Katherine Sizov and Jay Jordan
Courtesy of IBM
Two entrepreneurs are using data to help minimize food waste by placing sensors at different points in the supply chain.
Their company Strella aims to make the food industry more environmentally friendly while helping suppliers save money.
This article is part of “The New Creators” series, a collaboration between IBM and Insider Studios that celebrates the visionaries creatively applying technology to drive change in business.
It’s true what they say: One bad apple can spoil the entire bunch. That’s not just a metaphor; it’s a scientific fact. As fruit ripens, it emits ethylene gas, a hormone that regulates the growth of fruits and vegetables. It can also impact the speed at which this development happens: When surrounded by other fruits with ethylene, or the “fruit-ripening” hormone, fleshy fruits like apples, bananas, and peaches respond by ripening faster — and sometimes spoiling too soon.
Perhaps no two people know this better than Katherine Sizov and Jay Jordan, who created a sensor to monitor the gasses emitted as fruit ripens. Their technology is reducing food waste and saving apple suppliers money by identifying which apples will potentially spoil two months before they reach that point.
When Sizov learned 40% of all food is wasted before consumed, she set out to make a significant change in the food industry.
“It started out as basically a science project,” she said. But after piloting a few test sensors, she realized how high the demand for this type of product actually was.
“We’ve had customers tell us that their apples would have turned into applesauce if they didn’t have Strella sensors in rooms,” Sizov said.
40% of all food is wasted before it’s consumed.
Turning a science experiment into a profit
The result was Strella, which Sizov and Jordan co-founded. The company’s sensors are used at different points in the supply chain to collect data on perishable products and to put quality produce on the shelves while reducing food waste. Sizov, who is also CEO, said her team is currently working with 72% of the supply of apples and pears in the US.
“Produce is actually a very fast-paced industry because everything’s perishable,” said Jordan, now the chief operating officer of Strella. “Things move quickly and there’s an incredible amount of volume. We pride ourselves on giving people the answer of what to do, not just a bunch of data to figure out yourself.”
It hasn’t been hard for the Strella team to get people on board. No one wants to waste food, Sizov said, so growers, suppliers, and retailers have all been interested in getting involved.
“The carbon emissions on food waste are greater than all transportation combined, which is crazy because we think about cars as being a huge problem,” she said. “But the reality is it’s actually food waste. Cars are useful, but no one wants an apple to go bad.”
Apples are a largely domestic product picked in the fall. However, consumers can also get American apples in July, because they are stored in controlled-atmosphere storage facilities.
“So a packer who’s responsible for storing the fruit has dozens of storage rooms and each one is filled with like 5 million pieces of fruit, and they’re playing a little bit of a guessing game,” Sizov said. “We put our sensors inside those rooms, we monitor the fruit as it’s ripening, and we can tell about two months in advance of it spoiling that it’s going to.”
Bringing creativity to the biotech industry
“Creativity and a lot of intellectual thinking is just as much a muscle as working out.”
For Sizov, creativity begins with recognizing a large-scale problem, such as food waste, then using a novel idea or approach to tackle it.
Creativity is simply finding a new way to address something, Jordan added.
“Part of it is looking at an industry or a problem in a new light,” Sizov said. “So in our case, people have known that fruits communicate with each other. They’ve known about that for decades, but no one has really developed a technology that is actionable, that a customer can just make a decision. So in that case, we were able to kind of iterate, think about that idea, and add something new.”
Strella encourages employees to ask tough questions and then seek answers — and creativity is a critical part of the business’ culture.
“Creativity and a lot of intellectual thinking is just as much a muscle as working out is,” Sizov said. “So it requires us practicing and developing and constantly pushing.”
Learn more about Katherine Sizov, Jay Jordan, and IBM’s other inspiring new creators here.
This post was created by Insider Studios with IBM.