BROOMFIELD, Colo., Jan. 26, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- SnapDNA today announced the appointment of Mark J. Nelson to the SnapDNA Board of Directors. "We are pleased to welcome Mr. Nelson to the SnapDNA Board", said David Medin, Chief Executive Officer of SnapDNA. "Mark's deep experience in the food industry, biotechnology, finance, and operations verticals is invaluable to SnapDNA as we continue to pursue our mission to revolutionize food diagnostic testing and launch our first products in early 2022, reducing the total time-to-result for food safety test results from 3-7 days to less than one hour."
Mr. Nelson served as the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operations Officer of Beyond Meat, Inc. from 2015 to 2021, while leading the effort to take Beyond Meat public in 2019. Prior to Beyond Meat, Mr. Nelson was CFO of Farmer Bros. Co., a manufacturer and distributor of coffee, tea, spices, and culinary products. Nelson has also served in various roles, including: Chief Accounting Officer, Corporate Controller, Vice President and General Manager at Newport Corporation, a global supplier of advanced technology products and systems, and as Finance Director at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., a biotechnology product development company. Mr. Nelson holds a Bachelor of Business Administration with a specialty in Finance from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Isenberg School of Management, and a Master of Business Administration from Babson College, Franklin W. Olin Graduate School of Business.
"I am excited to join the team at SnapDNA as they set out to dramatically improve the food manufacturing pathogen testing process.", said Mr. Nelson. "This technology has the potential to dramatically reduce turnaround time required for traditional food testing, which will in turn reduce inventory investment, lower testing costs, and eliminate much of the need for dwell-time cold storage. I was attracted to this company based on my years in food manufacturing, observing the inefficiencies of traditional pathogen testing, and wondering if there was a better way. I believe SnapDNA is the better way."
SnapDNA has a transformative molecular detection technology and is initially targeting food safety. SnapDNA has invented the first self-contained, rapid, high-throughput, on-site analysis designed to replace food pathogen lab tests for the detection of potentially deadly foodborne pathogens including Listeria, E. coli & Salmonella, as well as spoilage agents and allergens. SnapDNA's proprietary analysis is an industry game changer. By reducing the time for pathogen test results from 3-7 days to less than 1 hour, the company can save food companies millions of dollars per year in operational and storage costs, and enable fresher, safer food for consumers. Food companies typically hold finished products for days waiting for pathogen test results from off-site labs.
SnapDNA has invented the first self-contained, rapid, on-site analysis designed to replace traditional food pathogen lab tests. The company's quantitative testing provides actual cell counts in a sample. Results are available in less than 1 hour. Hundreds of samples can be analyzed on a daily basis. Current methodologies provide qualitative or presence/absence results. Qualitative results cannot distinguish between widespread contamination and a single errant cell -- it is not uncommon to take months to determine the source of a contamination. SnapDNA's quantitative results can significantly reduce the amount of time needed to trace a potential contamination to as little as a single day -- before it becomes an outbreak and recall. The rapid and quantitative data generated through SnapDNA testing also enables predictive analytics that can dramatically reduce the occurrence of future contaminations.
SnapDNA has been recognized in both the public and private sectors. The USDA-ARS (Albany, CA) selected SnapDNA as the next generation food testing platform and was an early development partner under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. The company was recently awarded an Advanced Industries Grant by the State of Colorado, Office of Economic Development. SnapDNA won the Institute for Food Technologists, 2021 IFTNext Food Disruption Challenge for innovation in the food industry. The company has been selected by multiple prestigious industry accelerators, including: FoodBytes, Terra, Plug and Play, and Lloyd's Register Safety Accelerator.
About SnapDNA
SnapDNA is biotech and food safety company based in Broomfield, CO. SnapDNA's rapid, on-site analysis platform for foodborne pathogens, allergens, and spoilage agents can provide molecular, DNA-based results in less than 60 minutes. SnapDNA is the ONLY rapid test that meets or exceeds every key metric to replace a lab-based test, including analyzing only live cells with near-zero false positive and false negative results. SnapDNA is poised to revolutionize food safety testing. The company is launching its first product, TrueRapid™ Listeria analysis, in early 2022. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.snapdna.com or contact [email protected]
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SOURCE SnapDNA
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