EPISODE 79: What role does a Technical Center play in pet food manufacturing?

The below transcript is from Episode 79 of the Trending: Pet Food podcast, where host Lindsay Beaton and Justin Moore, Technical Center manager for Wenger Manufacturing discuss the company’s recently upgraded facility that now features full-scale extruders and dryers, enhanced testing capabilities and remote technology, allowing clients to conduct real-world product trials without disrupting their own operations. You can find the episode at Trending: Pet Food Podcast, on SoundCloud or on your favorite podcast platform. This episode originally aired on January 29, 2025.

We want to thank AFB International for sponsoring this podcast. AFB is the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions that make pet food treats and supplements taste great.

Lindsay Beaton – Editor, Petfood Industry magazine and Host, Trending: Pet Food podcast: Hello, and welcome to Trending: Pet Food, the industry podcast where we cover all the latest hot topics and trends in pet food. I’m your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine Lindsay Beaton, and I’m here today with Justin Moore, Technical Center manager for Wenger Manufacturing. Hi Justin, and welcome!

Justin Moore, Technical Center manager at Wenger Manufacturing: Hi Lindsay. Thanks for having me.

Beaton: In case you’re unfamiliar with Justin or Wenger, here’s what you need to know.

Justin joined Wenger in 2018.  He is responsible for the Technical Center’s staff, equipment, schedule and performance. Justin and his team are a vital resource for customers conducting research at the Technical Center, as well as customer seminars and demos. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Kansas State University, and prior to Wenger, he was Plant Manager at CJ Foods.

Founded in 1935, Wenger is the global leader in extrusion cooking systems used to produce plant-based proteins and snacks, pet foods and aquatic feed. Wenger’s primary operations are in Sabetha, Kansas USA. Every Wenger extrusion system is designed and built to meet specific customer requirements. Wenger process experts, along with the renowned Wegner Technical Center, assist clients in developing and manufacturing world-class extruded foods and feed.  Wenger is a subsidiary of Marel, a leading global provider of advanced food processing systems.

Justin’s work at the Technical Center as well as his overall expertise in companion animal pet food production make him the perfect person to come on today and answer this question: What role does something like this Technical Center play in the pet food manufacturing space?

This Tech Center existed in some form before, but it had a lot of upgrades, and it's basically a whole new thing now. What I want to start out with is what the onus was behind the new Tech Center. Why were all the updates made, and what were you hoping to accomplish by being able to create something like this in the industry?

Moore: Well, Lindsay, it was time to bring the Tech Center up to current standards for food safety design, as well as provide an opportunity for the Wenger Group to increase its footprint, allowing for additional capabilities. Keep in mind the Technical Center opened in 1965, so when construction started in 2019, the Tech Center was 54 years old and needed upgrades to the facility.

Beaton: What is the purpose of a Technical Center? What does it do for people in your part of the industry? What can customers get by having access to something like that?

Moore: The Tech Center here houses full scale extruders and dryers and ancillary equipment. We provide real world, scalable research and development on extrusion-based products and processes.

Beaton: The other day, I was talking to somebody about the importance of partnerships in the pet food industry, partnerships between manufacturers and consumers, partnerships among the different marketing advertising entities. But one of the things we really got to talking about was the importance of partnerships between suppliers and manufacturers.

I feel like this Technical Center can really bring about a type of partnership between you and your clients. Is that true? And what does a partnership look like when they have access to those kinds of things, and what exactly do they do? Like, can you give an example of a partnership that you have and how the Technical Center works for both of you?

Moore: Yeah, well, the focus of the Tech Center, of course, is research and development. We work with a variety of people in industry. We have potential customers that come in that we allow them to see equipment run for themselves, to talk with our experts to see if our equipment will fit their needs.

We have existing customers that take advantage of our expertise and processing capabilities, whether that is working on a new product, changing ingredients in an existing product, or maybe they're considering a new market. We partner with those customers and run tests here in the Tech Center. What that allows is it allows them to come here and test and not shut down their operations to do so.

