Bob Kuswa Video Interview
DM: Hi, my name is Donald Maycott, CEO of
Moisture Limited. Today we have Bob
Kuswa, CEO/Founder and inventor of BK Products, Inc. Bob is an expert and leader in the field of
using desiccant technology. Bob, can you
tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in this field?
B: Sure. Some 10 years ago, Don, I’d been reading
about food shortages, about bad air quality.
It seemed like power costs were starting to escalate and it took on a
new dimension for me. Over a 10-year
period, we discovered that we had the ability, by using certain minerals, which
we call zeolites, to control moisture and odor.
First, I think
we should say, we talk about we are the leader in desiccant technology. What is a desiccant? A desiccant really is nothing more than
something that removes moisture.
Basically, a sponge could be a desiccant because it removes
moisture. But we wanted more than that. We needed something for food
preservation. We needed something for
moisture control in freezers. Something
for better indoor air quality. We found
that using zeolites, which is nothing new, I’m not an inventor of
zeolites. Zeolites have been here for a
long, long time. They’ve been used in
arsenic control. They’ve been used in water
purification. They’ve been used in oil drilling. They’ve been used in numerous,
numerous applications. But no one had
ever taken the zeolite family line and brought it into a new dimension. I guess that’s why people say I’m the
inventor. I didn’t invent zeolites,
they’re a naturally occurring substance.
It’s a volcanic rock.
There are some 273 zeolite mines in the free world. We have chosen some that have some very pure
zeolites. None of our products are
chemically-induced. Everything we do is a
natural occurring event. We have taken
the line, we, being BK products, who I represent, and we have invented these
lines to serve specific needs of people.
We are extremely people-orientated.
An example is, we have designed a product for home refrigerators that we
call Mega Fresh.
Now, Mega
Fresh, when placed in your refrigerator, will do three things. It will give you a better air quality and
take the excess moisture out of your refrigerator. It will stop the cross transfer of
odors. I’m sure you’ve experienced, when
you open your refrigerator door, there’s an odor problem once in a while.
DM: Sure.
B: We can eliminate
that. But the most important thing, we
have the ability to take fruits and vegetables and place them into a state of
sleep. The USDA, United States
Department of Agriculture, says that we can take fruits and vegetables and the
only thing that continues to ripen them is the internal sugars. Do you like lettuce?
DM: Sure.
B: Lettuce, as you
notice, goes bad in three or four days.
It gets brown, it’s slimy, if you don’t finish the head, you throw it
away. Place a Mega Fresh filter in your
refrigerator, and I want you to try this, take a head of lettuce, instruct your
family members not to eat it. Leave it
in your refrigerator, two weeks later, make a salad, enjoy the lettuce. In one of our seminars, we had a woman that
stood up in the back of the room after I showed this product to the group and
she said, "I live in Miami and my lettuce lasted 21 days." End of conversation, I said, enough
said. So this is something that every
person that likes fruits and vegetables certainly can have an extension of
shelf life.
DM: So, Bob, do you
mean to tell me that this little box right here can extend my lettuce three
weeks, 21 days?
B: Oh, yes. Well, we have the philosophy in our company,
it has always been promise less and deliver more. So I’ll say two weeks, but you can hedge the
bet and go three.
DM: Is it safe, is it
a safe product?
B: It is absolutely
safe. OSHA has reviewed the product and
they have told us, and we have it, obviously, in writing, that we are inert,
we’re stable, we’re non-toxic, non-corrosive, non-explosive; 100% all natural
mineral. We have the lowest freight rate
in the entire nation. I don’t know if
you’re aware of this, but when you send product in a freight line, you have to
classify what the cargo is. Our cargo,
basically, if it was ever in an accident and went onto the streets, they would
sweep it on to the side of the road.
DM: Wow.
B: It’s that safe. Remember, we started from nature and we are
only going back to nature. Now this
product line, Don, extends all the way into the commercial field for larger produce coolers. But, basically, we were here just to discuss
the residential. That is what we
do. When I met with the USDA, I said,
why are you so enamored with the idea of preservation? And they said, that the country is actually
going to face food shortages over a period of time. I was not aware of this, but over 20 percent
of everything that we purchase in produce, 20 percent of what we purchase to
use, we throw away. It’s called shrink,
it’s waste and that’s what we’re trying to eliminate.
DM: That’s a
staggering number, 20 percent.
B: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
DM: So you’re using zeolites
in order to extend the quality of life, if you will.
B: Yes.
DM: In a lot of
different ways.
B: Oh, very
definitely.
DM: Not only in your
refrigerator.
