Ever since she was a little girl, Anna Davidson dreamt of cooking for a living, taking the skills she learned in her mom’s Arkansas kitchen and sharing it with the world. So, when she opened Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, IL, she was thrilled to have an immediate and lasting impact in the community: people clamoring for her baked goods, tons of rave reviews, a thriving catering business, and scores of people queuing up to sit in the café. Then the pandemic hit, and with it, uncertainty from a once-adoring public about the COVID-19 virus and communal gatherings.
With people concerned about airborne germs and viruses in sit-down establishments, Anna decided to meet the challenge of ensuring the safest possible dining experience head-on. “Once the pandemic happened, the way we connected with people had to become more creative,” she said. And the source of that creativity? Installing Fellowes commercial-grade air purifiers.
Anna worked with Fellowes air purification experts to determine the best products and placement at the market’s two locations. To provide the most effective air purification for the large spaces, the team opted for installation of Fellowes AeraMax Pro AM4 units, which provide 3 to 5 air changes per hour (ACH) in spaces up to 1100 square feet.
ACH is a measure of air volume that can be added/removed from a space in a given hour. The more changes per hour, the more quickly the air is purified, and the more quickly contaminants are removed. A machine created for the home may only change the air 1x per hour, which isn’t enough for places like restaurants where multiple people are congregating. In general, an ACH of 5 means your air is being cleaned every 12 minutes. Shared spaces like restaurants want to achieve 3-5 air changes per hour.
Not only do the Fellowes AeraMax Pro AM4 units installed at the two Blackberry Market locations provide the needed ACH, but they also feature an H13 True HEPA filter that captures at least 99.95% of particles as small as 0.1 microns, including allergens, dust, pet dander, and smoke. Anna and her customers and staff have added peace-of-mind because the air purifiers also feature PureView™ Technology, a proprietary and patented display that shows real time status updates as the air is cleaned – making the invisible visible.
What’s more, the installation of the Fellowes air purifiers allayed fears of airborne COVID-19. Fellowes AeraMax Pro AM4 air purifiers demonstrated, through independent laboratory testing, to be effective in eliminating aerosolized concentration of SARS-CoV-2 by 99.9999% through a single air pass test of the purifier. In addition, AeraMax Pro air purifiers reached 99.99% airborne reduction of a surrogate Human Coronavirus 229E in a 20m3 test chamber within 1 hour of operation in a separate test.
“The most important thing for customers right now is feeling comforted and safe. The air purifiers are a huge part of that,” Anna said. “There’s always been an issue of pathogens, different germs in a shared space, so the idea of adding air purifiers for the long term so customers could feel safe about being in the space was really important to us. It’s also important to me that we have a safe place for our employees to work. [Fellowes] air purifiers are making it a safer place to work.”