Beaton: Is this something that you found customers have always wanted? Or is it something they take advantage of just because it's there? As you were updating the Tech Center, or when you started to think about updating the Technical Center, were customers asking you if you could do things that you just couldn't with your existing technology, but you really wanted to make sure you could for future customers?

Moore: That's a kind of a yes and no question. We weren't well segregated here in the Tech Center to meet current standards of operation from a product safety standpoint. We test companion animal and human food here. We didn't have good segregation, so we wanted to provide increased segregation, increased capabilities for customers to test processes, ingredients, recipes, just a broad range of extrusion platforms with enhanced laboratory analytical testing as well.

Beaton: Now, full disclosure, I have seen this new technical center. One of the things I was most impressed by was the remote technology that you guys can incorporate, and I know that it was especially helpful when people were not traveling as much in the last few years. Can you talk a little bit about the remote technology and the ability for customers to see what's going on without physically being there?

Moore: That was probably the biggest upgrade, in my opinion, Lindsay, that we made to the Technical Center. We added a creative services group, which not only modernized our digital technology, but it improved our customer experience and interaction. We now have the Galen J Rokey Education and Outreach Center, which is housed on the second floor here in the technical center. It gives our customers the opportunity to be more involved in demonstrations and test runs, even if they can't be here.

We have 20 mobile cameras throughout the facility that gives us the ability to provide live streams, not only here in the United States, but globally, to any customer not in attendance. We also utilize drones. It's not uncommon, during a test here to see drones flying around overhead, videoing, taking pictures of the process as it's happening.

I think that is the single biggest improvement we made. It's expensive to travel. We now have customers that maybe send one or two people and the rest watch a live stream. We even have customers that test here almost monthly. Other than a video meeting prior to the trial, I haven't seen them in person for a couple of years.

Beaton: When you were updating the Technical Center, obviously that was a huge upgrade. What were some of the other challenges that customers have been coming to you with that you wanted to take into account as you were updating the Tech Center, because pet food production is getting more complex by the day, with novel proteins and different ingredients and wanting higher meat content or grain free, or there's just a lot going on in terms of formulation, and customers want to make sure their stuff is going to work, and they want to make sure the equipment is going to work.

What are some specific challenges that you can now answer for customers by showing them that, “Yes, this will work and here's why, or no, this will not work, and here's why”?

Moore: We're able to show the customer that their formula -- the new process they're wanting to try the new ingredient -- we're able to show them that it will work because our extruders are full-scale extruders. We have processing experts on-site. Our dryers are full-scale dryers.

We can see the process and the product from start to finish -- the ingredients coming into the high intensity preconditioner, coming out the end of the extruder into the dryer, out of the dryer into our finished goods packaging room, where we coat the products for customers who may be wanting to send products off for a feeding trial. Really, when a customer comes to the Technical Center and when they leave, they can have confidence that whatever they were testing, whether it's a new product or just an ingredient, from an extrusion standpoint, they're able to know whether it's going to work.

Beaton: What do you think clients most enjoy about all the updates to the Tech Center and the way it works now? From your perspective, what are the business benefits of being able to offer something like this to clients?

Moore: The list of what our clients enjoy the most … First, I would say it's the ability to see full-scale equipment run for themselves. We're not running desktop test machines here. Our customers enjoy the ability to come and work on a new product or a new ingredient, or maybe they're considering going into a new market. They can use us to test these parameters without, like I said earlier, shutting down their own operations to do so.

Another benefit our customers enjoy is having access to our processing experts. Our experts have the knowledge to study, test and produce products and help our customers develop these processes. I believe we have the best process engineers in the world, and that knowledge really affords us the opportunity to help clients with their testing and in some cases, even help our customers develop their products along with them in that partnership.

