AURI Podcast: Preventing Food Waste in the Food and Ag Space with Real-time Sensors
Originally posted to AURI's podcast and website, which can be found here (link).
Summary:
In this episode of the Ag Innovation News Podcast, Jake Simon, CEO and Co-Founder of ConnectedFresh, explores how real-time sensors are revolutionizing food safety. He explains how their 24/7 monitoring platform leverages AI to predict issues before they occur, saving businesses from costly food spoilage. As Jake says, “We’re helping organizations move from being reactive to proactive.” This conversation covers key topics such as automated temperature logs and energy management, offering valuable insights for anyone in the food or ag sector.
Full transcript of conversation:
Host (Dan Skogen):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Ag Innovation News Podcast, presented by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute of Minnesota. I’m Dan Scogin, your host for the Ag Innovation News Podcast. Guests on this podcast shed light on innovations in value-added agriculture, highlight important voices and work that’s being done throughout the Minnesota ag sector, and educate the public about resources and organizations that support Minnesota agriculture. Today we welcome to the program, Jake Simon. Jake is from ConnectedFresh. We’re going to learn about a 24-7 monitoring platform that you might be interested in. Jake Simon, welcome to the Ag Innovation News Podcast.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Dan Skogen (Host):
Jake, let’s start with something about you, your bio, your educational background, your work background, whatever you want to share today, but let’s get to know you a little bit better. Who is Jake Simon?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
I’m from Southern California, originally, and been all around for work and stuff. I went to the University of Southern California, focused on the business side and entrepreneurship side, and then went over to Deloitte Consulting, was working with them, basically trying to work with data and sensors and analytics for some very large name companies to prevent issues from becoming problems, right? How can you identify issues before they actually occur so you can prevent the operations from having to deal with those challenges later on? So born out of Deloitte was actually ConnectedFresh. I started helping out a friend who needed to be able to see something in real-time, their refrigeration for produce, and kind of the rest is history. So now we’ve done a lot from there, but very much a through line from the technology front of sensors and tinkering around with stuff. That’s kind of been my whole background.
Dan Skogen (Host):
And your business or your platform is ConnectedFresh, so give me the elevator speech on that. What is ConnectedFresh?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
With ConnectedFresh, we’re using off-the-shelf sensors to provide 24-7 proactive monitoring. Again, identifying and flagging issues as soon as or even before they occur. So an example of that can be, as soon as you have temperature rising in a refrigerator, can you tell me as soon as that’s happening so I can go fix that before it becomes an issue for my operations? And the “or before” side of it is more towards, we’re actually using some machine learning and AI to be able to predict, can early warning signals be able to predict that that issue is going to happen, that that temperature is going to rise even if it hasn’t even risen yet? So we’re trying to give people early warning so that these things don’t become emergencies and leading to closures or food waste or anything of that sort.
Dan Skogen (Host):
Sounds like you’re on the proactive side of maintenance. Is that a fair statement?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Yeah, totally. We say all the time that we’re trying to move people from being reactive to proactive. And predictive maintenance, preventative maintenance, all these very much go hand in hand. And because it’s such a unique platform, you really get to operate from anywhere.
Dan Skogen (Host):
So where is ConnectedFresh located or how is the business put together?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
It depends on what piece of paper you’re looking at. If you’re looking at headquarters, that’s Los Angeles, Delaware C-Corp. We operate out of Los Angeles, but our team is mostly remote. It’s a model that we were familiar with much before the pandemic where we’re all Monday through Thursday, we’d be at a client site and working remotely and all this kind of stuff. So it comes kind of second nature to us and we’ve kind of built the team and the operations and the process around that. So at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter where people are. We can find the best people for the job and they don’t have to be right next to us.
Dan Skogen (Host):
So you didn’t have a real huge pivot when COVID came along. You kind of were already prepared to work remotely.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Yes, very prepared to work remotely, but COVID did definitely have a huge effect on us. We’re starting to put everything out and we had a working platform as of the end of 2019, and we were ready to, at that time, sell mostly into restaurants. As soon as basically we were really able to onboard people, COVID hit and restaurants didn’t have the capability or the time for that matter to really engage with these types of things. But yeah, as far as operating as a team, we just kept chugging along and back then kept our day jobs and then worked on this nights, weekends, all that kind of stuff. And now we’re very much full-time obviously, but yeah, it was a very interesting time for us.
