 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 in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum, at a really unique event. It's Food IT, Fork to Farm, not the other way around, which you might think, hmm, this doesn't make sense, but it actually does really by the consumer-driven world is hitting everything, including the food and agriculture. And we're really excited to have the guys running the show, representing the Mixing Bowl. Rob Tricey is the founder and Michael Rose partner of the Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for having us. So first off, just a little bit history on this event. It's the first time we've been here. I think he says it's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum, academe, technology, farmers from, I think New Zealand was the one I heard from the furthest place. What's kind of the genesis of this show? So my background is 15 years in mobile internet and telecom venture capital. And my wife, actually a couple of years ago, started running a cattle ranch out on the Pacific coast. And through that, I saw how little technology was being used on the ranch and amongst local food producers. I came back to Silicon Valley and none of the big food or ag players were here then, four years ago. Monsanto just set up a venture group. Unilever and Nestle had one person each here. But by and large, Silicon Valley's IT innovation ecosystem was not focused on food and agriculture. So I started the mixing bowl, it's a little bit more than just a meetup group. And we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, we should do a conference on this topic. So the first year we did it at Stanford with a partner of ours. And we thought we might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come. And it was this kind of audience, kind of a cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. And so that's when I kind of said, you know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech ag wave and see where the heck this comes to roost. So it's been four years now and please be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues, Sean and Britta, having a blast, learning a lot. Okay, so that's the conference. And what about for the mixing bowl specifically? What is your kind of charter as an organization? Well, we've got three aspects of our business. So the first one is information sharing. So doing events like this, we do themed events. We do a water tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also contribute online. So we're contributing riders for Forbes. We also have an advisory business where we work with large corporates who are seeking innovation and trying to bring innovation to the food and ag sector, trying to bring technology innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business under the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well. We know about 12 companies in our portfolio. Now it's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in Ag here. And yet, you know, we talked to Paul from Forbes. He talked about, you know, their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, not San Fernando Valley, but San Joaquin Valley is a huge producer of food. So why do you think it was so late to come here? Well, I think that there have been other opportunities and I think that there's a misperception that agriculture doesn't need IT. And I think what we've now realized is that there's a huge opportunity, whether it is an internet of things or, you know, looking at tracking and transparency. There's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system. And there are also, I think, a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding 9 billion people by 2050. But then also, if we look at food safety, we look at, you know, what the consumer wants, which is why we're here today, talking about the fork to the farm. Consumers want change in food. They want different kinds of food. They want to deliver to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. So we love being here. Good, Michael. No, I was just going to say, I think that it's like any other vertical in the other sector that starts to adopt technology over time. And even in the ag sector, you've seen in the commodity crops in the Midwest with the automation, they adopted technology early, but you've got other sectors, whether it's the specialty crops down in Salinas or people who are doing almonds, et cetera. Those people are starting to adopt technology. They're just a little further behind than you are with commodity crops. Right. It's funny, we interviewed a guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago. And, you know, they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. And obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well. So it seems kind of, you know, kind of starting to stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we had a lot of platform shows, right? It's cloud, it's edge, it's connectivity, it's big data, drones. I mean, as you look at some of these big classifications of technology that are now being applied in the ag, are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or kind of the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? I guess if you kind of think about the fact that, you know, we're kind of looking at a staircase of adoption. And one thing that we need to do is actually digitize information. And that's one of the challenges that we have. Once we digitize, then we can start to manage operation based on that data, then we can start to automate, I'm sorry, optimize, and then we can automate. So it's kind of a four step staircase that we look at. And I think in a lot of cases, even like restaurants, a lot of them are still placing orders via fax and telephone. We need to get off of that and start getting them to order online through online platforms and so forth. So at any rate, one area that I'm particularly excited about is aerial imaging for agriculture. Because I think you are instantaneously, just by doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue they're going from a data desert to a data flood. Now the challenge is moving up that staircase to go make sense of that data and then ultimately be able to give prescriptive machine learning, our artificial intelligence-based recommendations to that farmer on how to do a better job, whether that is increasing sustainability, maximizing yield, looking at pricing, any of those kind of things. Right. One of the things you hear often in every industry, right, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing kind of that classic conflict or people, do they get it pretty quickly when you can provide the data to show them things that they could never really see before? I was going to say one of the biggest issues are not issues or challenges, it's also dictating the market. Timing is the fact that the average American farmer is 65, so we now are having this turn as the kids are coming back who are tech-enabled back to the production point, back to the farm, and starting to take over farms from their parents. And their parents, of course, have just been maybe a little slower to adopt the technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is there needs to be, there are all the different pieces, whether it's the sensors, or whether it's the connectivity of data, or whether it's the storage of data, there needs to be a solution that needs to be integrated. And so we see this on the farm, getting that data off and then getting it stored and then how to use it. But then you also see this in restaurants. In the restaurants you have all of the delivery services coming in. A restaurant could have seven different