 Melissa Tickle here, I'm an investment manager for Think Aventures, which is an early stage impact investor that invests mainly across agriculture, financial inclusion, and health. And we have two of our portfolio companies today, Chansey and Nature Lock that we'll be presenting. So just to give a little bit of context as to why we put together this panel, we've seen that many agricultural interventions in emerging markets are really focused on driving increase in productivity and yields, but at the same time over 40 percent of food is wasted in East Africa and in India, which we're also talking about today, primarily due to lack of post-harvest storage and access to market. Food waste is the largest component that's going into landfills, and one-third of all CO2 emissions and methane produced worldwide is organic waste. These challenges are only going to continue to increase as population grows and food production grows and the environmental implications and food security implications of this is something that we felt should be touched upon and wanted to bring together a few actors to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that they're seeing in this space. So with that, starting from an investor perspective, I would love, Chris, if you could give us an intro on yourself, talk about Acumen's broader investment thesis as it relates to climate and agriculture, and then more specifically with the topic I mentioned today. Great. Thanks. Welcome, folks. Associate Director of Investing in Agriculture at Acumen. Acumen at its heart is an anti-poverty organization. We invest philanthropic-backed, early-stage capital and entrepreneurs solving problems of poverty, and we couldn't, meaningfully, have a conversation about poverty without focusing on the 600 million small-holder farmers across the globe, the majority of them who are living at or below the poverty line. We also recognize that agriculture, in terms of economic development, has as much as a three-times return on impact compared to other sectors when we invest in it. So we've been investing in agriculture on that premise for a long time. We started our first agriculture investment in 2004 in Pakistan in Triptate, and since then have made 35 philanthropic-backed agricultural investments, deploying about $36 million in capital across 11 different countries, primarily focused in East and West Africa, India, Pakistan, and Latin America. We've learned a lot over those 18 years, and I was given the grace and space. So much for having me today in this session. Huh. Not yet. This is a highly interactive session, like people will cut me off. Yeah, I had space and time to dig into our portfolio when I first got to Acumen, which is really an incredible experience going back 18 years and uncovering insights about what we did, where we made mistakes, and what that could do to inform a forward-looking strategy at Acumen. And that year's worth of work now sits at the center of our forward-looking strategy and new initiative called Trellis, which will deploy $20 million of investment capital and $2.5 million of technical assistance across a four-region investment area over the next five years, early-stage equity and equity-like capital. There are four business models, central to Trellis, and I'll spare you the long description of all four for favor of sort of the last one that we talk about most, and that's most relevant to this conversation, which is something we call a value chain optimizer. And this is a business that functions in the middle of the supply chain to create additional efficiencies, in our case, essentially to drive value back up the supply chain to smallholder farmers. There's a lot of ways to sort of solve supply chain issues, but we think food waste is one of the most impactful for smallholder farmers. In emerging economies, especially access to cold storage is a huge issue and is quite dependent on access to electric grid energy, which is inconsistent. My colleague out of our India office describes on average about a four-hour window of electricity access for rural households and farmers. Food waste in emerging economies is quite different than developed economies. So here in the United States or across developed economies, we talk about food waste primarily at the end of the supply chain, wherein retail and consumer preferences are driving huge losses. But in emerging economies, we're talking about food waste in that middle part of the supply chain, either on farm, directly post-harvest, or in the aggregation of processing and cold storage. So it's no surprise then that Acumen's sort of investment thesis around this business model focuses in on those middle supply chain actors. Great, makes rational sense, but there's a lot more to it than that. We go back to our North Star poverty alleviation. We need to ensure somehow that when we make a middle of the supply chain investment, it's not exclusively enriching middle supply chain actors. But that the value created via the food loss reduction is going back up in some capacity to small to farmers. And that's nice to talk about. It's harder to do in practice. Three of the metrics we look at to try to ensure that this is happening is whether the technology extends beyond the supply chain itself to the farm level. So is the technology actually supporting additional marketable product for the farm? Are they able to save more product on their farm that becomes marketable and improves their incomes? Also, does the point of market sale move closer to the farm business? So are we able to move the point of sale and therefore the time of transport of the product from the farm to the point of sale, we're able to reduce that, make that smaller, therefore limiting the amount of food loss, respiration of fresh fruits and vegetables that could occur on that trip? And thirdly, can we create a secondary market, which we'll see in a video in a second for some of the product that isn't perfect, that's second that would add additional value to the small to farmers business. So that's sort of the lens we look at and each time we assess a business model in that space, we take that lens, we sort of overlay it as