Dan Skogen (Host):
A couple of weeks ago, we had a chance to sit down and just have a conversation about ConnectedFresh and how you’ve moved the program along or the company along. But you told me at that time that some of it was birthed through your participation in TechStars. Share with our listeners a little bit what TechStars is all about and what that process was for your company.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
It was a really exciting time for us. So we were in the TechStars Future of Food Accelerator, partnered with Ecolab last year in the Twin Cities, right? And so what TechStars is, it’s an accelerator program. And what that means is that businesses around a specific type of subject, for this one it’s the future of food, right? All came together in person and worked with mentors from the industry, investors, basically trying to really build a product at an accelerated rate, right? That’s why they call it an accelerator. It really allowed us to fine-tune a lot of stuff, especially for us. The platform was great. We have those capabilities at the end of the day—we’re product people, so that came second nature to us, right? That program really helped us accelerate the go-to-market side and making sure that we’re getting in front of the right person with the right messaging. And that’s the hardest part for us, is getting in front of people. But then after that, the technology kind of speaks for itself.
Dan Skogen (Host):
If an entrepreneur is listening to our podcast today and thinks, “That’s what I might need right now.” How long is the TechStar process? How do you get involved in it? How would you direct somebody toward TechStars?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
There are many different types of TechStars programs. My recommendation is, they have ones that are more general—you could be in one industry and the company next to you and your cohort is in a totally different industry doing a totally different thing. We were in one of their programs that’s focused on a more specific subject. They have ones that are focused on financial software, or future of food like this one, or different topics that are relevant to the city that they’re in. Twin Cities is really focused on agriculture and food, so it was definitely a great fit for that.
For anyone that’s interested in getting engaged with it, we highly recommend it from our experience. But it’s really what you make of it is my biggest piece of feedback. The application process is difficult. There’s a lot of people that apply, but at the end of the day, if you’re at the right point in your business, I think it can be a great accelerant. But there’s a very big difference between how much they can help impact if you already have a product versus if you just have an idea.
Dan Skogen (Host):
And how developed was your business when you got into TechStars?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
From a product side, we definitely had a full backlog of things we wanted to keep doing. We always kind of maintain that, but it was fully deployable. There were definitely things that we fine-tuned during the program that allowed us to, from a process standpoint, onboard more people faster and more effectively. But we were fully deployable. Some of the organizations in our cohort, though, they were a little earlier stage—usually past an idea, but MVP prototype kind of stuff and beyond. And some people totally pivoted during TechStars, which was really interesting, really cool to see. Hey, I’m going down this route, but actually, it may be better for us to go in a totally different direction. And there were a couple that really changed directions to different capacities during the program itself. So very interesting. I mean, it’s very hands-on. It really puts you in touch with mentors. I think the second week, we’re starting the process to meet with over a hundred mentors in a selection process of them selecting us, us selecting them, and ranking, and then we get matched. So we got a few mentors out of that, including ones from Ecolab, and it was a really great experience and perfect timing for where we were at for our business.
Dan Skogen (Host):
You may have touched on it, Jake, but I’m going to go back to it just to get some clarity. Your participation in TechStars accelerated your idea or proved out that you were moving in the right direction, opened markets, opened financing. What do you think the TechStar program did for you at the time you were involved?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Definitely all of the above, and especially with the go-to-market side and us refining our pitch and being able to talk more conversationally and focus on what’s going to resonate with that person or that organization, right? How are we positioning ourselves? So like with ConnectedFresh, there are tons of different types of sensors that we can easily onboard into the platform, right? We’re not manufacturing those sensors. They can easily be brought in. And then we do a ton of analytics, dashboards, alerts, notifications, escalation points, all this kind of stuff within our platform. And then we can also send that data to external sources as well. The benefit of that is that there’s so many different things that ConnectedFresh can do and talk to so many different types of people at one organization across departments and all this great stuff. But that’s also the challenging part—being able to summarize everything that we can be doing in something that’s more bite-sized, that anyone within the organization, depending on their role, can see the value for that. So it’s both, you know, a really good thing for us, but also one that we want to be able to do everything. But of course, you know, you need to take one step at a time.
