Big Ideas: “We can greatly reduce food waste by modernizing our delivery system” with Peter Mehring CEO of Zest Labs

As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Mehring. Peter is the CEO and a co-founder of Zest Labs. He brings extensive experience in engineering, innovation and management at emerging companies and large enterprises. Peter has led the Zest Labs’ efforts in pioneering freshness management solutions for the cold supply chain. The company’s Zest Fresh solution improves food quality, reducing waste, and benefiting the environment by modernizing the food distribution and delivery system. Visit www.zestlabs.com

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Before Zest Labs, I worked for Apple for a few years, leading large-volume consumer electronics development, part of running hardware development for Steve Jobs. Following my time at Apple, I took some time off to decide what I wanted in my next role — which was something that gave back to the greater good, helping society and the environment.

My job prior to Apple was running worldwide engineering at Echelon where we led a project to develop and deploy the largest smart grid in the world. Upon…