The Permian Basin Local Section members were invited to attend the September 2022 Zoom seminar hosted by the Greater Houston Local Section Young Chemist Committee. The presentation was “Developing a New Pasta (the Cascatelli Story): Essential product development lessons for the chemical industry”. Attendees had an opportunity to network before the seminar. Time was allotted afterwards for Q&A.
Mark E. Jones, PhD
Mark Jones retired in March 2021 as Executive External Strategy and Communications Fellow for Dow Chemical. He retired with responsibility, among other things, for next generation sustainability goals associated with innovation at Dow. Mark currently serves on and is past co-chair of the National Academy’s Chemical Sciences Roundtable.
Mark joined Dow in 1990 following a graduate career that had very little to do with his ultimate career path. He followed a degree from Randolph-Macon College with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado-Boulder where he studied gas-phase ion molecule chemistry. A post-doc at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science preceded coming to Dow. His early Dow career was spent in Catalysis, in what is now Core R&D.
Stephen F. Hahn
Steve Hahn is an experienced chemist, materials scientist, and evaluator of new technology-based business opportunity. He was employed by the Dow Chemical Company for 35 years in a variety of research and new business development roles. Beginning in 2010, Hahn established Dow’s Technology Scouting presence in the North American West Coast Region to identify and evaluate strategically aligned business opportunities.
Hahn has a B.S. in Chemistry from Michigan Tech and an M.S. in Chemistry from Central Michigan University. He is a member of the Academy of the College of Sciences and Arts at Michigan Tech and served on the Advisory Board for the Global Social Venturing Competition at the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. He is currently an Expert in the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships at the National Science Foundation, supporting the ICorps and SBIR/STTR programs.
Challenges in developing a new product
The story of Cascatelli, a new pasta shape, began with an observation something could be improved, that there was an unmet need. Many pasta shapes don’t hold sauce well. The surface area to volume ratio is wrong. Many shapes have poor mouth feel, too thin to resist biting. Many were hard to pick up with a fork. Dan Pashman believed there had to be an undiscovered optimum, a better pasta shape. Cascatelli is the result of his quest to develop and commercialize a new pasta shape and is well documented in a series of audio podcasts, Mission Impastable.
Mark E. Jones and Stephen F. Hahn presented the Cascatelli story and its many parallels to the chemical industry. The story of Cascatelli describes the common challenges and many of the characters inhabiting most new product development stories. There are incumbent pastas. Market incumbents frequently exist in chemicals and materials. Dan Pashman unexpectedly encountered something quite common in the chemical industry, the challenge of scale. This seminar related the Cascatelli story while highlighting useful takeaways for those working in the chemical and materials industries.