>> Narrator: From the computer history museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome to The Cube, I am Lisa Martin. We are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm event in Silicon Valley at the computer history museum. An incredible event talking with ag-tech experts, technologists, and really understanding how people that the produce the food can get together with those that are innovating technology and really improve the supply chain or the food chain. My next two guests are George Kellerman, COO and general partner of Yamaha Motor Ventures and laboratory here in Silicon Valley. Welcome George! >> Welcome, thank you. >> Great to have you, and we have Nathan Dorn, COO of Food-Origins and you're also an advisor to the mixing bowl. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Absolutely. So this is a really interesting event for us. We cover a lot of tech innovation events and looking at now even the title kind of threw me when I saw Fork to Farm. We're so used to the trend of farm to table, farm to fork, and I kept reading, is that right? One of the things is that everyone's tech-enabled, right? We've got computers in our pockets. I'd love to understand Nathan from your perspective, how are you seeing the consumer, this tech-enabled food consumer really drive the food and agriculture industry which is not only contending with demanding consumers, but environmental sustainability, climate change. How is that consumer being that influential? >> They're getting vocal with their dollar, with their pocket book, and they're able to say, "I'm buying based upon values and the values just aren't cost." So they're paying up for the opportunity to know more data behind the product and contribute to the farmer. A lot of people talk about their experience at farmer's markets. It's because of their direct relationship and the feel that they have control in their engagement, that they're really becoming more empowered. The agricultural industry is taking notice and they're starting to buy into that. >> Tell us about Food-Origins, the genesis of that in context with what you just mentioned. >> So I'm a technologist in agriculture. I've been involved in agriculture since I was a child, and recently worked in a major winery and vineyard team and then later with a berry company, and realized that most of the innovations that we brought, they lacked context of economics because we just couldn't see deep enough, more granular, and measure things that mattered from people movement to where the product actually came from, the impact on whether it was quality or not, and whether the economic-- There was economic differences. We accepted that as natural variation because a farmer's job is to grow something and make it successful. If you buy a seed and you put it in the ground and you do well and make money at it, you're going to do it again. You do more of it. Their job is if I can do this well, I'll do more, rather then reinvent it. Somebody had to take on that job of reinvention and we thought Food-Origins was a big part of that. >> So from a technology perspective, if we look at the food chain from planting to evaluating soil health and fertilizer requirements, and then the post-harvest, where are you seeing the biggest opportunities for farmers to use big data analytics, connected devices, GPS devices' sensors, to glean this information, learn from these machines, to improve from we'll say farm to fork? >> The amazing thing is there's so many great companies out there that are bringing pieces of the data, whether it's soil moisture or weather, or they're imaging, flying over my fields and telling me how healthy my plants are. But the gap is in connecting that data, going from pretty pictures that are standalone or great inventions that are standalone to this is the cause and these three attributes are the effect. You know, these three attributes lead to this effect. If I can do that, if I can make that connection, we've closed the big gap. We can create that continuous learning cycle that happens automatically within a farm, We can take this art to farming, leave it as an art, but take pieces of it and make it science and allow people to connect what soil moisture does to this product that was sold weeks later. How it affected the roots, then the plant, then the fruit, and then we can make all those connections. It's in that linkage, that's where the biggest opportunities are. >> So facilitating machine leaning-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> For the next generation farm. >> And then once you've got that machine learning, you've got the knowledge base to make those improvements, like buying the right robot for the right task, buying and having assets available at the moment they're needed, because a lot of these businesses-- Picking a berry is much different than picking a watermelon or picking an apple or a tree nut, or a piece of corn in a field. So by doing it, by having so much differences, knowing all the data ahead of time allows an innovator, a robotics company to do amazing work and make the most of their dollar asset. >> Speaking of robotics, George, Yamaha. My first thought was motorcycles. >> Absolutely. >> So tell us about Yamaha Motor Ventures. You're based here in Silicon Valley. What was the opportunity that Yamaha saw to get into the robotics space, specifically in the food and agriculture industry? >> Well when we launched Yamaha Motor Ventures two years ago, our mandate was autonomous vehicles, robotics, and industrial automation. We actually weren't looking at agriculture per se, but after meeting people like Nathan and others in the industry, it was obvious that there were opportunities for all of those, autonomous vehicles, automation, and robotics. It was just the application was a little different. Yamaha has actually a robotics division, so we have vehicles, we have robotics. Now we're looking at those platforms and technologies and looking at how we can marry them in the agricultural space. Maybe also how we can innovate new products and services. >> So in terms of adoption, what are you seeing from whether it's a generational small farm or a larger farm, where is the biggest opportunity that you see for adoption in the food chain? Is it planting, harvesting? Is it looking at drones or aerial vehicles to evaluate the health of crops? >> So I have a two part answer to that. One is people have to understand that agriculture is not just complicated. Complicated means with enough time, we could figure it out. It's complex. It's a complex system, meaning there's lots of different elements to it. We can't just assume that we can do a series of steps and it'll work, because there's going to be downstream consequences and you then have to think of those as well. It really is going to take a lot of people and a lot of different approaches, and there isn't going to be one solution or one area. You mentioned a lot of different things: drones, data collection, sensors, network connectivity, IoT. It's going to be all of those in a complex system. The system we're dealing with is complex, so the solution is also going to be complex and we have to figure out how to integrate that. It's not just enough to say here's a robot and we'll