In Honor of Our Founders

A Legacy of Innovation, Integrity, and Generosity of Spirit

Thomas E. Baroody · W. Wes Berry

K-Technologies, Inc. was built on a foundation of intellectual courage and a shared belief that better chemistry could make the world work more efficiently, more cleanly, and more sustainably. That foundation was laid — and tended for decades — by two remarkable engineers and visionaries: Thomas E. Baroody and W. Wes Berry. Both men have passed from us in recent months — Tom in November 2025 and Wes in March 2026 — and we honor them here not only as co-founders, but as mentors, colleagues, and friends whose influence will shape this company for generations to come.

Together, they brought more than 75 years of combined experience to the minerals, chemicals, and biofuels industries. More importantly, they brought a rare combination of scientific depth, entrepreneurial drive, and a profound commitment to sharing what they knew with the people around them.

Thomas E. Baroody

Co-Founder, President & CEO · 1942 – November 2025

Management Team: Tom Baroody Tom Baroody was the guiding force behind K-Technologies from its earliest days — a man who understood both the science and the strategy required to turn a great idea into a great company. Before co-founding K-Tech, he held vice-presidential roles at two major fertilizer and chemical firms, AMAX Chemical Corporation and Mulberry Corporation, and earlier in his career worked through a series of management positions in the iron ore and related industries for AMAX Inc. In 1987, he founded TEBCO Associates LLC, a consulting firm dedicated to the fertilizer, chemicals, and minerals and metals sectors — a platform that ultimately became the springboard for what would become K-Tech.

Over the course of a distinguished career, Tom authored numerous technical papers and earned nine U.S. patents, each reflecting his lifelong dedication to innovation and precision. He held a BCE degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a MSCE from the University of Missouri at Columbia. His technical credentials were matched by his business acumen: Tom had an uncommon ability to see the commercial potential in a complex separation process, to articulate it clearly to partners and investors, and to build the relationships necessary to bring it to reality.

Tom’s commitment extended well beyond the laboratory and the boardroom. He was an active and respected member of his community and was honored with the Kiwanis Club’s highest service award, a recognition that speaks to the same qualities he brought to every professional relationship: integrity, generosity, and a genuine care for the people around him. His presence in a room commanded respect, but his warmth made people feel they belonged there.

In his final years, Tom remained deeply engaged with K-Tech’s mission and its people. He was intentional about passing on not just technical knowledge but a way of thinking about problems — rigorously, imaginatively, and with an eye always on what the technology could ultimately do for the world. His vision for clean, efficient resource recovery was ahead of its time when he began, and it is increasingly central to how the global chemicals and minerals industries are evolving today.

W. Wes Berry

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer · March 2026

Management Team: Wes Berry If Tom Baroody was the compass that kept K-Tech pointed toward its purpose, Wes Berry was the engine. One of the most inventive and deeply knowledgeable chemical engineers of his generation, Wes accumulated more than 40 U.S. and foreign patents across a career spanning more than four decades. His foundational work in continuous ion exchange (CIX), continuous ion chromatography (CIC), and impregnated substrate processes has genuinely shaped how the minerals and chemicals industries approach the recovery and purification of strategic materials — from uranium and rare earths to cadmium removal and fluoride recovery.

Before co-founding K-Tech, Wes held senior roles at Borden Chemical, International Minerals & Chemicals, Stearns-Rodgers Engineering, and Advanced Separations Technologies. He earned both his BSChE and MSChE from the University of South Florida and was a proud member of AIChE, the American Chemical Society, the American Oil Chemists Association, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi. Since 1989, he also led his own consulting practice, W.W. Berry and Associates LLC, through which he continued to advance the science he loved.

What made Wes’s work at K-Tech so consequential was not just its technical depth but its relevance to some of the most pressing resource challenges of our time. The ability to extract rare earth elements from phosphoric acid streams, to remove heavy metals and contaminants from industrial processes, to recover fluorine and silica from waste streams — these are not merely elegant separations chemistry. They are precisely the kinds of technologies the world needs as it works to secure critical material supply chains, reduce industrial waste, and build the infrastructure for a sustainable future.

Perhaps most remarkable was Wes’s commitment in his final years to ensuring that everything he and Tom built would endure. He was deliberate and generous in passing his knowledge, his standards, and his vision to the next generation of K-Tech leaders. His standards were high — exacting, even — but they were offered with patience and with genuine investment in the people he was teaching. He believed in K-Tech’s mission to his last day, and that belief has become part of the fabric of this company.

A Legacy That Lives Forward

The most meaningful measure of what Tom Baroody and Wes Berry built is not found in patent counts or technical papers, though both are impressive by any standard. It is found in the team they shaped. The people who work at K-Technologies today carry the imprint of two men who believed that excellence was not a standard to be imposed from above but a habit to be cultivated through example — through patient explanation, honest feedback, and a willingness to show their work.

Jamie Knez, K-Tech’s Vice President and Senior Process Engineering Manager, is a direct expression of that legacy. A licensed Professional Engineer with 20 years of experience in process engineering and project management, Jamie collaborated closely with Wes in her years at K-Tech, absorbing not only his technical methodologies but his fundamental approach to problems: rigorous, creative, and deeply committed to results that stand up in the real world. Her work developing CIX and CIC technologies for rare earth element recovery, impurity removal, and resource optimization carries forward exactly the mission Tom and Wes set in motion.

Theodore P. (Tip) Fowler, K-Tech’s CEO, brings decades of executive leadership across mining, fertilizer, chemicals, and transportation to the task of advancing that mission. Having led organizations through transformation at Freeport McMoRan, Fertiberia, Agrico Chemical, and as founding CEO of JDCPhosphate — where he helped commercialize breakthrough phosphate technology and earned the Pierre Becker Memorial Award from the International Fertilizer Association — Tip is well suited to steward the company Tom and Wes built into its next chapter.

K-Technologies recently established a Technical Advisory Panel of esteemed industry experts — itself a reflection of the founders’ conviction that institutional strength is built through knowledge-sharing and high standards, not guarded expertise. It is the kind of forward-looking investment in continuity that Tom and Wes would have championed.

Tom Baroody and Wes Berry devoted their careers to technologies that recover valuable things — from streams that might otherwise carry them away, from ore bodies and waste products and industrial processes that most people overlook. It is a fitting metaphor for what they did for the people around them as well: they looked for potential, drew it out patiently, and sent it forward into the world.

We are grateful for their leadership, their generosity, and their unwavering belief in what this company can contribute. K-Technologies continues forward — guided by their standards, inspired by their vision, and committed to honoring their memory through the quality of our work.

Theodore P. (Tip) Fowler
Chief Executive Officer
K-Technologies, Inc.
April 2026