Startup Series: Clean Crop Technologies
Today's guest is Dan White, Co-Founder & CEO of Clean Crop Technologies.
Clean Crop Technologies provides a solution for solid food supply chains, which currently choose between killing pathogens and maintaining the health of crops. Eliminating this trade-off, Clean Crop's product treats pathogens while leaving the food intact. Utilizing groundbreaking research, the startup reduces molds, toxins, and pests in commercial-scale services for the global grain and nut sectors. In June 2020, Clean Crop Technologies raised $3M in a Seed round led by Prime Impact Fund. Before co-founding Clean Crop Technologies, Dan served as the Technical Director at ACDI/VOCA. Dan began his career in the US horticulture industry and spend the past decade in agri-business development and agro-input markets in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. He has over 16 years of experience in horticulture, nut, and grain value chains as an Agtech Entrepreneur.
In the episode, Dan explains how Clean Crop Technologies was founded, its solution, and the technology they use. Dan outlines their market strategy and how to evaluate potential customers. We also dive into a broader discussion about the current agriculture systems and how they impact our future. Dan is a great guest, and it was exciting to learn more about Clean Crop Technologies.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded July 26, 2021
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason, here I am. The my climate journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the, my climate journey or MCJ as we call it. Membership option membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show. That weren't just looking for education, but there were longing for a peer group as well.
So we set up a slack community for those people. That's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria. We screen for; Determination to tackle the problem of climate change ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent, and we're not wasting our time for trying and a collaborative spirit beyond that.
The more diversity, the better there's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community. A number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done. A bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well.At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website and click to become a member tab at the top. Enjoy. the show. Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to my climate journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Today's guest is Dan white co-founder and CEO of clean crop Technologies. Clean crop technologies is developing high-voltage atmospheric cold plasm technology for reduction of food waste and crop loss across the food space. It's an interesting topic because food waste is such a big source of GHGs, but it's complicated waste comes from different parts of the process from the supply chain to the consumers itself, to the farm.
In this episode, we take a deep dive into the different sources of food waste. The source that clean Crop, specifically is going after the origin story of the company and how they came to be solving the problem that they're solving the intricacies of their approach, some of their progress to date, their long vision what's coming next. And of course, where they need help. If you want to learn more about food waste, this is one that you won't want to miss. Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan White: Thanks for having me.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks for coming. Yeah. I I just saw you the other night at a little founder's dinner. So I feel like we're already caught up, but there's always more questions to ask and we can also help raise awareness for everyone else about what you're doing as well.
Dan White: Yeah, absolutely. Really uh, excited to share with the rest of the MCJ community.
Jason Jacobs: Nice. Well, why don't we jump in what's clean crop technologies.
Dan White: Yes. So clean crop, we're an ag tech startup we're based out in Western, Massachusetts, and at a high level, we have basically, we're bringing cold plasma to industrial scale to help solve a number of the different challenges we have in our food system. So we basically combine electricity with different food grade gases to remove contaminants from food surfaces, extending shelf life, and reducing food safety risk at the same time.
Jason Jacobs: How did this all come to be?
Dan White: Yeah. I grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. That's big agricultural area, big apple growing area. And so as my whole career in agriculture started working for a friend's families orchard back in, in high school and college I really kind of just fell in love with The whole food system at that point and dabbled a little bit in setting up a hard cider operation with them and then wanted to kind of travel the world. So I spent most of my career overseas in emerging markets I spent a lot of time in the middle east and in Sub-Saharan Africa. And about five years ago, met my co-founder partner, Dan Cavanaugh, but at the time was working as a commercial manager for Cargill East Africa. And he and I partnered on and off on a couple of different projects over the years, and looking at finding ways to try.
to Unlock value for export markets for farmers in Africa, and Southern Asia. And you know, when you're working in the supply chain space in agriculture, you're really just kind of playing a really fast game of Tetris between the stuff coming out of farmer fields, which any given year, you might have a supply glut, You might have a shortage some years, you're going to have really bad issues with pests or with different contaminants, particularly in emerging markets that don't have really good supply chain controls. And on the other side, you're trying to kind of match that with ever evolving customer requirements, export market regulations that are constantly changing and kind of fit these two different things together pretty quickly.