a veil across the investment to ensure, yes, the middle of supply chain actors being served, but there's legitimate value being created. We work with our lean data partner 60 decibels to measure the indeligence, the impact on the smallholder farmer community to verify and ensure that the investee we believe in and is noble, but also is promoting their business, but just to verify that what they're telling us is true of the impact on smallholder farmers. I just want to close on something exciting as well at Ackman in the sense that we have traditionally, and if there's other impact investors out here, had two primary sectors of our investment. We've had many, but two primary in energy and agriculture. And we're seeing a lot more crossover in our energy work and agriculture work, our strategic crossover here. And our agriculture work is really intended to create fundamental systems that serve a smallholder farmers. And our energy work is now coming into play in the sense that it's supercharging key components of that system in a way that create affordable, accessible and clean energy for smallholder farmers. And this really nice synergy and crossover between our two strategies and food waste is right, is a central metric to that crossover. So it's an exciting time for food waste and at Ackman. Thank you for that. And now, yeah, we're going to transition to having some of our portfolio companies that we mentioned kind of walk through their business model, how they're incorporating food waste and some of the challenges that they're seeing, and then we'll come back to in-person discussion once again. Thank you so much for having me today in this session. And I'm Tei Mokunya-Owendo, and I'm a co-founder of NatureLock Foods. And what we're doing at NatureLock is to preserve food that would otherwise go to waste by converting it into stews. We first cook it, we first pre-cook the foods with ingredients such as legumes and lentils, and then we load them with vegetables. And once we do that, it's all about the taste of the product. And then we lock that into place into a stew. And a stew would be that you rehydrate it. It's a dry brittle flake that we pack. It has a long shelf life because it's packed in a dry manner and it's got a long shelf life. And so what the consumer will do is just rehydrate it with hot water. And they're good to go and they can have their stews cooked together with an accompaniment like rice or any other starch that they would have. So the interesting part of our business model is that we can be able to preserve what foods that are at the farm level and convert that in our product development space into end products that are consumer-friendly. And we have started in Kenya. We believe that we can roll this model out because it's all about the pallets. It's all about what is available on ground level at the farmer level. And we specifically look out for what would go to waste if we didn't collect it at farm level and put it into our dried products. And then stews is where we have began, soups and stews. And what will happen is that we do have an array of different ways of recipes that we will put together in the form of meats and fruits and other types of vegetables that can go into the process. And so where we see a lot of impact, especially around vegetables, is when there's glut, there's pockets of across all African countries. There's those regions that have a lot of produce. And then there's those regions that have almost nothing and they're arid or semi-arid in some cases. And so how do we get this food that is plenty in some seasons when it's rainfall and how do we preserve that food that then have it go to the communities that don't have access to these fruits and vegetables and leggings? And at the same time, we're working with different partners to be able to come up with solutions that would also enhance fortification. Right now in the country, we're having a lot of drought and a lot of climate action that's not working. That is a crisis in the country. And so how do we engage feeding programs? How do we feed the children in schools? How do we look at the vulnerable communities and provide to them what our solution entails? And so we also are a nutrition solution for these kinds of vulnerable groups. So I'll stop there for now, but we feel that this model can be scaled up significantly across Africa. So where then we can feed ourselves with our own food from our own soils, that makes sense. Thank you so much, Stay. And Andrew, over to you. Can you also give an introduction of yourself and Chansey and then dive a little bit more into the business model? Hi everyone. My name is Andrew Wallace, co-founder and CEO of Chansey. Chansey is an insect protein company in East Africa. And what we do is we grow maggots. We solve three of the biggest issues facing humanity in the 21st century. We take food waste, which is a huge problem and we convert that food waste into protein for animal feed using a larvae called the black soldier fly larvae. In doing so, we obviously profitably upcycle it into a valuable commodity and a commodity that's alternatives are having rather environmentally ruinous effects on our rivers, seas and oceans. That is what we do. And then over to you Nidhi from, as we're asking you to give a brief introduction and then dive into the business model please. Sure. Thank you for the opportunity. At S4S, we are reducing the food wastage that at the farm gate for the small hold of farmers, whatever is the lower grade produce which would either not get the right price in the market or would get wasted. We have them process this produce and convert them into food ingredients. So we provide them end to end entire ecosystem that is required for them to process these produce to food ingredients. So starting from technology access to finance, market linkage, raw material training, everything is provided to small holder farmers to convert the produce at the farm gate. It's aggregate this produce, do quality control and supply these as food ingredients to food and beverage industry. In India, the challenge is huge. We based food worth $14 billion and the problem of food wastage is