Cold Chain Innovation with EverCase’s Chris Somogyi

Our latest episode is with Chris Somogyi, CEO of EverCase, a novel technology to reduce FLW by improving cold chain technology. Together, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in climate-smart cold chain and how to catalyze innovation and new technologies to reduce FLW.

If you have an idea for an episode topic you’d like to see featured or if you would like to participate in an episode of USAID’s Kitchen Sink, please reach out to Nika Larian (nlarian@usaid.gov).

There’s no time to waste!

Transcript

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(Speaker 1: 0:06

Nika Larian) Welcome to USAID's Kitchen Sink a food loss and waste podcast. I'm your producer, Nika Larian. 30 to 40% of the food that is produced is either lost or wasted, contributing to a global food crisis with over 800 million going to bed hungry. Listen on as USAID experts speak with researchers and development professionals to explore solutions to this critical issue that demands a kitchen sink approach. When it comes to climate food security and food system sustainability, we have no time to waste. Welcome to USAID's Kitchen Sink. My name is Nika Larian, your producer and food loss and waste advisor at the US Agency for International Development. I'm joined today by Chris Somogyi, CEO of EverCase, a novel technology in the cold chain space. Today, we'll be discussing some of the challenges and opportunities within cold chain, as well as discussing how to foster innovations to reduce food loss and waste. So, welcome Chris. Please introduce yourself.

