Chemical Processing: Serving Chemical Engineers Since 1938
Chemical Processing is one of the longest-lived trade publications in American industry, a magazine and website for the professionals who design, operate, maintain and retrofit chemical plants. Published from Nashville, Tennessee, by Endeavor Business Media — today branded EndeavorB2B — and found at chemicalprocessing.com, it serves the fine, specialty and commodity chemical, petrochemical and pharmaceutical plant sectors. Its mission, stated by the publisher, is practical: to give readers information that helps them do their jobs more effectively, run their plants more safely and efficiently, and stay alert to trends and developments that may affect them. Few industrial titles can claim an unbroken conversation with their industry stretching back to 1938.
1938: Equipment Preview and the Founding of Putman
The magazine began in September 1938 as Equipment Preview for Process Industries Production Men, the first magazine of the Putman Publishing Company. Its founder, Russell L. Putman, was a veteran of more than nineteen years in industrial publishing who launched the title in the shadow of the Great Depression, in the same month Europe moved closer to war with the Munich agreement over the Sudetenland. The first issue ran sixteen pages with a print run of 18,700 copies. Its product coverage — small self-contained cooling towers from the Marley Company, catalyst carriers from the Carborundum Company — shows a young process industry buying American-made hardware, with instrumentation and control still rudimentary. That equipment-preview format, practical and product-centred, set the template the magazine still follows.
Four Renamings to Chemical Processing
The title evolved with its industry. It became Chemical Equipment Preview with the January/February 1941 issue, shortened to Chemical Preview in May/June 1943, then Chemical Processing Preview in May 1947, and finally Chemical Processing in January 1950 — the name it has carried ever since. Each change widened the remit: from previewing equipment, to previewing the chemical field, to covering processing as a whole discipline of operations, maintenance, safety and management. That the name settled in 1950 and never changed again, through decades of media-industry consolidation, made Chemical Processing one of the most recognisable brands in process-industry publishing.
The Putman Media Decades
For most of its life the magazine was the flagship of a family business. Putman Media, founded on Chemical Processing's 1938 launch, grew into a publisher of nine business-to-business trade magazines for manufacturing communities, including Control, Control Design, Food Processing, Pharma Manufacturing, Plant Services, Smart Industry and The Journal. After Russell Putman's death in 1973, John Cappelletti and about fifteen other employees purchased the company, and the Cappelletti family continued to control it for decades. Editors marking the magazine's seventieth anniversary in 2008 noted that continued Putman ownership was an increasingly rare situation in a turbulent media business. The house style Putman prized — experienced editors, problem-solving content and an emphasis on practical usefulness — shaped Chemical Processing's voice: plant-floor credible, vendor-aware and focused on what works.
Seventy and Eighty Years On
The magazine has marked its own milestones as industry history. Its seventieth-anniversary reflections compared the 1938 product pages with modern plants: the same basic unit operations, transformed by instrumentation, control and global supply chains, and an editorial scope widened from equipment to trends such as cyber-security, which earned a cover story in 2008. Its eightieth anniversary in September 2018 reproduced the founding issue and traced how vendors had merged, renamed or vanished while the underlying technologies endured. Those retrospectives underline Chemical Processing's archival value: because it never stopped publishing, its back pages form a near-continuous record of American chemical manufacturing from the Depression to the digital plant.
The 2022 Sale to Endeavor Business Media
The family era ended in May 2022, when Endeavor Business Media acquired Putman Media. Endeavor, founded in Nashville in December 2017 by Chris Ferrell and headquartered there, had grown rapidly by acquiring business-media brands. The Putman purchase brought Chemical Processing, Control, Control Design, Food Processing, Pharma Manufacturing, Plant Services, Smart Industry and The Journal into Endeavor's Manufacturing, Processing and Design and Engineering groups, joining titles such as IndustryWeek. Endeavor said the Putman brands collectively reached more than two million processing professionals a year in print and online — the world's largest audience of engineers, processors and maintenance, reliability and automation professionals in its markets. Putman chief executive John Cappelletti framed the sale as an opportunity to grow the brands with Endeavor's resources, and Endeavor committed to carrying forward brands Putman had served for more than eighty years. The parent company rebranded as EndeavorB2B in 2025, with Chemical Processing now described as part of Endeavor Business Media, a division of EndeavorB2B.
Who Reads It and What It Covers
Chemical Processing addresses the full plant team: process and design engineers, operations and maintenance staff, and the managers who retrofit and run existing plants across fine and specialty chemicals, commodity chemicals, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Its coverage spans every major plant category the publisher lists — automation, processing equipment, asset management, environmental protection, safety and security, and utilities and energy. In practice that means articles on reliability and maintenance barriers, asset-management economics, energy efficiency, and the fundamentals editors periodically restate — as in its widely read reminders that remote monitoring and sound maintenance basics still decide plant performance. Industry news, mergers and acquisitions and supply-chain developments are covered for their plant-level consequences, delivered through the website and e-newsletters as well as the magazine.
The Digital Operation and Podcasts
The modern Chemical Processing is a digital brand with a print heritage. Its About page reports that more than 22,000 chemical industry professionals turn to chemicalprocessing.com each month for industry information, news, product development, safety best practices and processing technologies and equipment. Two podcasts extend the editorial voice: Process Safety with Trish and Traci, in which Trish Kerin of Lead Like Kerin and editor Traci Purdum discuss current process-safety issues, mitigation options and next steps; and Chemical Processing Distilled, a growing library of short episodes extracting essential guidance for engineers who operate and design plants. The news operation is self-aware about its place in the cycle — when the Endeavor sale was announced, the title reported the news of its own acquisition for its readers, quoting both publishers.
Safety, Reliability and the Practical Tradition
If one thread defines the magazine, it is the insistence that sophisticated plants still succeed or fail on operational discipline. Its reliability coverage has examined, for example, how a major Honeywell performance-materials group cut maintenance costs by 16 percent and raised overall equipment effectiveness from 70 to 82 percent through a maintenance-excellence programme — translating into more than a billion dollars of additional operating income over the period — and has argued that predictive maintenance and analytics deliver only when aimed at the most business-critical equipment. Process safety is treated as a standing beat rather than an occasional special, reinforced by the dedicated podcast. Environmental protection and energy management complete a coverage triangle — safe, reliable, efficient — that matches the stated mission of helping plants operate more safely and efficiently.
Standing in Process-Industry Media
Chemical Processing's authority rests on continuity. It has published under its current name since 1950, under its founding family company from 1938 to 2022, and now under one of America's largest business-media groups, EndeavorB2B of Nashville. Its audience of plant professionals is smaller than a mass business readership but unusually influential: readers who specify equipment, set maintenance strategy and answer for plant safety. For researchers, the title doubles as a primary source on twentieth and twenty-first century chemical manufacturing; for practitioners, it remains a working tool. Nearly nine decades after Russell Putman mailed a sixteen-page equipment preview to 18,700 readers, Chemical Processing still does the job it was founded to do — putting practical, plant-tested information in front of the people who keep the chemical industry running.
