Processing's Weekly Mixer: Food Processing's Processor of the Year, and more
Welcome to the latest installment of Processing's Weekly Mixer, which highlights recent content from EndeavorB2B brands relevant to process manufacturers.
This week's entry features content from Food Processing, Plant Services, Chemical Processsing and Pharma Manufacturing, as well as this week's content from Processing.
Food Processing's 2026 Processor of the Year: Chobani
From Food Processing: No longer just a yogurt company, Chobani at age 20 remains an admirable success story.
Dave Fusaro writes:
Back in 2012, Chobani was our eighth Processor of the Year, celebrating the fact the company had just passed the $1 billion in sales milestone. “From zero to a billion dollars in just five years,” our December 2012 cover said. It was strictly a yogurt company back then, only a year or two removed from its original company name, Agro Farma Inc.
This year’s Chobani is a different company, still celebrating its dominance in Greek (actually Turkish) yogurt but also making significant inroads in coffee creamers, then ready-to-drink coffee, and most recently frozen, ready-to-make, plant-based meals and snacks. And apparently surpassing the $4.5 billion sales mark.
It’s been a long and winding journey, even for the son of Kurdish nomads.
Read the entire article HERE.
More on Chobani from FP's Processor of the Year coverage:
The fascinating man behind Chobani
Chobani is building its future
R&D on three very different fronts
Only 39% of maintenance workers consistently use their CMMS
Reasons why a CMMS may not be used include:
- Technicians were never properly trained on it (47%).
- It requires a desktop and is not usable in the field (35%).
- The system takes longer than the workaround (26%).
- Its use is framed as optional (22%).
- The data inside it is outdated (13%).
One big question is how to integrate AI into systems on top of operational knowledge when much of that knowledge has never been inputted into the system at all. Underlying maintenance data may not keep pace with where it needs to be to get the most out of AI.
Meanwhile 55% of surveyed maintenance teams use AI “in some form.” For 24%, that use is common across operations, while 31% are trying AI out in a few specific areas.
“People are building discipline around how to leverage AI and use AI, but they're not being disciplined in using the system to put data into it, so that the AI actually produces something that's valuable,” says Limble CEO Gary Specter in an interview with Plant Services.
The hose inspection gaps that put chemical plants at risk
On May 5, 2021, a flexible hose ruptured while operators transferred oleum from a railroad tank car at the FutureFuel Chemical Co. facility in Batesville, Arkansas. About 73,300 pounds of the chemical escaped over 73 minutes, leaving an operator with severe chemical burns. In the published incident report from July 2025, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) found that the hose's inner fluoropolymer layer had been damaged, possibly by creep during nearly seven years in storage before installation. The acid then ate through the underlying structural layers.
The same CSB volume covered 30 incidents from April 2020 through January 2025, with two fatalities, 25 serious injuries and about $1.8 billion in property damage. Five occurred during truck or railcar loading and unloading, where hoses do most of the work.
Hoses are among the few pieces of process equipment that operators connect, disconnect, drag, bend and swap by hand every shift. They are also among the least documented. Many plants can pull a pressure vessel's inspection history in minutes but can't say when they last tested a given transfer hose or confirm it’s the hose specified for that service.
One of the company’s engineers who previously worked at a large power plant can personally relate to this scenario. During normal operation, no leaks were identified in the system. But after an extended maintenance outage, an oil line ruptured when the system returned to service with pressure. Luckily, there were no human injuries due to the hose failure, but there was significant cleanup and additional equipment downtime. The hose was inspected while the equipment was running during daily operator walkdowns and visually inspected during the maintenance downtime, but a failure still occurred when the system returned to service.
With fall turnarounds and year-end audits approaching, now is a good time for plant teams to closely examine four common gaps.
Consortium demonstrates continuous manufacturing platform for APIs
A European consortium has designed a continuous manufacturing platform for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), using fentanyl to test an approach aimed at supporting more flexible production and reduce reliance on centralized manufacturing.
Members of the Europe-based consortium PIPAc — composed of four life science technology providers: De Dietrich, Alysophil, Bruker, and Novalix — co-developed the new platform and launched a pilot program that successfully validated its ability to continuously manufacture fentanyl.
The platform combines continuous flow chemistry, real-time analytical monitoring, and AI-driven process control. The integrated system measures process conditions and uses AI to adjust operating parameters. The pilot was critical to PIPAc’s mission of identifying new ways to enable domestic supply-chain resilience and reduce dependence on the centralized production of pharmaceutical ingredients following years of geopolitical uncertainty and disruption.
“For decades, pharmaceutical manufacturing has relied on production models that were designed for a different era,” says Frédéric Guichard, group executive director of De Dietrich. “Today, the industry faces new challenges: supply chain resilience, production sovereignty, faster industrialization and greater flexibility. PIPAc demonstrates that it is possible to rethink how pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured.”
