We hope to cultivate a clearer understanding of the technologies, organizations and producers that are working together to create a “climate-smart” future for agriculture. Speakers include executives & sustainability leaders from the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium (ESMC) (Debbie Reed), EarthOptics (Lars Dyrud), Continuum Ag (Mitchell Hora), and Vence (Kevin Silverman).

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iSelect Venture Associate Tom Bunn is joined by Dr. Brianna Stubbs of Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Dr. Thomas Perls, Director, New England Centenarian Study and Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and Dr. Christopher Rhodes of Davis, California Startup, Innate Biology.Research over the past few decades on aging and longevity has come to the surprising revelation that aging is a disease in and of itself, upstream of many of the most common causes of mortality. Breakthroughs in laboratories and clinics are being shown to stop and even reverse the aging process. During this Deep Dive we discuss the emerging technologies and lifestyle changes that are at the forefront of this exciting topic.

From fruits and vegetables, to tree nuts and flowers, specialty crops are different from other agricultural products. For one thing they are typically sold at a premium, due to their higher nutritional value and better taste. At the same time, they represent the next stage in development of the agricultural system, bringing these products to a wider range of potential customers and at lower cost.Listen to the second in our two-part series on specialty crops, in which we will highlight the startups and technologies that are changing the industry for the better.

Synthetic DNA is used in many cutting edge technologies from industrial biotech, to medicine, agriculture and beyond. However, synthetic DNA's potential has not been fully realized due to the inefficient, 30+ year old method of chemically synthesizing DNA. The current process is limited in output to relatively short DNA sequences and its purity is often less than ideal. In contrast, iSelect portfolio company, Molecular Assemblies, is pioneering a state of the art enzymatic DNA synthesis technology that can scale to produce longer synthetic DNA, which can unlock advances in many different fields.Hear about Molecular Assemblies and the end markets that its enzymatic DNA synthesis technology unlocks. We will be joined by Molecular Assemblies CEO Mike Kamdar, Codexis President & CEO John Nicols, and guests who are potential customers of synthetic DNA.

Specialty crops represent a unique class of crops and derived food products, from fruits and vegetables to tree nuts and flowers. The products produced by this industry make up a significant portion of U.S. agricultural output and represent a diverse and important source of high quality nutrition as well.Listen to the first in a two-part series examining the nuances of the specialty crop industry. In Part 1, we will focus on the industry's dynamics, challenges and opportunities, while in Part 2 we will highlight the startups and technology that are changing the industry for the better.

Value-based care is a healthcare delivery model in which providers are paid based on health outcomes and the quality of care rendered, rather than for specific services. Under this model, the quality of care supersedes the quantity of services provided. On this episode, we will examine where value-based care has been successful and discuss the challenges and opportunities with its continued adoption. Our panelists will include Blake Marggraff, co-founder and CEO of CareSignal; Vishal Bhalla, Chief Experience Officer at Parkland Health & Hospital, and others.

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Healthy soil is at the root of food quality and yield, and soil carbon is a key component of healthy soil. In fact, as the main component of soil organic matter, it is carbon that gives soil its water-retention capacity, its structure and its fertility. Interest in understanding and measuring soil carbon has increased not only as a means of improved agricultural outcomes, but to also potentially store significant quantities of atmospheric carbon in the fight against climate change. In turn, opportunities to build markets around soil carbon offsets have gained momentum. But in order for all the benefits of improved soil carbon storage to be realized, a deeper understanding of how to measure, manage & standardize it is needed. It is time for new solutions.In this episode, we will discuss the future of soil carbon and the options available to measure and manage this precious resource, as well as the marketplace solutions that might offer a solution going forward.