either is because of lack of infrastructure at the farm gate, not having the feasibility to preserve the food using cold storage because of lack of electricity and also challenges of small holder farmers to reach distant markets. So we help them process this produce using solar powered food dehydrators that we give to these farmers. We are working with 60,000 small holder farmers and 1,200 women micro entrepreneurs who process the produce. Great, thank you. And maybe just starting with you, how are you measuring the environmental impact of the business model and the work that you do? There are three ways in which we measure our environmental impact. First is what is the food that we prevent from getting wasted? So what is our processing capacity? Is what we are preventing from the food from getting wasted? These food products are highly perishable, so onion, ginger, garlic, turmeric, all these products. So we prevent 60,000 tons of food from getting wasted. So that is the first thing that we measure. Second is we use solar powered technology to process this produce. So our second level of environmental impact that we measure is the CO2 that we are saving from entering the environment by switching it from a traditional method like using coal or electricity to process, switching this to solar powered. So how much CO2 or electricity is what we are preventing from getting used? And the third part of our solution that we measure is what is the reduced logistics that we have in our business model? So instead of transporting fresh produce and the current supply chain moving from farmer to the market to the processor, we no longer have to transport the fresh produce. So instead of transporting 10 vehicles of onion, we now only have to transport one vehicle. So that minimum logistics, that minimum movement of logistics is what we are measuring. This is more on climate mitigation. On climate adaptation, what we see is that we are helping farmers become more climate resilient. So in Benewa, there is a short climate shock. The farmers have an alternate way of using their produce so they can process it. Also, there is a change in their cropping pattern as more and more market linkages available. They know that for perishable produce, they have a short market at the village level. They now switch from their more cash crops to more climate resilient crops and their varieties. So they switch to horticulture where they don't perceive the same amount of climates. So this is the way we are measuring our climate impact and all of this is done using our digital infrastructure. We have end-to-end digitization in our organization and at each stage of our operations, we measure this. Andrew, back to you. Would you be able to talk through how exactly you're measuring the environmental impact along the value chain? Yeah, so for every Chansey facility, we take at least 18 metric tonnes of organic waste every day and profitably upcycle that into sustainable protein for animal feed. What a lot of people don't understand about organic waste is when it breaks down in landfill, it releases methane gas and nitrous oxide, both of which are pretty ruinous for our environment. In fact, 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions comes from the food that we throw in the bin. So by converting that into protein instead of methane, we've obviously got a huge carbon offset from what we're doing. There's a lot of other environmental benefits to what we're doing. We're selling a sustainably sourced protein. What people tend to use in our part of the world is fish meal. When you consider that the vast majority of global fish stocks are threatened or critically endangered, it's great news that we can provide a protein source that is cheaper, more sustainable and better quality. But in truth, I always get a bit suspicious when people talk on about the environmental impact of their business. People that know anything about insect protein will know that it is truly circular and it is the very essence of a sustainable business. So really how we measure our impact is we track our production. The more we produce, the bigger environmental impact we have. And that's a fantastic business to be in. Maybe jumping back to Nidhi, it would be great if you could provide some more examples of the types of organizations or farmers that you're sourcing from and the opportunity that this brings to the smallholder farmer. Sure. So we source 100% from small-holder farmers who earn less than $3.5 per day. We source from 60,000 farmers. They are in our network who have access to market. The farmers who process the produce are 100% women farmers. We have them take the journey from farmers to entrepreneurs. These women are all new to credit. They were either landlifts or working as farm laborer. They have Sporty Act work opportunities. They cannot travel outside their home. They live in poverty. As men migrate to cities in search of alternate income options, women are required to run the household and also work at the farm. So for these women farmers, this is an alternate source of livelihood. So creating an entire end-to-end thing for them so that they can process where they are. Staying at their farm or staying at their home. We create small farm factories for them and aggregate the process produced that they make and supply it to food and beverage industry. These would be like your Sodex, Nestle, Capital Foods. These are our food and beverage customers and also small-holder restaurant catering industries like Indian Railways or Cloud Kitchen. So we have two types of customers. One is definitely the small-holder farmers and women of micro-entrepreneurs from whom we procure and process and other is to whom we supply which is the large food and beverage industry. 