And you got a little bit of margin on top and in that process, you just kind of get caught up in. trying to Put out fires day in and day out, but there was one day that he and I were working on, a, a peanut project and we're trying to make the numbers work, but there were, you know, there was really this kind of huge set of supply chain contaminants that were coming through that were just driving a lot of the cost structures on, on this project and Kind of develop this thesis that, you know, right now, as soon as those things hit the supply chain, there's not really a way to deal with these contaminants. You can't really turn back the clock. And once they're there, they're just an embedded cost in the system. They're huge drivers of waste and they're also huge drivers of human health problems.
And so we set out to find a tech that could address these problems. And initially as a hobby, but over the longterm, it became increasingly seriously. We, we looked at a huge range of technologies. We looked at UV light, high pressure pasteurization, but eventually we stumbled on some papers from Dr. Keener.
Who's now our chief science officer who developed this high-voltage atmospheric cold plasma system and started tinkering around with it. And we're really excited by what we saw as its ability to degrade contaminants Without hurting the quality of the food, which coming from that supply chain side is a huge component of any of these solutions and started tinkering with it. And one thing led to another and we were able to bring it to scale at the R&D phase. So...
Jason Jacobs: And if I can kind of pair it back, just to test my understanding of what you're up to, at least what we've covered so far. So essentially when food is shipped during that process, if contaminants are introduced, then as the food goes through the supply chain, there's some percentage of it that ends up spoiling because of these contaminants. And the initial hypothesis was if there was a way to help avert some of this Spoilage from the contaminants that it could have a huge impact both on margins because there'd be less waste, but also on impact because it would take less resource to bring the same food supply to bear. So you were looking at different potential solutions, you uncovered this technology that was in the lab that you thought could apply, and that eventually became the basis for what clean crop technologies does.
Dan White: Yeah. I mean, the food system has a lot of problems as you're well aware. Um, climate change both as a contributor, You know, being responsible for up to 7% of greenhouse gas emissions through various modalities, but also as a direct threat, you know, changing climate is, and the results in the crop failures from, you know, increasing flood incidents and drought and everything that we're seeing in in California, for example, you know, is probably one of to me, the scarier, the scarier outcomes, and it seems like one of the higher, Higher probability drivers of the kinds of systemic collapse that are the sort of worst case scenarios that we hear about is we get to a point where our food system can't. You have three years in a row where your staple crops in a critical mass of the world undergo late frosts or flood conditions in Illinois, combined with wildfires tearing through Bakersfield, you do that enough times? And you start to see pretty structural food shortages around the world. So climate change is obviously a a huge driver here most for us, but it's, it's one of many different problems. You know, there's structural issues with just overutilization. resources, Water shortages as well as just a lot of systemic injustices in the food system.
And what really attracted us to this technology is that it seemed like it had the ability through being able to remove these contaminants from food surfaces in a way that was pretty agnostic of the underlying food substrate That was agnostic of you know, what other use case was. There could really solve a lot of these things at the same time. So by removing those molds from food surfaces, you can enable those foods to last longer from farm gate to the end consumer. Meaning the chances that an end consumer is going to throw that away, go down, keep more food In the supply chain, both so that whatever emissions have been embedded in that food from production through to transportation and into that consumer's refrigerator don't get wasted. So we don't have to duplicate them, but also, and in in, in many ways, much more importantly, you're keeping that organic matter out of landfills Where it converts into methane emissions that, you know, per ton or a much more potent greenhouse gas emissions than even CO2. And so really we see our ability to keep food in the supply chain, keep it from getting wasted, either through getting burned or ending up in landfills as the most direct impact that we can have in the supply chain space on just making sure that every calorie we produce one way or another is making its way to satisfy the growing food security challenge that we have ahead, And keeping down those total emissions needed to get there.
Jason Jacobs: And before we dig too far down the path of the particular path that you're taking to address food waste, maybe. And I don't I don't know if you have these stats off the top of your head, but just kind of frame the problem. So what are the different key drivers of food waste generally?
Dan White: Yeah, it's a really complex problem. There's a number of kind of meta-level analysis that all have slightly different numbers, but in general, the general sort of stylized facts in this space are that you've got around a trillion dollars worth of, of food is wasted at some point between the field and the end consumer every year.
