In this episode of "Let's Talk Farm to Fork," we're joined by Steve Statler from Wiliot, who we will be talking to about how their innovative IoT and cloud technology is improving distribution and reducing the amount of annual food loss within the fresh produce industry.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mitchell Denton: Hello, and welcome to "Let's Talk Farm Fork", the PostHarvest podcast that interviews people of interest across the food supply chain.

Today on our show, I'm joined by Steve Statler from Wiliot, who I'll be talking to about how their innovative IoT and cloud technology is improving distribution and reducing the amount of annual food loss within the fresh produce industry.

So with no further delays let's get started.

Hi, Steve. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today. How are you?

[00:00:27] Steve Statler: Oh, great. I'm actually just about to go off on holiday to Italy. So I'm in that pre-holiday frenzy, but, uh, I can't think of a better way of spending the day, than having a chat with you about some of the things we're doing. So thanks for the opportunity to do that.

[00:00:41] Mitchell Denton: Oh, no worries. Uh, whereabouts in Italy are you going?
[00:00:45] Steve Statler: We are starting off in Venice, then we're going to Florence and then we're going to Rome. So it's a very touristy route, but it's one I've done before, and my wife hasn't and neither has my son, so I'm, I'm enjoying doing that with them.
[00:00:58] Mitchell Denton: No, that'll be lovely. My wife's from Triste, which is near Venice, quite North Italy. So it's a beautiful area, I'm quite jealous.
[00:01:07] Steve Statler: It is, well, my wife has actually been spending the last uh week and a bit hiking through the Dolomites. So she's, uh, already kind of in the zone, uh, in that area, literally in the zone.
[00:01:20] Mitchell Denton: Oh, fantastic. I mean, I could spend the rest of this podcast talking about Italy, but I probably shouldn't.
So, before we get into it, I'm just gonna let you introduce yourself. Uh, tell us what you do, and if you have the time, perhaps a fun fact about yourself.
[00:01:35] Steve Statler: So, uh, first of all, I'm Steve Statler and I am responsible for central marketing within Wiliot. I joined the company back in 2017, a few weeks after it was founded. So I dunno whether that's a fun fact, um, uh, other fun facts, I played a role in a professional production of Antony and Cleopatra.
[00:01:58] Mitchell Denton: Oh, nice.
[00:01:59] Steve Statler: I played a slave that handed an asp to Cleopatra. And it was an amazing experience hanging out with a bunch of, uh, real actors who were, were on TV and that sort of thing.
[00:02:11] Mitchell Denton: That's great. In another life, uh, maybe would've gone down the theatre route. Is that, is that what I'm getting from this?
[00:02:17] Steve Statler: I think so, I think so. I, um, I don't think I'm a very good actor, so I'm, it's probably good that I stuck to the technology, but I used to run a, uh, the college radio station, that required less talent. But its also been largely automated. So I'm, I'm pretty pleased that I, uh, fell into, computer science and, and then into this.
[00:02:36] Mitchell Denton: Fantastic. Before I start to ask you questions about Wiliot's technology, I just wanna ask, would you mind describing your Pixel technology to the listeners and what goes into these postage stamp-sized chips?
[00:02:51] Steve Statler: Yeah, it's, it's a ground up redesigned IOT device. So Wiliot is a semiconductor designer. We're a fabulous semiconductor company.
So we designed this chip, which, uh, is the brains in a computer, the size of a postage stamp, which is battery-free. It powers itself by harvesting or recycling, the radio frequency energy that surrounds it.
Which allows you to make them at very low cost, very small, very thin, you know, a lot less, uh, environmentally hazardous when compared to IOT devices with batteries.
And, uh, they look a bit like RFID tags for anyone that's familiar with those, but they have the benefit of being secure.
Um, they talk to infrastructure that sometimes is already there. So the cost of deploying our product in a store can be, uh, hundreds or thousands of times less than if you had to kit out a store or a distribution centre or a tractor with the equivalent gear.
And, uh, we actually give away all of that IP and technology to people that wanna make our tags. And what we do is we provide a cloud service, which gives people access to the information that is provided by these pixels, these tiny postage stamp-sized computers.
[00:04:16] Mitchell Denton: Yeah, that's fantastic. Continuing on this thought, the technology can be deployed in a number of use cases, how is your IOT, pixel, and cloud technology improving the traceability and distribution of fresh produce within the food supply chain?
[00:04:32] Steve Statler: I mean, there's, uh, a lot of benefits to applying these tags to containers for food and other products. But before I go there, it's basically about visibility. Uh, at the moment we really, it's really hard to know what's going on in a supply chain, 99% of the supply chains in the dark.
But when you start attaching these tiny pixel tags, then suddenly you've got visibility. So pixels are called pixels because they bring light, they're small, and when you get a lot of them, you start to get this picture that wasn't visible before.
