Working in Clark County: Dana Lukens, director of Global Logistics at Emerald Kalama Chemical

Have you ever looked at the back of a bottle of soda and wondered what on earth the long, hard-to-spell-or-pronounce words listed in the ingredients were?

Maybe you’ve seen the term “benzoic acid” (OK, not that difficult) when assessing how many calories you were about to ingest in that can of Dr Pepper. Turns out, Vancouver has a little claim to fame when it comes to benzoic acid: the city is the headquarters for the largest global producer of the chemical, which helps keep food from spoiling.

The chemicals used in products including carbonated soft drinks, packaged foods, fine fragrances, paint and tires are manufactured by Emerald Kalama Chemical, which has headquarters on the third floor of a large office space at 1499 S.E. Tech Center Place in the Bennington neighborhood. The manufacturing facility is in Kalama, about 40 minutes north along the Columbia River.

The company also has production facilities in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Henry, Ill. The modern, newly designed office space at Tech Center Place was opened in December 2015 after business operations outgrew the space in Kalama.

While the company has 500 employees globally, 146 are in Kalama and 64 are in Vancouver.

“Our benzoates have been used to preserve foods and beverages for many, many years because they are recognized as safe, nature-identical ingredients,” said Jenna Blankenship, a spokeswoman for Emerald Performance Materials, the parent company of Emerald Kalama Chemical. The business also has another division, CVC Thermoset Specialties. Emerald Kalama Chemical has been a supplier for more than 60 years under various names. It was originally built by Dow Chemical and later sold and made into an independent company. It started producing its “key products,” such as benzoic acid, in 1972.

Clients of Emerald Kalama Chemical are all over the world; the business ships to more than 75 countries. To manage such a complex operation, which includes transporting chemicals across international borders, the business has a number of focused executives who oversee from start to finish the manufacture and delivery of these “raw materials.” The Columbian caught up with Dana Lukens, director of Global Logistics at Emerald Kalama Chemical, to get insight to her complex job, which focuses on transportation, warehousing and global trade compliance.

Originally from Central Pennsylvania’s Amish country in Lancaster County, Pa., the Bucknell University graduate now lives in Portland’s South Waterfront neighborhood. Before working in chemical manufacturing, she served about six years in the military, stationed at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

Lukens later worked at the National Security Agency Hawaii and earned a master’s degree from Hawaii Pacific University. She then worked at a chemical and plastics distributor in Houston, where she didn’t like the weather. She’s now enjoying the Pacific Northwest.

In her spare time, she tries to reach out to young women in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“There are not enough women in operations, but supply chain especially. I’ve had one manager who was a female my whole career, which is just wrong. That’s not enough,” she said.

What exactly does this company do?

We’re a specialty chemical company and we have multiple end products that go into consumer and industrial products, things like Dr Pepper, Coke, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, we’re in laundry detergents, we make a cinnamon smelling product. We have a plasticizer business in sealants and adhesives and tiles and paint. We’re all over the place; we’re everywhere.

What would you say your strategies have been in developing effective global logistics for Emerald Kalama Chemical?

The global supply chain as a corporate function is fairly new to the organization, so we’re about 2 years old as a central function. It’s kind of the umbrella that I sit under.

My role was not a back-filled role; it was a new role for the organization, so it’s kind of just figuring out, OK, how do we streamline our processes? How do we get a standardization approach to all of the different sites? Really we’re focusing on day-to-day execution.

The transportation market is always challenging, especially the last year has been really challenging. We work with hazardous chemicals, so that makes it difficult. There’s more complexity in what we move and who we can use. We have specific requirements around handling and that kind of thing, so it’s really just a lot about partner management.

Who are we using as suppliers and carriers and making sure they can deliver what we need — there’s so much safety and compliance around storing chemicals and that kind of thing. It definitely adds complexity to the logistics function as a whole, being in this industry. The learning curve is pretty steep.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the supply chain process? What does that look like?

We have one main raw material that comes into a process. It’s toluene oxidation. So it’s a chemical process. We have drums of material, we have big totes of material, we have bulk tanks of material. We have liquid materials and we also have powders. So logistics scope is, “OK this finished good is ready to go, where do we put it that’s the best strategy around getting it to our customers?”

We have warehouses that we work with third-party logistics providers. There’s working on how do we best secure a load to make sure that there’s no damage when our customer receives it? Making sure that we have the right labels in the right languages. We’re in food and pharmaceutical material, so we’re making sure that we’ve got the right labeling and the right verbiage and the right language to make sure that we’re going to be able to get it across an international border.

With chemicals it’s even more difficult to make sure that we’re compliant and following all the rules for global trade, which change all the time.

Have you ever experienced a hang-up in that process and how did you solve that?

On a daily basis, there are issues with things like that. There are various reasons that something could get held up, or maybe it’s just a random inspection of a material. So any one of those and many more could happen when you’re crossing a border. It’s just working with your suppliers and working with your customers.

We have a global trade compliance manager who’s really an expert in global trade. Really it’s just who do you know and seeing who you can reach out to? Do you know someone in Brazil? We also have a strong legal team who can also help if there’s a bigger issue.

The thing that’s awesome about logistics is that every day is different. You’re never bored, you’re never doing the same thing.