Using Technology to Limit Shrink
By Western Growers staff I f you ask Hazel Technologies co-founder and CEO Aidan Mouat where the idea came from for creating the technology that helps prevent food waste by keeping fresh produce edible longer, don’t expect to hear an astonishing tale of discovery. “Everybody always thinks there is this ‘Eureka!’ moment in chemistry where some flash of inspiration starts the ball rolling on a new technology,” Mouat said during a recent interview. “Our story is a little more pedestrian than that.” But for growers, packers, and shippers of fresh produce, the important thing is not how the technology came to fruition, it’s how it can help improve the quality of their product and ultimately their bottom line. And Hazel’s technology does just that. The main premise behind the technology developed by two of the company’s co-founders is sustainability. They started out with a mission to try to reduce food waste by coming up with a tool that was commercially attractive to growers/packers/shippers that could help solve key problems like rejections, downgrading or not being able to reach overseas markets. “We wanted to ensure that every piece of produce grown by our customers gets to a consumer who is willing to eat it. That, at its heart, is the solution to the food waste problem,” Mouat explained. The company was born from a chance meeting between Mouat and Adam Preslar, the company’s chief operating officer, and one of its five co-founders. At the time, both Mouat and Preslar were doctoral candidates at Northwestern University and were enrolled in an entrepreneurial accelerator program called NUvention. Mouat held a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Emory University and was well-versed in materials and synthetic chemistry. The work he was doing in 2012 on his Ph.D and as the fellow for the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN) exposed him to sustainability challenges and other issues that included a new understanding of the role of chemistry in agriculture. As a bio and medicinal chemist, Preslar was fascinated with working with relatively small, cheap, uncomplicated, manipulable molecules that he could use to trigger significant physiological effects in plants and animals. With Mouat’s expertise in small molecule separation, storage and manipulation, the pair found common ground. They combined their spheres of influence in sustainability and chemistry and moved forward. “Putting those two halves together is what really created the technology we have today,” Mouat said. “Adam showed me a very cool set of molecules and with my background and expertise, I knew how to create very cheap and biodegradable materials that can deliver those molecules in a commercially relevant context.” The pair knew they needed other skills to effectively flesh the enterprise out, and so they recruited other co-founders, including Amy Garber and Pat Flynn.
Garber, a patent agent for 10-plus years, holds a master’s of science in law from Northwestern and serves as the company’s chief intellectual property officer. Chief Marketing Officer Flynn has a degree in computer engineering from Northwestern. A fifth co-founder is no longer with the company. The Technology and Its Sustainable Upside Pedestrian beginning aside, it’s the technology that sets Hazel apart from others who dabble in this arena. Hazel’s core technology uses a small sachet that can be placed into master cases of produce. The sachet stores and time releases small amounts of an active ethylene inhibitor, 1-Methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), into the atmosphere of the produce that physiologically slows the aging process, improving quality and extending shelf life. “It seems simple, but it’s really not,” Mouat said. “There are a couple of simplifying factors—like the low concentration threshold—that make the chemical engineering much easier to attain.” Most produce has a low threshold for application. Once the 1-MCP is applied and the saturated concentration level is reached, the effect is the same. All of the produce in the case is protected evenly. 1-MCP has been in commercial use, mostly by the fresh produce industry, for 25-30 years. The company that first commercialized it applied it through a fumigation process, but doing so limited its effect on most produce. Mouat and Preslar recognized that the problem was not with the compound, which Mouat describes as “phenomenal.” The problem, he said, was with the delivery system and how it was applied. Mouat explained that he and Preslar changed the function of the materials to slowly release the active ingredients instead of doing it as a single shot, providing
two benefits. The first is that the slow release application technology improves the response of the produce over single shot applications. The second benefit is that customers don’t have to change anything about their shipping and packing practices. Mouat said they can change the dose rate of sachets to give customers different shelf life times.
“We can literally dial in the shelf life requirements of each particular supply chain. It’s something that has never been done before and has gotten our customers fairly excited,” he said proudly. “We have found this really cool sweet spot where our stuff is really effective and as a result, it gives customers one of the longest shelf life extensions they can get,” he said. “We’re not aiming for
32 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2018
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