 From the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Food IT, fork to farm, brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Food IT show at the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View, California, really an amazing show. 350 people, all kind of pieces of the spectrum from academe to technology to startups to Yamaha, who thought Yamaha was into Food Tech? I didn't think that, to startups. And we're really excited to have two of the partners from the Mixing Bowl and the Better Food Ventures, Britta Rosenheim and Shauna Day. Welcome. Thank you, thanks Jeff. So first off, congratulations on the event. What are your impressions? You guys have been doing this for a couple of years now, I think. Yeah. Better, better, better. No, I think this is great. We've had a fantastic turnout and the content's always very interesting and the interaction between the audience and the speakers is fantastic. Yeah, we just finished up a panel, IoT Internet of Tomatoes. So there's always some great conversations really going. I think we're talking about that later this afternoon. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. And it is interesting, right? Because all the big megatrends of cloud and we cover these in tech infrastructure all the time and big data and sensors and IoT and drones and these things, really all being brought to bear in agriculture from everything from producing the food to eating the food to the scraps that we donate, I guess. No, I mean, you're spot on. Some of the big macro challenges are what's driving a lot of the innovation. As you said, food scraps, but waste is a major, major challenge. Labor, certainly here in California is something that we've seen a lot of innovation around solving some of those labor pain points and certainly sort of environmental sustainability and resource management. How are we using water? How are we using our inputs? Those are a lot of the big themes that are driving interest in the sector and driving investment. So you guys are talking about some of the investment sites. You guys put on the show, but you also have an investment arm. So you're looking for new technologies that play in this space, correct? Yeah, Butterfood Ventures makes early stage seed investments. So really at kind of not ideation stage, but pretty close after that. So working with entrepreneurs and really helping them nurture them and grow into hopefully successful companies. We've made 12 investments so far. I think seven of them have stepped up to price equity around. So yeah. Excellent. And you guys have brought this architecture landscape of the innovation. We won't show this on camera because there's way too many names for you to see, but obviously you can go online. It's available for download on our website at vaccinebolhub.com. But it's fascinating. I mean, there are literally what? Dozen categories and many firms within each category per side. So I wonder if you can give us a little bit more color on this landscape because I had no idea the level of innovation that's happening in the food tech space. You just don't think about it probably if you're not in the industry. I'll let Shauna kick off. Between Shauna and I, we cover fork to farm. So Shauna covers from the farm all the way through distribution and the area that I focus is on distribution all the way to kind of consumer consumption. And so we have a nice harmony there. So we'll start at the beginning with Shauna. Looking at over 3,000 companies. So the 3,000. 3,000 between the two of our sort of databases. My coverage area is really infield technologies, hardware, software applications. So anything from sensors, drones, soil moisture, weather, crop management, farm management software all the way through to, as Brenda said, distribution. So looking at supply chain management, logistics, trading platforms, collaboration platforms. So there's a lot going on. And every time I roll out one of these technology landscapes, I'm always adding categories which is sort of representative of the way that the market is evolving. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening now in the post harvest part of this market that more investors are starting to pay attention to. We've heard more of that today's events as well. You know, sort of technologies that are focused on minimizing waste in the supply chain, making things more efficient, sort of helping shorten that supply chain so that we've got fresher food, more local options for consumers. And I've been tracking the space for the last six or seven years. And to echo Shauna's point on every time you put a new map out, you know, can you be thinking about different categories? I mean, every single year you've looked at it and the ecosystem has changed so much in terms of even how you categorize or even think of the different innovations that are kind of shaping the space. So I focus on, the way I look at my map is from in-home media consumption, discovery. So media marketing, advertising, all the way through e-commerce. So both B2B and B2C e-commerce platforms, all the way through restaurant and retail. So grocery, delivery, you know, hyper-local marketing and the like. So can you explain the crazy success of these little short food videos that are just taking the internet by storm? It's fascinating, right at the end of the media consumption. It's really something to see. Yeah, I mean, I think BuzzFeed really took the traditional food media category by surprise with, you know, they really created this new, literally, video content for consumption that is extremely addicting, short. You know, it kind of makes everything seem approachable. You know, it's kind of the bite-size version of the food network. And I'm, yeah, I find myself. The view count's on and off the shutter. You can't stop, you can't stop watching it. You know, whether I'll make it or not. You know, like the trawling potato and... So the other, the sub theme for this year's conference, right, is fork to farm. And I'm just curious, right? Cause we've seen consumerization of IT impact all the different industries that we cover. And, you know, it is really the end user at the end point that's driving the innovation back upstream. I wonder if you could speak to kind of the acceleration of that trend over time. Is it relatively recent? Or, you know, there's some specific catalysts that you've seen as you've studied the market that have really driven an acceleration of that. Do you want to start with consumer and then look back into the grower side of that? Yeah. I mean, I think you've seen kind of a long evolution since my web grocer, Cosmos, of, you know, kind of 10, 15 years ago. And, you know, people thinking, I'm never going to buy food online. You know, there's really don't have that, you know, trust level. And, you know, kind of e-commerce in general, mobile technology in general has kind of changed the consumer's