B: We can go into
another product line. We can use the
Mega Freeze, which is the counterpart of the Mega Fresh. This goes into your freezer. It will give you a better running
freezer. Have you ever had a bad-tasting
ice cube?
DM: Sure.
B: Never again,
that won’t happen. Have you ever had
freezer burn?
DM: Absolutely.
B: What is freezer burn? It’s excess moisture in your freezer and
what’s happening, that frost is getting into the packaging. It’s breaking away the glue that’s holding
the package together, creating a freezer burn.
We stop that. You will no longer
have those problems.
DM: Wow. That’s pretty impressive.
B: Well, thank
you. You had asked if there’s anything
else we can do. We have, and we brought
along today, this filter. This filter is
a 20-pound filter that is called Awesome Air.
This works in conjunction with your air conditioning. We need one filter for every five tons of air
conditioning. Well, what can I
achieve? There are three things that we’re
able to do with an Awesome Air filter.
We can give you better indoor air quality, we can give you energy
conservation, and last, but certainly not least, we can give you mold
prevention.
How do we do
something like this? When this works, in
conjunction with your air conditioning, and please understand what air
conditioning basically does, it takes excess moisture from a room. It’s like a sponge. It dries it out, sends back the cold air to
the room, but it doesn’t take out enough moisture. We take out the excess moisture. A more technical term, if you were in the
HVAC business, we take the latent load, giving you back the sensible load so
your air conditioning is working better.
Now
by doing so, we’re going to give you a drier environment and a drier
environment is a cooler environment. By
doing so, having a cooler environment, the Tampa Tribune states that every time
you move a thermostat up 1-degree, and you’d be moving it up because you feel
cooler, you save 5 percent on your energy bill.
I made that statement to TXU, one of the larger power companies in the
nation, and they corrected me. They
said, I was absolutely wrong. My heart
stopped. They came back and said, no,
it’s 7 percent, so that made me happy.
Customarily in
commercial, you can raise the thermostat 3-degrees. In a home, where you have less usage of doors
and less windows and less occupants in and out all day, you can move the
thermostat up 4-degrees; true energy conservation. Now, we had mentioned better indoor
quality. Allergens piggyback on water
molecules from room-to-room, that’s how they get around. Well, if you’re in a drier environment, you
have less water molecules so you have better indoor air quality. But last, and the one that is so important to
us, is mold.
Mold is gold and people look at me and say, why do
you say that? Where did this mold come
from? The litigations in this country
today, Don, are unbelievable on mold.
DM: Yeah, you’ve been
hearing it a lot. In a lot of the news,
you’ve been seeing a lot of mold stories in the newspapers.
B: And lots of
punitive damages. Now, what we’re able
to do, I cannot kill mold. Mold is a
living spore, but mold can only live where there’s excess moisture. Now where did this excess moisture come
from? This could have come from excess
humidity because your air conditioning was shut off. It might be because you had a water leak from
a roof problem, a broken window, a faulty pipe, a bad water heater. Numerous things, you must fix the
problem. Once you fix the problem, in
conjunction with using the Awesome Air and your air handlers, we will dry out
the air, stopping the mold from growing.
Once the mold stops growing, you can kill it. You can kill it with bleach or trisodium
phosphate and it will not come back.
One of the
selling tools and we’ve used it in the past and it certainly isn’t a threat is,
we look at people and say, would you like mold prevention today or litigation
in the future? So we feel we’ve done,
we’ve done something for mankind. And we
say that because, not only better indoor air quality, energy conservation, mold
prevention, this product never wears out.
We ask that every 18 to 24 months this product be removed from the air
conditioning unit and dried in the sun or placed in low heat in an oven for a
couple of hours and then reinstalled.
The product, with a little loving, tender care, will last forever.
And our thought
pattern at BK is more of, you know, if we can do this for the people that we’re
associated with, we’ve given something back to mankind. We’ve kind of left our foot in the sand,
giving you food that will last longer, giving you energy conservation, giving
you better air to breathe. We feel we
really truly are the leader in desiccant technology.
DM: And, Bob, you were
telling us about some success stories with your Mega Fresh product. Can you tell us some of the success stories you
had with the Awesome Air product?
B: Oh, sure. Awesome Air is named properly, it is an
awesome product. Without mentioning
specific names, there’s many major hotels and motels that use our product now. One of the examples that comes to mind is one
of the major chains had a snap inspection through the franchise people. And they said, you people have serious mold
problems. We’re going to close you down,
lose your franchise, if you don’t correct this problem.
