Yarok’s Creation to Solve a Leafy Contamination
I first encountered E. coli in the Fall of 2014 when I attended an event to remember the life of Linda Rivera. She was an active community member and a mother of a student that went to my school at the time, Green Valley High School. Her son spoke about what happened. Essentially, Linda ate a few spoonfuls of E.coli-infected, raw cookie dough and soon after her kidneys stopped working, she went into septic shock, and as the years passed by, she grew ill, and eventually passed away due to organ failure. My community left the event in disbelief, all appalled by the malicious effects of E.coli. My perception of E.coli changed forever.
Year after year, there are countless deaths from foodborne illnesses. Enough is enough. One doesn’t have to be a microbiologist or a food tech extraordinaire to understand that these continuous waves of illnesses and deaths from foodborne illnesses need to end and can be ended.
Here is a supply and demand graph with a twist. It portrays the current environment revolving around foodborne illness prevention.
There are many ways that food producers can test food for contamination. The problem is that testing produce takes several days, and the market prefers untested fresh produce over wilted food that has already been tested.
Due to this preference, while the produce test results are pending, consumers buy the potentially infected fruits and vegetables; in the worst-case, many get sick and some die due to the contaminated produce they consumed. Even industry statistics show that about half of product recalls are due to microbiological contaminants.
Data source: Swiss RE in Fortune, Sept. 2015
If testing time is long, producers simply deliver and pray. If testing time is short, producers can afford the wait to deliver. Yarok Microbio, a food tech company, came up with a solution for the current problem: faster microbiology detections to find contamination. Before co-founding Yarok, Jonathan Sierra had worked as VP of Research and Development for a European fresh salads producer. There, he was shocked to discover that product recalls due to foodborne bacterial outbreaks continued to take place, with no way to get test results before products left the production facility. He contacted Dr. Vladimir Glukhman, with whom he’d worked on a previous project; and initiated a project based on Glukhman’s scientific principles; the project eventually developed into a startup company called, Yarok.
Their technology speeds up the bacteria detection process from several days to about 45 minutes. Yarok delivers results with confidence and within a fast testing time, a maximum of four to eight hours (depending on the bacteria being detected). The goal is to allow producers to deliver with confidence, if the tests prove to be free of contaminants, or to stop production and take measures if they detect contamination.
The three most common bacteria that cause serious illnesses are Salmonella, E.coli, and Listeria. Yarok tackles this “Unholy Trinity”, and is working on additional dangerous bacteria that are a menace to both industry and consumers.
Yarok’s technology can test all types of products, not just fruits and vegetables. They test raw materials before production, which saves on operational costs. Yarok’s technology also tests the production facility and equipment with customized swabs that can be applied to every industry. The ability to test a wide-variety of niche environments is very economical and efficient because it can prevent unnecessary recalls and avert major financial damage.
The life-saving tech company is incredibly impactful, founders Vladimir and Yonathan both have experience in the food tech industry, thus Yarok has a competitive edge. Their technology comes from the founders’ multidisciplinary backgrounds, and together, their approach gives Yarok a competitive advantage in the business of preventing foodborne illnesses. They benefit the food industry by preventing product recalls, saving on production costs, and by protecting the consumer by preventing contaminated food from reaching the market.
The R&D takes place in Israel, and there is a laboratory in Northern Italy aimed at demonstrations and testing. The technology will soon be used by an Italian company that sells fresh cut salads because of how prone raw vegetables are to contamination. They chose Italy because Yarok’s technology gained of traction from European companies who want to see the technology in action. In an effort to make “seeing it” and “believing it” as convenient as possible for European companies, they opened up a testing center in Italy. In addition to testing that takes place in Italy, Yarok’s technology is already being tested in Israel’s second largest dairy.
Many similar solutions from large multinationals come from the lab, but Yarok’s technology comes from a non-orthodox approach, the Israeli approach — solutions do not come from the lab, they come from the production floor and the industry.
Today, Yarok is able to provide the fastest time-to-results among the available technologies because it has adopted a new and different approach to bacterial detection. (For the science nerds out there,) Yarok has conceived and adopted a new biotechnological approach in fast diagnostics called Detection of Intracellular Metabolism of the Specific Target Bacterium. The new approach led Yarok to develop a new breakthrough technology, the only one able to give better answers to the food industry’s specific requirements.
Unlike existing testing methodologies that forensically look for “signs” that bacteria are present, Yarok Microbio directly and specifically identifies the intra-cellular metabolic activity of the live target bacterium. Current “rapid” technologies require the presence of large quantities of detectable molecules that indicate the presence of possible microbes. Yarok detects and directly identifies individual microbial cells.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Yarok’s approach is it is usable with off-the-shelf lab equipment, unlike other competitors who have extensive hardware that requires more skills to use and also costs more money to manage.
There is a constant stream of massive foodborne illness outbreaks. In January 2018, there was a Listeria outbreak in South Africa that left 200 dead and hundreds more sick. 200 innocent human lives were taken, and hundreds of people suffered from fevers, muscle aches, and excruciating gastrointestinal symptoms. These deaths and illnesses are all preventable cases.
Not only could the pain have been prevented, but the loss of human capital was preventable as well. Each of those 200 individuals had passions, aspirations, and careers. Imagine how difficult it was for any of the people, sick with listeriosis, to go to work when they could barely leave the toilet. Or think about the parents who grew ill, and couldn’t make their children breakfast or put their sons and daughters to sleep at night. Every human being impacts the world, and in order to be responsible for one another, we must do everything we can to prevent illness and promote a high quality of life. Yarok does just that.
Imagine a world free of worrying. Mother nature has a mind of its own, yet we can control things like foodborne illnesses thanks to food tech companies like Yarok.
