Costco Wholesale, one of the largest retailers in the world, has partnered with California-based agtech company Zest Labs to enhance and improve their fresh food supply chain. The retailer will be utilizing Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh technology to manage and forecast the freshness of their produce products, which in turn could help them to reduce food waste and save money.
Silicon Valley start-up Zest Labs sued Walmart this week, claiming the company stole its original technology that keeps produce fresh while in transit. Zest CEO Peter Mehring discusses with Cheddar, a live streaming financial news network broadcasting live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
“Instead of licensing the Zest Fresh technology given Walmart’s manifest need for it — and the mounting pressure it faces from Amazon and other competitors — Walmart misappropriated it without paying for it,” the complaint, which is filed with redactions to protect proprietary information, reads. “Plaintiffs file this lawsuit to protect their trade secrets and recover the billions of dollars that Walmart will save as a result of its unlawful conduct.”
Agricultural tech company Zest Labs and its parent company Ecoark Holdings Inc. have filed a $2 billion complaint against Walmart, claiming that the retail giant unfairly and illegally used its Zest Fresh intellectual property in the development of Walmart’s Eden food freshness technology.
“In reality, Walmart used its years of unfettered access to plaintiffs’ trade secrets, proprietary information, and know-how to steal the Zest Fresh technology and misappropriate it for Walmart’s own benefit,” the complaint said.
Costco Wholesale has tapped freshness management solutions provider Zest Labs to enhance its fresh food supply chain. The wholesaler is utilizing the Zest Fresh solution to further define and verify best practices that ensure delivered freshness for their produce. The solution will also provide end-to-end fresh food supply chain visibility.
There’s always two sides to the same coin: on the one side, those in our industry are tackling the goal of feeding many with delicious, fresh produce; but on the other side, there’s excess and waste that comes with the territory. However, companies like Zest Labs have taken it upon itself to remedy food waste as a rising problem in our industry and world.
Costco Wholesale has selected Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh solution to further define and verify best practices that ensure delivered freshness for its produce and provide end-to-end fresh food supply chain visibility. The solution helps reduce waste, which further enables Costco to maintain its low prices for fresh food.
AgTech company Zest Labs said Costco was using its Zest Fresh supply chain solution to further define and verify best practices that ensure delivered freshness of produce. Zest Labs is modernizing the post-harvest fresh food supply chain with innovative technology solutions that provide true end-to-end supply chain visibility that helps improve sales and reduce food waste.
Every company is obsessed with data. They rely on it to make better decisions that improve their business and effective data capture helps leaders gain a clear view into their operations. However, data collection is only as valuable as the usable insights that it provides.
Using a dashboard to report on business status offers stakeholders a quick, high-level view–but a targeted causative analysis can yield valuable information that may enable bottom-line improvements. But, unless you know the causative agents behind the problems you’re trying to solve, you’re going miss the solution. Zest Fresh enables growers, distributors, and retailers to immediately see which pallets are most perishable and need to be sourced to markets faster.
Zest Labs has developed a technological solution that can reduce food waste by tracking produce’s freshness along the supply chain in real-time and routing them accordingly. Zest Fresh, involves IoT sensors placed in pallets of fruit or vegetables as soon as they are harvested and a “freshness metric” to determine the remaining shelf life, which can vary significantly between each one. The technology can improve freshness for customers and quickly increase retailers’ produce department margins, which ultimately benefits growers and distributors as well.
Food waste is a frustrating phenomenon that not only affects our environment but also impacts consumers’ wallets and businesses’ bottom lines. Up to 40 percent of the food we produce gets thrown out, costing the nation an estimated $218 Billion each year. To fix a problem, we must understand the cause. In reality, most of the factors leading to food waste happen upstream in the supply chain before the produce ever reaches the store.
Margin pressures for retail grocers are being further squeezed due to increasing consumer expectations for high quality and low prices. Grocers can recover margins by reducing waste for fresh foods. The industry needs an accurate view of which produce has sufficient remaining shelf-life to meet freshness and sales requirements, and which produce will spoil before it can be sold and consumed. By leveraging actionable insights about remaining freshness, the way to reduce waste become clear, and grocers and other members of the supply chain can manage the variables affecting shelf life at the pallet level.
One of the causes of food waste is produce that goes bad earlier than expected. Of course, shipping produce that is fresh is the goal of every grower. In what manner it arrives and how fresh it remains once in the store, however, is largely out of their control. Zest Labs has come up with a solution called Zest Fresh that allows growers and shippers to know how long each pallet of their produce will remain fresh.
There is a lot of innovation happening right now in the fresh food industry. Over the last few years, significant investment has been made in AgTech (agriculture and technology) solutions, particularly preharvest for field management, irrigation and pest control. Now, the industry is turning its attention to postharvest AgTech, and that’s where one San Jose, Calif.-based company fits in.
The world’s grocery market is poised to grow by one third over the next five years. But competition is increasing too — from expanding supermarket chains and other major players. To compete, food retailers will have to cater to changing consumer preferences and, when it comes to produce, after years of competing primarily on price and quality, freshness has become the new battleground. Zest Fresh uses IoT-enabled temperature sensors to monitor time and temperature of pallets, combining this information with product and field data to yield a real-time freshness metric that helps retailers decide how to route produce.
Blockchain makes it easier to track a product throughout the supply chain and log data points about key safety and quality information at every stage,” according to Peter Mehring, CEO of Zest Labs. The question Mehring and other observers have is whether blockchain, now in its infancy, is a true game changer or just another overhyped technology.
With all the technological advances we’ve made, from self-driving cars to IoT-enabled personal assistants, it’s hard to understand why we still waste nearly 40% of the fresh food produced in the United States. With all the technology available to us today, how can our food supply chain still be this inefficient? The short answer is that technology, particularly IoT, has historically been underutilized in post-harvest agriculture.
Most cold supply chain monitoring products monitor only the environmental conditions of the supply chain, rather than the condition of the product moving through it. That needs to change. “For fresh food, end-to-end- pallet-level data is essential for delivering freshness and safety,” asserts Peter Mehring, President and CEO of Zest Labs.
