Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope (Part 5)

SM: What are the deployment models of your first two products?

DC: The Purfresh Cold Storage is integrated into existing warehouses. The Purfresh Wash is used as part of the line when fruit is harvested. Today they use heavily chlorinated water. We have a couple of wash applications that allow us to eliminate the chlorine and use ozone instead. That means the fruit is washed with zero chemicals. We just ozinate the water, which purifies the fresh food.

SM: How big are these product lines?

DC: My first week I flew up to Yakima, Washington. It is a tiny little town that has a big billboard that says, “Welcome to the Palm Springs of Washington!” I met a lot of farmers and it was summertime. They had Levi’s and boots and talked relaxed and slow. I remember on Friday night as I headed back to the airport thinking, “What did I do to my career?”

Then I looked out on the runway and saw three Gulfstreams; these guys were taking their wives and girlfriends to Vegas for the weekend. I quickly realized that these guys come across as good old boys, but they are very wealthy and very smart. The food industry is large and in many cases private. The public companies we know about, such as ConAgra, are very large.

Early on we were evangelizing. These folks would have 300 rooms and they would offer up a single room to try out over the season. The food industry is a ‘try before you buy’ industry. They will pay for it, but they are not going to do a full rollout until they feel comfortable. Each room may have $3 million worth of food in it.

SM: What does a pilot like that cost?

DC: All in, around $100,000. In the event of full rollout you can see $1 million from a single customer. Now we have added monitoring, so we have a service contract and recurring revenue. Now we have a nice blend between the two.

In cold storage we monitor the ozone concentration that we are storing. In transportation we monitor everything the food goes through all the way to market. We can stop decay and pathogens in transit. We monitor time and location, oxygen and CO2, ozone, temperature and relative humidity, and power-off alerts.

Every container may have 1,000 boxes of produce. A lot of people don’t realize that most of our food travels 1,500 miles and is carried by refrigerated shipping containers. Growers have not had any insight or control over food once it is shipped. Shipping is their greatest risk. Protecting growers food all the way to market is our third product, and that is in the market now. The Carrier Corporation OEM’d our entry level product, and they have a 70% market share of those 1.2 million refrigerated shipping containers.

SM: What about your products?

DC: We have a product, Purshade, for solar and water stress, which is sprayed in the field. If we got only a 15% share of addressable acreage and it was rate adjusted, that is a $1.5 billion TAM per year. In cold storage the TAM is $2 billion annually. In transportation is organized by trip, and there are 5 million trips per year. We charge $1,500 per trip. That is a $7.5 billion TAM.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope
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