>> Narrator: 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 here and ready, Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are 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, "Hm, that doesn't make sense," but actually it does, really by the consumer-driven world that's hitting everything including the food and agriculture and we're really excited to have the guys running this show, representing The Mixing Bowl. Rob Trice is the founder and Michael Rose, partner, of The Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, first off, a little history on this event, it's the first time we've been here. I think you said there's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum: academe, technology, farmers, from New Zealand, I think 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, 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 had 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 as a little bit more than just a Meetup group and we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, "You know, 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 might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come and it was this kind of audience, kind of cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. So that's when I said, "You know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech, ag. tech wave and see where the heck this comes to roost." So, it's been four years now and I'm pleased to be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues Seana and Brita, and having a blast, learning a lot. >> Okay, so that's the conference. What about for The Mixing Bowl specifically, what is your 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 did a water-tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also are contributing writers 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 and innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business, out of the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well, we have about 12 companies in our portfolio. >> That's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in ag. here and yet, we talked to Paul from Ford, we talked about their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, or not San Fernando Valley, 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 there's a huge opportunity, whether it is Internet of Things or looking at tracking and transparency, there's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system and there also are a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding nine billion people by 2050, but then also we look at food safety, we look at 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 it delivered to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. >> So we love being here. Go ahead, Michael. >> No, I was just going to say, I think it's like any other vertical in any 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 that 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, etc. 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 the guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago, and they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. Obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well, so it seems kind of start and stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we go to 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 ag. are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? >> I guess, if you think about the fact that we're kind of looking at this staircase of adoption. 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 operations based on that data, then we can start to optimize, and then we can automate. So it's a four-step staircase that we look at and I think in a lot of cases, even at 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, by just doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information than they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue, you'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 or 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 real often in every industry, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing that classic conflict, or do people 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 challenges that's also dictating the market timing is the fact that average American farmer is about 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 new technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is, 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 and they need 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 restaurants, you have all of the delivery services coming in, so a restaurant can have seven different delivery services picking up from the restaurant. And they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sales system and very few of them currently will integrate with a 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 to happen in food and in agriculture. >> And are they getting that? Because the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101 is they have a great crop, crap prices go in the toilet. They have a crappy crop, price is up but they don't have enough quantity to share and gaming the system, and who's going to plant what? Do they start to see 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. A lot of people 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, 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, 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. >> It's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago when people said, "Well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? Zeros and ones, it's bits." And they were both like, "Nooo," and they got over it, 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 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 complement 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, but the reality is, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. >> Jeff: Just line cooks? >> Just line cooks, right. So when you see someone like Chowbotics who's here showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the market place for these kind of approaches. >> The other thing too is you touch on such big, global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but you know, 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, in California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water in the rivers and the environmentalists who want to keep the salmon swimming upstream. These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution, and as I think somebody said in they keynote, there's no free trade-off. 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. 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 moving front and center to them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally and 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. >> Right. >> Yeah, I would say the thing is, it is complex, so they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today, and the example somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray, well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize an entire system so you actually use more energy. So we use less water but we burn 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 backend. So there's 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 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 input, it's less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag. is just by its nature having a very positive impact. >> Right, two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro, and fundamentally what we believe at The Mixing Bowl is, as Michael said, at Better Food Ventures, 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 harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges in food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. So the reality is we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era, we've maximized the yield that we can get there. So now we are going to be looking at IT and how can we actually apply IT to these different challenges and I'm going to cough now. (Jeff laughs) (Rob coughs) >> Well, 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. And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. >> Right, right. Well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us, it's really fun to come to more of an application-centered show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of Cloud and big data and sensors and IOT and drones and all of these things are having material impact on us day by day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage, they're waiting for you. >> Thank you. >> 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 with the next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: 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 academia to technology, to start-ups to Yamaha. Who thought Yamaha was into food tech, I didn't think that. To start-ups and we're really excited to have two of the partners form the Mixing Bowl and the Better Food Ventures, Brita Rosenheim