expectation. And, you know, kind of purchase and consumption patterns period for all other goods. And so we've gotten to a point where there is a level of trust of, you know, if something is going to come to you in the mail, there's just a expected level of trust, or you can send it back. And so that's kind of lent itself to this food category. So I think in one way that's been kind of an overall industry shift in terms of, you know, kind of the changing expectations of the consumer. You want to push a button. You can get your shoes, your lipstick, you know, your dog toys at a push of a button. Why not your food? And so, you know, the problem with that is, you know, food is very different. You know, it either has to be hot or cold. You have the cold chain, speed, you know, the manual labor involved. Just the, you know, kind of cost infrastructure is totally different than sending, you know, a box of, you know, lipstick and makeup to a consumer. And so I think you've seen a tremendous amount of funding in this, you know, kind of on-demand delivery category. A ton of different, you know, kind of Uber for this, Uber for that around the food space. You know, meal kits. But I think the reality of running those businesses have proven to be very difficult in terms of, you know, kind of making the costs work out in terms of a business model. So- Don't they all know WebVan failed? They're all too young to probably miss the WebVan. I remember that. You know, that being said, there still is an opportunity there. You just, it's about getting to the right scale. Right. And so obviously Amazon just bought Whole Foods last week, you know, I think, you know, that there is room for a brick-and-mortar approach here. But they're, you know, I think, you know, on-demand delivery is not going away in the food category. So who can actually deliver that? Because the consumers are not going to say, oh, the business model doesn't make sense. I don't want this anymore. You know, they just don't want to pay for it. So somebody has to figure out a way to- They told us. No, the other has to be a little detailed about how far he's going to pay. And Shauna, it used to be, if we make it, they will eat, right? I guess that doesn't hold true anymore. Well, you know, it's a different adoption dynamic in the grower part of the technology adoption curve. The consumers tend to, I think, pick things up more quickly than your traditional ag player, ag stakeholder. The growers have been a little bit more tentative in terms of trying to figure out what kinds of technologies actually work. They're all of a sudden sort of confronted with this idea of data overload. All of a sudden, you know, you go from having no data to more data than you know what to do with. And that's sort of driving some of these adoption dynamics. You know, people are really trying to figure out what works, what business models are sustainable in agriculture, I don't mean sustainable from a resource standpoint, but just will that business be around in six to nine to 12 months to support the technology that's in the field. So it's been a little slower, I would say, on the production agriculture and grower side in terms of that uptake. But you know, the other challenge that I think we face in terms of those models is really the flow of data, the flow of information is still very siloed. And in order to get the kind of decision support tools and the supply chain efficiencies that we're looking for in the food system, we really need to figure out how to integrate those data sources better, what's coming out of the field, what's happening in the midstream sort of processing and then what's happening on the supply chain and logistics side before you get to that consumer who's demanding it. But there's a lot of stages of information that need to kind of harmonize before we can really have a, I think, more optimized system there. And are you seeing within the data side specifically some of the kind of traditional players like Tableau and you know, there's clearly been a lot of activity in big data for a while. We've been going to Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World for forever and ever. Are those people building ag specific solutions or are there new players that really see the specific opportunity and better position to build the analytics to enable the use of that data? I think the big IT incumbents are looking at this very, very carefully, but there are a lot of nuances to agriculture that are different from some of the other vertical industries and there's been a lot of observing from the sidelines down there, less I think kind of deployment of actual technologies until people really understand how this market is starting to shake out. I think IBM and some of those big tech players are definitely on the fringes here, but I think again we've got this challenge of how do you actually deliver value to growers so you've got all this data and you can crunch all this data. How do you present that information in a way that a grower can make a better decision about their operation? And oh by the way, does the grower trust that data? And that sort of is a challenge that I think we're still in the early innings in terms of how that, it will come that we're still in the early innings. Which is always the case, right? To go from kind of an intuition, we've always done it this way, like three generations of grandfathers that have worked this land too. Here's the data, you can micro-optimize for this, that and the other and really take a different approach. I'd say one of the challenges both on the ag side but also even on the food side at you, there's a lot of startups you meet with that are all about big data, big data, but big data really needs to be big data. So the incumbents are really the only ones that are in the position to crunch that amount of data. You can't actually get the insights when you don't have scale. And so there's a tremendous amount of companies that have a really interesting, innovative approach to collecting data, to how you can use it, and all they need is scale. But that's virtually impossible unless they're acquired by or have a partnership with, which isn't going to happen, a larger incumbent. So big data, you really need a tremendous amount of data points to actually get to something that's useful. All right, well, Shauna, Britta, thanks for taking a few minutes again. Where can people go to get the pretty download? It's a lot of logos on this thing. MixingBallHub.com, so that's available, both the ag tech landscape and the food tech landscape. All right, great. And again, thanks for inviting us to the show. Really great show, and congrats to you both for pulling it off. Thank you very much. All right, Team Britta, Shauna, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Food IT in the Computers Museum in Mountain View, California. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching.