YouSaid · the spoken record

Danielle Nierenberg

lines on the record: 64
first: 2016-12-14
most recent: 2016-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And fruit that's grown And it just allows new entry points, like you said, for all different types of new players. It's democratizing access on both ends. And this is a theme that I love. But the other thing that, you know, earlier you mentioned how you can do a map of all the fruit around the world and map the times and their perishability. And it reminded me, the image that popped into my mind is this map that makes its rounds on Twitter that's really popular of countries organized by the most popular social network that's essentially a way of showing this dissolution of borders and movement through technology. And what I love about what you're describing is you can now essentially remake that map that you described of all this produce and by perishable life by shelf life and location.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And not just the best type of fruit, but the best grower, right? And fruit that's grown in regions that, for example, strawberries has grown in Watsonville and bread in Watsonville. And now you're transporting that down into Mexico to grow. That fruit was optimized for growth in Watsonville, right? That genetic variety might not be the best one in Mexico, but because doing a breeding program in a bunch of disparate places to match a local geography is so cost prohibitive, you just go with that. Produce that's better suited to the growing environment that it's actually in. You know, you can actually improve yields relative to what they'd be if they were bred in another environment.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's normal in terms, like so, I grew up part of my life in Sri Lanka. I mean, what's normal here? Apples, bananas, berries, is actually really rare there. And what's normal there is like papaya, mangoose, rambutang, all these things that people have never heard of. And some of them are just incredibly delicious and more so than anything you'd find here. You just don't get access to them. So like in some future world,”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. So they're really interesting. They're actually another branch of citrus, but you cut them open and they look like caviar pearls and each of those little pearls has a citrus flavor to it. I know that my finger limes caviar limes are cocktail limes. Okay. But they're really these incredible little citrus fruit. And the challenge with them is, you know, they brought them in the US, they grow a bunch of them. But the shelf life of these things is like five days maybe. A supply chain that only lasts five days doesn't get you into very many stores. It's just not really commercially viable. And so we've been able to extend the shelf life out to like 25 days”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To come up with these new varieties. And so one of the visions of the future that I get really excited about is the opportunity to extend the shelf life of a crop so that smaller produce variety can make it into a grocery store. And this is the same value proposition for a smaller organic grower in the United States as it is for a smallholder farmer in the developing world. Same thing with an organic farmer in the US and one crop that we worked on that we never thought we'd work on are called finger limes. And check them out if you haven't picked these things up in the store. They're natively from Australia, but they were brought into the United States about eight years ago now.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually the thing that probably gets me most excited. You know, there's a reason that if you held up a dozen different kinds of produce, that most people could name those common dozen kinds of produce. But if you think about the genetic diversity that exists on this planet, there are millions and millions of different kinds of produce. The reason that you're not able to identify them is that you don't live in a region in the world in which they're grown or you don't live in a region to which those products are able to be imported into. And so, you know, when I think about what happens is, you know, when you look at what plant breeders do basically is when they're breeding a new crop, they're looking down the list. And number one thing on their list is transportability and taste, nutrition is like level 12 or 13 on the list. It takes really significant investment for big companies to be developing breeding programs. And those breeding cycles are like eight years long. And so you need to do massive investment.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it starts. I mean, I think in the future you're going to have a fancy 3D printer in your home and how wealthy you are is going to be what type of 3D printer you have if you're really wealthy you can print the latest and greatest iPhone if you're not so wealthy maybe you can only print you know shoes or something like that”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great example I think of is this initiative a lot of people from NASA to Autodesk that I've been working on, which is bringing 3D printing to be able to like recreate entire new structures in space so that you can actually build what you need. That's like local manufacturing on crack.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, who's going to develop the HP of 3D printing with the different inks that are all from material science understanding that allows you to print a fully functional device? And we can't, we don't do that now. And maybe with the combination of laser centering, some other stuff. But if you start thinking about combining chemistry and mechanical engineering and robotics, which give you 3D printing with material science, which gives you the ink, I think the opportunities for doing local manufacturing are just kind of incomprehensible.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and they're training the people that are going to do the work. Right. I mean, all of our team, I mean, we couldn't have hired straight out of undergrad and tested them to do what they do for us now. I mean, they needed the training that came from government-supported programs to do the core fundamental science that underlies what we're doing. Yeah. For me, I think the part that I really get excited about is in the field of additive manufacturing. I mean, I look at a 3D printer now and we use them in our office. And, you know, we're extruding a thermoplastic elastomer, you know, out of a heated nozzle. And we're just basically making a structure and letting, you know, melting it and letting it dry. And I look at that and go,”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. One of the things that's really interesting about material science is unlike a lot of the other disciplines, and maybe because it is cross-disciplinary, it is the one where I still think a lot of government-led innovation funding is the most important because they are the most interested in really thinking of the next generation of materials.