and Seana Day welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Jeff. >> So first off, congratulations on the event, what are your impressions? you guys been doing this for a couple years now I think. Bigger, badder, better? >> No I think this is great. We've has a fantastic turn out 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. >> 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 bare in agriculture from everything from producing the food to eating the food to the scraps that we don't eat I guess. >> No, 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 challenge. Labor, certainly here in California is something that we've seen a lot of innovation around solving some of those labor pain points. Certainly sort of environmental sustainability and resource management, you know, how are we using water, how are we using our inputs. Those are a lot of big themes that are driving interest in this sector and driving investment. >> Right so you guys are talking about some of the investments, like you guys put on a show, but you also have an investment arm, so you're looking for new technologies that play in this space correct? >> Yeah, Better Food Ventures makes early stage, seed investments so really 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 priced equity so. >> Excellent, and you guys have brought this architecture landscape of the innovation. We won't share this on camera because it's way too many names for you to see, but obviously you can go online. >> Seana: It's available for download on our website MixingBowlHub.com. >> It's fascinating, there are literally what, a 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. 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 Seana kick off, between Seana and I, we cover Fork to Farm, so Seana covers from the farm, all the way through distribution and the area that I focus on, distribution all the way to consumer consumption. So we have a nice harmony there. We'll start at the beginning with Seana. >> Looking at over 3,000 companies. >> Jeff: 3,000? >> 3,000 between the two of our sort of database's. 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 as Brita said, distribution. So looking at supply chain management, logistics, trading platforms, collaboration platforms, so there's a lot going on. 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 that there is 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 of that more today's even as well. Technologies that are focused on minimizing waste in the supply chain, making things more efficient helping shorten that supply chain so that we've got fresher food. More local options for consumers. >> I've been tracking the space for the last six or seven years, and to echo Seana's point on every time you put a new map out, you know we're thinking about different categories I mean every single year you've looked at it, the ecosystem has changed so much in terms of even how you categorize or even think of the different innovations that are shaping the space. 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 eCommerce, so both the B2B and B2C eCommerce platforms, all the way through restaurant and retail. So grocery, delivery, hyper-local marketing and the like. >> So can you explain the crazy success of these little, event handling, short food videos that are just taking the internet by storm? It's fascinating right? >> Yeah, BuzzFeed's tasty. >> Media consumption is really something to see. >> Yeah, I think BuzzFeed really took the traditional food media category by surprise. They really created the new, literally, video content for consumption that is extremely addicting, short, it makes everything seem approachable. It's kind of the bite-size version of the Food Network and I find myself. >> Off the chart right? >> You can't stop. Whether I'll make it or not you know, like the twirling potato and. (Brita chuckling) >> So the other, the sub-theme for this years conference is Fork to Farm and I'm just curious right. Because we've seen consumerization of IT impact all the different industries that we cover. 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. Or is it relatively recent or you know there's some specific catalyst that you've seen as you've studied the market that has really driven an acceleration of that? >> Seana: Do you want to start with consumer and then we'll get back into the grower side of that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you've seen kind of the long evolution since my web grocer cosmos of 10, 15 years ago and you know, people thinking, I'm never going to buy food online really don't have that trust level and you know kind of eCommerce in general, mobile technology in general has changed the consumers expectation and purchase and consumption patterns, period, for all other goods, so we've gotten to a point where there is a level of trust of if something is going to come to you in the mail there's just an expected level of trust or you can send it back. So that's kind of lent itself to this food category. I think in one way, that's been an overall industry shift in terms of the changing expectations of the consumer. You want to push a button, you've got your shoes, your lipstick you know your dog toys at the push of a button, why not your food. So the problem with that is food is very different it's has to be hot or cold, you have the cold chain speed, the manual labor involved. Just kind of the cost infrastructure is totally different than sending a box of lipstick and makeup to a consumer so I think you've seen a tremendous amount of funding in this on-demand delivery category a ton of different Uber for this, Uber for that, around the food space. Meal kits, but I think the reality of running those businesses have proven to be very difficult in terms of making the costs work out in terms of a business model so. >> Don't they all know why Van failed? They all probably too young to miss the Webvan and AT&T. >> Yeah, that being said, there's some opportunity there it's just about getting to the right scale. So obviously Amazon just bought Whole Foods last week I think there is room for a brick and mortar approach here but there, I think on-demand delivery's not going away in the food category, so who can actually deliver that because the consumer's not going to say, oh the business model doesn't make sense, I don't want this anymore. They just don't want to pay for it. Somebody has to figure out a way to. >> Oh that other pesky little detail About. And Seana 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 pick things up more quickly than the traditional Ag player, Ag stake holder, 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 confronted with this idea of data overload. All of a sudden, you go from having no data to more data than you know what to do with. That's driving some of these adoption dynamics. People really trying to figure out what works, what business models are sustainable in agriculture and I know unsustainable 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 silo'd 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 mid-stream 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 harmonize before we can really have a more optimized system. >> Right, and are you seeing within the data side specifically some of the traditional players, like Tableau and clearly there's been a lot of activity in big data for awhile we've been going to Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World for ever 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 you know the analytics to enable the use of that data? >> I think the big IT incumbents are looking at this very, very carefully. But there's 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 from the 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 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. That sort of is the challenge that I think we're still in the early innings in terms of of how that. It will come, but 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, you know, like three generations of grandfathers that have worked this land too, you know here's the data, you can micro-optimize for this, that and the other and really take a different approach. >> I's say one of the challenges both on the Ag side, but also even on the food side, that there's a lot of start-ups that 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 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. 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. >> Alright, well, Seana and Brita thanks for taking a few min utes again, where can people go to get the pretty download it's a lot of data on this thing. >> It's MixingBowlHub.com so that's available both the AdTech landscape and the Food Tech landscape. >> Alright great, well again thanks, for inviting us to the show, really great show and congrats to you both for pulling it off. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks very much. >> Alright, Brita, Seana, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE we're at FoodIT in the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching.