LuminaBusiness case
What you would be buying, in your categories.
Written for the controller the quality lead forwards this to. What is known, what is not, and the model you fill in yourself.
The honest category
Most plants approve this as a compliance decision, not a payback project.
We have not measured a return at a customer yet, so we do not publish one. If you need it to pass a payback test, two things would have to move: overtime your plant actually stops paying, and product you do not have to destroy. We measure both with you, on your own records, before anyone asks you to convert.
To file it as compliance, a controller needs a dated audit finding, a customer requirement or an FSIS record behind it. We will not tell you your spend is compliance; we will tell you what you would need to file it that way.
Where the cost lands
- 01 Cash this year
Compliance labor Labor and fees
The one line booked under food safety's own name: the QA department, lab, audit and consultant fees. Counts when a position, overtime line or engagement actually falls.
- 02 Cash this year
Sanitation spend and re-cleans Operating cost
Labor is roughly half of a sanitation budget; chemicals about six percent (Marriott via Meat+Poultry, 2022). Re-clean and late-start minutes are where downtime becomes cash, as overtime.
- 03 Balance sheet
Product on hold Working capital
Inventory at cost until disposition. The hold itself carries a financing cost; the cash is the write-off if the lot is destroyed.
- 04 Cash only as overtime or lost sales
Line downtime Variance
No journal entry. It shows up as labor-efficiency and overhead-volume variance, and as cash only when pounds are never made or are made up on overtime.
- 05 Words only
Product shipped at risk Corporate contingency
Never on the plant P&L. Corporate accrues when a recall is probable and estimable; the plant sees write-offs and shutdown.
- 06 Words only
Audit exposure Revenue deduction
Retailer fines and chargebacks are deductions from revenue at the segment. Prep hours are avoidance, shown not counted. Lost business is words.
What you would be buying
One license per facility.
No per‑seat fees, and the price in writing before the pilot.
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License
An annual facility license for the platform, with the first sensor unit included when Detect ships, plus a one-time hardware installation fee on purchase (mount, unit and cabling), stated with the annual price before the pilot starts; software onboarding included; nothing charged during a trial. The subscription is billed annually. Usually classified as a service contract and expensed. The installation fee is a one-time charge for equipment Lumina owns; expect it to be expensed or spread over the term. Your controller makes the call.
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Sensor units
Supplied and installed by Lumina, mount included, under the license when Detect ships; Lumina keeps title, so there is no capital request. We write the order form so an embedded-lease test takes one reading: the included unit's value shown separately from the software, a twelve-month hardware term with explicit renewal, service and substitution terms stated.
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Unit of sale
The facility: one establishment, one site. A two-building site is agreed in writing before the order form.
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Additional units
A fixed annual price each, with the count fixed in the order form and changed only by dated amendment. Never per seat, per alert, per swab or per pound. A fee that grows with alerts is a fee on your own vigilance.
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Term and escalator
Twelve months, renewing. No multi-year commitment required. The escalator is capped in writing.
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Exit
Your data exported in a standard format at no charge, a stated retention period, and any unit removed with the mount site restored to hygienic condition at Lumina's cost.
The number is not on this page. You get one written annual figure in the first conversation, with everything that changes it listed, and the year-one price and escalator cap in writing before any pilot starts.
The full cost
What the plant pays that the invoice does not show.
Lumina supplies and installs everything, mount included, and charges nothing for a trial. What the plant pays beyond the invoice is its own time. Listed here so your controller does not find it after signature; no dollar figures, because each one is yours.
- Power and a network drop to the line, run by your own approved electrician. Lumina pays for the run during a trial; on a sale it is covered by the hardware installation fee.
- IT and OT security review hours
- Installation during a sanitation window or a scheduled stop
- Management of change and hygienic-design sign-off; sanitation and pre-op sheet updates
- Training on every shift, and again at turnover
- Time to respond to alerts
- The pilot runs alongside your existing swab plan, so it usually asks for no extra swabs. Where extra testing is needed, we run it at no cost to you.
Available on request, before you sign: security questionnaire, data processing agreement with subprocessors, data-flow diagram, insurance certificate, and a plain statement of what the sensor is and is not, including that its field false-positive rate is unknown and every flag you verify costs a swab. During a pilot, Lumina runs that testing at no cost to you.
How a pilot runs
What goes in writing before anything goes on the line.
- 01
A one-page measurement plan, signed by your controller
Which lines: re-clean and late-start minutes, overtime by department, QA hours on records and investigations, hold days and pounds, corrective-action closure days. A baseline from your own logs, not ours. A control line or shift. Lumina produces the report; the plant witnesses and approves.
- 02
Nothing changes in the food safety program
Sampling plan, verification testing and release stay as they are. A sensor is paired with existing testing and is never a release criterion.
- 03
A fixed measurement window
Monthly reports, ending in a one-page conversion memo in the controller's columns, including a list of what was not measured.
- 04
No automatic conversion
The post-pilot price, the hardware installation fee and the escalator cap are in writing before the pilot starts. Converting is your decision on the measured result.
- 05
No fee during the pilot
Lumina supplies and installs everything for a trial at no charge. Extra testing a flag prompts, where it is needed at all, is run at no cost to you. Anything else is stated in writing before the pilot.
- 06
Exit
Your data returned; any unit removed and the mount site restored at Lumina's cost.
What we measure with you: late-start minutes by cause, pounds held, days to disposition, re-cleans per week.
In the budget meeting
Three sentences that survive a controller's next question.
This is a fixed annual line in next year's QA budget, filed as compliance against a dated finding or customer requirement, and it changes nothing about our sampling plan or how we release product.
We pay nothing until you have signed the measurement plan: our own logs are the baseline, you witness the numbers, and converting is a decision we make on the result.
The only savings I am counting are overtime we stop paying and product we do not destroy. The hours, the audit prep and the recall risk I am showing you, not counting.
Size the problem, not the product
A worked example, with the Lumina column left blank on purpose.
This sizes the cost of the problem in a plant's own numbers. It does not compute a return, because there is no measured reduction to compute with. The quantities below are placeholders for one illustrative ready-to-eat line, not averages: one re-clean a week, fifteen minutes lost, two holds of 100,000 lb for three days, two positives, five hours a week on records.
Your numbers stay in your browser. Nothing you type here is sent to Lumina or saved.
Rates 4 inputs
Payroll: base wage plus payroll tax and benefits
BLS OEWS May 2025 mean wage, meat cutters and trimmers $18.89/hr and slaughterers and meat packers $20.08/hr, x 1.3 for payroll tax and benefits (NMPAN small-plant business plan) = $24.56 to $26.10; rounded
Payroll: QA technician or supervisor, loaded
Illustrative placeholder for salaried QA; no public QA technician wage was used. Use yours
Your overtime policy
Federal time-and-a-half (FLSA, 29 U.S.C. 207). Applied to the loaded rate it slightly overstates, since not every benefit scales with overtime
Corporate finance: your hurdle rate or WACC
Illustrative placeholder. Food-processing sector cost of capital is 5.79% (Damodaran, January 2026); use your own rate
1. Re-cleans and late starts 10 inputs
Sanitation log; pre-op inspection sheets
Illustrative placeholder
Sanitation log; crew schedule
Illustrative placeholder
Sanitation log
Illustrative placeholder
Timekeeping, sanitation department
Illustrative placeholder
Downtime log by cause code; start-time log
Illustrative placeholder
Line staffing
Illustrative placeholder
Production schedule; timekeeping
Illustrative placeholder
Production reports; standard run rate
Illustrative placeholder: about 80,000 lb a day on two shifts
Sales and planning: is this line capacity-constrained?