Dan Skogen (Host):
And I want to circle back to ConnectedFresh and what you offer, kind of the purpose of your product. But through the TechStars program, if I remember right, when we had our earlier conversation, that’s really where you met AURI. Our executive director, Shannon Schlecht, was involved. We had a couple of food personnel that were involved, and really that’s where you were introduced to the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute. Is that right?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Yes. That’s exactly correct. Shannon was one of those mentors that we were meeting with as we were going through everyone. So very, very helpful, and helped us understand what are some of the more urgent needs, right? Ended up getting connected to more people from the greater AURI team, and they were very helpful in understanding, you know, what are some of the things that you see that are things that people are doing manually, or things where it’s like, hey, a sensor might be able to read this type of data, digitize it, and provide immense value just from that process, let alone the actual notifications and alerts and all that kind of stuff that comes with signaling issues as they’re occurring, right? They gave the example of leak detection, right? Leak detection can be something where, you know, it’s typically more of a facilities kind of thing. But you can certainly start understanding, is there bacteria that’s growing in an area because something is leaking, right? And that totally goes back to the food safety side, and one that, you know, we span across operations, food safety and quality, and facilities for organizations. So being able to see the power of what these sensors can do across was great, and the AURI team had some really great suggestions, because obviously you guys are very much experts in the industry that talk to a lot of people, especially with trying to solve their problems, right?
Dan Skogen (Host):
Jake, we want to circle back and get more on your company and what you do, who you do it for, and why other companies might be interested in approaching you. But I want to remind our listeners that this is the Ag Innovation News Podcast, and we’re visiting with Jake Simon. Jake is sharing a little bit about everything about ConnectedFresh, and we’re enjoying the conversation. Jake, I have to be honest, a lot of what you’re talking about sometimes goes over my head, but I’m not in the food industry, and I’m certainly not in the sensor or real-time sensing industry. So who needs your services? Let me come back to that question. Who’s a good client for you?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
To that point, our job is to make this extremely easy for people to implement and bring in as a benefit to their teams, but we don’t expect that everyone has to become an expert in this like we are, right? That’s the role that we serve for people. So we’re mostly going after, you know, I have a lot of refrigeration, for example, and I need to be able to monitor that refrigeration remotely so that someone isn’t going around physically, manually, writing the temperature down on a clipboard and relying on that sort of data, but also being able to, at any time, be able to understand what is the risk level, right? If something has gone out of range and you’re walking around taking manual logs, if you see that something’s out, how long has it been out? If you’re opening up in the morning and something’s out of temp, has it been out of temp for 45 minutes or eight hours? We’re trying to provide visibility across an organization, up and down, side to side of how are my assets working? How are my processes going? Temperature is usually, you know, kind of the slam dunk. Someone should be digitizing their temperature logs because it provides immense value across and can easily save tens of thousands of dollars if you’re able to prevent a loss, right, of having to throw food out, for example. But there’s tons of other different types of use cases, right? Everything from fully automating cool-down logs in a production setting or a kitchen setting, power consumption, doors, leaks, temperature in transit, cleanliness and scheduling and all this kind of stuff. So to go back to before, right, we really do span a lot of different types of use cases and use a lot of different types of sensors and stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re usually focused on, like I mentioned, operations, food safety and quality, and facilities. And we’re looking for things like are people experiencing equipment issues or food safety and compliance incidents, and how can we prevent those costly human errors with writing things down and that data not really flowing into the entire organization.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
So we span across as far as industries and verticals. We are focused in the greater ag and food service worlds, which includes grocery distribution centers, restaurants, of course. In Minneapolis, actually, we’re monitoring refrigerated grocery delivery vans. And so if they’re parked and they’re turned off, of course, it’s not going to start notifying you. But as soon as they turn on and they’re going out and serving food to customers, we want to make sure that those assets are correctly refrigerated so the item is food safe and reduces spoilage and all that kind of stuff. So from an industry standpoint, from a role standpoint, and from what we’re trying to solve, that’s kind of it in a nutshell.
