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Haskell innovation offers a place to rebuild a sense of calm at worksites. The StillGuard sensory booth provides a restorative experience for construction workers. * By Ric Anderson * | 4:55 a.m. August 27, 2026 * | 2 Free Articles Remaining! * News * Health Care Innovators As Hamzah Shanbari discusses the mental strain of construction work, he reels off a list of stressors that start stacking up like floors being added to a building. "Construction is a rugged environment," he said. "It's hot, it's humid, it's dusty, it's dirty. It's noisy and there's a lot of pressure," said Shanbari, director of innovation for Jacksonville-based Haskell. "The more projects we do as a company, the more we get pressure on completing them faster, completing them with more accuracy and completing them with less rework. So there's just more and more pressure being put on the worker in the field." To provide relief for workers at jobsites, Haskell is developing a sensory booth designed to help them relax and manage stress through science-backed mental health support technology. The global building services company's StillGuard prototype uses light, sound and vibration to provide immersive, calming experiences. It also cancels outside noise, allowing workers to unplug from worksites and take short breaks to decompress. Shanbari said the concept was designed to address a need for improved health, safety and well-being in an industry that has one of the highest suicide rates in the U.S., as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2022 study by the Center for Construction Research and Training found that construction workers are five times more likely to die by suicide than from a jobsite accident. "Mental health is becoming more and more of an important topic, not just for Haskell but for the industry," Shanbari said. Haskell is developing StillGuard for its own employees but also with an eye toward marketing it to others. Shanbari said employers could benefit through improved job performance by site workers, resulting in higher quality of work, faster completion of projects and reduction in expenses from delays and redoing defective work. How it works Shanbari directs Dysruptek, Haskell's innovation and venture capital arm, which has developed other innovations such as a patented device allowing remote-controlled testing of pneumatic equipment that operates at such high pressures that the force of failures is calculated in equivalent pounds of TNT. Working with Abby Paris, research and development analyst for Dysruptek, Shanbari developed StillGuard from an idea that evolved from a collaboration with Jacksonville-based Castano Group, a design and video/audio production agency, and Memories Again, a two-person team that produces music curations. "They came to us and said, 'This is something we can put in a quiet room in the office where your employees can sit down and relax,'" Shanbari said. "We looked at that and said, 'OK, that's nice to have, but the people sitting in the AC in the office are not our audience.'" From there, the focus shifted to providing a soothing spot for workers at jobsites, which led to development of the prototype. Dysruptek has produced three units, all in noise-canceling booths used by musicians and singers to practice or record. Each has a video screen, color-changing lighting and a control panel that allows users to choose between one of three experiences and change audio volume and video brightness. Shanbari and Paris said the screen displays and music are designed with patterns and frequencies that have been scientifically proven to calm the nervous system. In addition, a heavy subwoofer under the seat creates vibrations that also have been shown to relax the body. For instance, the first experience shows a video display with clusters of lights that move back and forth across the screen. "This is scientifically proven, that just moving your eyes back and forth, left and right, actually helps you be less stressed about whatever you're doing," she said. The three experiences are: * Repair, which according to Haskell uses low-frequency tones and sound tuned to a frequency that is known to reduce stress markers. The experience is designed to ease tension and promote a sense of calm. * Reset: Humming noises and natural water sounds are used to encourage a relaxed mental state and regain focus for high-pressure tasks. * Recharge: The experience is designed to lift a user's mood and energy through brighter tones and a slightly faster tempo. Next steps StillGuard is undergoing testing at Ohio State University. To be used on jobsites, it would need to be designed with a weather-resistant, climate-controlled enclosure. Meanwhile, Shanbari is working with site managers and others to determine protocols for using the device in the field. He said challenges include overcoming a stigma in the "Git-r-Done" world of the construction industry about mental health care. Another is a concern that workers would take advantage of the privacy of the booth to take long breaks, smoke cigarettes or otherwise not use it for its intended purpose. Shanbari said the goal is for workers to view a session in StillGuard as no different than a bathroom or coffee break. "I hate this comparison, but it's the closest thing: It's like a porta potty," he said. "Somebody goes in there for a bio break, and that's acceptable. That's necessary. But there's no place to go for a mental break. So that's where this pod comes in." Shanbari believes that as more workers try StillGuard, any stigma surrounding it will gradually melt away. The idea, he said, is that "the more they go talk to the rest of the workers, that kind of spreads as it's a cool experience." "That's all we're trying to achieve, if they see it as 'Oh, that's a cool thing,'" he said. This story originally appeared in the annual Healthcare Innovators edition of The Daily Record, published Aug. 27. The Daily Record is distributed for free in key business nodes in Northeast Florida and mailed weekly by subscription. Dial 877-231-8834 for more info.

Consistency and innovation intersect in pet food facility design. Greg Daniel of Haskell Co. argues that breakthrough pet food products demand deep process knowledge, frontier techniques and facilities designed with innovation in mind from day one. April 28, 2026 During Petfood Essentials, Greg Daniel said simulation and digital twin models have the potential to cut installation and commissioning time for full production processing lines in half. MongtaStudio | Bigstock.com Greg Daniel, strategic industry advisor for pet food/treats and protein at Haskell Co., addressed attendees at Petfood Essentials during Petfood Forum 2026 in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 27 with a practical framework for achieving both product differentiation and manufacturing consistency. His session, "The nexus of consistency and innovation in pet food manufacturing," centered on the argument that breakthrough pet food innovation is challenging but achievable - and that it requires strategic collaboration, deep process knowledge and early integration of innovation goals into facility design. The power of 'I don't know' Daniel opened by reframing what innovation actually requires, arguing that the foundation isn't creativity or vision - it's curiosity. "The power of 'I don't know' shouldn't just stop at 'I don't know,'" he said. "It's: what? How do we learn? What is the next step?" Curiosity paired with effective learning builds experience, he said, but true breakthrough innovation only comes when risk-taking enters the equation. He illustrated the point with a story from his time at Mars Petcare, where a chance observation in a break room - watching a colleague heat up a meal - led him to put a Dentastix treat in a microwave. The product puffed up, then hardened. "It's more of 'what happens' learning," Daniel said. "Then asking yourself: how do you create that, if it's something that you're actually looking for?" Process cannot be overlooked. Daniel said the pet food industry holds a vast reservoir of recipe, product and process knowledge accumulated over decades of research, development and engineering. As experienced talent ages out of the workforce, he warned, the next generation of pet food developers and manufacturers will need to fully understand the inherent interactions between formula, equipment and operations - and the physical and chemical transformations that occur throughout production. Equipment wear is a prime example, he said. As extruder screws wear over time, the transformations happening inside the barrel change - and so does the product - even when operators haven't intentionally changed a thing. "If you don't do or change out a screw every so many years, you're going to wear out that screw, and your transformations inside that extruder are going to change," Daniel said. He drew on design-of-experiment work from his time at Procter & Gamble and Iams to illustrate how controllable process variables - moisture, steam, back pressure, screw speed - can be intentionally manipulated to achieve specific outcomes. In one experiment, adjusting moisture inputs shifted bulk density of an extruded kibble by nearly 100 grams per liter, with downstream effects on bag fill, palatant absorption and texture. X-ray imaging of kibble cross-sections allowed the team to quantify porosity changes with precision. In a separate study using Iams cat food, whole-batch grinding of ingredients - with all other processing conditions held constant - resulted in a four-to-one animal preference over the standard product and roughly 58% fewer brokens and fines. The goal, Daniel said, is to develop products and processes that are "process center-lined" - delivering superior consistency while generating less waste. Frontier processing techniques for differentiation. Daniel said some of the most promising avenues for product differentiation in pet food aren't new technologies at all - they're established techniques from adjacent industries that haven't yet been widely adopted in pet food manufacturing. He called them "low-hanging fruit that's been tested in other industries that we can bring to pet food." One example he highlighted is flash drying and milling, a combined single-step process originally designed for the beer, wine and spirits industry that can achieve a five-log pathogen kill on fresh meat. The process can take a 60-70% moisture slurry from raw material to finely milled powder in roughly four to five seconds. Daniel acknowledged the technology carries a higher cost but said it opens new avenues for ingredient innovation in the industry. Other frontier techniques he cited include meat grinding with chunk formers capable of creating muscle meat striations, low-moisture extrusion as an alternative to conventional drying, heat-treat oven/dryer systems adapted from the automotive industry that use steam to achieve thermal kill, and electron beam (e-beam) technology adapted from medical sterilization. "I think it's something that's coming back," he said of e-beam. "It's something that we need to pay attention to." Strategic facility design for product innovation. Daniel argued that the time to embed innovation capability into a production facility is before construction begins - not after equipment has been placed into whatever floor space is available. The framework he outlined spans four areas: product lifecycle management from concept through startup; process development and scale-up; site and system design for food safety and flexibility; and system analytics including simulation modeling and digital twins. On facility layout, Daniel said decisions about floor materials, wall treatments, airflow, drainage placement and zoning have long-term consequences for a facility's ability to pivot to new product formats. "If you're making a baked biscuit today and you want to make fresh pet food tomorrow, how does that incorporate? What is the overlap?" he asked. Looking ahead, Daniel pointed to AI and digital twin technology as the next frontier. He envisions AI systems that integrate formulation and processing data together to drive transformational understanding of product development, compressing timelines significantly. Simulation and digital twin models, he added, have the potential to cut installation and commissioning time for full processing lines in half. Daniel concluded, "Through collaboration, we foster a culture of creativity that drives effective learning and converts knowledge into experience, empowering us to take calculated risks that lead to innovation and strengthen our relationship in this industry." Unlock Personalized Content! Sign up and the recommendations below will be more personalized for you!