put it in the field. It's going to be well, what is the data that it's basing its decisions on and how is collecting, when? As Nathan said, knowing when to put it in the field. That's also a lot of data collection up till that point. I think actually what Nathan's focusing on is we have to start with data. We need to build that historical data where we can apply machine learning to it. We have to start somewhere, and that data is going to come from drones, from sensors, from a lot of different networks. It might just be putting sensors on the vehicles that are in the field now. >> Right. But they're connecting different kinds of data, not just GPS, but they might be collecting hyper spectral imagery to detect disease and insect infestation, the health, the vitality of the plants and the fruit. So there's a lot of opportunities, but this is not a five year solution. This is a generational, multi-generational solution that we have to come up with. >> And is it also a multi-educational step process with farms across the US to really understand how to maybe deconstruct this complexity so they can understand the value that can be gleaned? >> A lot of the farmers I talk with, they'll tell me point blank, they're not farmers. They're people who foster and help the biological system of plants growing and creating produce. They're there to facilitate that. They're not there to do that, but think about innovation as a whole. A farmer has a super multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary skill set. Whatever innovations we bring have to fit in an entire skill set of a farmer, whether it's human resources manager, chemist, biological expert, soil scientist, mechanic. It has to fit an economist. They have to be able to match all those things, so it's going to take people that want to be engaged and have a passion for changing that system and being involved in that system to help carry it to that next step I think. It's going to take people like Yamaha Ventures. >> Well I think fortunate for them that they have people like you who are leading them on the way. George and Nathan, we want to thank you so much for sharing your insights on The Cube with us today. We wish you the best of luck in ventures. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. Again, we are at the Food IT: Fork to Farm event at the computer history museum in Silicon Valley. I am Lisa Martin, stick around. We have great guests coming up next. (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.

(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live 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. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event. I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick. Jeff, this is a really interesting event. The first time we've been here with The Cube, and one of the first things I said to you this morning was "Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as "farm to fork, right, farm to table." But it's really interesting mix of investors here, people that are very educated in food and agriculture and one of the things they're focused on is connecting people who are feeding the world, billions and billions of people, with the people who are changing the world through technologies. And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm which I found really interesting. >> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl and we were talking about the Conference. I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up? "Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?" But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer and what they want to eat, like everything else, is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows is driving now what the food producers have to create. And what's interesting is they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications of those decisions upstream and downstream. And so that's a big topic of the theme here. The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors: Yamaha is here >> Yes. >> And one of the main sponsors. Google is here as one of the main sponsors. And we just had one of the opening keynotes from one of the guys from Google talking about how they've taken really just the task of feeding the employees to a much greater responsibility in both what people eat, how it gets produced, and really more sustainable longterm food kind of as a circle he called it. So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited. We've got Deans from a lot of big schools, we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha. I'm really curious to find out what they're doing in this space. And it's fun to get, you know, out of the tech infrastructure space to see what's really happening on the front lines. I really want to get into edge computing, I really want to get into cloud, data, you know, all of the themes that we follow over and over and over again, but now a real specific application. And doing some of the research, you know, we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years and we're not growing any more land. So how are those challenges being addressed with technology? How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems? And then how are the consumer driven prioritization impacting all of this? So it should be a great day. >> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum of guests on the show today. And we think of food and agriculture as one of the largest industries globally and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility feeding billions of people in a very short period of time. Having to deal with environmental sustainability, we're going to be talking about that on the program today, climate change, and also the consumer. But there's tremendous potential for big data and IOT and analytics to improve farming efficiencies from planting to weeding to fertilizing to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability. There's, you know, opportunities for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines, as well as robotics and automation. We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics, who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and I'm really curious to see how these, from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors, how Venture Capital is really seeing big data as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary, for the entire food supply, the food chain. >> Right, right. And another topic that's come up is really transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of where their food comes from, how it was raised, but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes, there's no perfect solution, right? There's always trade offs. So how are people creating values, making trade offs based on those values, and how are the food producers now being able to deliver to those values? So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day. We're going to go wall to wall. We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests, a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in. And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited. >> Alright. >> A lot of great topics. >> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.