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would probably say probably the main breakthrough that will change a ton of technologies all across is battery technology. As if we can get a higher storage, lighter, longer lasting batteries, that will change a lot. It will change everything from drones to VR to literally every industry. But it's unclear if there will be a private company innovation or if that will be created out of a government lab somewhere.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. My skill set is around knowing what molecules can do and how to characterize them. I have no idea generally how to make them. And so without being able to connect those skill sets, people who know what to do with them and the people who know how to make them and then manufacture at scale and then do all this other stuff, it's really difficult to come together.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The challenge is you can do so many different things in materials. You can be doing the chemistry. You can do the characterization. You can be doing the measurement. You can do the property stuff. You can do structural. You can do so many different things. And I used to say, I don't care how you make it. I just need a little, have you show me the structure on paper and I can tell you what it's useful for. But that's a big problem, right? When you start talking about supply chain and building a business.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Exactly, it could be figurative or literal in this case for once. Imagine you're living in a society today and you event steal, right? It's everywhere. It's everywhere on this planet. And so although the opportunities for gain in material science are just, I think, unfathomable almost, it's incredibly difficult to do because material science is Generally, or is such an interdisciplinary field”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What material set we have available to us. I don't think it's that surprising that material science is becoming really interesting again because I view material science as bridging the gap between what's available and what's useful and how can you combine what's available to give you something that's useful and give you some new set of properties that enable some new advancement. The fruits are almost inconceivable of material science innovations. I mean, think about if someone”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, see, the funny thing to me is material science has been fundamental to us as a species. Look at how we've defined our ages. Stone Age. Oh. The Bronze Age. So great to see. Steel age, right? Silicon Age. We define our development as a species by”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, where it's not just like a tool or a future, but it is a core of a product. And I think the most exciting things in material science in general are things like flexible electronics, the future of that. I mean, to me, all these things are interconnected because the thing that held a lot of this innovation back before in the past was that there was a lack of supply chain for materials or the ability for different groups to work together or systems to rapidly prototype and then figure out how to scale. And when you have all these different companies now coming into the space, just material science being taken more seriously as a core enabler for new types of tech, it's kind of phenomenal what's possible.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started in material science as well, and I eventually moved on to more of the software because of the problem that you just mentioned, which is it's hard to iterate. And I always thought that material science was sort of confined to R&D. There was a really good time for material science, I think, a while ago with semiconductors, but I thought today it's mainly R&D. But I think because of some of the things you just mentioned, it's becoming possible to build a company based off of a material sense today more and more.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent a lot of my PhD work using transmission electron microscopy tomography to view things on really, really short length scales on nanometer length scales and really look at things in really fine detail. And the time-lapse photography for us for me feels like a different kind of microscope. It allows us to kind of view the world without time in terms of produce aging, which really has led to some really incredible realizations about the physical aging process of fresh produce that's led to some really interesting developments at the company.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But with basically the advent of, frankly, the Arduino unit, we've really been able to scale this. I mean, in 3D printing. So, I mean, all of our time-lapse systems are built with 3D printed components.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, all our entire office runs on Raspberry Pis and Arduino units that control controllers to measure different stuff. And the great thing about that is they are scalable because you just go buy another $40 computer that has a wireless card built into it that you communicate from halfway around the world, hook a couple custom-built peripherals into that, and you've scaled that system. So I think I would have agreed with you five, six years ago. Yeah.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to a major fab. That is, we are at a really incredible time in history right now where you don't have to do that for most of the stuff. You don't have to do that anymore because you can buy an Arduino unit for $12 and you can program what you used to have to solder a PCB board to do.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you have that infrastructure for characterization or rapid prototyping, do you then make a trade off in your ability to then scale things? Because then you're not using existing scaling things. I'm thinking of the analogy of semiconductors. And when people used to prototype custom chips versus going to a major fab.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a number of members of my team spent their PhD basically learning different techniques, technique development to basically access some new understanding of some fundamental set of molecules. And so I think at our core, we have this kind of respect for not just using off-the-shelf technology to get general information, but really committing to understanding and learning a new technique or developing a new piece of equipment that can help speed up some of those iteration cycles in material science. If you come by and visit our office, you'll see a large number of systems, analysis systems that we've built ourselves that we've had to make the investment of time.