1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Elly Truesdell of Almanac Insights (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In your industry, how do you see geography playing out? I take it you invest mostly in American companies. 

Elly Truesdell: Primarily American companies. We have recently made our first investment in a Canadian company. We are open to and will look at companies abroad. Where we really like to make sure we’re positioning ourselves is to add value.

If we’re being pitched by a European or South American company that is strictly doing business in those countries, we don’t necessarily bring much value. We want to make sure that there’s a reason for us to invest. 

Sramana Mitra: Those who want to come to America to sell to the American market are interesting to you because of your connections in the distribution channel.

Elly Truesdell: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: In that context, how are you going to look at supply chains that are tied to China or Europe? Especially going forward to places where there has been ravaging because of coronavirus.  

Elly Truesdell: It has been catapulted in our consciousness of needing to do a lot more research and education around where we can feel trust, where and how we can put levels of transparency throughout the supply chain. We are really investing in farming that is more local or that is indoor tech-enabled. We’ll double-down on that. Indoor and tech-enabled smart farms can pay a real role in the future. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you going to be looking for supply chains that are contained within North America going forward?

Elly Truesdell: I don’t think I would go that far. The impetus and what made the investment I mentioned interesting is recognizing how intense this coronavirus spread would be and that there was a real reason to have focused-on-North-America supply.

We just have to look at it a lot more closely. I wouldn’t rule out European supply chains at this point. For good reasons, there is a lot to being mindful of Chinese supplies and different levels of food safety. 

Sramana Mitra: You brought up technology. Our accelerator is almost exclusively in technology and in technology-enabled services. I want to talk about technology from two angles in your portfolio strategy. Number one is on the production side. What kind of information technology usage are you seeing in the production of food?

Elly Truesdell: It’s pretty amazing to see how much development and innovation there has been in terms of technologies that support the overall food system. We’ve invested in two indoor farms. We’ve invested in Smallhold which is a mushroom-focused indoor farm. Also, Bowery which is a vertical indoor farm with highly-sophisticated technology.

Smallhold has a really interesting pitch in that they call their concept distributed farming. They recognize that, on average, the consumer is allowing the produce to decay for 15 days before it hits the retail shelves. For mushrooms, they have built and developed this concept for micro-farm sets in retail stores.

It’s the first certified organic farm within a grocery store in the US that’s growing organic mushrooms. The farmers are beginning to grow out mushrooms on substrates. They deliver it to the store still growing. Once it reaches maturity, the mushrooms can be harvested in store and sold that day. There’s a lot in the backend of that.

Those types of systems are extremely thoughtful. How do you grow this much produce in proximity at scale? One other example where we’re noting some technologies is as a result of nutrient density and the quality of fresh produce and food.

There are some scary statistics about the decline in nutrient density in the past 50 years. We’ve identified several companies that we are interested in that offer technologies that can scan different items of produce. One in particular has catalogued the top 15 items in the grocery store.

You can understand when you’re buying an apple from Washington or New Zealand what impact that has on the actual nutrients. That just connects to so many of the issues like climate change and intense pesticide use. There are a lot of spectrometers which are these at-home devices. There are some that are more B2B. We are looking across the sectors.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Elly Truesdell of Almanac Insights
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