The Invisible Threat in Every Bite

There’s a quiet kind of trust we all live with.

You grab a sandwich from the deli, toss lettuce into your salad, sip a smoothie with frozen berries—and somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s faith. Faith that the food producers, testers, transporters, and retailers did everything right.

But behind that trust is a massive, unspoken problem.

Every year, contaminated food sickens 48 million Americans. It touches you, your friends, and you see it in the headlines. And what’s worse—it’s not that we can’t detect the allergens, the bacteria, the pathogens, the invisible culprits. We can. It’s just that our systems for doing so are... slow. Cumbersome. Expensive. Outdated in the way landlines are outdated: still functioning, but clunky and far away.

That’s where Nathan Newman enters the story.

At the helm of Paramagnetix (Santa Cruz), Nathan leads a small but relentless team that built the PX2, a portable biosensor so reliable and sensitive it’s rewriting the rules of detection. The device is fast, compact, and designed not for labs in white-tiled rooms but for the real world: food processors, distributors, even restaurant chains that can’t afford to wait three days for results. Designed for businesses and consumers alike, tests can be performed on-site-  anywhere, anytime.

“When we started, people told us it couldn’t be done,” Nathan says. “They said the sensitive instruments were too big, the costs too high. But what we’ve built is compact, affordable, reliable, and extremely accurate.”

Here’s the thing: food safety isn’t glamorous. It’s not AI or rocket ships. It’s not something you brag about at a cocktail party. But it’s essential. It’s what keeps our kids safe, our supply chains running, our grocery stores and restaurants open. And for the first time in decades, there’s a technology that makes this invisible layer of safety... visible.

PX2 isn’t just a product—it’s a timing play. The food industry is under pressure like never before: from regulators, from consumers, from their own conscience. Speed and accuracy are no longer luxuries; they’re survival.

Paramagnetix sees the opportunity clearly: food safety today, expansion tomorrow. Once PX2 proves itself in the field, its magnetic resonance detection technology could apply across industries—to personal medicine, detecting cancer and debilitating diseases at its earliest stages- to detecting environmental dangers in your home and workplace.

Standing in the Paramagnetix lab, surrounded by stainless steel, sensors, and the faint hum of prototypes, you feel it: the hinge moment. The point where the old world gives way to the new.

And it’s oddly poetic—how something as tiny as a microbe can change the course of a company, a career, even an industry.

“Every breakthrough looks impossible until someone does it,” Nathan says, almost offhand, like he’s repeating a lesson learned a long time ago.

He smiles, and you get the sense he’s not just talking about food safety.