100% of our value chain which is our micro-entrepreneur partners are in poverty and we help them double down their household income and help them move out of poverty. So they earn $1,000 to $1,500 as an annual additional income and we save 60,000 tons of produce from getting wasted and 300,000 tons of CO2 annually from entering the environment. So this is a win-win situation for all. Maybe switching over to sourcing. Can you provide some examples of the types of organizations that you're sourcing ingredients from, specifically those that are sourcing food loss and the impact and opportunity that this provides to a small-holder farmer in Kenya? We're sourcing predominantly vegetables from farm to feed. Farm to feed is an organization that as we were setting off we connected and partnered immediately because we felt that we were complimenting each other and what they do is look for food in the environments around Nairobi where they will collect what would go to waste. So for example, they have farmer communities and in those communities they have a central place where once the farmers have sold what they can in the marketplace then whatever is left over and it's definitely good then they consolidate it and farm to feed will distribute it to their supplier base. So we have become a subscriber to these foods and these are wonky carrots. These are tomatoes that maybe are not the shape that the market desires and we take these and we process them into our products and we are able then to reduce on that waste. The other portion of waste that we feel or it might not be waste in particular but it does contribute to climate resilience is sourcing through the Ministry of Agriculture the varieties of the mung beans or the beans that are resilient and can grow in the semi-arid areas where only these varieties can grow. So what we are doing is creating a farmer base where we can stimulate them to grow these crops and then we can off take commercially and then the communities then can have a business model for them that will grow them and at the same time they can grow food that they can eat themselves and then in the long term we see ourselves being able to bring this model to the community level because our process is simple enough that it can be tailored to an off-grid space an off-grid place in the community level where then the transporting of the raw ingredients does not have to happen and we can bring the process to the farm level and so we can process what is going to waste so this takes care of the sensitive like vegetables or fruits that would then go to waste and cannot be transported because of the remoteness of the region again being able to assist the farmers in that way. So long-term we see ourselves going into that space as well and being a solution on the ground at farm level. Great, so we've seen a couple of great examples of portfolio companies that are working in this food waste space and just wondering if you could touch on some additional business models that you've seen whether in portfolio pipeline they are excited about. Sure, yeah, I think just a big shout out to Nidhi there who's an acumen investee her model specifically of sort of expanding the number of access point nodes into local communities is a capital expensive model but is starting to become a theme across our portfolio and the other example of that that we have most recently is a company called Promethean out of India that we invested in three years ago at a time when they designed and manufactured a bulk milk chiller specifically for the dairy industry and the primary market was a B2B model where they were selling to sort of large but fragmented dairy aggregators across India and had real impact and scale potential and we were excited about it. They came back to us this year and said we want to take that model and add micro chiller to that and this is the difference between a 2,000 liter bulk milk chiller down to a 40 to 60 liter micro chiller which has six individual tanks each 10 to 15 liters individually and what we want to do is we want to extend that down to the village level so we want similar to Needy's model to have a village level entrepreneur manage that asset we want to source directly from smaller farmers aggregate in these nodes and then create centralized aggregation facilities going forward and then they went further and said we want to make those village level entrepreneurs village level centers where they'll also offer a bundled suite of services including inputs primarily feed extension services on the farm extension services and through digital applications to support animal health and veterinary services specifically to improve animal health and milk production and milk quality on the farm and you can see it and it's true of a lot of emerging market models where the vertical integration, the necessity to bundle services together to fill multiple gaps across them is real so we're really excited about that transition for Promethean we think it's going to be an important sort of shift of their business model which will deepen and increase impact for smaller farmer communities that we're focused on the other one I wanted to bring up is an East African pipeline company that's created a lipid based coating for vegetables and fruits that can be applied directly after harvest that has the capacity to maintain quality and improve shelf life of products by up to 10 times its original value outside of cold change storage necessity so if this works at least an adjacent to cold storage if not a partial replacement of some of the cold storage needs around the world so it's those type of innovative models that Acumen with its relatively small amount of capital is really trying to uplift, invest in and drive the rest of the impact investing community to focus in on That's great, thank you for that Shifting gears a little bit we are going to hear a different perspective from Carolina Garcia who is part of ABM BEVS 100 plus accelerator program and she'll give much more of an explanation here but basically discussing how as a large corporate they're working with startups to solve many of the environmental challenges they have along the value chain but specifically post-production here in a couple seconds I'm Carolina Garcia I'm the Global Sustainability and Innovation Director for ABM BEVS and I work for an amazing initiative that's called the 100 plus accelerator an initiative that ABM BEVS launched back in 2018 to partner with startups all across the world that were solving sustainability challenges and that could help us closer