Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope (Part 4)

SM: When you joined the company, what was it selling?

DC: It was selling boxes that were ozone generating devices to places such as the Bronx Zoo, the Honolulu Aquarium, Western Digital’s cooling tower and other people. It was purely a box which was sold.

SM: What was the very first transformational step you took?

DC: The very first step was to change all positioning. It is no longer about pounds per day and volts; it is about higher level solution benefits. Reducing loss on food or enhancing food safety are two good examples.

SM: Did you have to redevelop the product to go into the food market?

DC: The ozone product was not going in, and we had to do a lot of experimentation to optimize the ozone for the food market. To do that experimentation we had to hire domain experts. For the first time you had Silicon Valley people like me hiring ex-USDA scientists and agricultural experts to optimize ozone-based applications for food. That one transformation required us to change our key skills. We then had to develop the applications, whether it was a produce disinfectant via spray bar or cold storage.

That meant we had to transform our entire image to include our marketing tools and our website. We really had to become a different company.

SM: What was the first product that your revamped company launched?

DC: It was a cold storage product. Today most fresh food goes into storage after it is harvested. Different products are stored for different amounts of time. Cherries can be stored for three days and apples can be stored for at least a year. While they are in storage they are exposed to several risks, including decay. Another is over-ripening. Third, stored food faces food safety issues such as E. coli and salmonella.

We found that by introducing ozone in the parts-per-billion range into storage warehouses we could kill surface and airborne organisms that cause decay and we could eliminated a ripening hormone allowing us to arrest the ripening process which allows longer storage time, better shelf life, and better quality. Finally, we realized we could kill pathogens.

SM: Were your lab guys who were doing ozone work able to make the transformation into food implementations?

DC: I am not sure that they transformed. They continued to be hardware guys. We added another layer above them. They continued to be hardware equipment guys and made hardware to do these new applications. We added another layer; we did not replace them.

The company had a bunch of water customers. It is easy to kill bad things in water. Since most fresh produce is washed once it is collected, it just made sense for us to move in that direction. We knew water purification and figured we could use that water as a powerful disinfectant. After it is sprayed it turns back into pure oxygen. That led to Purfresh Cold Storage and Purfresh Wash being our first two applications.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope
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