Company brief: FoodFul modernizes dairy herd management by installing sensors in barns to monitor cow’s health and feed intake. The scanners are placed in the feeding alley of barns to determine if a cow is eating or not. Machine learning algorithms are applied to the data collected to identify which cows are on the onset of sickness and which cows are most feed efficient.
How did you get Foodful started in the first place?
In the very beginning of last semester in Spring 2019, I joined the Digital Agriculture Hackathon at Cornell. It was the first time I attended a hackathon at Cornell. I used to love hackathons -- I was a pretty big hackathon junkie back in Vancouver. It was a lot of fun to me, especially because I love building and creating cool stuff that I wouldn’t normally create within certain time constraints. So I just wanted to see how the Digital Agriculture Hackathon would go. I was not really well-versed in the agricultural space, or agriculture tech in general at all, back then. So I just kind of joined for the fun of it. And then at the hackathon, I got to meet this team of really great guys: one of them (Xiting Zhao) was getting his Masters of Engineering in Computer Science , while the other one (Joseph Tarnate) was getting his Master’s in Food Science.
And we just came up with this seemingly silly idea from observing cows. One of the guys took us to the Cornell Barn, and we got to see actual cows. We noticed that the cows have these little tags on their ears -- RFID tags -- and work the same way our Cornell cards work; they can scan just like our cards do. Xiting worked with RFID sensors before, and he hypothesized what would happen if we had these sensors placed at the bottom of the stalls; every time a cow bends down to eat, the tags would pick it up, and then we’d correlate all sorts of information. At first, we thought it was a really silly idea in which we thought that this had already existed and that we didn’t know how useful it would be. But shortly afterwards we thought, “It’d be a cool hackathon idea, right?” So we pulled all-nighter just building it out of hardware and then also the web app to visualize the data. We actually ended up winning most market-ready category, which came with a prize package of $2,000. So we were very happy about that. Afterwards, we started getting in conversations with professors about the idea, and a few of them were so excited about our idea. They mentioned that if that actually exists, that would be really useful given that dairy farmers really do have a problem of telling how much their cows actually eat. And [then we thought] the dairy farming industry is essentially just like a unit economics game, right? All that matters to them is how much the farmers are spending to feed the cows versus how much milk they are producing to sell, right? They typically don’t have data on individual feed consumption for the cows.
Once we got the idea going on, we thought - “okay, that’s interesting.” So we took more time on it and interviewed dairy farmers. Over the course of several weekends, we just drove in a car and bounce around upstate New York just talking to dairy farmers and literally went to their doors and asked if they wanted to talk. You’d be surprised -- a lot of them are actually really open. So we did a little more research and realized that we did have something that was more than just a hackathon idea. So we pursued it more and applied for accelerator funding. We were really lucky to have been accepted to ERA (Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator) over the summer. We went over there, developed for about three months, and had our demo day. Then, we got another grant from the National Science Foundation to just do customer interviews across the country. So currently the other two members are just bouncing across different states right now, talking to dairy farmers. And I’m working more with that product.
So what challenges do you anticipate Foodful might encounter in future years and how do you plan on mitigating these risks?
I see a lot of challenges, honestly. For one, just really scaling the business and also getting a lot of farmers on board to use our product. Right now, the difficulty is developing the product. We want something that is scalable, affordable, easy to manufacture, and reliable over the course of very long periods of time. If you have been to a barn, you know what it’s like -- it’s a lot to handle. For one, the cows have very strong heads, so having the product be durable and manufacturable is very important. That’s the current problem, but in the long term, one of our biggest concerns is about the market need for it and also getting them to the farmers. Dairy farming in general is a very loosely connected industry. If you go upstate and drive around you’ll realize that they operate in their own kind of way. They typically sell their milk to the next level in the supply chain and go about their days. There is no easy way to sell directly to all of the farmers. A lot of the more conventional ways of mass marketing can’t apply in this situation. It’s a lot harder when you’re trying to market within the dairy space because the market is relatively fragmented. So we’re trying to find ways to approach that as well.
Talking about the potential future challenges with assessing that market, how have you gone about marketing Foodful? And what steps or plans do you have in expanding across the country like you talked about in talking to different farmers or is it expanding through the supply chain, perhaps?
So our current strategy is more or less just like getting connected with these groups called co-ops where certain dairy farmers have to choose to participate in these collections and groups of farmers. The easiest way to go about doing this is to target the co-ops and talk about what the implications are of what we can do, and then we can focus on those individual dairy farms associated with these co-ops rather than knocking on every single dairy farm’s door and asking if they’d want to buy our product because that’s not scalable at all.
We have our very first early adopters -- six farms who have signed up to buy our product once we develop the product, so we’re still working on developing that. It was a lot of cold calling for those six farms, honestly. Though we didn’t have that many connections within the dairy space, we decided that we would just knock on doors, email people we’ve received contact for, and call the numbers we were given. And a lot of them were actually really receptive. We realized a lot of them are interested in the space. If you somehow connect with them, it’s really interesting how easy it is to really build a relationship and have them gain interest in your products that way.
What challenges have you faced taking on this responsibility of working on a startup while being in school as well?
It’s a huge responsibility and a huge time commitment, honestly. A startup is very much defined by the commitments of each single founder, right? Because you don’t have the resources or the right scale to really go about doing all sorts of things. Every single person is really responsible to hold up their end of the bargain, and I’ll say that alone encompasses a lot. Currently, I’m mostly focusing on the platform, software, and data that we’re collecting at the dairy farm right now. Though it might not seem like a lot, there is a fair amount of work to do on a weekly basis because I have to check tasks off the agenda while balancing school. The good thing is that I’m actually getting research credit for this, which definitely helps!
Along with that, what experience from majoring in Information Science do you hope to apply to the future for Foodful and in post-college life?
I’m still very interested in the tech space in general. The great thing is that Information Science teaches you a different variety of things. For example, I’m probably concentrating in data science, but I’m also very interested in front-end development and the user interface (UI) component of it. I did a tremendous amount of that during the summer, such as developing the actual platform and doing all sorts of data analysis, which is very applicable to the core of what information science really is. I think being aligned with this major and what I had to do at Foodful actually made a lot of sense, and the other co-founders feel this way as well. Xiting focused on the hardware component, and Joseph was the person who was connecting with dairy farmers and understanding the problem space within the dairy industry. So studies-wise, a lot of our backgrounds really came together to form a really cohesive and holistic team.
Going off of that, what unique perspective do you think you bring?
I’m very software and data science focused. So throughout the summer, a lot of what I did was software heavy. Even for the technical stuff, a lot of what we had to do was just developing it, and a lot of what I got into was just focusing on everything software. This encompass so many things, such as developing the platform, designing the platform, integrating the data, choosing cloud providers, talking to these cloud providers for start-up discounts, choosing the best data structure to store data, processing the data, and all sorts of these kind of things that are what you would do over software was what I was focused on. The team was very wired on getting the hardware component done well. So I think that’s the perspective and hard work I think I bring to the team.
Would you want to do entrepreneurship in the future?
Definitely. I think something that also I’ve come to realize is that entrepreneurship is quite like an art just by itself. I honestly think that a lot of people should get into entrepreneurship at some point in time because it really teaches you a lot about how the backbone of many things got started, what really needs to happen to get a company to really create value, and what essentially all companies do. I think a lot of people have the impression of Microsoft or Facebook, for example, as these companies that are really well-established and that they’re just making money. But what people don’t understand without having a history of entrepreneurship experience is that in order for these companies to get going, they really need to be solving some hardcore problems. Especially if the companies are to really sustain what they’re doing. And when you’re working at a big company, you don’t really consider that as much. You don’t consider the value creation part of it, and you don’t consider the problem space that all of these companies are solving. And I think getting into entrepreneurship really taught me and gave me that laser-focused vision of being very user-driven and always being about your customers. Honestly, what are companies if they don’t consider the customers? The dynamics of how people are -- it’s really important to have an adaptable skill set. Because when you’re a co-founder, you realistically have to do so many things right to compensate, and you have to work really hard. And it really embeds a drive that I think a lot of people would benefit from having.