And so, you go from a supply chain that's in the dark to suddenly having an almost omniscient view of the product throughout the entire cycle from farm to store.
And you know, the practical benefits of that are massive opportunity to reduce waste and improve quality and, uh, reduce carbon footprint. So there's a lot that can be done to make that farm to fork, supply chain more sustainable simply by understanding the temperature and location of the product.
From the point that it's pulled out of the ground or, or picked off the vine or wherever it's being harvested and going to the destination. So I can go into a bit more detail into, you know, why visibility allows you to reduce waste and, uh...
[00:06:03] Mitchell Denton: Please do.
[00:06:04] Steve Statler: Yeah, so, I mean, it's, it's funny, it's like, all this stuff's been going on in the dark, you kind of hope that it's being done efficiently. Everyone puts the processes in place, and then you shine a light on it, or, you know, you lift up the cover and you're like, argh gosh, reality is actually not always as clean and tidy as you hoped it would be.
So what we've seen is, you know, one example is just the flow of product, harvesting and so forth, it's not a gradual process. It all gets done, you know, within a short period of time.
So we find produce gets put into packing sheds, storage areas, and this sort of ideal "first in, first out" flow of produce turns into a "last in, first out."
So, you can have perishable products sitting at the back of a storage area, whether it's on the farm in a distribution centre or even in a store. And so, you know, what should be a three day journey to the store can actually be an eight day journey. And so just that means that shelf life is really at its limit.
And, that's not good because if the stuff goes bad in the store, then you're throwing it away and writing it off. If it goes bad in the customer's home, you know, they get the strawberries home and they don't taste good. They're obviously dissatisfied and they'll start looking for another place to shop.
But that flow is just one dimension, there's a whole temperature dimension that we see, especially in cold chains in, uh, not necessarily frozen transportation of product, but these refrigerated containers.
You know, we'd like to think that it's all one temperature in there, but actually it's many different temperature zones.
And as we've started to work with more and more grocery stores and we've started tagging more and more things that go into these big containers, we're finding a lot of things that shouldn't be frozen are being frozen. And a lot of things that should be kept cool are actually much too warm.
So, I mean, one specific example, there was, uh, watermelons that are not supposed to be frozen and they weren't just frozen once they were frozen seven times.
So you can imagine what that product is like when you get it home, cut it open and you know, it's just mush and the same goes bananas. And so there's a lot, and one of the things that if you start to have this omniscient view of where everything is, the flow, the temperature, you can empower the local teams, to fix problems quickly, send messages to the person that's in charge.
Maybe the driver who's, turned off the cooling unit on the reefer container. You can do tactical things, but then, you know, you, you can still get amazing information that allows you to sort and reorder the product before it goes onto the shelf.
Rather than doing first in, first out, which is, uh, very often seen as the ideal, you can actually do ripest first. So, something that may have been in the supply chain for three days, but has been exposed to quite high temperatures, maybe you want to get that on the shelf before something that's been in the supply chain for four days, but has been kept at, you know, like a really good temperature control level.
So those are some of the things that you can do, and then net result of that is less waste. And if you can eliminate waste, then you are essentially shrinking your carbon footprint and becoming more profitable at the same time.
[00:09:33] Mitchell Denton: Yeah, absolutely. So I see that there are both battery-free and battery-assisted pixels. Could you please explain the points or difference between the two?
[00:09:43] Steve Statler: Yes. So, uh, size, battery free. There's no battery, so it tends to be smaller, battery free tags are the size of a postage stamp. When we add a printed battery to the chip that we have, it does make it bigger. It becomes about two thirds, the size of a business card.
And so there's a size difference, there's a cost difference. So, uh, our battery free pixels, by the end of next year, they'll be less than 10 cents. Our hope is that the battery assisted pixels will be round about a dollar in that timeframe.
So, you add the battery and it definitely makes it more expensive, but it has the advantage that you don't have to worry about there being radio waves to harvest energy from.
So we frequently get the question, "I'm on a desert island. I'm in the middle of nowhere. There's no radio energy to harvest, will your product work?"
And the answer is, well, no, it won't. If it's battery free, but if you have a battery assisted pixel, should you wish to start doing serialisation of your supply chain on a desert island, it will work.
So that is, you know, really the benefit and, they're both two different tools in the kit bag for people to use, to, uh, get visibility of, uh, of, of assets.
[00:11:00] Mitchell Denton: So I assume the battery assisted pixels would go on more of those like long haul journeys through the supply chain? Would, would they go through like shipments and things like that?
[00:11:10] Steve Statler: Well, actually, I mean, you can put the battery free pixels in there, and in some ways they're very suited to that, but you do need to have a radio device that is broadcasting some Bluetooth energy, or other kinds of energy. And is, is configured to read the tag as well.
And that kind of dishing out the energy as well as reading it, it's a hurdle, especially in the early days, but we're getting more and more companies that make devices that are making them work with Wiliot, is the, uh, tagline that we use.
And in the future, 6G has been announced, and some of the feature sets include, basically what we are doing. So we see a future where basically every radio device, uh, will work with ambient tags like ours. And so that will be less of a concern.
The place where we see the battery assisted tag work best is where your crowdsourcing. It's not in a, in a supermarket that's owned by the person that's doing the tagging, uh, and the person that's doing the tagging wants the tags to be readable in every supermarket there is.
And, you know, realistically not every supermarket is gonna have the devices that energize and read our tags. So in situations like that, where you're crowdsourcing, use cases like, uh, merchandising compliance, which has the sign that's advertising the, uh, uh, labor day promotion been put out and 50% of the time, it's not.
In, in cases like that, where you want anyone with a phone to read a tag randomly in any place, then that's the place where this battery assisted pixel or tag really comes to the fore.
[00:12:53] Mitchell Denton: Yeah. Fantastic. So have there been any exciting partnerships that have been formulated through getting your technology across the farm to fork journey?
[00:13:02] Steve Statler: Many many, I mean, part of it is, you know, the retailer themselves becomes a partner because they're at the apex of a supply chain that includes farmers and distributors and so forth.
But, in terms of our scale, we're a startup, we're 150 people, we're well funded. We had a soft bank invested $200 million, uh, in our company, Amazon, PepsiCo are investors.
But, you know, we're still very small relative to the giants of the smart tag industry. Uh, Avery Dennison is the largest, and they are, they're also one of our investors.
But they also have massive production capability and a huge partner network of companies that take inlays, the kind of the core of these smart tags and finish them off with different conversions that might be resistant to, uh, moisture and all these other things.
So, seeing our core technology embraced by companies like that and other, the WiFi access point vendors, the people that make those radio devices, uh, companies like Cisco, and Aruba and, Juniper Mist, who make a lot of the infrastructure.
Those are the partnerships that get me really excited because therein lies the ability to scale.
And that's what every startup wants to do, that's wanting to change the world and, and, and we wanna change the world.
[00:14:22] Mitchell Denton: Yeah, absolutely. What's the biggest challenge Wiliot is currently facing. And how are you looking to overcome it?
[00:14:30] Steve Statler: Well, I think there's many challenges, all of them are solvable. At one end of the spectrum, human beings are not very good at changing what they do.
And if you go to someone and say, "Hey, what if you could see every item inventory in your supply chain? Would that be valuable?"
Then they'd probably say yes, it would be valuable, but then, you know, how do they get ready to absorb that? It just requires a lot of re-engineering of roles, responsibilities, processes.
And that is one of our challenges, it's yeah, this can completely transform our supply chains, make them safer, more efficient, more sustainable, but it requires change.
So our response to that is to be less ambitious and really look at optimising processes that already exist. So we've gravitated to applying our tags to returnable transport items, crates, and pallets, because if you suddenly get visibility of those you don't really have to change what you do.
You just can have a smaller pool of pallets and crates, and, you know, rather than buying 6 million, you buy 5 million and you tend to lose a lot less of them.
So that doesn't require boardroom decisions, but to really take advantage of what we do and maximise the benefit, which is, you know, less about optimising the crates and more about optimising what's in the crates, the produce. That tends to require people to change what they do and how they do it.
And that really just requires education, which is why people who do what you do are really important to us because you're helping to get the word out.
Hopefully people will listen to this and they'll give some thought to it. And, uh, you know, eventually as an ecosystem, we'll figure out that, "Yeah, this is a good idea."
And we'll all start changing the way we do what we do.
[00:16:22] Mitchell Denton: Yeah. Yeah. You, you mentioned earlier, cases of watermelons being frozen up to seven times before reaching their end destination.
I'm just wondering, what's the biggest surprise you've found in relation to fruits and vegetables, traveling through the fruit supply chain.
[00:16:37] Steve Statler: Um, just the sheer magnitude of the issues. That's like just one issue, I could reel off a litany of bad handling, problems, which none of it's malicious and it's just, know, everyone's doing their job.
And, you know, the fact that everyone's under the arrival of stuff that should be in chillers that are left for hours on the shop floor.
And I mean, there's just so many things like that. And the thing that is a little frustrating is that finding out about problems is not always welcomed, you know?
[00:17:16] Mitchell Denton: Yeah.
[00:17:17] Steve Statler: It's like, uh, ignorance is bliss and there's definitely a certain amount of that. So it's not just about technology, it's about empowering people to solve the problems.
If all this information goes to some VP in head office and they start firing out nasty grams to everyone that's got a problem, then that's gonna be problematic.
So, part of what we've got to do is think about systems that provide the information to people that can fix the problem before anyone in headquarters ever sees it.
And yeah, okay, maybe there's escalation. So there's a lot of usability, user experience, design, cultural things. So the fact that people don't want to know that there are problems is probably the thing that, call me naive, but I just thought people would wanna know, but uh, often they don't.
[00:18:05] Mitchell Denton: Yeah, absolutely. Continuing this thread, we've talked about how the supply chain is mostly in the dark, talking about traceability and transparency. What, in your opinion represents one of the main challenges in the fight against food waste?
[00:18:20] Steve Statler: I think it's the fact that our organisations are not set up to do what needs to be done. And I think, you know, what we've talked about is pretty technical. If you look at how many people would be bothered to follow along and think about this, it's it's small.
So, you know, I think getting the information to the board level, CXO level about what is possible and then having them get the right people to approach it in the right way is, I mean, those are some of the things that I think are critical to moving it forward.
And you know, the thing that has really surprised me pleasantly is that when you do talk to a chairman or a, a, a CEO, they kind of get it.
They're kind of hoping that there are some magic bullets from a technology perspective that are gonna allow them to deal with this supply chain nightmare that we're facing and, and the environmental nightmare. I mean, it was 111 degrees just up the road from me in Escondido.
This can't go on, we've gotta do something about it. And, if it's about everyone doing the right thing, then guess what nothing's gonna happen.
But what I see is the opportunity to save money and have, you know, much better tasting fruit and vegetables and throwing less away.
And so that's kind of what gets me up in the morning, that's the thing that makes me optimistic.
[00:19:43] Mitchell Denton: Talking to guests on this podcast, the COVID pandemic has either been a bit of a problem or a great opportunity for them and their business. I just wanna know, as far as Wiliot is concerned, for better or worse, has the COVID pandemic had any effect on your day to day operations?
[00:20:01] Steve Statler: For sure. Uh, and you know, it's been a mixed bag. We went for over a year of not seeing the, the R and D folks over in Israel where the chips are designed and a management team that couldn't get together.
And that had a real impact on us. But the flip side was, it's really created some huge problems that our technology is really well suited to.
So outside of the farm sector where this definitely applies, but outside of the farm sector, you know, we, we ended up doing a project to integrate our tag with those tiny vials of COVID vaccine. That would never have happened if we hadn't been dealing with the fact that temperature control of medicine is also super important.
[00:20:46] Mitchell Denton: Definitely.
[00:20:46] Steve Statler: So it's, and it's also stressed retail in a way that I think is accelerated, you know, coming to terms with what was happening already, which is this move to omnichannel buy online pickup in store. Suddenly everyone's been forced to learn how to order things online. And the old ways, just no longer are sustainable.
Uh, we see, 20% of pick requests failing, uh, when people buy online because the inventory is just so outta whack, because the old systems didn't need to be that accurate, but the new systems have to be super accurate because if I'm buying the last watermelon and I show up, and it's not there, then I'm gonna get pretty annoyed.
You know, there's only so many substitutions that someone that's getting a delivery will accept. So, it's definitely helped us from that perspective, by accelerating the visibility of problems that were gonna be surfaced anyway.
[00:21:48] Mitchell Denton: Absolutely. So is there a particular group or innovation within the industry that you're excitedly keeping a watchful eye on?
[00:21:56] Steve Statler: I mean, I think it's the retailers, because you know, they have so much power. They can set, you know, one of our largest customers. I think who's almost everyone's largest customer.
They have the ability to set standards in a way that can completely transform an industry, that's a very, um, exciting thing.
So it's, it's, it's what kind of is driving a huge amount of our hiring activity. So if anyone is interested in what I've just described, then please go to the careers page on wiliot.com because we need people to deploy this technology and, and, and make it work to satisfy those, those retailers who really the agenda in this supply chain.
[00:22:41] Mitchell Denton: Yeah great. So Steve, we are coming to a close, but before we do, I just wanted to ask what is the major point you really want the listeners to take away from this episode?
[00:22:51] Steve Statler: I think the key thing is the possibilities of what can be done, you know, start to think about if everything was online and I could see where everything was, how could I change my business? And, It's taken me years to really think through this, to the extent that I have. And I think it's a, it's a, it's a very valuable thought experiment.
And who knows, maybe you'll start up a new business or maybe you'll start up a new business inside your own business or, or, you know, maybe you'll bring in some technology that can address some of these big problems that we've been discussing.
[00:23:23] Mitchell Denton: Yeah, No, that's great. Well, that's offered today's episode of "Let's Talk Farm to Fork."
Thanks for listening, and thank you, Steve, for joining me today.
[00:23:31] Steve Statler: Oh, it's been a, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much.
[00:23:34] Mitchell Denton: If you'd like to know more about Steve and Wiliot, check out the link and the description of this episode.
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Until next time you've been listening to "Let's Talk Farm to Fork", a PostHarvest podcast.