Dan Skogen (Host):
And when I hear you go through that, it makes me wonder, is this what the industry is doing now? It’s just writing it down? Is it a manual process?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
You might be surprised at how much of this is manual today. Just to keep going on the example of temperature—by the way, temperature monitoring, we have a more advanced version of temperature monitoring, which I can get into—but temperature monitoring itself is the least differentiated thing that we do from our indirect competition. But just to focus on that one because it’s very easy to visualize: typically, you have someone, if it’s a restaurant or a distribution center, literally walking around with a clipboard and a pen, writing these things down. There’s come this wave of apps that can help you manage those types of processes and checklists and kind of stuff across your organization. But a lot of those are still manual. You’ve replaced that clipboard with a tablet, but you’re still having someone go take those records. Those types of records are, in some areas, required by law. In other areas, it’s industry norms. But with upcoming legislation and everything, it’s definitely going towards the validation step of knowing that that reading is what it is. Anecdotally, I don’t want to overgeneralize, but people have joked about, you look at those sheets with all the temperature readings from the refrigerator, and yesterday’s isn’t filled out, or tomorrow’s is already filled out. At the end of the day, the person who’s taken that log doesn’t want to be taking that log. It’s not bringing them any joy to have to go do that task. How can you refocus that person to doing things that can actually be generating revenue or helping the team in a more meaningful way than being data entry on top of early warning and all that kind of stuff?
Dan Skogen (Host):
From a business standpoint, for me, the businessman who’s thinking about ConnectedFresh, how do I know if I’m in or out of compliance or drifting in one direction or the other? How do you create a baseline? Do you do a business analysis or energy audits for potential clients to kind of get them started?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
At the end of the day, we do not want to be looked at as an expense. We want to be looked at as a net savings. And there are a lot of companies in the sensor space—kind of generalized—where they’re trying to give you a bunch of data so you have a bunch of data, but that’s not actually necessarily helpful. What’s the data that’s actually going to move the needle for me from an ROI standpoint? And there’s a lot of different levers across different types of organizations to be able to enable that, but really the focus is what is the business challenge? Going back to our Deloitte days, to be honest, that’s exactly what we were doing there: What’s the start with the business challenge, break it down, how can we use technology and apply it to give you a significant ROI? Not something that gives you two times your money back, but something that’s tenfold or 40-fold, and that’s some of the results that we’re seeing.
A lot of times people are coming to us and saying, “I need temperature monitoring,” right? I know I need that, and we’ll help them analyze what’s the ROI on it. We have online calculators on connectedfresh.com, that can… I think it’s connectedfresh.com/savings. People can just put in what they have in their operations, and it’ll tell you how much you’re potentially losing out of that. We’re not using it as a funnel tool. It’s free—you don’t have to put in all your contact information—but we’re just trying to allow people to understand what they may be missing out on that they don’t even know, right? Something like temperature, where you’ve been doing it manually for 50 years—why do I need to do it differently, right? It’s not necessarily in everyone’s mind of, oh, this can do all these different benefits, right? It’s our job to be able to educate people to help them understand this is what it’s going to be able to do for your organization, your operations, your compliance, and make things a whole lot easier and flexible and scalable long-term.
Dan Skogen (Host):
Sensors certainly were around way before ConnectedFresh. So what was the process like to develop what you’re offering?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Sensors… I mean, the term Internet of Things, IoT, you know, it may have had a big boost with Wi-Fi-connected home devices and things like that, but it’s been around for many decades, right? Everything from hardwired refrigeration probes in grocery stores and things like that. These types of systems have been around, but they have come down so significantly in cost, and the technology being wireless allows us to do a lot more with that device at the end of the day. So again, we don’t manufacture any sensors. We’re using off-the-shelf components, but they’re all surrounding this protocol called LoRaWAN—L-O-R-A-W-A-N. Basically, all you need to know about LoRaWAN is it’s super long distance and very low power consumption. So a sensor that fits in the palm of your hand easily is rated by the manufacturer to work for five to ten years on a single battery charge. And the encryption and all the data security questions that the IT department is definitely asking, right? It’s all because of the way that the protocol is built.