(Speaker 2: 1:14

Chris Somogyi) Thank you so much. Great to be here with you. Chris Somogyi, I'm the CEO of a company called EverCase, which is based in Texas. It's a spin out from Xerox PARC. That's Palo Alto Research Center. You may have heard about the moment where Steve Jobs came and learned about the graphic user interface in the mouse, looking over the shoulders of some guys. That was Xerox PARC where that was, and ethernet was developed there and the laser printer. So it's quite a hallowed place. Recently, it's become part of SRI International, but I was working there for a couple of years in the Cleantech Group and we were asked to find some new amazing technologies and product opportunities. And I had met a professor of food science at the University of Hawaii some years before when I was living there, and came across this technology and was just stunned. So I convinced the university and Dr. June to bring the technology to Xerox and we incubated it there for about a year. What it does is, well, we like to say that we freeze time, not food, which I know sounds a little odd, but basically, we improve how food is stored and we increase the shelf life of delicate perishables foods, and flowers, and even medical goods.- Thank you for that. Your interesting background and a brief overview of the EverCase technology. I really like the slogan of saving time throughout the cold chain. I think that's a really powerful message. So can we start off by you outlining some of the challenges that exist in our current cold chain?- Sure, I was mentioning to you earlier today, you know, that the cold chain to me is in so much, well, we think about it as a place, to place, to place, the boat, to the truck, to the warehouse, to the truck, to the store, to the home, and that's true. And I guess traditionally, you're worried about that. Like, will my truck get fit into that place? Does the warehouse have enough room? Is the restaurant ready to receive this? That's sort of thing, but to me it's if I look at it from afar, the whole thing kind of looks like a time budget. It looks like someone is standing there with a stopwatch and throughout every one of these steps of the cold chain, everyone has gotta feel the hustle, the urgency, the shipping, the fishing vessel. If they freeze their fish, they lose about a dollar a kilo in value. But this ship is full of fuel and workers and they wanna stay out there as long as they can and fill the belly of the ship before they have to come back. But they have to come back kind of soon or else they'll lose the value of the fish. So there's this tension that's going on and really every step of the way is like that. Does the trucker need to drive all through the night to get to his destination? Are there certain destinations that are just too far away? I wasn't counting on this giant traffic jam outside of Dallas. Do we have to fly these fresh cherries up from Chile to Chicago? Wow, that's an extra expense so we have to hustle the whole time. So I look at it as an incredibly urgent, almost stressful sort of thing. Everybody's worried about the food going bad along the way are the temperature is stable? So though this may not is may not be mentioned typically as, you know, the big cold chain problem, it's maybe the hidden problem. The stress of having to keep up with this stopwatch is it's expensive, but it's also, you know, an undue level of anxiety that everyone has to face.- And certainly in the low and middle income countries where USAID works, that stopwatches is running over time as there are gaps in cold chain, poor infrastructure, maybe there's no good roads to get where you need to go. So that stress, that time is even more important in those settings. So after outlining some of the challenges, can we take a turn for optimism and outline some of the opportunities that exist in sustainable cold chain? And along with that, can you make the business case for why companies should be investing in their cold chain? Why governments should be interested in making those investments to improve cold chain?- Sure, there's lots of room for improvement. Another aspect, I guess, of the cold chain hassle is being able to predict how much product you actually need and can sell at a given moment. I've had the chance to visit large grocery chains in Canada, United States, and across Europe. And I'm really quite surprised about the spoilage rates and about how they're keeping track of this, you know? I haven't visited everybody and I'm sure there's some that are extremely modern and on top of this, but some of the more modern ones that I visited were still keeping track of spoilage rates with a dry erase marker, you know, on a board kind of tucked away in the back of the warehouse section. And there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what their spoilage rate really is. Here, well, we only lose 7% in seafood, but in the reality, someone will whisper to me literally in the hall,"It's more like 15%," so wow. One Spanish company that we have gotten to know loses over $100 million a year in seafood losses, but it's valuable to them because it affects how they draw customers into their store. So I'd say on the software side for sure, the opportunity to try to predict your needs a little bit more accurately, you don't know. On this Tuesday, well, we think we need 60 pounds of salmon for the week at this one particular store. A million things could happen to mess that up. So you can hone your predictions a little bit better based on whatever series of inputs you use, but at the end of the day, it's not gonna be perfect. What we like to think is a potentially a big contributor is to kind of let some of the steam out of this tension and just buy yourself more time. So with our system, you can store meats and seafood for weeks so that salmon that arrives in the grocery store, fresh salmon, might have three, four days left on it. If you super cool it in an EverCase equipment, it can reside in there for three weeks and still be fresh. It's kept below freezing, but it never freezes. And so we can extend weeks of life to produce, fresh cut flowers, meats, cheeses. So we think that altering that time budget, giving everybody extra time will have a big impact on the cold chain. But other things like better predictions of demand will also help.- Certainly as you've indicated, there's a lot of room for improvement and a big role for technology to play in reducing food loss and waste. And on some other episodes of the podcast, we'll be talking to certain apps that are either working in household consumer waste or looking at restaurants, like you said, to budget, how can we make you more efficient? How can we reduce waste? How can we use technology to be more conscious of the food that we're purchasing and consuming to reduce food loss and waste? So on that note, and you mentioned where EverCase is located in Texas seems rife for innovation. So how can we really foster innovation for technologies to reduce food loss and waste? Whether that's in the cold chain space or more generally, how can we encourage those innovations? Whether that's through public-private partnerships or... What are the steps that need to be taken to encourage those steps?- Well, I guess who are the likely committers of innovation might be a good question. Across the country, there are incubators all over the place. Some of them might be in the community, like in Austin, we've got one, some of them might be affiliated with a corporation or affiliated with the university, or take like Y Combinator out in San Francisco. These are sort of centers of innovation-thought leadership, I guess I could say. And those groups have boards and advisors and they share their notions of what are interesting domains to explore. Or right now, AI is absolutely on fire and that's great. So if you're a young entrepreneur wanting to start some company, I don't really know what, but I want to be an entrepreneur, you might feel like you really ought to be in AI, and part of that is cultural, right? So I think maybe there's an opportunity to use those places as points of influence to share this incredible story about food waste, right? So I'm sure your viewer viewers know all about one third of all food is wasted at a cost of over a trillion dollars With huge carbon footprint implications and food insecurity issues. But even if you don't care about any of that, just we are very limited in the culinary choices that we have because of the cold chain. And actually, when I was in the Kentucky recently, I had to give a little talk and I found an article which stunned me. Someone had taken a basket of grocery goods from 1950 and performed a nutritional analysis on them back then, and they came up with some score. And then someone about two years ago decided to repeat this experiment. They took the modern analogs of those food items and subjected them to this same nutritional study. And they found that, as a whole, it was between 30% and 50% less nutritious. And, you know, it's easy to be angry about that, but I don't think that was done out of malicious intent. I think that pressures to make sure that the mechanical damage to foods is mitigated. So sturdiness was probably a little over-emphasized in the past few decades. And, you know, any biological entity is going to have to make choices in how it expends its energy. And if you want it to be sturdier, then it's gonna have to compensate for that in some other fashion. And really, at the end of the day, historically, the foods that we eat have been chosen because they're sturdy. I mean, we eat wheat and rice because it stores nicely.- And certainly within that anecdote, soil health has a large role to play, and as we've heard today at the ReFED Food Waste Summit, food loss and waste, soil health, biodiversity, it's all connected. There's been a lot of talk about circular economy and taking food waste, composting it, and taking that back to the earth. And a lot of innovations all along that chain, all along the circular economy, it's a really great moment I think for entrepreneurs, innovators to come in and really seize this opportunity we have in the space to reduce food loss and waste. So thank you for your insights. To wrap up, I wanna know what's next for EverCase?- Well, we have our first orders from food companies who wanna reduce the amount of preservatives and want to extend the range of potential ingredients in their foods. We have a number of partnerships brewing with appliance makers, we've got deals going in Europe, Australia, and North America. We're always looking for great team members and we're always looking for great investors. So it's a long march, but I've had six or seven startups. This is probably the one that I'm the most proud of has the biggest impact potential, and I think it's probably the most important. So we're always looking for fans and helpers.- Well, thank you so much, Chris. I really enjoyed hearing about your journey as an entrepreneur and exploring some of the challenges and opportunities that exist in cold chain. So I look forward to seeing EverCase near me soon.- That's a deal.- Thanks Chris.- Thank you.- Alright. Thank you for tuning in to USAID's Kitchen Sink. This podcast was produced by Nika Larian and is organized by the USAID Food Loss and Waste Community of practice co-chairs Ahmed Kablan and Ann Vaughn. Additional thanks goes to Feed the Future, the US Government's Global Food Security Initiative and the USAID Center for Nutrition.(music playing)