Clean Crop Technologies
Our Investment in Clean Crop Technologies
Reducing emissions from food waste by extending shelf life
As reported in The Washington Post last year, the carbon footprint of U.S. food waste exceeds that of the airline industry. For many, this fact is both staggering and surprising. Nearly a third of all food produced in the U.S. goes uneaten or discarded and results in 170 million metric tons of emissions annually – equal to the CO2 emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants. The other statistics that color the magnitude of this problem are equally jaw-dropping: food waste in the U.S. represents $408 billion spent per year, utilizes 18% of farmland, and expends 4 trillion tons of water. Additionally, food security in the United States has hit historical highs with more than 26 million Americans reporting to the Census Bureau that they don’t have enough food to eat.
The stages and causes of food waste (source: U.S. Government Accountability Office).
For this reason, Project Drawdown, a climate research nonprofit, has highlighted reducing food waste as one of the most impactful solutions to addressing climate change. With nearly a half million deaths caused by food-borne illnesses, improving the quality and longevity of food can also improve the health and nourishment of people globally.
Given spoilage is a main driver of food waste, producers have adopted solutions, like food coatings, UV light, chemicals, and ozone gas, to eliminate mold and bacteria that commonly contaminate their commodities. However, these solutions fall short of effectively and efficiently ridding foods of the contaminants that shorten their shelf life. Clean Crop Technologies, based in Holyoke, Massachusetts, provides a novel solution to this problem by utilizing a proprietary high-voltage reactor that generates ionized gasses that eliminate pathogens without degrading the quality of the food passing through it. By effectively extending the life of food commodities — initially nuts, seeds, and wheat — the company is helping to reduce a major source of emissions while ensuring food is healthy and greater numbers of people are properly nourished.
We are deeply appreciative of Amy Duffuor, General Partner at Azolla Ventures and a Clean Crop investor and board member, for introducing us to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Dan White. We’re excited to back him and Daniel Cavanaugh, Clean Crop’s co-founder and COO, as they work to reduce food waste and its emissions and help better feed the world.
What is Clean Crop Technologies?
Clean Crop Technologies has developed a proprietary industrial-scale system, using ionized gasses, to decontaminate food while preserving its quality. Other processes might add coatings to the food or pasteurize it through the use of heat or chemicals. The most common practice today is thermal (heat-based) pasteurization, in which food is heated to 130-145 ℃ and then rapidly cooled. With Clean Crop’s technology, food passes through an ionized gas that kills the toxins, pathogens, and pests. The process is tunable, enabling the targeting of specific pathogens without disrupting the quality or taste of the food being treated.
Clean Crop’s high-voltage reactors kill unwanted pathogens without degrading food quality or nutrition, and can operate up to ten times more efficiently than typical thermal plasma systems. Its cutting edge technology provides a myriad of benefits across the food supply chain:
Designed for industrial-scale food processing, Clean Crop’s reactors are designed as modules that can be stackable to allow for higher scale production. This enables a food processor to expand capacity from one hundred kilograms of food processed an hour to one thousand kilograms (one ton equivalent). Beyond its current focus on nut, seed, and wheat, Clean Crop has plans to scale into produce, meat, seafood, and cheese.
Why did we invest?
Compelling Founder-Market Fit
Clean Crop’s founding team of CEO Dan White and COO Daniel Cavanaugh brings extensive global experience in agriculture, with expertise in trading, processing, and developing agricultural feedstocks. On the technical side, co-founder and CSO Dr. Kevin Keener brings peer-reviewed expertise in cold plasma food safety treatments, and CTO Yaqoot Shaharyar leverages more than a decade of experience in machine learning-driven R&D for engineering and materials sciences. Collectively, they offer a complementary blend of skills and expertise needed to bring this technology to market.
Addressing a Major Source of Emissions
Globally, food waste has been attributed to 8 - 10% of greenhouse gas emissions or 4.4 GtCO2 per year. As stipulated by Project Drawdown, if food waste could be halved in the next 30 years, it would be equal to taking 2,570 coal-fired power plants offline. Suffice to say, mitigating this problem offers a substantial opportunity to reduce global emissions.
We are excited to be working with the Clean Crop team as it scales its offering and seeks to make food safer and more abundant, while ensuring that less of it is wasted in the process.