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's iteration cycle when it really comes down to it. You know, I love programming computers because I'll write some code and I'll get a debug error. It says you did something wrong. You need to fix it. The challenge in material science, I'm just broadly speaking about material science here is when you want to hit compile, it might mean six years of PhD work to compile the system that you might get one data set out of. And that iteration time really Kills a lot of, I think, companies that are looking at getting into materials based company.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not unlike how artists or photographers see the world differently when they paint or capture it on film. You just look at scenes very differently because you bring your craft at a very deep X-ray level.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for us in the physical realm, like nature's operating system are the laws of physics and we just want to use that system, understand as much as we can, and then take pieces and let the operating system operate on them. It feels like a different type of x-ray vision, where instead of just looking at the object and seeing, okay, that's a water bottle, knowing down to the molecule what it's made out of, why it has the properties it has, and how you could impact those properties by changing what the water bottle is made of.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should definitely. It's really incredible, but what we've been able to do basically is rally this group of incredibly talented people around this core focus of leveraged nature's operating system to solve problems that nature's solved before, basically by just blatantly copying what nature's doing.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across disciplines, chemistry, biochemistry, material science, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering. So across a wide range of disciplines, and it actually requires each of those disciplines because one discipline is looking at how do we extract these materials, how do we purify these materials, which is one discipline, how do we take and confirm what these materials are, which is analytical chemistry, how do we then combine these things in different ways to form interesting structures, that's material science, how do we analyze these things. That's, you know, more than the physics realm. How do we have enzymes make these things for us? That's biochemistry.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me to be able to sit here and abstract to the 30,000 foot level of analogy of Legos, I have to have a team of 62 very, very talented individuals composed of over 50 scientists and 15 of those are PhD scientists. All my materials.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are some of the, I mean, that's when you say that that way, it's a beautiful simpler explanation of what you're doing, but actually what you're doing is actually pretty complex and complicated. It requires a lot of hard science. What are some of the challenges you have to overcome to be able to create those Legos and building box or combinatorial innovation?”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jumped into all kinds of makeup products. Yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting future product line. Nature is provided us this incredible toolkit of different molecules that are available to us and that us as material scientists are in a fortunate position now with today's technology to be able to isolate those materials from nature, look at them as if they were a LEGO and say what would this be useful for? And if I combine it with this other LEGO and I let these things dry together, will they form a structure that could give me some really interesting problems?”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in a way, there's a lot that goes into it. And empirically, actually, this is not a new idea what we're doing, right? Monks discovered in the Middle Ages that you were able to dip apples and beeswax and they would last throughout the winter. Those are pretty incredible innovation at the time, especially considering lack of access to refrigeration.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An incredibly efficient thing. It's actually one of the only non-zero sum games that I can really think of. I think it's beautiful and elegant the way that it's been put together. But it's done pretty damn well without us for millions and millions of years. And then we came along and said, oh, nature, you've got these beautiful, well-thought-out, well thought out, you know, systems in place. And what we're going to do is we're going to, we see the mechanism that you're using to do that. We're going to develop a new chemistry or new molecule that's going to interfere with that particular machinery. The problem is that those processes that we generally interfere with are really valuable processes. That's why they've stuck around for so long. And so they're used by many, many, many different types of life forms. And so it's incredibly challenging to poison one bug without poisoning every single bug that's out there, even the good ones. What nature's done is not generate, you know, kind of a poison to kill things. It's use the exact same molecules. It's just combined them in different ways.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is my definition. But what I've landed on is for millions and millions of years, nature has used the same building blocks and it's just basically broken them down and recycled them into different forms. Very efficient things.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's just an important distinction to be made, and that classically the technologies that we employ in agriculture, I think are what I would, so I've kind of gone through this kind of mental exercise of what is a chemical And what is a molecule”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree, and it's redefining technology to mean in an interesting way. Because when I think of the typical cold chain, I remember anecdotes from companies that were doing thin film electronics and they would do like these sort of thin film disposable sensors as a way of putting really cheap RFID tags in order to tag the status of where it is in the supply chain and keep a certain temperature level and be able to monitor it continuously. And there's all these interesting, probably very useful complicated technologies in the existing system. But what you're essentially doing is bypassing that with an entirely different very natural form of technology, which brings me to my next question, which is, what is the technology in the, quote, traditional