CHICAGO — The produce industry needs to play catch up with innovation and advancing technology, David Krause believes.
Krause, president of Wonderful Citrus, gave the opening keynote address at the United FreshTEC Expo on June 25.
“The bottom line is we need to find ways to deliver more fresh faster, for less, as industry,” he said.
Krause said the produce industry is generally late to adopt new technology.
“We as an industry are not ready, and we have work to do to be in the position that we need to be as an industry,” he said.
To keep venture capital companies interested in agriculture, adoption of innovation needs to increase, he said.
“Investors need to look and see results before investing further, and we as an industry need to embrace the new tech entering the markets and help keep this momentum going if we are to the new breakthroughs,” he said. “We have to adopt and be sponsors of new technology,” he said.
Global hunger, food waste, climate change, labor challenges and changing consumer buying habits are some of the reasons tech innovation is needed, he said.
“These challenges are causing more and more reasons for our industry needing to make changes and I think the answer, how we are going to do that, is to use tech,” he said. “The use of technology can help us overcome many of these difficult challenges,” he said.
The motivation ultimately is profit, he said, by increasing revenue or decreasing costs. That could come through automation at the farm level, material handling, quality control equipment and making products better for consumers.
“Probably the biggest benefit is the use of data collection so that we can share information with virtually everyone at any point in time, from consumers to producers,” he said.
Keeping an open mind to new technology also has to be part of the mindset.
“I’ve felt quite a while personally that our next breakthrough for our industry would, in fact, be technology that’s not even in front of us today,” he said. “And it could be from an industry that is not what we think of about.”
