James Rogers

You hear about what's going on the farm.

You know what's happening on the table or in the restaurant.

But the two is like, well, that apple might have been grown in Chile and gone through a refrigerated supply chain with pesticides sprayed all over it and then fumigated when it came into the country before it sat in storage somewhere.

And then you picked it up at the grocery store thinking it was fresh off the tree.

And of course it's not.

Well, we were so naive.

We thought, well, hey, if food lasted longer, more of it could get to people.

And so we'd be able to feed people, and that'd be amazing.

But it turns out that actually the early feedback that we got from customers was, I don't want food to last longer.

The garbage can is my best customer.

Every piece of food that you throw away is another piece of food that I get to sell.

So there's this crazy mismatch in incentive where you want to buy something that's better quality and longer lasting, but somebody earlier in the supply chain might not have any sort of interest in that.

So our first customer was right up the street from us.

We make our product out of plant material.

So we were looking for plant material, and this guy was growing...

coffee cherries.

I didn't know coffee beans, like they're inside of a coffee cherry.

This was news to me.

So you got all these coffee cherries after you get the beans.

We met this guy.