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

“A certain mode of transportation. And you can actually look at it in really interesting ways. I mean, the way I always think about the world is that, again, I keep going back to this, all produce is seasonal and also perishable. And so you can look around the world around where produce is available at different times of year where it's able to be grown. And then you know the overall shelf life of that commodity. And you know how fast the”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes really down to transportability and transportation costs. So, for example, in the case of avocados, the price of shipping a box of avocados to China is more expensive than the box of avocados itself because of perishability, you have to air freight them in.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with perishability is really that everything is seasonal, it's also perishable, and that means that if I'm growing a particular commodity in a portion of the world that does not have access to a market where I'm able to turn that commodity into money, then it doesn't even matter if I'm growing that food. I'm not able to earn economic returns for my labor. And so what ends up happening is you end up having nature doing its thing, growing all of this produce that's inherently valuable, but because of the perishability, because of the inability to get that produce from the place that it's produced to the market where someone's actually willing to pay for it, you return none of the economic value for your labor. So it's all about market access.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing about that though is that perishability affects every single kind of produce on this planet. And that means that it's either feast or famine in most parts of the world, particularly if you only have, if you're a smaller farmer, you only grow one type of crop. So my example I always pick on is, you know, if you're a mango farmer in the developing world. I love Nagos, by the way. It's my favorite thing in the world. I think you're from South Asia.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting that you say it's a high class problem and indeed preserving fresh berries is definitely a high class problem. If the joke at the retail level is that the berry consumer spends twice the number of dollars in the grocery store as the non-berry consumer. According to Driscoll's, that's true. Wow. And so in that sense, yeah, absolutely. You can actually put numbers to it. Preserving berries is a high class problem.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to say something that's probably not very popular in this room, which is That sounds like a high class problem to me because I've been to countries where you actually don't get a lot of fruits and choice and what you eat. Like you actually can only get certain items certain times of year. And so it's certainly very useful. It's preserving food. But like, what is the benefit overall? Like when you think of the food ecosystem as a whole, like what does it really do for us?”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pesticide usage that's just required in order to get you fresh high quality produce to your table currently. The trick about what we're doing is that it's not some sort of synthetic material that nature's never seen before. We're just using the exact same building blocks that nature uses every single day. And we're simply repurposing them for a different application.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contain as many variables in that system as we possibly can. And so what you end up doing in things like strawberries in particular, really sensitive, delicate fruit, is that even before you get started, you go out and you tarp the field and you hit it with something like methyl bromide or chloropicrin or hot steam, which just carpet bombs everything that's in the soil. And now you're able to plant your fruit. And so it won't be attacked by any of those things that were out there naturally. But that leads to the ability of certain pests, certain pests and pathogens to get into that system because there's no kind of natural defenses that are out there. Fascinating. So it's really kind of interesting, you know, by solving one problem, you create other problems, long-winded way of saying there is, you know, significant amount of”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really tough. I mean, strawberries are in a really difficult position, and actually a lot of agriculture is this way, in that the way that we grow food, the way that nature produces things is through a systems approach. It's got this huge complex system, and part of the system is growing things, and part of the system is breaking down things and recycling them. And it's got this whole machinery that's built up. The problem is for us in commercial agriculture, we don't care so much about the breakdown. We don't really care about the system diversity. We just want to.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking about strawberries in particular as an example because the one thing I know about strawberries apparently have the highest concentration of pesticides of any fruit. You have to like wash it like three times and I'm OCD so I wash my strawberries like five times to like get the disgusting layers off to make it fresh and healthy.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's actually happening is what we're doing basically is taking materials from inside of that strawberry, the structural building blocks, the components that give the produce its actual structure. We're extracting those, and then we're reapplying them to the outside of the produce. And so the materials we actually apply are imperceptible.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, it's not half a banana and a quarter of a strawberry or something like that. We actually know down to the isomer what these materials are when we create these blends. We then extract those really particular subsets of materials. We turn them into powders so they're lightweight, they're low cost to distribute. And then we ship them to wherever we'd like to use them. We reconstitute them in liquid form and we dip fresh produce into that solution and we allow it to dry.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use food to preserve food, which sounds really abstract. And so to make it more tangible, effectively what we do is we take uneaten plant material. So things like stems, leaves, scrapeskins, orange peels, banana leaves, whatever is available. We blend those things up and then from those blends, we extract very particular subsets of molecules.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About Yes, I Yes, I did. Let's talk about the fact. The fact that the pitch, the graphs on their slide, this is what I noticed were color coded by the fruits. And so, okay, we're giving a lot of insider knowledge. Let me just tell our audience what the hell we're talking about, which is that you guys work with food technology and in particular one of the first products that you guys have out is a protective layer. Actually, I'll let you describe what your product is.”
2016-12-14 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source