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In 2019 over 600,000 people died from cancer in the United States alone. One of the primary drivers behind these high mortality rates for cancer is late diagnosis. For this reason, we’re seeing increasing demand for noninvasive methods to detect cancer easily and at earlier stages. In this podcast, we explore and analyze different methods for noninvasive cancer detection from the mucus in our lungs to the blood flowing through our veins and the software in our imaging systems. The fact is, early detection of cancer is a real opportunity to improve patient outcomes and channel patients to the appropriate treatments earlier with the idea that early detection and early screening helps prevent some of these later-stage cancers and reduce the cost in our healthcare system.  There’s a strong opportunity currently due to recent advances in biomarker detection and liquid biopsy as well as advances in artificial intelligence and computer science in general that allow us to do more sophisticated work in imaging analysis. This gives us the opportunity to look at new ways to better screen patients for cancer. Right now, a lot of the existing screening methods have high rates of false positives, which can lead to great expense and unnecessary procedures. Why Early Cancer Diagnosis Matters The idea of early detection as the best, most effective approach to cancer care is really not new. As far back as 1907, the British physician Charles Child observed that cancer itself is not incurable. It’s the delay in treatment that makes it difficult to cure later on. So he pushed an early public campaign for early intervention.  Some patients whose cancers are detected and truly treated early may have better long term survival than patients whose cancers are not found until symptoms appear. Unfortunately, effective screening tests for early detection do not exist for every type of cancer, and for cancers for which there are widely used screening tests some of the tests haven’t yet been proven to reduce cancer mortality.  Still, there have been some important successes in screening and early detection.  Deaths from cervical cancer in the U.S. declined substantially after annual screenings with the pap test were introduced. And screening for colon and breast cancer have both been shown to reduce mortality from those cancers. When it comes to measuring the abilities of a screening tool, it comes down to sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity is the percentage of patients with a disease who test positive for that disease. Specificity is the percentage of patients without a disease who test negative and sensitivity and specificity live in a state of balance. When you increase sensitivity, that usually comes at the expense of reduced specificity, which could mean more false positives. Likewise, high specificity does a good job of ruling out people who don’t have the disease, but these tools usually tend to have lower sensitivity, which can mean more false negatives,  Screening tests, in general, tend to have high sensitivity to avoid missing potential disease, while diagnostics tend to have high specificity so that they really understand true negatives.  This matters, because cancer is an enormous industry. Cancers are the second leading cause of death behind heart disease. More than 1.7 million people have been diagnosed and, in 2019 alone, more than 600,000 people died. Four and 10 people in their lifetime will be diagnosed with cancer. The problem with high selectivity The tradeoff between test sensitivity and selectivity is on clear display in the diagnosis of prostate cancer. The prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) is generally used for men over age 50. The standard threshold of a PSA level is four nanograms per milliliter, so the test has a low sensitivity of 21% but a high specificity of 91%. Since the test doesn’t have high sensitivity it tends to miss patients that have cancer. But consider what happens when PSA sensitivity is increased by lowering the rate to 2.5 nanograms per milliliter. In a recent study, researchers who ran that scenario based on existing PSA test results found that up to 6 million men in the U.S. would be defined as abnormal and indicated for a biopsy under that new threshold. And that’s the challenge. When you increase test sensitivity for cancer, what you’re really doing is increasing the number of false positives. Overdiagnosis is a known problem in prostate cancer. According to some estimates, out of 1,000 men tested 240 get a positive result indicating that they need more invasive diagnostics. Of those, 100 will get a positive biopsy showing definite cancer and it’s estimated that of that 100, about 20 to 50% have cancer that would never grow, spread or harm them. At the end of the day, only one or two of these patients actually avoid death from prostate cancer as a result of the screening.  There’s a high cost — material, physical and emotional — associated with screenings that don’t have high sensitivity. And it’s a cost that innovators are working to address with today’s new, non-invasive cancer diagnostics tools. On this episode, we talk with two of them and learn more about the new developments that are changing how cancer is screened for and treated.

Many of the major medical conditions that we face in our lives share an underlying cause: chronic inflammation. In fact, it’s the single largest driver of disease and disability. For years, therapies have been aimed at treating the symptoms of chronic inflammation, but existing therapies do not act to prevent disease progression or directly treat the disease pathway without severely impacting the immune system. There stands a large opportunity to develop preventative therapeutics that tackle chronic inflammation before it leads to disease progression and to treat diseases at their source. We will break down our analysis today by discussing startups that are tackling holistic approaches, which create solutions to treat and prevent chronic inflammation, as well as systemic approaches where companies are working to use specific pathways and an organ system to develop a curative treatment for chronic inflammation. And in today’s deep dive, we’ll really explore companies that are developing therapies to prevent and cure chronic inflammation. What is inflammation? Inflammation is a process where the immune system recognizes and removes harmful stimuli, whether that’s from infection or injury and begins the healing process and a normal acute inflammatory response. We’ll see increased activity in the immune system when a threat is present and that will resolve once the threat has passed. In cases of chronic inflammation, there are factors such as social, psychological, environmental, or biological that prevent the resolution of that acute inflammation. The result? Systemic chronic inflammation. It’s essentially like a problem that never gets resolved, so it remains in an inflamed state waiting for resolution. We see this in diseases ranging from cardiovascular, to autoimmune to neurological and more. The trouble with chronic inflammation Chronic inflammatory diseases have been recognized as the most significant cause of death in the world today, with more than 50% of deaths being attributable to inflammation-related diseases. This includes conditions such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, autoimmune and neurodegenerative conditions and more. It is far more common – and deadly – than many people realize. For example, LDL cholesterol is inflammatory and often gets recognized by the immune system after it’s oxidized, which can lead to heart disease. It’s the same thing in diabetes. Several large observational studies have shown that patients with high levels of C reactive protein, which is a measurement of inflammation, are more likely to develop insulin resistance. In addition, researchers have discovered that in patients with type two diabetes cytokine levels are elevated inside fat tissue and excess body fat, especially in the abdomen. This can cause continuous chronic low levels of abnormal inflammation, which alters insulin activity kind of contributes to diabetes. Overall, chronic inflammation is a leading driver of the nation’s $3.5 trillion in annual healthcare costs. The good news is that we already know what causes most chronic inflammation. Lifestyle factors including inactivity, poor diet, harmful environmental factors, industrial toxicants and psychological stress are at the root of most of these issues. However, we’re not likely to see any decreases in these causes anytime soon. That’s because another key contributor to chronic inflammation is literally impossible to stop: aging. The aging process overall has been found to be a general inflammatory cause that involves the whole body and provokes the diseases we associate with age, including Alzheimer’s, atherosclerosis, cancer and more. New therapeutic solutions The fact is, the effects of chronic inflammation can be observed throughout life and are known to increase the risk of death. That means we really need to find strategies for early diagnosis, prevention and treatment of chronic inflammation. Existing solutions to tackle inflammation are typically focused on treating symptoms and sometimes adversely affect the immune system. Steroids are among the more commonly used anti-inflammatories and they work by suppressing inflammation and treat symptoms but do not prevent the underlying inflammatory condition. This causes patients to often become reliant on them to manage their symptoms, and this can lead to unpleasant side effects. Steroids, for example, can cause fluid retention, weight gain and high blood pressure after just short-term use. Over the long-term, patients experience cataracts, high blood sugar, elevated osteoporosis risk and more. There are alternatives, however. DMARDs (Disease Modifying Anti-Rheumatic Drugs) are immunosuppressives that are designed to slow damage to tissues or organs. By targeting the immune system, they generally interfere in combinations of critical pathways in the inflammatory cascade. Biologics are a subset of the DMARDs that are usually engineered drugs designed to block cytokines, which are the proteins needed to cause an immune response. Regardless of the solution, the market for anti-inflammation therapeutics is large and growing, expected to reach $106 billion this year. Therapeutics are valuable because they can play a large role in helping to prevent and cure inflammation before disease progression can occur. This could represent a huge decrease in the cost of our healthcare system and an improvement in the quality of patient’s lives. However, getting to this future will require new approaches to targeting inflammation. On this podcast we look at what this means for drug developers, physicians, patients and more, and what’s coming next in the world of inflammation therapeutics.

iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on early cancer diagnosis using blood-based tools. Testing patients for cancer has typically involved a tissue biopsy — collecting the cells in question for closer examination. However, these tests can be invasive, risky, costly, and painful. Liquid biopsies, on the other hand, rely on analyzing bits of tumor material that are found in bodily fluids such as blood. In this conversation with iSelect venture associate, Tom Bunn, we discuss the growing field of blood-based cancer diagnostics and how it can improve patient care by finding tumors earlier in their development. Tim Sprinkle: So, once again, we have Tom Bunn, with iSelect Fund, here to talk about this week’s Deep Dive topic. Tom, welcome.  Tom Bunn: Thanks Tim. Glad to be here.  TS: So, what did you guys learn this week?  TB: We have been seeing companies trying to tackle, early screening or diagnostics for cancer using liquid biopsies and blood. So, this week we focused on blood-based cancer screening and diagnostics tools, which will ultimately allow healthcare providers to understand, hopefully, when patients have cancer and hopefully where that cancer is in their body at a much earlier stage in the cancer development. Hopefully before it’s metastasized. TS: Interesting. And how far along is this technology right now?  TB: There are several very well-funded companies that are working on this. One is a very well-known company that spun out of Illumina in 2016 called Grail. It’s shown very good retrospective data and they’re going into the clinic for prospective data next year. So, their blood assay has shown very good data in terms of looking back at cancer patients to determine and to basically prove out which ones had cancer and which ones didn’t. The next step is really taking it into a wider cohort of patients, both with and without cancer, to be able to prospectively determine who has early stage cancer and who doesn’t. TS: And I would assume given cancer’s predominance in just the general population, the market for this sort of technology is massive. TB: It is. The estimates around how much money you can save from early diagnosis are massive. One estimate I read puts it at $26 billion a year, which is basically many more than any other therapeutic approach can promise. So if you look at where a lot of the cancer companies and R&D money has been spent, it’s really been spent on late stage options for people who are likely going to add, unfortunately, a month or two under their life. This approach is kind of really a paradigm shift in that, instead of focusing on late stage patients who we should obviously still be focusing on, the lion’s share of our work should really be around diagnosing and screening for cancer at its earliest possible stage so we can have a much better chance of curing it.  TS: The idea of curing cancer has been kind of the goal for a long time, but it’s true, if we’re not going to cure it, finding better ways to better address it in the moment is the best approach. Is that kind of where the technology is right now?  TB: I think so. I mean, the earlier the earlier we can find cancer, the better results are. If we find prostate cancer in the early to the mid stage, it’s almost 100% curable. It’s the same for breast cancer. There, there are anomalies to that rule, but generally speaking, most cancers can be cured if you solve them before a certain progression in the life cycle of the cancer.  TS: Excellent. Well, it’s really interesting stuff. Thanks very much for your time, Tom.  TB: For sure. Thanks for having me.

iSelect managing director Mark McCall recently participated in a panel discussion at the Family Office Impact Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Hosted by Gitterman Wealth Management, Family Office Insights and 5th Element Group, the event was a private gathering of 250 Family Office, ESG, Impact, and Climate Change Experts to discuss the relationship between private capital and positive social change. Mark was able to sit down with Ed Rogers, CEO of iSelect portfolio company Bonumose, to talk about the intersection of food and health, the potential impact of “healthy” sugars and the opportunities that Bonumose is seeing in the market for nutritious, natural sugars. Mark McCall: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Mark McCall. I’m a managing director at iSelect Fund. We are a venture capital firm headquartered in the Midwest. With me is Ed Rogers. He’s the CEO and cofounder of Bonumose, one of our exceptional portfolio companies. I just want to first of all say thank you again to Jeff, to 5th Element, and everyone else for this fantastic conference. I am not from a family office, but I feel like I’m in a family of 300 people right now. This is right down our alley and I love everything that’s going on here. Just a few words about iSelect. Again, we are a venture capital firm. We’re headquartered in the Midwest in St Louis. We primarily invest in food and agriculture and healthcare and life sciences, a little bit of resource efficiency as well. We have over 50 portfolio companies, and importantly we are an open ended evergreen platform, making it very accessible for investors to invest in the companies that we bring onto our platform, which is about two companies every month, to invest on a continuous basis and also to develop customized investment plans. Ed, I’m going to let you introduce the company, but one of the things I’d like to point out is the title of this session starts with “natural nutritious sugars.” I’m quite sure that most of you have not seen the words “nutritious” and “sugars” in the same sentence. So, with that in mind maybe introduce the company a little bit and perhaps give the audience a little bit of a taste of what that means. Ed Rogers: So our company is a 3- year-old startup based in Virginia and we’re focused on nutritious sugar. Right off the bat, nutritious sugar is a thing and our company has a technology that will democratize nutritious sugar, making nutritious sugar affordable for mass market adoption. It’s important to acknowledge whenever you’re talking about an alternative to regular sugar, to sucrose, which is the gold standard of sweeteners. It’s great tasting, it’s very functional and food sugar does a whole lot of things in foods beyond just bring sweetness. It provides the structure to foods. It reduces water activity in baked goods, so it helps reduce microbial contamination. It depresses the freezing point in ice cream to result in a creamy ice cream. So these are all things that sugar does: it’s great tasting, it’s functional and it’s cheap. So all alternatives are going to be judged that way at least by the consumers. So we have a process for producing rare sugars such as tagatose and allulose. They occur naturally in fruits and some grains and actually tagatose occurs in the Cacau tree, the tree that produces the bean for chocolate. But they occur in such tiny quantities that they can’t effectively be harvested. There are processes for making these rare sugars that are expensive and we’ll talk about that in a second, but what you really need to know is that they really shine when it comes to health. So allulose and tagatose do not raise your blood sugar level. In fact, tagatose has been shown in phase three clinical trials to reduce blood sugar levels. So not just not raised, but actually reduce. They are not going to cause cavities. Allulose has even been shown to break up dental plaque, so it’s good for oral health can be used in toothpaste and mouthwash. They both contribute to weight control. They are extremely low calorie. They give a sense of satiety. They don’t trick the brain into overeating. The brain thinks of them just like regular sugar, and so they’re not going to lead to overeating. And then the last one I’ll mention is gut health. Tagatose is a prebiotic, so it’s a dietary soluble fiber. It goes into the large intestine, it feeds the good gut bacteria in the large intestine and leads to all sorts of good things there. So there is a host of other health benefits that I could get into time permitting, so they’re great for you. They’re not just benign. They’re actually beneficial. Sometimes we say “beyond benign, they are beneficial.” And they also don’t taste weird. There’s no aftertaste from tasting these things. They taste very much like regular sugar. The sweetness is almost identical. They function in foods the way that regular sugar does. As I mentioned earlier to our two primary verticals are food & agriculture and healthcare & life sciences. We are seeing an extremely tight relationship between our food, our diet and our health. MM: There was a New York Times article about a week and a half ago called “Our Food is Killing Us,” and in it they cited the CDC with a statistic that there are 100 million U.S. adults, almost half the population, that are either diabetic or prediabetic. So most of those pre-diabetics don’t know that their blood sugar levels are elevated and that the number-one cause of death of mortality in the United States is diet and nutrition related and all the derivations that come from that. So we spend over a trillion dollars a year in this country alone in the treatment of chronic disease. That is a genesis from our food and our diet. What if we could shift those dollars from true at the end of cycle, treating those diseases, to the beginning of the cycle and produce a healthier diet? Healthier foods, healthier sugars in this case, and not only decrease our health care costs as we go forward, but obviously create a much healthier population. So, 90% of our investments are in food and agriculture and healthcare. We think about this every single day. And this particular company is one of our premier portfolio companies. Let’s get into the affordability side a little bit. ER: So, just to be clear, this is an existing natural sugar. It is not an artificial sweetener. It’s not a high intensity sweetener. This has existing natural sweetener sugar that’s just very difficult to access right now. And thus it’s very expensive. So one of the other things that we, and everyone else here I believe, wants to do is bring healthy nutrition to the masses, to everybody, not just those that can afford. So one of the most important things is having access to this sugar, which of course then leads to being adopted by the CPGs and being adopted by even the junk food makers. Imagine eating a candy bar that’s actually good for you. Having your kids drink apple juice, let’s say, that actually is good for you. Some of the large food ingredient manufacturers, the large corn refiners, are starting to recognize the opportunity with allulose and tagatose, but they’re using technology that is inefficient. What they do is they start with cornstarch to make allulose and that’s a multistep process. Multiple steps with extremely low yields. Tagatose is a little bit different. It actually starts with lactose, so milk sugar, but again it’s a multistep process and extremely low yields. What Bonumose does is that we do start with starch. It’s not corn but we can produce nearly 100% yields in a single step, a single conversion step. So, what we’re doing is we’re producing six to eight times the yields that the incumbent companies can do and we are eliminating processing steps and the assets that we use or the production equipment that we use is very much like high fructose corn syrup production assets. When it comes to the crystallization, it’s very much like regular sugar. And so we can, because of our high yields and our efficient process, which eliminates these processing steps, we can be cost advantaged even at small scale. But what’s really exciting is if you imagine shifting some of the specifics of shifting to supply chains for high fructose corn syrup and the manufacturing assets for high fructose corn syrup at massive volume, we could be on cost parity with high fructose corn syrup. And that’s when we go from being merely a really great investment opportunity to an opportunity to affect the world and affect public health on a broad scale. That’s the exciting part. That’s fun to get up in the morning to work on. MM: And to that end, just a frame where the company is, they’re still in the process of developing a pilot plant but they have contracts with some of the largest companies in the world. Some of the largest CPG companies in the world are in active discussions with them. The message is getting through to the larger influencers, if you will, on a global basis that the product exists, it can be made affordably and it’ll become less expensive as the development costs increase. ER: I’ll talk to that a little bit. We’ll be in commercial scale production next year. We are in the final stages of negotiating a manufacturing partnership with one of the major potato processors, and have a starts leftover from the cutting of potatoes for french fries. One of the advantages of that is that it’s available to us at a low cost. It is non-GMO and it’s not corn. MM: If any of you watched the Superbowl ads, corn sweeteners have a little bit of a bad name in the United States. This is a fantastic company that sees true strategic opportunities to turn potatoes into healthy, affordable sugars. ER: That’s right, but that supplier is actually going a step further. They want to not only be the supplier of the starch, but actually the host site for our first plant and probably operate the plant for us. We provide the labor and the supervisory people that are necessary. We also have a great partner on the distribution side. We’ve chosen not to go directly to the CPGs ourself, so in North America we just signed — actually, I got the copy today by email — a distribution agreement with one of the major sugar refiners and brands in the world. They are already having the conversations with the large CPGs for us and we’ve got multiple other partnerships we’re working on. MM: A lot of this conferences is focused on the renewable energy side, carbon emissions, sustainability and this is more so on food and health, which impacts billions as well too. However, there is a sustainability aspect to what Ed is doing as well. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that. How so not only is it healthier, this is also a more efficient product. ER: Sure, and I see we’re running out of time so there are just two things I’ll mention quickly. The amount of water that’s required to produce the starts that we will use in our production process is much lower than the amount of water that’s required to produce a pound of regular sugar. So, a pound of our stuff would require a lot less water. But what’s really interesting is the opportunity to upcycle these byproducts. I mentioned the potato processor in french fries. We also have a really interesting tie-in with plant-based protein production. So, plant-based protein is becoming a bigger thing, including plant-based meats and dairy. But, for every unit of protein produced, there’s a lot of starch that’s also produced. Yellow pea, that’s what Beyond Meat uses — for every unit as a protein, there’s two units of starch left over. Chickpea is another one. For every unit of protein, there’s three units of starch. Potato actually has an interesting protein profile; there are eight units of starch for a unit of protein. And so there’s a glut of starch. It’s going to be coming online and we have an opportunity to off-take that at a good price and turn it into a healthy sugar. So we’re excited about that too. MM: I’ll just make one comment and that’s that we are tremendously excited about this not just for Bonumose but also the rest of the companies that are truly trying to bridge the gap between our and nutrition and our health and wellness. I just can’t emphasize, and I’m know I’m preaching to the choir, how important that is. If we can shift the dollars from treating after the fact to a healthier diet beforehand. Again, not only will we have saved dollars, but we will have a much healthier population. And that’s what we as a venture capitalists and investors wake up everyday looking to do.

iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on digital product development for food and beverage companies and how, among the world’s largest food companies, more than half of revenue is generated by products that have been introduced in the last five years. Many food producers are now using digital technology to stay ahead of this curve and bring innovative new products to market faster than ever before. We spoke with iSelect venture associate, David Yocom, about what this all means for the foods we eat and the companies that make it all. Tim Sprinkle: So, we’ve got David Yocom here from iSelect Fund talking about digital product development for agriculture companies. David, let’s talk about what digital product development really means. David Yocom: So, one of the things that we come across a lot when we’re thinking about food tech investors, as opposed to in-field ag investments, is for things like ingredients how they get incorporated into how food companies bring new products online. That’s something that we talk a lot about but maybe hadn’t done a full sort of deep dive into. We have expertise on the team who understand that really well. But for me in particular, it was a good learning experience. So, what we were focused on this last week was trying to figure out ways in which companies, like new startups, are finding ways to incorporate data or to digitize portions of food product development. The idea of going from an ideation of “I want to create a new type of snack or a new type of Cheeto or a potato chip that has these various types of factors” all the way to a successful product and market. Largely because there’s an incredibly high failure rate for certain types of food products, as high as 90%. So, trying to find ways to either shorten that development cycle, increase the longevity of products or reduce the cost of development was the focus of the conversation. TS: And how does a food product fail in the marketplace? Does that just mean people don’t like it or don’t want to buy it? DY: So, when you’re going to create a new food product, there’s a lot of different considerations you have to take into account. Not only what you think consumers are looking for, but what consumers are looking for that’s sustainable. You have to think about trends versus fads, just to think about whether or not you have the technological or food processing capabilities to actually produce a food product that you’ve thought up. Is it going to require you to bring in a new ingredient? Is it going to require you to bring in different formulations than you have to use in the past? Is it going to be too expensive? There are many ways that food products could fail in the product development cycle. They can also fail in the market. One thing I read through said that the baseline for a new food product from a major food company in the first year would be about $50 million in revenue. So, companies that don’t hit that threshold are numerous. Today there are more and more small brands in the market. They’re helping consumers find opportunities to clean label high protein, animal-free foods and those that are free of byproducts. And the degree to which those new products are being turned out by smaller companies, it’s a lot faster than how the big food companies are responding. So, one of the big challenges is how those large food companies cope with that rate of change. TS: Do you have any examples of what smaller, more innovative startups are doing in this area and what they’re bringing to the market that big guys can’t do yet? DY: Typically, the main places that we’re seeing it is in vegan, vegetarian, high-protein, gluten-free, clean label, etc. So, it’s ingredients that everybody can identify that are either all-natural ingredients or all well-known ingredients. So those types of things are aligned with nutritional aspects. They’re able to try to take these products to market with a lower risk as opposed to when a major food brand puts out a product. In those cases, it’s a massive undertaking. The expectations of success are much higher, because the scale has to be much higher when the cost is much lower. So, you can come into the market with a premium product that will target a specific audience and you don’t face maybe as many of the scalability issues that you might if you’re trying to service a large portion of the market. Plus, you don’t have to face some of the same cost issues because there are consumers are willing to pay a higher price. TS: Interesting. That’s helpful. Thanks David. I appreciate the rundown. We’ll talk to you next time. DY: Thanks Tim, anytime.