I can go to so many different manufacturers and pull a device that works with LoRaWAN, and it’s going to work within that same ecosystem. That’s what allows us to be so flexible and adaptable. If you need a methane sensor because you want to be able to measure the bathroom smell, for example, you can get that sensor and it doesn’t have to be from the same vendor as the temperature sensor or the energy sensor, right? They all work together in this ecosystem. This ecosystem itself—we’re partnered with AWS as their go-to-market partner for travel and hospitality, which includes industries like this. It’s an amazing technology that you don’t pull out a sensor and then you have to have an app, connect to it, and connect to your Wi-Fi and all this kind of stuff. We pre-configure the equipment, give it to you, and you hold a button down for five seconds, and it starts blinking, and that’s the entire setup process. You put it on the rack or on the wall, and that’s it. So it makes it extremely easy to deploy for teams to deploy themselves.
Dan Skogen (Host):
But as a business, if I’m having things monitored, am I getting results in nearly real time?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Oh yeah, absolutely. So all these sensors, they basically… it’s kind of a hub and spoke type of model, right? So you have this hub in the center, this gateway, and then however many sensors you have—it could be hundreds of sensors—can connect to the same gateway. So in a facility, you have one gateway, all these sensors connect to the gateway, and then the gateway itself is what connects to the internet, right? Either through Ethernet or a cellular signal, so it never even has to touch the network ever. And that’s how we get the data, right? But to your question about how fast does that train take? If you press a button on a sensor, it’s gonna show up on the dashboard in less than a second. It is near real-time.
You’re not getting temperature data like, “It’s 38 degrees, it’s 38 degrees, it’s 38 degrees.” You’re getting, “Hey, it’s 38 degrees,” and then it goes into a deep sleep. It wakes up after a set interval and then takes that reading again. And that’s what allows it to have such long battery lives on these types of things, upwards of a decade or more.
Dan Skogen (Host):
We’ve focused a lot on food today, but ConnectedFresh has other applications. Is that a fair statement?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
There are other applications, certainly, but we are very focused on the food service industry and beyond, right? But focused on food a lot. We have a lot of indirect competition, but not a ton of direct competition. From an indirect competition standpoint, yeah, you have those checklist software solutions that will give you a temperature sensor and fill a line item—very limiting long-term. So I always caution people, make sure you know what questions to ask before you get into that space.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have these generalist IoT platforms, right? It’s kind of a DIY—pull any sensor, put it in there, and you can set your high-low limits, and it’s pretty basic stuff. However, what those don’t do is the analytics that can be specific to this industry. They don’t do some of the anomaly detection that can be specific to the types of assets in this industry. And there are just advanced use cases—whether it’s advanced rules or dashboards—that you can’t replicate on one of those generalist platforms.
A great example is automated cool-down logs. You cook up some chicken in a batch, you’re cooling it in a refrigerator, and it has to reach 70 degrees within two hours and 41 degrees within four hours after that. That is a complex system of different thresholds, set points, and multi-steps to make sure that the employee going into the refrigerator is taking a probe, putting it in, and walking away. The rest of the system does everything and starts notifying people if it’s failed, then creates all the reporting out of that. But if it’s going to fail, is it on track to not reach the right temp by the right time? If you can prevent that from happening, you can reheat that food and bring it back down again or try to rapidly cool it with other means to avoid spoilage and having to throw it away for food safety.
There are advanced use cases that may look simple by the end when you see the dashboard, but there’s a lot going into those types of things that you don’t get with generalist platforms. That’s why we’ve taken the approach of focusing on the industry, solving these problems that otherwise wouldn’t be solved by generalist platforms, which work in certain situations, but not when it’s food service focused. That’s really the area where we’re trying to provide the solutions and scalability.
Dan Skogen (Host):
And if someone listening today is interested in learning more or incorporating sensors, what should they know and what questions should they be asking?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
A lot of people who can find benefit from sensors… I was mentioning across operations, food safety, quality, sustainability, facilities, and beyond—not all of these people are very technical people. You may know what sensors are and what they can do, but how do you choose? There are a lot of pieces of software out there that are adding sensors as a capability to fill a specific function, but the problem and the question people should be asking, to your point, is how flexible is the solution at the end of the day? How much of the data is my data?
As far as we’re concerned at ConnectedFresh, it’s your data. Put it in the right place. We act as a platform, but we’re not advocating for everyone in the organization to have access to another login for another app doing another thing, right? There are so many things out there. How can we plug into what you already have today to augment that with real-time data without dedicating yourself to a specific platform indefinitely?