our gaps so basically every year we publish a list of challenges that we're facing to reach our global sustainability goals we select startups, we give them each up to $100,000 to test and prove their solution within our value chain and after that we help them grow and scale however, two years ago already other amazing partners joined the initiative and now the 100 plus accelerator is led by ABM BEVS Colgate Palmole, Coca-Cola and Unilever and the four companies are working together to boost innovation through collaboration and based off of those challenges and call for proposals that the Accelerator puts out every year could you walk through what some of the operational challenges are for ABM BEVS and then what the goal is with the Accelerator program and the companies that come through that of course every year we have different challenges you can find all of them in our webpage and I invite you all to follow us in our webpage and in our social media and you'll get to see the progress that we're doing and all the great partnerships that we're doing with startups but more or less we have a big piece on circular economy that focus primarily on circular packaging and how can we make all of our packaging be made out of sustainable materials but also be reused and recycled we also have a big part of upcycling our waste and this is how we ended up partnering with Chance also here in the panel because they help us upcycle our organic waste produced in our breweries and actually this pilot we also did it in partnership with Unilever so they're helping us upcycle the organic waste to feed Black Soldier fly which is amazing and I'll tell you more in detail later on we have challenges around water stewardship so how can we protect our waterships but also become more water efficient smart agriculture how we can transition faster to regenerative agriculture climate action which goes all the way from how to fuel switch reduce our emissions throughout our value chain innovate with different cooling alternatives and this year we have other two categories that are very exciting for us one on biodiversity and the other one on inclusive growth so every year we will update this very thorough list with all of our subject matter experts and we try to source every year different solutions that are helping us reach these gaps That's great, thank you and how do you look to work with these companies post-acceleration program? As I was mentioning the acceleration process from our program it's super focused on delivering a successful pilot so once we select the startups we match them with a local team and together they define the KPIs and what they intend to do for the pilot program and Andrew can tell more about the experience with chance but in his case for example the pilot was about building a facility in Dar es Salaam very close to our brewery and start taking some of our spent yeast and spent grain and proving that actually these startups can actually upcycle our waste and similar to that case we do these with all the startups all across the world so the pilot usually runs for eight months or so and in parallel we also offer training and many other opportunities for the startups and the idea is that once it's done if successful we help them grow and scale to other countries or inside the same country or to another zone so in that case of chance in which I'm putting it as an example because it's here on the panel so it's easy for me we are now looking forward to scale the solution in partnership with Unilever as well to Kenya and South Africa and to other sites in Tanzania as well so once we prove that that solution is feasible it's doable, it's cost effective it's helping us drive sustainability we try to make a plan to help these solutions grow and scale and what we have seen is that more than 50% of the startups that go through the program end up working with us in the long run and are skilled and they grow with us Thank you for that and then maybe shifting over to Andrew because we do have on the panel you're just coming out of this program with funding in addition to a partner scale so it would be great if there's any additional context you wanted to add about the partnership that Carolina missed and then also if you have any advice for local organizations that are also looking to partner with a large corporate that would be great for the audience Yeah, interesting question how to work with a multinational big corporation I used to work for one and from experience I can tell there's often a huge disconnect between what's being said at the top and what's actually being done on the ground because it's such a large behemoth my my secret is to find a winner find a champion find someone in that organization that actually cares and we've heard from Carolina she's a great example of someone that is actually doing what she's supposed to be doing at a multinational and through people like Carolina they do exist at multinational as I promise you can actually get things done and so we have we've grabbed the opportunity with both hands formed a great relationship and yeah, we've been a huge success with our pilot and obviously moving forward we've shown the pilot works and it doesn't need to stop there we can continue expanding we are providing a waste management solution for AB InBev and Unilever both of whom produce a lot of waste in their process we are taking that waste and diverting it from landfill and converting it into something of that which it's win-win for everyone involved maybe wrapping up because we are towards the end of this panel just want to give some space for any of the panelists to jump in if you have any closing remarks or any advice that you would give to entrepreneurs in this sector who are actively fundraising as I know a few of you are or funders that are seeking to invest in these types of solutions so my biggest advice would be that no one organization can solve the world's challenges on its own and we need to partner all together this innovation ecosystem because it is together that we will be able to deliver successful results so for startups all across the world like the 100 plus accelerator is one