non-traditional sense that we're talking about here? Because it's kind of interesting. Like you're essentially describing”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're actually building from scratch as opposed to trying to wedge into an existing supply chain. So although it's difficult and challenging for particular reasons. The white space or the opportunities are actually really, I think, an interesting kind of proving ground for what the ultimate power of the technology really can be”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And the other, I think, interesting point around that is what we've done in the United States is that we've built up these supply chains around the intrinsic constraints of the piece of produce. And this whole supply chain has been established just understanding this is the limitation of that piece of produce. You show up in Nigeria and you give somebody a packet of material that's able to make their tomato last twice as long. They're not going how does this affect the temperature that I'm supposed to store my tomatoes during cold storage?”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, that's exactly how I think about it as well. You know, one of the ways I look at our product as well is infrastructure in a packet. And you've got really poor roads. And now you're able to get that produce a certain distance before it goes bad. Well, if you double the shelf life of that produce, it's effectively like doubling the rate that you're able to travel on that road if you kind of think about it that way.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does, but it's fascinating that you use the word compensate because, yes, technically it is a sort of compensation. But I think the interesting thread to me is that it's actually an opportunity for an entirely new system that bypasses existing systems. It's actually a way to go outside. And when you think of like the full stack startup, I mean, not to get all crazy riffy, the thing that's really interesting that makes companies like Lyft and Uber work versus the traditional taxi services companies, according to Chris Dixon's full stack startups thesis, is that you're essentially bypassing existing systems in order to do it. So it's just a really fascinating theme in general when I think about how innovation happens. Oh, yeah.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And think of it as distributing refrigerators in a packet to treat their mangoes and get an extra 10 or 15 days of shelf life out of those without needing to do all the infrastructure development necessary.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the funny thing about that, and it's actually horribly unfunny, is that that's in the US. We've got this incredible technology and incredible supply chain. And the way that we've been able to get down to a third or 40% of our produce being thrown away is that we've been able to use refrigeration. We were able to use low temperature technology to basically slow everything down inside the fruit. And that works, that's work that's gotten us to about throwing away a third if you call that working. Now, so you start talking about trying to be able to reduce losses, which can be 80, 90% of a harvest in the developing world. If you want to just piggyback off what we've done in the quote unquote developed world, you're trying to say, oh, well, everyone should just implement a cold chain. Well, that's really hard to tell a farmer to do in the developing world where there's hardly roads, let alone electricity grid, let alone the capital equipment necessary to do the refrigeration. And so I have”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's particularly ridiculous when you consider the amount of resources that go into producing that food, right? You know, the numbers are around 80% of freshwater going into irrigation, you know, all of the pesticide usage that ends up, you know, running into the water streams that's putting pesticides and fruit that we're not even eating, all the human capital that goes into it, all the fertilizer, all this stuff, and then ultimately a massive, massive amount of it's ending up in a landfill.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm super happy you brought that up, Melenka, because if you look at spoilage rates in the United States and the numbers are kind of all over the place, but they're between a third and a half of what we're growing. It's ridiculous.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, right? There's producers, you know, which is a really a large number of disaggregated relatively small farms. There's some huge, huge farming operations, but a bunch of really disaggregated small farms. And then there's a relatively concentrated number of grower shippers that typically grow some portion of the crop that they're shipping, but then they aggregate or buy from a bunch of those disaggregated growers. Then there's the grower shippers who are handling most of the transportation. And then there's retailers, basically, and that's going to be food service channel or just a general retailer. And then there's really the end consumer. There's some kind of side alleys in there and kind of different niches, but that's kind of the general organization.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's amazing, right? You think about being able to just by preserving produce an extra week be able to earn two to three times more for that exact same commodity, that's a dramatic improvement in the amount of economic value those smallholders are able to capture.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they rot and they just rot. And that's the, it's said to me once for fresh produce, the tyranny of time. And that really resonated with me because if you think about the position a smallholder farmer is in when a trader comes to them, that trader has the best leverage in the world because they know that they can just sit outside the farm until the mango's rot and then say, oh, you either sell them to me now or sorry, I'm leaving. And so the smaller farmers often left in a situation to say, well, I can either earn two shillings per mango or nothing. And what we found in talking to smallholder farmers is that if you can extend the shelf life of a mango by an extra week, they can earn an extra three to five shillings per mango. So just by...”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the Midwest or anywhere else. You're totally correct that this absolutely goes both ways. And it's actually really fortunate that it goes both ways because if you're a smaller farmer out in the middle of nowhere and you've got a thousand mangoes and your neighbor's got a thousand mangoes and your other neighbor's got a thousand mangoes, you can't sell a mango to your neighbor to save your life.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source