An example is having a temperature sensor in a walk-in refrigerator. That temperature sensor, from an operations standpoint, removes the need for someone to go around taking temperatures all day. That’s huge for that person. From a food safety perspective, they’re looking at the food component, ensuring longevity, reducing spoilage and food waste. From the facility standpoint, they’re looking at the asset itself. Is it functioning properly, and what do I do if something is going wrong? And can I layer energy consumption on top of that?
If someone says, “Hey, you want to do temperature monitoring,” the problem is that’s where it starts and often where it ends. You may need temperature monitoring today, but what about tomorrow? What’s coming down the line—energy consumption, doors, fill-level sensors for inventory, trash bins, paper towel dispensers—so many different things can be connected. If you start with something that just focuses on temperature because it fulfills the core business today, you may limit yourself tomorrow. Is this future-proofing your ability to do more without having five different systems doing five different things?
Dan Skogen (Host):
That’s a great point. A lot of different directions to consider.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
A great example of this is energy consumption. Before ConnectedFresh, we were doing some projects in the industrial side. I was working on Ford’s F-150 line, trying to prevent that line from going down. How can you use the sensors and the data to predict failure before it actually happens? And in those cases, in those types of settings, there are tons of different types of sensors and early warnings that can start predicting that. And we know that this industry, the food service industry, is a little bit further behind the industrial side, but it’s following the same wave.
So you have things like energy consumption, which is beginning to be a more common conversation in the food space, but it wasn’t a few years ago. Temperature monitoring wasn’t common a few years before that. And so, we’re looking down the line and we can see trends that we’ve seen in other industries and be ready for them in this industry when people want to engage in and solve those problems.
But there’s also an element of, we don’t have to design for everything today. Having this type of structure, where it doesn’t really matter what type of sensor it is, it’s going to work on that platform and send data to other sources. The important part is, you don’t have to figure everything out today. You have this baseline that allows you to expand and adapt as you need to.
Dan Skogen (Host):
We’re running out of time, but that last comment you made, that we don’t have to figure out everything today, when you guys think about the future of ConnectedFresh, where does this go?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
One of the things that we’ve started doing a lot more is filling those capabilities for organizations. So, for example, a work order management system that looks over facilities doesn’t have real-time data today. However, working with ConnectedFresh, they can have that capability tomorrow. We have very flexible requirements, so an integration isn’t a huge thing from their end. It’s very easy for them to do and allows them to have this capability, while also building it on a platform that can also be helping a corrective action system or an organization’s own data lake or BI tools, right?
Putting this data in the right place is our mission—being an aggregator of sorts to help put that data in the right place. That’s where we see ourselves. We’re not going to create a work order management system ourselves. We’re not going to create a corrective action system or a digital checklist software. That’s not our business. We’re really focused on staying in our lane, doing what we do best, and working together with the industry.
So at the end of the day, these pieces of software—whatever they are, these third parties—they can benefit immensely from this real-time data in their existing applications, which they are experts in, and then be able to send that data anywhere for people to put it in the right place. That’s huge for us, and these walled gardens of data can’t last much longer. That’s just not something that scales well, and we’re here trying to help solve that.
Dan Skogen (Host):
Jake, you piqued someone’s interest today. Where should they go to get more information about ConnectedFresh?
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
ConnectedFresh.com is your place to go, but we are very focused on “book a demo, have a conversation with us.” We’re friendly, I promise! To your question about what people should be asking—they don’t have to decide, “Hey, I want to do this, can I buy it?” Let’s look at it and help you understand the value so we ensure it’s a successful program for you. We don’t want it to be an expense, it has to be a savings, and we can help think through that with you. So always invite the conversations. Worst-case scenario, we always get really great feedback. It’s a win-win.
Dan Skogen (Host):
Jake, thanks for spending some time with us today.
Jake Simon (ConnectedFresh):
Thank you very much.
Dan Skogen (Host):
We’ve been visiting with Jake Simon from ConnectedFresh. I want to thank him and thank you for joining us today. And thanks for listening to the Ag Innovation News Podcast presented by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute of Minnesota. Thanks to my podcast crew of one, Lisa Martinez, AURI communications manager and the editor of this production. If you want to learn more about AURI, go to auri.org.