delivery services picking up from their restaurant, and they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sale system. And very few of them currently will integrate with the POS. Right, right. And I think whether it's in a restaurant or on a farm, this lack of integration, API integration, making it a usable solution, as opposed to a number of features, is where we're probably going to see a lot more tech innovation. I think unfortunately what you're probably also going to see is a lot of consolidation because you've had venture capital-backed companies with solutions for food and agriculture that have their own proprietary solution, their own OS. And we know that from other tech sectors, that's not a long-term viable strategy. Ultimately, the data will be free, it will open up, it will interconnect, and we just need that to happen in food and in agriculture. And are they getting that? Cause right, the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101, right, is they have a great crop, prices go in the toilet, they have a crappy crop, prices up, but they don't have enough quantity to share in the gaming system and who's going to plant what. I mean, do they start to see kind of the value of sharing some level of data aggregation for the benefit of all? I think there's a misperception out there that farmers won't share their data. The reality is they're willing to share their data if it's providing some value to them. You know, a lot of people are going to want to charge these farmers for their data without any demonstrable benefit to using that data. And I think where you can find a solution, I think the farmers are, I'm speaking generally here, I think the other thing is, farmers know if you're not paying for the data, you probably are the product, right? And they're smart enough to figure that out. And so they don't want people misusing their data for reasons that aren't clear to them. And they've had bad experiences with that in the past. But it's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago people said, well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? It's zeros and ones, it's bits. And everybody's like, no! And they got over it, right? Right, right. But the other thing I'll say is, I think that the challenges are changing. And this is not just standard commodity ups and downs. Particularly if you look at kind of here in California, the specialty crops, we have lost access to what has been a cheap labor pool historically. And we need to automate. So now we need to go where Northern Europe has already gone in terms of automating production for specialty crops. And then things like climate change are causing different crops to grow in different seasons. And we need to be able to predict that. We need to take more of it indoors as a nice compliment to outdoor growing. So there's a lot of different things that farmers are dealing with now that they really haven't had to deal with in the future. And I think the same is true on the restaurant side. Yeah, and the predictability of understanding what your needs are going to be is going to be so important here, particularly because we need to see more automation both on the farm and production and the restaurants. I know a lot of people talk about being concerned about losing their jobs to automation or robotics. The reality is, I mean, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. Just line cooks. Just line cooks, right? So when you see someone like Chalbotix who's here who's showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the marketplace for these kind of approaches. The other thing too is you touch on such big kind of global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but I'm looking for the water track. I mean, that's got to be a huge piece of this whole thing. You have the environmental concern. Again, California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water and the rivers and the environmentalists that want to keep the salmon swimming upstream, right? These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution. And as I think somebody said in the keynote, there's no free trade-off, right? You've got to make decisions based on values and they're not simple problems. So you guys are right in the middle of a lot of big society changes. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things is this is not just a US or a California thing. Globally, things are changing. And whether it is China having more disposable income available to eat more meat and what the ramifications of that are versus other societies with more environmental challenges with the front and center of them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally. We don't really have that connectivity layer globally to share this innovation, to find the right solutions and get them addressing these market challenges. Yeah, I would say the other thing is it is complex. So they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today. And the example that somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray. Well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize the entire system. So you actually use more energy. So we use less water, but we burn more coal, more coal, more oil, whatever it may be to pressurize the system. And then if it produces a product that has more water content, you spend more energy drying it on the back end. So they're just trade-offs. I would say the other thing that we found is really interesting is people ask us if we're social impact investors. And we aren't, but we're socially comp. We have a social impact consideration about what we do. But pretty much everything that you see in this space right now from an innovative side is moving the ball forward either. It's better nutrition. It's less inputs, less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag is just by its nature having a very positive impact. Right, right. Two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro. And fundamentally what we believe at the mixing bowl is, as Michael says, at Better Food Adventures, we don't consider ourselves social impact investors. First and foremost, we want to keep financial grounding. However, I think at a core level, we all believe that IT is harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges. In food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. I mean, so the reality is, we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era. We've kind of maximized the yield that we can get there. And so now we are going to be looking at IT and how we can actually apply IT to these different challenges. And I'm going to cough now. Well, and see even something people think IT and they think highly technical and they think of cloud, they think of data connections. Well, look at food waste. The bulk of food waste that happens in our society happens at the home to the restaurant. So even if it's an iPhone app that's teaching our children how to deal with food waste in their home, it's a technical approach. It's hugely impactful, right? And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. Right, right. All right, well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us. It's really fun to come to more of an application-centric show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of cloud and big data and sensors and IoT and drones and all these things are having material impact on a day-by-day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage we're waiting for you. All right, thank you. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are at the Food IT Show in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back for the next guest after this short break. Thanks.