What might be one of the biggest challenges you faced from your entrepreneurship experience?
It’s just a lot of pressure really. I think a lot of the pressure that comes from these kinds of ventures from yourself. Over the summer at the accelerator, my schedule was tight -- I would wake up in the morning at seven o’clock, go on the transit for an hour and 45 minutes, did absolutely nothing but work on this until six o’clock, come back at eight, grab dinner, keep working on this until midnight, and then repeat. We kept working like the vast majority of the time and a lot on the weekends as well. We would just work non-stop on Saturday and Sunday. I actually remember when some of my friends were in the city over the summer as well. We planned beforehand and said we should all meet and do something in the city. In order to do that, we had to push two weeks ahead of our schedule just for me to see my friends on Saturday. We knew that in order to do well, we had to go pretty hard. A lot of that was from ourselves. We got accepted to the accelerator, and we received trust from ERA to do well and we knew we couldn’t just fail and under deliver. That was absolutely one of the biggest challenges. I think there’s really a dark side to the startup life. There are parts of it that are not as glamorized -- the parts that are not shown and the parts that people don’t think about. For example, your personal life being conflicted by the start-up is very real, and I got to feel that over the summer, at least a little bit. It felt very lonely at times, and I was with the same guys eating the same meals virtually every single day for like three months. It can get very isolating. But then again, it got me a sliver of what it takes.
Also, ERA was completely right. We’ve actually gotten yelled at a few times. It’s funny because people see these accelerators or incubators as like, “Oh, an accelerator! My company is going to grow.” And then what they don’t see is that in order for that growth to happen, a lot of it is on yourself. They definitely help you with the funding and the connections, but the value of what that growth is and where the meat of the work is from -- comes from the founders. So what they do is they really push you hard.
There is an entrepreneurship consultant, Felix, over at eHub Kennedy. When we spoke to him about getting into ERA and told him that that’s what we were probably doing over the summer, he said that we were essentially selling our souls away. Those were virtually his exact words. Because it was, and I got to understand more what that meant. They just kept pushing you -- every week or every other week, they would talk to us about what we’re doing wrong and why we’re not growing fast enough. And sometimes it was really rough. We’ve been in meetings where there’s a bunch of these other guys who are investors of ERA and probably very successful people literally pointing at us and noting what we’re doing wrong. And asking why we weren’t seeing profits, why we weren’t getting our first customers, and asking these kinds of things. And these were some of the challenges that we’ve experienced working on Foodful.
Is there anything else you want to say?
I think Cornell has a fair amount of resources and connections to entrepreneurship in general. This was one thing I was pleasantly surprised by. Over the summer, we would have these sessions on Wednesdays where we would get some well-established people or companies to speak, like some venture capitalists who’ve invested in Uber early stage for example. Or even someone who has sold his or her company for $500 million or who currently has a company that’s pulling off $300 million a year. The thing is that a lot of them are from Cornell. Every time that happened, we thought that was really cool. The fact that a lot of them went to Cornell is one thing, but another point is that at Cornell, there’s so many resources -- eHub, eLab, Blackstone, Life Changing Labs, and so many resources that are designed to help students see through their ideas. At some point, I believe most students here probably had some idea that they really wished to build into something great. I would like to say that you should not be discouraged if you don’t have entrepreneurship experience. There’s tons of people who are and are more than happy to help you out. So even if it’s an idea that’s as silly as something that came out of a hackathon, if you’re willing to talk to these people and learn about entrepreneurship, you’ll see yourself and your project going a long way.