platform they are many of course and look out for the others but in our case we are very welcome to have you join us in our family please follow us, please apply on the next round of applications please reach out because we are looking for these innovators and for the VCs and the investors of course startups cannot grow and deliver to big corporations like ourselves without your support right to scale so we all need to partner and work together for these startups that are innovating to build a better world you are going to be the companies of the future we have no doubt about it so count on us to help you grow and scale in this purpose Andrew or maybe anything to add that a partner with the right set of investors in our case it was admin fun and sometimes those investors can add a lot more value to you apart from the funding and the money so look at the right fitment for your organization as an investor and also what all other things that they can do as a value addition which is industry insights giving you platforms like these so definitely look at what are the other value add things that the investors would bring into the team thank you and Andrew my advice would be to entrepreneurs who are going through a capital raise or about to embark on a capital raise not all money is the same not all investors are the same in fact an investor is a little bit like a marriage once you've got them on board very difficult to get rid of them so put a lot of thought into who you are bringing into that bed because it can really make or break your business don't be in a rush to raise money from anyone and everyone think about what else they are bringing into the table do you want them in that marriage yeah I'd say I'd tell entrepreneurs to really focus on seeing where their solution lies so sometimes when we are fundraising and out of my experiences if you focus on the funds you need more than what your solution is then you might adapting your solution to what the funders require rather than what solution you are bringing that meets funding so it is good to really think through what the solution you have is and believe in it so that it is a solution that people believe because you believe and they want to support what you believe in that is much easier to fund even I think from a funder perspective and it is more sustainable because then you have holding power you have resilience you can be able to dig in when it gets hard because you really believe in what you are doing so that is really a very important ingredient great time check four minutes do you have anything you wanted to add it is hard for me to add much more than that advice and from their perspective I think their best place to make advice like that I would only add that entrepreneurs should try their best to consider scale right from the very beginning it is a much harder thing to add in later on but if you can make it in from the start and Acumen is thinking about scale beyond just top-line revenue growth we are thinking about scale of impact as well so if you can build scale of impact or scale of revenue and growth into your business model early and figure out the ways you can measure that effectively and report it out the long friendly marriage relationships with impact investors like Acumen are real and on the table and exciting so that would be the only thing I would close with thank you very much we have a couple minutes left for questions if there is anyone that has one we have some mics we can pass around hi everyone thank you for the insightful valuable conversation my name is Rami Jada I'm the CEO of FooterTech and we are building a capex light business model to upcycle any type of vegetable size stream on site into in this case edible mushrooms to extract protein ingredients my question is in the type of impact investment is it more like appealable or likeable a business model in which we try to reduce the funds required for capex or is yeah it's a great question asset heavy businesses are difficult to fund I would say but they're not at all outside of our Acumen portfolio especially when we find when you can make that asset part of the wealth generation of the smallholder farmer community we're going to look at that quite favorably in our assessment that way we have some exciting models happening in community based investments around the world where middle of the supply chain asset ownership is being passed directly to communities and farmer communities often through farmer producer organizations and in that case we're excited and looking forward to investing in that sort of capex heavy asset that way so it depends of course on the model but I don't think you should struggle if it's a core part of your model to reduce capex in the name of what your larger businesses at least from our perspective yeah I would agree I would say that there's enough and we similarly invest in different solutions some that are more capex heavy than others I would say that there's definitely enough funders out there where you just you need to know who to approach but the capital said hi my question is specifically about nature lock so my understanding is that they're able to preserve the foods but without any use of actual preservatives can you explain a little bit more about that patent pending mechanism sure so they basically have designed a way to preserve fruits, vegetables, meat, fish but focusing on vegetables right now using natural fiber so right now they're using cassava flour and basically they process the or chop up the vegetables to a certain size and then are able to implement the preservation the uniqueness is that it preserves well it's significantly less cost intensive as some other preservation mechanisms and it keeps the same flavor profile, nutritional profile and color profile as well of the product so they're starting with this product called stews day launched in Nairobi and in Kenya and then are looking to use this technology across a variety of different types of products even in like fruit flavorings for like ice cream and things that are a little bit more out market they see a huge demand for a more cost effective way to get access to that flavor