And I think the something close to 800, I might get the specific data just wrong. It's around 800 million tons translate into that trillion dollars. And it's a complex problem. So the key drivers of waste are are different depending on where you are in the world, depending on what crops you're dealing with. So for example, in the developed world and Europe and east Asia and us more waste occurs, the further you get from the farm gate to the end consumer. And a lot of it is fresh fruits and vegetables. So I think something close to 40% of fruits and vegetables in the U.S end up getting thrown away. And the majority of that is at the consumer level. Whereas when you go to emerging markets where supply chains aren't as mature, but aggregate consumer behavior is much more attuned to making every calorie. count. By the time it gets to the end consumer, there's very little waste, but where we have a lot of waste is between the farm in the farm and then the supply chain on its way, because you'll have failures in cold storage, you'll have other contamination problems that occur because there's less controls on the food safety side.
And so at a high level though, there's this aggregate waste that is massive and is anywhere from 10 to 40% of any given product, anywhere in the world is lost before it actually reaches anyone's mouth.
Jason Jacobs: And what is it that led you to focus on the contaminants piece specifically?
Dan White: Well, food, food safety was kind of the initial focus in the company, largely because it was just a, a pervasive area that we saw sort of was structurally under valued. We had found, you know, at the time back when we were starting to look at the company in 2016, 2017, the original research, there was kind of a burgeoning interest in ag tech, but the vast majority of that focus, and I think even still today, the vast majority of that focus has been really looking at the production side.
There was sort of a seminal Report that the world bank put out about a decade ago, that estimated that, you know, fro- at that point, we would need to produce 70% more food by 2050, just to be able to maintain our current food security needs and all of that in the context of climate change, where we needed to figure out how to do that Without putting another 70%, you know, increasing the land use for agriculture by 70%. So that meant finding other efficiencies in the system that we could, we could work on. And so a lot of the focus in those first years really seemed to be focusing on how can we do crop breeding to create crops that have higher yields?
How can we look at other on-farm technologies like precision agriculture that could really help boost yields per acre in a sustainable. way. But very little focus was being put on the fact that there's still, you know, at least half of that, that production, in some cases up to half of that production, nearly half of that production was getting lost between that farm gate and the end consumer of what we were producing today.
You had Very little attention. At that point, was really being paid at that side of it at the supply chain solution side. And so that was really because it was where I had been focusing a lot of my career. I saw this as an opportunity where there were a lot of technologies on the shelf That could just help us keep whatever food we're producing already in that supply chain long enough and safely enough to be able to satisfy some of those food security needs in a way that just really structurally reduces the pressure on other parts of the supply chain at the production side, to try to figure out how to eke out additional tons of food per acre, when we're having a hard enough time just maintaining those current averages as it is.
Jason Jacobs: So when you set out to look for potential solutions, what are your learnings from going on and looking at different technologies that were in the lab and for any other aspiring entrepreneurs out there that are maybe starting down a similar path, what advice would you have for them as they're navigating and trying to evaluate which technologies might be ripe for commercialization?
Dan White: Yeah, I think my partner and I are sort of atypical being a hard tech founders in that we don't, you know, we're not engineers, we're not scientists. You know, we really came at it from this problem side. And so, you know, we kind of developed, we backed into these heuristics when we were at that discovery phase, trying to find a solution that I think I would really recommend any other, uh, Entrepreneur, whether you're the inventor of a tech or you're kind of surveying the landscape for something to work on, would use. And I think you know, we really set out knowing what that market was going to be able to bear at scale. And so we had a real focus on not just what technologies are doing. Cool things at the 100 grand, 200 grand level, But if we crunch the numbers today, what is the energy use? If we were to scale this directly up to treating one ton of food, 10 tons, 50 tons an hour, what would the form factor of that machine look like? Would it be the size of a football field? Would it be close to something that would fit inside a processing facility? Where would that fit in? And, you know, obviously any of these technologies in the lab are going to be immature and you're going to hope that there's going to be a lot of room to optimize and improve efficiencies. But at first pass, there was a big difference. We found across technologies just in terms of how much optimization you would need to get that electricity consumption.
For example, down to a level that was viable to get to viable unit economics or how much optimization was needed to drop the form factor of a unit that could. do 10 tons an hour down to something that could fit inside an existing processing facility. And so I'd really recommend, you know, as early as possible focus on paths to scalability, what's your line of sight on scalability, backing out from what that eventual customer is going to need And that's going to be the best guide you can use to really focus your resources sufficiently.
Jason Jacobs: And can you talk a bit about the technology itself and how it works?
Dan White: Yeah. So, you know, plasma systems they've existed for, for several decades in various industries. Right now, most commercial plasmas are used for things like sterilization and surface etching and deposition in like the semiconductor industry or, you know, advanced materials.