Visitors and customers here to the Tech Center can also experience general and specific training seminars. You mentioned earlier in the intro that we have product development, processes, operations and maintenance classes with classroom and hands-on training in a focused learning environment.

There’s a whole list of things that I think our clients really enjoy about the Technical Center.

Beaton: Let's talk about your educational capabilities a little bit more, because that goes way beyond, “Come partner with us clients. We have the ability to help you formulate and more.” That’s one part of the industry, and then you can supply the machinery, that's another part of the industry, but being able to bring people in and educate them on how pet food is made with a full-scale line sitting there and being able to teach people -- that's a big responsibility and a big plus for the industry at large. How important is being able to do that to you guys, just in terms of what you're able to offer the entire industry?

Moore: I think it's incredibly important. It gives us the opportunity to continue to be the leader in innovation and education in the industry. We have and it continues to grow. Every year we have done more demonstrations and seminars and Wenger Care programs for our existing customers. We have done more of those this year than we ever have, at least in my time here, which, of course, has been marred by COVID, so that slowed us down considerably.

 Having the Galen J Rokey Education and Outreach Center really allows us the opportunity to not only have our experts in a classroom setting giving lectures on processes and ingredients and the why things are the way they are, but then in turn, we're able to go down to the testing floor, start up the equipment, let those people get their hands on the equipment, and actually make the changes that we say to make.

They can see, “Well, when I add water, this is what happens. When I speed up the RPMs and the extruder, this is what happens. When I slow them down, this is what happens.”  It’s a great opportunity to learn, especially for people new to extrusion.

I mentioned the Wenger Care program for our existing customers. We have a lot of people take advantage of our Wenger Care program to bring in new extruder operators and allow them to run equipment here with our experts to learn the basics of extrusion.

Beaton: Before we wrap up, I want to know what your hopes are for the future of the Technical Center. What are you guys looking into as you continue to use it and maybe think about growing it even more? What do you really hope it ends up doing for your clients and just the existence of something like this in the industry? What do you hope to continue leading the way in?

Moore: We obviously want to continue to collaborate with customers and prospective customers, delivering new solutions that meet their needs, wants and desires. Our goal here is to continue to be, what I say is the tip of the spear -- spurring innovation across pet food, aquatic food and human food.

Because in the end, that's what the Technical Center is here for. That's what we do. We innovate, whether we are testing a new piece of equipment that our engineers here at Wenger designed to testing a new process that our process engineers have brought into us – “Hey, we want to try this, so let's test it to our external customers coming in.” We want to continue doing what we've been talking about the whole time here, which is testing ingredients, new products and new processes.

Beaton: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming on today, because as soon as I saw the Tech Center, I realized that it was an opportunity to talk about partnerships in the industry, because it's so very clearly meant for that. Partnerships are becoming increasingly important in this industry, and probably in all industries, because consumers want a partnership with the manufacturer and with the brands that are making and providing their pet foods. That means we need more partnerships on this side of the industry so that everybody can work together to put out the best product. If you have the capabilities to educate and to help people produce those, then I feel like you're exactly where you should be in the industry. I really appreciate the opportunity to have you on and have a conversation about the Tech Center.

Moore: Thank you, Lindsay. It was a pleasure.

Beaton: Before we go, let’s do a little plug: Where can people find more information about you and Wenger?

Moore: They can find more information about me on LinkedIn and more information about the Technical Center and the Wenger Group at the website, wenger.com.

Beaton: That’s it for this episode of Trending: Pet Food. You can find us on PetfoodIndustry.com, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow us on Instagram, @trendingpetfoodpodcast. And if you want to chat or have any feedback, or if you have stories that you would like to tell and make sure we get to David, we can do that as well. I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me an email: [email protected].

And of course, thanks again to our sponsor, AFB International, the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide, offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions that make pet food treats and supplements taste great.

Once again, I'm Lindsay Beaton, your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for tuning in!