Don, the
problem is so universal. How many motels
have you been in that has a swimming pool in the middle and these rooms are all
facing around the pool and all the kids always want those rooms so they can get
to the pool. Well, that’s all the
moisture that’s coming. Constant
moisture is coming in to your room, promoting excess moisture, promotes
mold. By using our product, and in this
case, you can’t use the 20-pound filter because you don’t have central air
conditioning. You don’t have a
thermostat. You have what is called a
wall unit. You’ve seen it, where you
have the knobs and you change the knob to warm or colder, more fan, less fan.
DM: Sometimes they
don’t even work.
B: Thank you. Have you ever been in a motel room that
really the air felt fresh and wholesome?
DM: You know, there
really hasn’t been one that I’ve really enjoyed.
B: I would have to
tend to agree with you. We have
developed one that is cousin to this one.
Again, it’s Awesome Air and it fits right underneath that wall unit. And by using this, we eliminate the excess
moisture, giving you better indoor air quality.
Stopping the excess moisture, stops mold, stops the smell.
Now, many, many
times, and we can take this a step further, we have another product that works
in conjunction with better indoor air quality and that product is Odor
Stop. How many rooms have you gone into,
motel rooms, how many motion picture theaters have you gone in, how many
elevators have you gone in where you can smell perfume? Somebody has spritzed perfume to disguise a
smell. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it
happen.
DM: Just this morning.
B: This product,
again it’s a zeolite, a completely different derivative of the moisture ones,
controls absolutely no moisture, but eliminates. Does not disguise, does not mask, it
eliminates odor. We have literally, over
the past 10 years, have not found an odor that we cannot control. We can go from smoke control where we’re
working in major casinos, major hotels.
Did you know when you go in and you ask for a non-smoking room, you
probably got a 50-50 chance that somebody had smoked in the room the night
before?
DM: Oh, yeah, I
believe it.
B: Oh,
positively. We found, in one of the
casino rooms where we used our product, they invited a very, very important
sports figure, who was highly allergic to smoke, to stay in that room for three
nights. That room previously, four hours
earlier, got occupied by smoking people.
At the end of his three nights, he praised the management for better
indoor air quality, how good he could breathe.
So, we can
eliminate odor such as smoke, cigar, dog, urine, formaldehyde. In a home, when they put down new carpeting,
that’s formaldehyde. Do you know how
toxic some of these odors can be in your own home? Cleaning fluids, paint, many people have
runny noses, itchy eyes, heart palpitations, they’re sick. They’re sick in their own homes. They’re sick in places they work. It’s because of the odors that they are
coming into contact with. Diesel. I just flew into the Atlanta terminal, I’m talking to you from Atlanta. Delta Airlines uses us
to control diesel smells. They were
previously using a charcoal, now they’re using us.
Again, it’s a
product that will not wear out. Remember
where I told you, you can dry our products out?
This product you don’t dry. You
wash it out with soap and water, rinse it out with clear water, re-hang
it. It will last forever. Again, it doesn’t mask, it doesn’t disguise. It eliminates odor.
DM: Bob, where can I
use the product that you have in your hand (residential size Odor Stop
filter)? Because, you know, I have some
friends who smoke in their car and me being a non-smoker, I almost get sick
just sitting in their car to go have lunch or go out to a restaurant or to go
some place.
B: Okay, I’m a
non-smoker. We’re the worst people in
the world because we’re critics. Have
you ever stepped into somebody’s car that smokes and they say, I’m sorry it
smells, but I smoke?
DM: Right.
B: I mean, I’ve
heard that so many times, it’s unbelievable.
If that person would take that little package there, take it out of the
shrink wrap and place it on the dash of their car or on the back part of their
car, let it be in the sun constantly, within three days, that car will become a
non-smoking vehicle. You will not smell
the smoke. Once you cure that smell and
eliminate it, take that package and put it under the seat, you’ll always have a
good smelling automobile.
Place it in a
closet, put it in a diaper pail. You
have a dog? Use a bigger one, you’ll
never smell the animal in your house.
DM: Wow, so you mean I
can give this away to my friends, for their birthday, Christmas or whatever.
B: Fundraiser,
whatever.
DM: And just like say,
here, put this in your car. Put it on
the front dash, the back dash, and I can get in their car after that?
B: And they don’t
have to apologize any longer.
DM: Wonderful,
great. Well, that’s really it for today
and, Bob, I want to thank you for coming and spending some time with us,
talking about all of your wonderful, all-natural desiccant products. And I look forward to trying this one in
particular.
B: Well, good. Thanks for having me.
DM: Thanks.
B: Have a good day.
