The Mix Master

Have you ever wondered how tomatoes make it into your ketchup without leaving it lumpy? Or how the egg whites get into mayo—or mustard seeds into mustard? It’s all done with machinery, of course. But there are different machines for different products. There are high-shear mixers, high-torque mixers, high-shear emulsifiers, low-speed agitators—even one called the mayo mill.

The majority of them are manufactured at a single plant in Londonderry, N.H., by a company called Admix, whose founder, Louis Beaudette ’74, came to the field by a most unlikely route.

As a biology major at Lowell Tech, he wrote his senior thesis on the treatment of groundwater pollution. This led to his first job, at Kenics Corp. in Andover, where he spent 15 years designing mixing and blending equipment—initially for water treatments, and later for food.

“I became fascinated with the food-processing business,” he says. “It’s a constantly changing environment—one day it’s all about low-fat, then it’s high-protein, the next day it’s gluten-free. I came to love it and wanted to stay involved.” And he saw his chance: “The machines that companies were using to mix food were really slow. I felt the process could be more efficient.”

So in 1989, he founded Admix. Today, it is the largest supplier of mixing equipment for canned and packaged, prepared foods. He was right about the speed thing: Admix can now do in just 30 minutes a mixing job that used to take up to eight hours, Beaudette says.

It’s demanding work that never seems to slow down. A few years ago, he says, when the media began writing about the evils of fructose corn syrup, “The phones were ringing off the hook. Kraft, Campbell’s, M&M—they all wanted new machines, so they could get off fructose and mix with solid sugar instead. It was a crazy time.”—GD