“My favorite thing about my job is the freedom that working in Research & Development (R&D) gives me to be creative and research things. Certainly, it has to be disciplined, but it doesn’t mean I have a script for every day,” says Peter Allred, Ultradent’s Technology Director over Formulations. Thanks to that culture of creativity and the freedom Ultradent gives its R&D team to try new things, the size and product offering of Ultradent has grown vastly since Peter first arrived. “When I started at Ultradent, I think we had 75–80 people who worked here. Now we have over a thousand! We made Opalescence® once a week—now we make four or five batches a day. Usually we’d make one or two other things, like Ultra-Etch, once a week too. We were a very small operation. There were only 10 people filling syringes and now we have automated machines to do that.” He continues, “We would go to Dr. Fischer’s house once a week or so to fill up two containers of glycerin, which is, aside from water, the most used ingredient in any of our products—and now we receive that in tanker trucks 500 gallons at a time, at several shipments a week. The scales have changed dramatically!”
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