And most of those are, they operate at a low pressure. So you pull a vacuum on a system. And you basically create a voltage differential? So you have a high voltage electrode nano, and the CAFO that creates a high voltage field. In that case, you push some sort of gas into that, and then you use that to accomplish some process.
And it's been kind of a niche technology largely, you know, only really relevant in these very high value sort of small, small form factor industries, because it's just been very expensive to use. And what we really saw as the potential for it is if you could figure out how to make a plasma system work at atmospheric pressure where you didn't have to pull a vacuum.
You're really dropping the unit economic requirements significantly. You're dropping the amount of energy needed to operate the system. And that's really the first core innovation that we focused on is figuring out how to create a plasma system that operates reliably reproducibly at scale at industrial scale, to be able to process tons of food per hour in the atmosphere, which causes its own set of technical challenges, which you have to overcome. But if you can do it, it unlocks a huge range of potential applications. And so at a high-level, we basically create a high voltage field. We pushed gasses through that, that turned into reactive gas VCs that can have the ability to degrade contaminants on food surfaces. So they can degrade pathogens like E. coli or salmonella listeria, a wide range of toxins.
So one application space we've spent a lot of time on is something called aflatoxin, potent carcinogen, but also the common mold. So white mold that you might see in your strawberries. or Brown mold on your lettuces. Our technology can degrade those extending shelf life in the process. And so we're able to through some unique innovations that we've developed Turn this plasma system into a highly tuneable machine to really focus on degrading those contaminants while leaving alone. Those things that really matter for food quality. So we can degrade the salmonella without, without oxidizing the fats or the lipids or the micronutrients, depending on the food that we're treating. And that's really the core challenge area that we've we've focused on in terms of, of solving, which is ultimately what the customers need to be able to adopt this at scale.
Jason Jacobs: So, where does it sit in terms of the process of bringing this food to market? And also, how is it delivered just practically? Like, is it your own hardware or yeah, where does it live?
Dan White: Yeah, it's our own hardware and you know, we're really targeting in general. for A number of use cases that we're looking at. We're targeting people in the supply chain side. So folks who are buying kind of raw products from farmers and then processing them before those get sold on to the final CPG manufacturers. And so we're building a hardware piece that will fit into a agro processing facility alongside every other piece of equipment. So in the nut sector, for example, you know, there's Processors today that have, you know, a long line of machinery that's shelling and cleaning and sorting and grading those nuts as they move from farmer stock to a file stock for sale and our machine is Just going to sit alongside that processing line, it's going to be slightly different, you know, where it sits in each supply chain, but in general, yes, a piece of hardware is going to sit there and just be a final decontamination step before it gets sold onto the next customer.
Jason Jacobs: So what needs to change, if anything, in terms of how these customers do, what they do in order to incorporate this technology into their process.
Dan White: It's slightly different for every supply chain, but in general, you know, we've really tried to focus on building this in a way that it's really easy to retrofit into existing facilities. So process integration is really just a function of, you know, is there a point in this facility where food is moving at a speed or in a form that we.
Can can process it ourselves. So at what point in this facility, can we most easily integrate without having to disrupt the way that the other equipment sits? And so with most application spaces, we really focus on customers where we'd be able to kind of bring our machine in and it would be relatively plug and play as a retrofit without having to trigger a huge redesign of the, the process scheme for the, for the entire plant.
Jason Jacobs: And when you look at the potential types of foods that you could provide these capabilities for, how do you think about the trade-offs as it relates to profitability, for example, across categories, viability across categories and impact across categories, is it generally cookie cutter or to these sliders, if you will change a lot from one category to the next.
Dan White: Yeah, it's a really good question. It's what we spent. I think my partner, and I spend most of our time thinking about is kind of looking at the trade offs across these categories. Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of impact, and we see big differences in the type of impacts that we have from one vertical to another. I mean, for example, if you're looking at, food safety, so salmonella remediation in the nut and grain space is a big area. We're looking at. There's Potential impacts on the climate change side, just through displacing more energy-intensive solutions to those problems today. So for example, right now, today in almond sector, there's a regulatory requirement that almonds are pasteurized for salmonella. and there's a range of those technologies that do it today. Some of them are pretty energy-intensive. and our system is up to 20-times more energy-efficient than those existing solutions for salmonella. So we can kind of displace thermally
Jason Jacobs: Would the policy needs to change in order to displace that requirement?