Illustrative: not sold out, so lost minutes are made up rather than lost. Set to 1 only if every pound you do not make is a sale you lose
Standard cost card; product P&L
Left blank: no public source gives a plant's contribution margin per pound. Enter yours
2. Holds 6 inputs
Hold log
Illustrative placeholder
Hold log; hold tags
Illustrative placeholder
Hold log
Illustrative placeholder; use your own hold rules
Standard cost card; inventory valuation
Hormel FY2025 Retail net sales per pound ($7,455.2M on 2,873.7M lb, 10-K). That is sales value; your book cost per pound is lower, so this overstates. Use your standard cost
Write-off approvals; destruction certificates; discount sales
Illustrative: nothing destroyed this year. One destroyed 100,000 lb lot at $2.59/lb would be $259,000
Write-off approvals; disposal invoices
Illustrative: book cost as above, no disposal fee
3. Positives and investigations 2 inputs
Environmental monitoring log; corrective-action records
Illustrative placeholder
Lab invoices; corrective-action records
At least about $1,600 of investigative testing per event in a small plant (Kalish, Food Safety Magazine, 2020). Add your own labor
4. Records and paperwork time 2 inputs
A time log, or the QA manager's estimate
Illustrative placeholder
Your controller decides
Illustrative: hours freed stay on payroll. The honest year-one default
5. Outside fees and audit preparation 3 inputs
Accounts payable
Left blank: enter yours. One account told us it pays about $50,000 a year for an annual document review; that is one account, not an average
Audit calendar
Illustrative placeholder
Time records; QA calendar
Illustrative placeholder: three people for three days
A Cash, this year
A budget line falls and its owner re-budgets it: overtime, outside fees, lost sales on a sold-out line.
- Sanitation overtime on re-cleansRe-cleans x 52 x crew x hours x overtime share x rate x multiplier When overtime hours fall on payroll
- Production overtime to make up lost minutesLost hours x 52 x crew x share made up x rate x multiplier When overtime hours fall on payroll
- Lost contribution on pounds never madeLost hours x 52 x lb/hr x share not made up x sold out x margin Only if the line is sold out; otherwise zero
- Records overtime, or a position removedHours x 52 x QA rate x share removed When the overtime or the position comes off payroll
- Outside consultantAs entered Only when the engagement is cancelled
B Balance sheet
Working capital or a write-off, traceable to a transaction: product on hold, product destroyed or discounted.
- Carrying cost of held productHolds x lb x cost/lb x days / 365 x cost of capital Financing cost of inventory sitting on hold
- Write-offs and discounts on held productPounds destroyed or discounted x loss/lb Only with a documented event behind it
Product tied up in one hold, at book cost: working-capital exposure, not a cost. It becomes a cost only if the product is destroyed or discounted.
Counted by a controller if the line falls (A + B)
C Avoidance: shown, not counted
Real time or spend, but a reduction cannot be confirmed on a budget line: hours that stay on payroll, positives that did not happen.
- Production crew paid while waitingLost hours x 52 x crew x rate Shown, not counted: wages are paid either way
- Sanitation straight time on re-cleansRe-clean hours not on overtime x rate Shown, not counted: wages are paid either way
- Investigations of positivesPositives x cost per investigation Shown, not counted: a positive that did not happen cannot be confirmed
- Records time that stays on payrollHours x 52 x QA rate x share kept Shown, not counted: hours freed are not cash
- Audit preparation hoursAudits x hours x QA rate Shown, not counted: hours freed are not cash
D No number
Recall, brand, lost customers. No cell, by design: an avoided loss cannot be booked.
- Recall, brand, lost customers No cell, by design: an avoided loss cannot be booked, and no average recall cost is defensible
- Not a Lumina result. We have no customer measurement yet.
- A saving counts when a budget line falls, not when hours are freed.
- Recall cost has no cell on purpose.
- Nothing here changes your sampling plan, verification testing or release decisions.
Design partners
A partnership, not a purchase.
One line, one shift, counted by your team. What you give, what you get, and the questions we answer in the first call.
What starting looks like, week by week. The terms people ask about: data, exit, price in writing before the pilot.