and get their hands dirty. I think that’s a very Wisconsin thing.

Tom: I’ve lived in a handful of states
throughout my career and I encounter people from Wisconsin all over the place.
One of the co-founders of Zymochem is a UW–Madison alum from Wisconsin. There’s
a familiarity. You speak a little bit of the same language.

Adam: Part of the reason we named
Wisconsin Lighting Lab that came from Tyler living in Boulder for a few years.
He said the Wisconsin people always found each other. They were very proud to
be from Wisconsin. Only a couple percent of our business is in-state, but
there’s something about that Midwest brand, those Midwest values. It’s less
about where we’re selling the product and more about who we are. It means
something to us that we’re from Wisconsin.

Tom: I love what you guys are doing
here. I love that you’ve brought manufacturing back to Fond du Lac.

Adam: Well, thanks, man. This is one
of my favorite ones. Maybe next year when you guys are back, we’ll do round
two.

Tom: I feel like I only scratched the
surface. There’s a lot there.