Dan White: no, It's just a validation process. So when you have a new solution to a food safety challenge, like this, there's a board out there that has sort of a checklist that you just have to show that your tech has killed enough salmonella in this context and validated that in a real facility and you just kind of get added to the list of acceptable solutions. So it doesn't require an overhaul on the policy side. And so in that context, there is some climate impact there, but the human health impact is really high, right? So we can really help move the dial on a number of these human health problems. we can help address a lot of sort of global economic issues.
with the way that the supply chains operate, you know, if you can really help emerging market producers handle some of these contamination problems, you're helping level the playing field with what markets they can access. So there's sort of a cascade of different applications.
Jason Jacobs: Maybe avoiding recalls too, right?
Dan White: Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Avoiding recalls, reducing import rejections, you know, at the point of entry. So, you know, there's thousands of containers and shipments that get rejected every year at the port of Rotterdam or, you know, in the port of Louisiana Por- port of new Orleans. And so, you know, the more you can kind of help manage those issues.
You just reduce those rejections and save a lot of costs in that way. But then you move to looking at something like shelf life, extension in meat and seafood. The climate impact is huge because the embedded carbon in those products per pound is massive. And in a lot of what you're able to do is enable your customers to, to really reduce a lot of those transport logistics, the carbon that's embedded in those.
So for example, if you can add time, you know, significant days to, to shelf life for raw seafood, you're able to really move a lot. of Raw seafood that today has to go directly from that boat into a processing facility and onto a plane to get shipped to, Omaha, to still be fresh. By the time it gets on someone's plate, you can move a lot of that for some of the more regional geographies onto shipping containers that can really reduce that embedded those transport, the carbon footprint of that transportation for those products. In addition to having those food safety impacts. And so, you know, when we look at those, we have kind of a two-pronged strategy, our primary focus with the Cortech is we're really most interested today in those application spaces where we're at profitable unit economics at a smallest scale as possible, just to get the tech out there and to have it start to interact with the real world Because that's ultimately, what's going to really accelerate our ability to find efficiencies, to ruggedize the tech and then unlock a lot of these bigger opportunities down the road. And so that's why we focus very much on the the application spaces that are not the largest markets that we see, but are the ones that are closest to getting to market today to help us ruggedize the technology, because we see it as the straightest path to really capturing as many different application spaces as possible with as much impact across all of these categories that we care about as soon as we can.
Jason Jacobs: Well, you raise an interesting point because there's one multiple time, very successful entrepreneur. And he's done a bunch in clean tech as well as some other verticals. But what he told me is that even if you're purely climate motivated with your first beachhead market, you shouldn't necessarily factor that in. And you should just find someplace, as you said, where you can. Get a beachhead somewhere and get the unit economics. Right. And kind of prove it out. And then, you know, down the road, expand from a position of strength and then incorporate more of those mission elements over time. That's tricky for a fund like us. That is so climate-motivated because, you know, we want to be assured that the thing that we're backing is taking a big swing at climate. And if someone takes that approach, even if it's the right one, there's some chance That they go in that market that maybe has a lesser impact and they, they never returned So we wrestled that one. Actually what's your take?
Dan White: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is at the end of the day, I can imagine for your fun, if your thesis is, you know, we want the straightest line to as much impact as we can. Cause this is a massive problem. And, you know, we just need to do it as fast as we can. I think my argument. When I when I have this conversation with investors is it's not so much that I'm saying, well, you know, I got to Zig before I zag. I think from a technology perspective, what we found is that the straightest line that it's, it's not so much, do I focus on on this market that has maybe has slightly less climate impact today, but I can get there with a unit that can Process one ton hour, or do I focus on this market? That's got sort of 10 tons an hour and you know, minimum requirement, but has more climate impact. I think that the. argument is not, well, I need to go do this first and it's spending in a kick out my time to market, you know, to this other application space by another two years.
I think my argument is in my, our thesis is that it might take us four years to build that 10-ton unit, simply because we're having to wait until we hit all sorts of technology scale before we can even get the unit into the market. I think that if we take one year, to build that one-time unit, It's going to take us only three years to get into that higher climate impact space because the pace of innovation and generation in Just from having contact with the real world, having to operate 24/7, having to company build around that application, it unlocks all sorts of opportunities, accelerates all kinds of development and regularization. that I think, I think will actually be the fastest pathway. There's always opportunity for mission creep market applications always like, You know, different over time, but I think that as long as you've got climate, as part of your core thesis as a company, as we do, and as long as there is clear application in everything that you're working on, I think within that bundle of application spaces, our focus is just the sooner we can get this technology into the market, the faster we're going to get to any level of impact for across any vertical.
