Courtesy of Shore Bank Pacific
If you were a small business owner looking for a loan, you'd expect financial and perhaps accounting advice from your banker. But if you're a specialty dried-fruit producer in Oregon seeking funding, you might end up with a lesson about tadpoles.
The fruit producer had been cited by Oregon agencies for water-quality violations. He was using sugar brine to infuse more flavor into fruits, and then dumping tons of waste brine into a pond, where it decomposed. Kathleen Sayce, the banker who worked with him, realized that without a way to reuse the sugar, "He couldn't see how to ramp up production without costly additional ponds."
With her encouragement, the owner installed a centrifuge, which removes water and raises the density of the brine solution without altering flavor. That led to greater brine reuse. The resulting 80% savings in monthly sugar bills allowed exploration of ...
