A Digital Food Supply Chain.

The InSight Labs’ team is building something genuinely useful and necessary for the world today; any company that adopts our software as their central application for food analysis would be significantly better off than they were before. This is why I argue that a digital food supply chain is the only way forward and I will provide contexts for that argument.

A New World

Today is July 25, 2019; mother earth has over 5 billion more people than she did 50 years ago and uncertainties in weather patterns have been progressively getting worse. If you are a stakeholder in the food industry, you are probably paying attention to these rapidly changing dynamics and planning a suitable response that ensures you survive and thrive.

If you are not a stakeholder in the food industry you are probably thinking why should I care? Well you should because chances are you live in a metropolitan area and you don’t grow your own food. Next time you are grocery shopping, try to think about all the sequence of quality control actions that has to happen before you pick up your fruits, vegetables, ketchup, granola bars, apple juice, sausage, or whatever you’re into at the store.

A recent study of the food supply chain in America showed that food travels an estimated 1500 miles from where its produced all the way to where it is consumed. This shows that we are increasingly becoming far removed from the sources of our food and that trend looks to grow bigger going into the future because more people are choosing to live in cities than countryside a trend which also drives the labor shortage generally experienced in the food industry.

The disconnect

Prior to World War 2, most people got their food from subsistence farming or community driven coop and they certainly did not have the same challenges like today with the advent of large-scale food production. Quality control risk then meant a few dozen recalls in Woodbury NY (Great place to visit) not a few million recalls across the country.

When America entered World War 2, the conversation about food changed because of the new logistical challenge of adequately feeding our brave soldiers across the Atlantic. For the first time, food had to be preserved, packaged and shipped on an industrial scale. M&M candies, Maxwell coffee etc are a product of that era’s innovation as well as the concepts of frozen vegetables, canned meals and adding vitamins & minerals to bread.

After the war, the food supply chain like we know today started to take shape along with defined quality control standard practices. The emerging food industry quickly understood the importance of a great quality control mechanism and this led to the development of tool sets needed to accomplish analytical tasks for checking the quality of whole food and corresponding by products when necessary.

We know that population is growing, weather is spotty and more people are living in cities — all factors that put strains on the food supply chain. We also know that the tool set for quality control are not changing quick enough to correspond and accommodate all the factors listed which leads to a bottleneck on the supply chain and occasional lapses that cost millions of dough ($$). There’s an obvious disconnect in the evolution of quality control tools in the food industry and we are working to fix the disparity.

A New Tool.

Some of the tools been used today in the food industry dates back to the 1950s, a time when mainframe computers and polaroid cameras reigned supreme. Since then, computers have become smaller and powerful while optical devices have become advanced to see beyond our visible spectrum. Both of these advancements are important because they serve as an underpinning to the development of a new set of tools for the industry.

Typically, stakeholders in the industry want an accurate quality check to measure parameters that affects the quality of the type of food they are dealing with, which means the fastest and most accurate way to measure will be the perfect scenario. Our application offers that using combination of light spectroscopy + design engineering + chemometrics + Software engineering + data analysis; which is why our vision is to create a powerful a collaborative platform for really smart scientist, engineers and analyst to make a new tool set for the future.

These methods enables us to measure how different types of food molecules interact with light, create a model of the patterns of interactions and convert that into a software that can be used to accurately measure food parameters in real time. Our physical space also mimics this principle of collaboration with a fusion of the wet lab squad and the dev team, two differently creative worlds with single a mission to make the world a better place one food at a time.

The challenge

It is exhilarating to see clients use a product that you’ve built more so a product that is innovative in a way that optimizes food production. Because our technology represents a seismic shift in the way the value chain is setup, there are some challenges that we would have to overcome in order to have a meaningful impact on the world.

Some of the methods and techniques that are currently been used for quality control in the industry vary wildly and they are very fragmented. Sometimes a subjective analysis (visual inspection) by an expert suffices and other times a very sophisticated machine with a centrifuge that spins at over 1500 rpm is deployed.

Due to the slow incremental progression in the industry, most of the stakeholders have been used to a certain way of doing things and they have no idea what they need in a new tool. How could they? They’ve never heard of the food analysis software.. Although we like to resist change as humans, we also need to change to ensure survival.

The old saying around here goes that customers don’t know what they want and another renowned one says the customer is always right; this is another paradox that startups like us have to deal with, where you have to adopt both principles to succeed. We are not afraid to innovate but we make products that make our customers’ life better.

Moving Forward.

I live in the bay area, a sprawling tech metropolis in Northern California. The state is the biggest food producer in the country with world leading research institutions spread around. Because I live here, I am surrounded by world leading food producers and I see what the power of effective collaboration can do for innovation. This is why I often feel blessed and grateful to be here at this time.

California supplies over 30% of the world and over 90% of America’s tomato consumption, which means the biggest players in the industry, reside here. Let’s say we are fortunate to work with one of the biggest tomato processors in the world (true story btw), they also have to constantly perform several quality analysis from the moment they receive raw tomatoes from supply vendors until it is processed into puree, paste, diced or whatever by-product necessary.

Even though our technology could be integrated at several points of their operational processes, we are progressing steadily and cautiously to avoid breaking things. We really do care about our customers which is why our mission as a company is to understand what they need and translate the value of InSight Labs into features based on their terms.