Jason Jacobs: So, if you weren't optimizing for impact and you were purely a capitalist, would you go after different markets or go in a different order or have a different approach in terms of how you take this to market, than you are.
Dan White: That's a really good question. I think in our case, not necessarily. Cause I think in either case, if what you're saying is you're trying to solve for scale, you know, every ton of product that we treat is one ton product. That's going to have marginally less risk of loss, marginally higher value for our customer. Those two things go hand in hand. And I think the focus for me. is How do we get this technology into the world as fast as we can. And that would be true regardless of what the operating principle of the company is, because I think, I think for any given outcome, that's going to be the most important thing that we can do is is get contact with the real-world conditions as fast as we can.
And it's generally the, the recommendation I would give any other, Hard tech entrepreneur is your product's never going to be perfect. The sooner you can get it out into the world, the sooner you're going to figure out what you need to fix before that's, you're going to have, you know, a real operable, scalable product out into the world.
Jason Jacobs: So how long have you been working on it? What are some of the key phases you've been through so far? And where are you today?
Dan White: Yeah. So we started the company officially in January of 2019. And at that point it was really just Dan and I and our chief science officer who invented the Cortech kind of working at a base level. We were part of the MassChallenge Boston accelerator that summer. And built some traction in some of our beachhead markets builds a couple of sort of prophetic prototypes. And then we had a see ground, We closed last, June, built out the company. Now we've got about 14 folks on staff, had our, our first customer field pilot in the spring. And right now we're just focused on getting our first unit out into the market at some point next year to start generating revenue and moving into as many additional verticals as we can.
Jason Jacobs: And in terms of category, where are you starting? And in terms of business model, how much have you thought through and worked out what the go-to-market business model will be And do you anticipate that that will evolve as you get further in? Or do you have a good sense of the scaling model at this time?
Dan White: Yeah, we're, we're really focused on, I think initially deploying on a fee-for-service model. So we'll be building these units, getting them out into customer, hands in, in the near-term operating them, at least in the near-term, operating them on a, on a fee-for-service basis And, and I think there's a number of advantages for that one in most of our most verticals we're looking at that's a pretty widely accepted and growing service model is moving away from asset ownership and towards hardware as a service, it really reduces the perceived risk. on The customer part to adopt a pretty new technology.
And it's going to give us the ability to give really high touch on this in those first you know, five years of operation. When you build a new piece of hardware, that's integrating, you know, different fundamental disciplines, you really want to be able to see what the maintenance cadence is, and kind of manage that in-house without just sending a unit out to a customer that bought it and have them call you every three months when something novel breaks that you didn't see in your accelerated aging tests. So initially we're going out to market on a fee-for-service basis. And I think over time that might change. I think as we move you know, across verticals, there's always nuance that we want to be open to. And it's going to really be an open conversation with the people that are most interested in the tech and different spaces. But, but yeah, I think in the near-term, we're going to be really focused on that. It seems like the fastest path to getting as many units out into the world as quickly as we can.
Jason Jacobs: In what market?
Dan White: We're going to be looking at remediation for these contaminants in in nuts and grains. So that's our our first set of customers are, are in that space, displacing thermal pasteurization, and generally improving food safety there, but to have another set of other key verticals lined up in the hopper that are still at the R&D phase right now, but are going to be rolling online in the next couple of years So
Jason Jacobs: great. And what's the pitch?
Dan White: Sorry, the pitch in terms of,
Jason Jacobs: oh, so when you're talking to potential customers about why they should do a pilot with you, what do you tell them?
Dan White: Well, most of the time we're targeting application spaces where either there really isn't a solution today, or if there is one we've already been able to do our homework and really find that we're orders of magnitude cheaper to be able to accomplish that.
So oftentimes we're going to be talking to customers in spaces where maybe they have existing solutions for one problem, but our tech is. you know, Pretty broad spectrum in terms of the contaminants that can remove. And so we can offer some value addition that differentiates from others. So in the almond sector, for example, right now, there is no solution for aflatoxin Really there's only solutions for salmonella. We can solve both of those problems, which are the sort of top two food safety challenges in that space for a fraction of the energy demand. So that translates to reduced electricity costs and operation costs for our customers.
Jason Jacobs: And do they ask for things like ROI, payback period?
