Water treatment specialist Culligan Middle East, which has created a powerful impact in the region’s food service and healthcare sectors, is now helping its clients to reopen safely and, in return, rebuild its own business which has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company which caters largely to the food service sector was hit hard during the lockdown when many of its food business customers were closed.

“We have got a large food service business which has been struggling because, during the lockdown, so many of our customers have been closed. We are now helping them to reopen safely,” Rodger Macfarlane, Technical Director, Culligan Middle East, told the Gulf Industry in an exclusive interview.

“The relaxing of restrictions, particularly those which have seen tourists return to Dubai, has allowed the company to work closely with its hotel clients to make sure they were ready to reopen for business,” he added.

Macfarlane: sanitiser has been a lifeline for us

Water treatment expert

As the technical director at Culligan Middle East, Macfarlane’s job is to make water safe to drink; safe to make coffee and food brands; safe for use in hospitals, and for all manner of industrial purposes.

“We have made a particularly strong impact in the food service and healthcare sectors. In food service in the Gulf, we provide water treatment solutions and service at 3,000 sites now right across the food sector - everything from coffee shops to restaurants and hotels,” said Macfarlane.

Established in Dubai in 1993, Culligan Middle East, today has offices and partners in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and has grown to be one of the largest and most diverse water treatment companies in the Gulf region, offering a total water management package to industrial sectors.

The business is particularly strong in the UAE for the Middle East arm of the global leader in water treatment Culligan, which has more than 80 years of experience as a provider of industrial water treatment solutions.

“Along with Qatar, we’re also quite heavily involved with food service in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,” Macfarlane said. In healthcare, it is present in many major hospitals, such as the Mediclinic Hospital, Cleveland Clinic and the American Hospital in the UAE, the Central Hospital in Qatar, and many more.

Culligan’s inhouse sanitiser: a successful foray

The company works directly with thousands of consumers and organisations to deliver the full spectrum of water requirements, serving a wide range of industries, including the food and beverage sector, oil and gas, energy and power, healthcare/ hospitals/ bio-pharmaceutical, and the manufacturing sector.

“We provide, and make water safe, for the home, the workplace, restaurants, swimming pools and spas, cruise ships and cooling towers,” Macfarlane said.

Culligan’s water treatment technologies include water filtration, water softening, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, medical and pharmaceutical reverse osmosis, deionization, disinfection, instrumentation and control systems, waste water, chemical treatment and mobile and containerised systems.

Its solutions have improved performance and lowered costs. There are many examples across the industrial sector, where water impacts every part of the value chain. In the beverage industry, water of different qualities is required for cooling water, boilers for steam generation, bottle washing, machine sanitization and water to be part of the product.

“The food sector is traditionally our busiest, and the many restaurants that have Culligan Water on tap save cost and protect the environment. Their customers have great tasting water, pure clear ice, while our systems reduce scale and iron build up, make cleaning easier and use less detergents,” he said.

Food service sector is one of the largest unit of Culligan’s business

Combating Covid-19 impact

Interestingly, to limit the damage caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and help the company quickly recover from it, Culligan embarked on an effective initiative of producing sanitisers.

“At the beginning of the lockdown, we were really struggling to find a sanitiser in the market that we could use for cleaning the office, and for use as a hand sanitizer, Macfarlane said.

The company decided to adapt one of its existing water treatment products in its Dubai laboratory to produce a ready-to-use hand and surface contact sanitizer, which was originally made for use by its own 400-strong workforce in response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

“Because it was so effective, we decided to start selling it, and Culligan Safe Guard 45 H 25 has been in great demand, initially from industry and across business in the UAE,” he added.

Since being introduced into the UAE market, it quickly became the company’s current best-selling product. So much so that the company had to ramp up production of its sanitiser at the Dubai manufacturing plant to meet demand from the Middle East, Africa and other GCC countries amid Covid-19 pandemic.

“We were forced to increase production to meet demand from buyers in Ghana, Somalia, South Africa and Uganda, as well as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,” Macfarlane remarked.

“We literally quadrupled our production output, and at times were working 24/7 almost exclusively to produce this product,” he added.

The secret of the sanitiser’s success is that it has a base of hypochlorous acid, a substance the body’s white blood cells produce naturally to combat infection, making it highly effective and safe, he stated.

Culligan’s manufacturing facility in Dubai was opened in 2014 on a 10,000 sq m site. It’s a purpose-built, integrated manufacturing, sales and service centre, including facilities for equipment fabrication, chemical blending and water bottling. Currently, 75 per cent of its production reaches the UAE and Saudi markets, with the remaining 25 per cent split between Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the rest of the world.

Culligan plans to focus on its core business of water treatment

Core business stays

Macfarlane, however, quickly clarified that water treatment is going to remain its core business. “Of course, water treatment is our main business, but we are going to introduce a range of new sanitisers for different applications,” he announced.

“We’re now building on our existing knowledge and our existing application base for the sanitiser to produce a larger range of sanitisers for food applications, food preparation, and the medical and automotive sectors,” he added.

As an example, Culligan helped the Grand Plaza Movenpick Media City, introduce Safe Guard 45 H 25 as a key part of its new health and safety measures. The sanitiser is used in all public areas and restaurants to keep a safe environment for guests and team members.

“In fact, the sanitiser has helped us build on our working relationship with hotels who depend on us for everything from in-house water production to managing water treatments and other special projects,” Macfarlane said.

“It’s a similar situation in the healthcare industry, as hospitals who rely on us for water solutions have also become sanitiser customers,” he added.

Culligan is currently developing new technology for use in pre-treatment of water in the food service and commercial drinking water markets. “It will have the same results that you get when using a water softener within the water heaters, but without the sodium that water softeners contain,” Macfarlane revealed.

“We’re also introducing some interesting new chemistry for high pressure boiler systems which is being adopted by Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority,” Macfarlane said.

“It replaces traditional technologies and traditional treatment chemistries, and provides a far improved performance at a lower cost,” he added.

One of its biggest new business successes has come with Expo 2020 Dubai project where it has secured 19 separate water treatment projects across the site. These include the UAE Pavilion, as well as pavilions for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia and Morocco, the Sustainability Pavilion and the Expo Metro stations.

The scope of work ranges from grey water recycling for WC flushing to treated sewage effluent (TSE) recycling for cooling tower makeup, filtration and softening, chlorine dosing, copper silver ionization for domestic water, chilled water, condenser water, side stream filtration and chemical treatment for TSE to be directly used as cooling tower make up.

The company works with leading companies across the region to deliver a huge range of industrial water treatment solutions, as well as solutions for top brands in food service and dining, hotels and resorts, hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

Optimistic outlook

Nevertheless, the company is positive about its future prospects. “We believe that business will return in 2021, particularly in the UAE where travel and tourism is bouncing back because that is the stated aim of the government,” Macfarlane said.

“We see a similar situation in Qatar, and we feel Bahrain, to a certain extent, will follow what’s going on in the UAE. In Kuwait, we see business being quiet for the foreseeable future because there is no major tourism industry. Saudi Arabia is coming back towards earlier levels, although that is more to do with an increase in the oil price and other factors, Macfarlane said.

“We already have offices and partnerships in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and at this stage a lot of our expansion is focused on increasing our penetration into those markets rather than geographical growth.

“But we are also looking to expand our chemicals business around the world and are actively looking for agents and dealers to help us to do that,” he added.

At its Dubai manufacturing facility, Culligan produces an extensive range of chemical products and delivers hygiene services for municipalities across the region, for cruise ships and the marine industry, for swimming pools and spas.