For over 30 years, Snomax has been manufactured by a fermentation process much like you would make beer, wine, yogurt or cheese. This process is closely monitored for quality control and effectiveness.
Because Snomax is an all-natural product and each batch is different (lot of Snomax comes out of production with different ice nucleation effectiveness), we track each batch by serial lot number.
We even track each batch by how long it takes to harvest each portion of a batch. We do this because the Snomax stream coming out of the tank will have higher number ice nucleation sites than the same batch later in the day as the product is processed into frozen wet pellets and placed in large coolers on its way to be freeze-dried.
The freeze-drying process is further tracked by tray, and chamber number as the freeze-dried pellets are placed in plastic lined fiber drum, each drum is given a unique number and samples of each drum are sent off to an independent lab for analysis.
After the independent lab finishes the quality control tests, they tell us the Ice Nucleation Activity level of each batch, which tells us the number of grams of freeze-dried pellet to place in each bag.
Next, the hermetically sealed bags are packed at the specified weight that ensures the right level of effectivness. Ten bags are placed in a box marked with a final production lot number, and all the boxes are sent off to a medical sterilization facility to have the Snomax granules, the bags and the box that holds them sterilized, we do this to give the product better shelf life.
After all these steps the product is returned from sterilization were we hold the product until samples from each lot number have been recheck by the same independent lab for quality making sure each bag is sterile and ready to treat one hundred thousand gallons of snowmaking water.
Each bag treats one hundred thousand gallons, so a box of 10 bags treats one million gallons of snowmaking water.