Dan White: Yep. It's all part of the, the conversation, you know, and a lot of it comes down to sort of, every sector has a different unit, but most people like to negotiate, you know, around a price per pound or per ton. And it's just kind of benchmarking against what they see is that, that value for that lot. So if you're an exporter, you're sending products to Japan, you've got a perceived profit margin there per pound for your almonds, You've got a risk that you've priced in for aflatoxin or salmonella, And you know how much you're paying per pound for steam pasteurization today. For example, we're able to come in and, and usually be pretty competitive on both the price point, as well as the energy consumers that it goes into it.
Jason Jacobs: And given that you are so mission-driven, are you planning to track things like how you're not just the financial metrics, but the impact Metrics as well. And if so, when do you start that? Especially given that you're so small and resource-constrained and have so many things on your plate, and also what are the key metrics that you think would be most impactful to track in this case?
Dan White: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. I think one thing that has been really tricky as we've been digging much more into the food waste questions in particular is that it's clear that This is a massive problem. It's a huge driver of our emissions problems. It's a huge driver of the number of natural resource challenges that we face. But it's also really difficult to definitively understand how those things occur, you know, supply chain to supply chain. And so I think for us, you know, a key thing that we've looked at is potential partnerships with groups like ReFED, For example, looking at who do a lot more in depth supply chain level analysis, tracking food from the farm gate to that end consumer. We're really trying to find partners who are aligned with us, who are interested in identifying supply chain, doing the research, trying to track. product, Understanding some counterfactuals that between product that's been treated and hasn't for the good of helping us understand long-term as a sector, how do we actually move the dial on these challenges?
So trying to find those third-party groups who can really do the heavy-lifting from a resource side to track those hypotheses and try to iterate and adapt over time, that way. Cause like you said, we're a small group. We can't really track every nuance here, but we think that's probably the way forward.
Jason Jacobs: And key milestones you're driving towards over the next say 12 months.
Dan White: Yeah, right now, it's all about getting this first product out into the world and going from prototype to something that is repeatably scaleably manufactured and put in front of customers. And so that's our big focus right now, as well as really trying to ramp up and scale up our, our R&D capabilities across a huge range of additional verticals that we've had kind of in the wings, but just haven't had the bandwidth to focus on today.
Jason Jacobs: And if you could wave your magic wand and change one thing outside of the scope of your control, that would most accelerate your progress, what would it be and how would you change it?
Dan White: Yeah. Yeah. I think someone being able to figure out a way to, to reliably reliably help our end customers quantify and put a cost on that, that food waste question. You know, I think there's a structural market failure today. Where you see this trillion dollars of food that's wasted, but when you actually dig into the supply chains, very few people are actually capturing that on their P&Ls. and I take one way or another as a food system, we need to figure out ways to, to re-internalize those costs somewhere so that someone has an incentive to really solve them.
And our focus in this front has been to really focus in on those aspects of food waste, where, where it is being held as a cost point today. But then there's a huge set of food That's still getting thrown away. That isn't as accessible to market-driven solutions because cause no one really sees it as a cost And I think that's a huge area for policy innovation. It's a big area for, for sort of structural support tools, analytics, traceability, technology that could solve some of these questions that I think could really unlock and help quantify and drive solutions in that food waste space.
Jason Jacobs: And then within the scope of your control, where do you need help for anyone listening that is intrigued by what you're doing? Who do you want to hear from?
Dan White: Yeah, we're actively hiring for a range of roles. You know, there'll be up in the MCJ member group here soon. Really anyone out there who's passionate about food, safety, food waste innovation around the intersection of plasma and engineering, electrical engineering, anyone that's just got a ton of passion and willingness to learn. Love to hear from you and always looking to build our network of folks passionate about this intersection.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And Dan, anything I didn't ask that I should have, or any parting words for the listeners?
Dan White: Yeah, just really appreciative for everything you've been doing long time listener. first-time caller here, and really excited to talk more with folks in the community about how we can collaborate on trying to trying and get this tech out into the market as fast as we can.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome. Well, really inspired by your work. And hopefully this episode helps with some visibility and awareness and some high-quality inbound for you and wishing you and the whole clean crop Technologies team success on your long journey.
Dan White: Great. thanks a lot, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason. here. Thanks again for joining me on my climate journey.
If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.c. note. That is .co Not .com. someday. We'll get the .com, but right now, .co. you can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests.
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