GreenPod Labs

GreenPod Labs Market Insights: The more time we spend on the field understanding the crop variabilities, farm practices, inherent fruit quality, etc. - we build more refined insights about various challenges in fresh produce supply chain. Within the banana export supply chain, crop procurement is happening across multiple locations such as Tembhurni (Maharashtra), Tadipathri (Andhra Pradesh), etc. The fruit quality and spoilage across these different locations are significantly different. To get deeper into this hypothesis our team collected water samples from the banana wash station to quantify the microbial load across two different locations. The samples were analyzed from more than 10+ farms combined. The results showed that the microbial load in Andhra Pradesh is 2 to 4 times higher compared to Maharashtra. There might be multiple reasons for this such as atmospheric conditions, fruit care, farm maintenance, etc. Building a product that acknowledges these inherent differences is critical to provide long-term value addition. As we get more data points, we keep working on improving our product to facilitate these variabilities. Gayathri Saivenkatesh Tharshini Venkatesh #microbialload #bananafarm_location #greenpodlabs

GreenPod Labs Market Insights: While working on any fresh produce supply chain. The question we always dabble around is should we evaluate crop quality using subjective data (flavor, taste, color, cosmetic look) or objective data (firmness, brix, maturity)? From a B2B customer point of view, subjective data is what matters from a product development/ R&D point of view - objective data is more critical. For the last few months, we have started building a bridge between subjective data and objective data. This has helped us communicate better with our customer and build products accurately that fit their needs. For example, the color of the crop is mapped with the brix of the crop - this builds the correlation between what happens outside to what is happening inside. Even though this requires more upfront cost and time - this saves a ton of time and money long term. #greenpodlabs #cropquality #subjective #objective

GreenPod Labs Insights: While working on the Banana supply chain understanding we collected several crop data points to understand the crop quality variations across different farms. One data point we tracked was the respiration rate of bananas (without any treatment) from different farms over 20 to 25 days using our tools. We did these exercises across 7- 10 farms. We ensured the bananas had the same maturity across all these farms The outcome was fascinating, for the first week we didn't see any significant difference in the respiration rate across different farms but over the shelf life, this difference was significant. The image below shows amount of variability across different farms in the respiration rate. Multiple variables contribute to these variabilities such as heat, light exposure, agri inputs, farm management, soil type, rain exposure, etc. This helped us understand the depth of the problem and the need for a robust solution. Jaganivash B Chakravarthy M #greenpodlabs #banana #respirationrate #cropquality

We’re excited to welcome GreenPod Labs, a groundbreaking biotech startup tackling food waste, to the #ACTForEnvironment portfolio! Greenpod Labs is a biotech startup pioneering a patented solution made of natural plant extracts that leverages biomimicry principles to reduce post harvest spoilage, thus increasing their shelf life by 40-80% and abating 400K tons of emissions in the next 3 years. Our grant will help them accelerate the product development for 2 high-demand crops by 7x to enable market expansion. Learn more about Greenpod Labs and ACT's catalytic role in their journey on our blog: https://lnkd.in/guJ_9RG4 Deepak Rajmohan #CoFoundersOfSocialChange #FoodWaste #GHGEmissions 

GreenPod Labs Market Insights: Customer pain points come in various form factors. While we were working with banana exporters, one of the critical challenges they faced was finding experienced/ trained farm supervisors to do farm selection. The farm supervisors need to visit the farms and look at multiple data points such as banana pulp %, banana bruises, etc. to select the right farm for banana procurement. This becomes more subjective and highly dependent on the person. We wanted to solve this problem using the tools we have built. We built a data science based web app that can quantify various parameters such as pulp %, finger dimensions, etc. The intention is to democratize the knowledge and enable the farm supervisors to move towards objective decision-making. A few of our current customers have already started using this beta version of the tool. Simple solutions can make a huge impact on the customer's journey. Interested customers please reach out to us. PS: Piyush Kumar built the model single-handedly, focusing on the customer needs. #greenpodlabs #datascience #cropquality

🌟 Award Announcement! 🌟 We are proud to announce that GreenPod Labs has been awarded the $50,000 Post-Harvest Loss Innovation Prize! 🎉 This Prize, awarded by Factor[e] Ventures in collaboration with in collaboration with Shell Foundation , ISF Advisors, MicroSave Consulting (MSC), Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and AndMore Associates, LLC recognizes GreenPod Labs for their innovative active packaging technology. Their groundbreaking solution leverages ambient active packaging to activate the natural defenses of fruits and vegetables, offering a promising solution to the pressing issue of post-harvest losses. This innovation extends shelf life of fruits and vegetables at ambient temperatures, thus eliminating the need for costly cold storage and potentially revolutionizing the preservation of produce in resource-limited settings. Congratulations to the GreenPod Labs team Deepak Rajmohan @Vijay Anand! 🎉

GreenPod Labs Market Insights: Consistently throughout my customer conversations so far, one factor has been very clear - top B2B customers value their time a lot. If a customer is willing to take his time to explain the problem in detail - it means that he values that problem very deeply. The customer's willingness to spend time is directly proportional to the intensity of the problem. From my perspective, if a customer is willing to take 3-4 hours of his time to speak about a problem - it means the intensity of that problem within his operations is very very high. This can be one good proxy to decide if you take up this as a problem to solve. There might be some exceptions to these cases - validating it from multiple customers is worth it. #greenpodlabs #customer #time #problemstatement #value