S9E118 Christopher Thomasen / Seasony - From Engineer to Entrepreneur: The Transformational Journey and The Vision for The Future of Vertical Farming

0:00:00 - Harry Duran

So, christopher Lyssel Tomlinson, ceo and co-founder of Seasony, thank you so much for joining me on the Vertical Farming podcast.

0:00:08 - Christopher Thomasen

Thank you for having me, Harry.

0:00:09 - Harry Duran

So, for the benefit of the listener and the viewer, where are you calling in from?

0:00:14 - Christopher Thomasen

I am calling in from a dark and cold Copenhagen, denmark.

0:00:19 - Harry Duran

Are you born and raised there?

0:00:21 - Christopher Thomasen

Born and raised just outside of Copenhagen, together with my two co-founders actually born and raised just in the western part of Copenhagen.

0:00:27 - Harry Duran

OK for people that may not be familiar with that region of the world. What is it that keeps you there?

0:00:34 - Christopher Thomasen

That's a good question. I mean we have a pretty strong social network in Denmark. You know there's a lot of free social security, free education. There's a quite a good education system and at least that has been very beneficial to me and my two co-founders. You know we've both we've all three of us taken master's degrees here in the vicinity of Copenhagen yeah, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer and international business and politics for the case of our COO Akan. So quite a nice place to be and to live.

0:01:03 - Harry Duran

Yeah.

0:01:04 - Christopher Thomasen

But of course you have to take the good with the bad, and the bad is the weather and the late and the early nights.

0:01:11 - Harry Duran

Do you get to do a lot of traveling as well?

0:01:15 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get to do a lot of traveling. I just returned from my honeymoon with my now wife which was quite amazing to Namibia and, of course, with with work, there's a lot of travel as well. Yeah, great to see other places as well.

0:01:28 - Harry Duran

How is it Not?

0:01:29 - Christopher Thomasen

it's an amazing place. I mean I would recommend everybody to go and did a self drive trip all throughout the entire Namibia, so that was quite an amazing adventure to see the country and see the animals. That was really amazing.

0:01:41 - Harry Duran

Was it one of those drive through safari experiences?

0:01:45 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, it's a drive by yourself safari kind of experience, so there's a lot of sleeping intents and like a camping sites ish all over Namibia. So really amazing and to get very close with the elephants and giraffes and all the different types of antelope. So quite amazing and it's very, you know, not a lot of inhabitants in the movie. There's about two and a half in the same area as Nigeria, so not a lot of people, but a lot of beautiful nature.

0:02:12 - Harry Duran

Do you find that trips like that are helpful for you to get you out of your maybe comfort zone, or maybe get you to see other cultures, other experiences that you wouldn't get to experience, you know, if you just spend time in your own country?

0:02:26 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, definitely. I mean it's always an amazing experience to see something that's radically different to what you used to. I mean, together with my girlfriend and our wife, I mean we've also been to Japan and to you know South America.

Seeing these places are just amazing. Also, to just dive a little bit deeper into other cultures is quite amazing to get to experience and it also helps to just disconnect a little bit from work. As an entrepreneur, I think you can get pretty caught up in working all the time, so it's nice to just plug out a little bit and basically see something else.

0:02:58 - Harry Duran

When did you first identify as an entrepreneur?

0:03:03 - Christopher Thomasen

That's a good question. I mean, when people told me enough times. I think I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur before at least having started seasoning together with my co-founders and never thought about it that way. As it's a personality trainer, so, yeah, a lot of great jobs before that, and education as well. So didn't really think about it until you know you're told enough times.

0:03:24 - Harry Duran

What would you describe as the mindset difference moving from having you know where we consider a nine to five job, you know where you're getting that steady paycheck and you have all the benefits that are associated with being an employee, and also you know, obviously, some of the constraints as well. How would you describe that mindset change when you move into becoming and thinking like an entrepreneur?

0:03:44 - Christopher Thomasen

It's something that probably takes some time. I mean, when we first took the job it was quite early, not that far out of school, so we just did it and didn't think too hard about it. Maybe that was a mistake, but essentially, you know, we kind of got into it and I think the way of working is a little bit different. Right, it's a lot more about just figuring out solutions and using first principles to always find solutions to problems and seek opportunities out yourself. I think that's some of the biggest differences Is that seeking out of opportunities yourself and looking for, you know, the needle in the haystack and the opportunities that are out there.

0:04:21 - Harry Duran

I've heard reference to first principles a lot and it's something that I've looked into as well. So, for the benefit of the listener, can you describe how that's influenced you and maybe just a quick overview of how you see and use first principles?

0:04:34 - Christopher Thomasen

I think you know, from my perspective at least, it's rooted a little bit in my education.

I mean, I took a Master's in Mechanical Engineering and you know getting back to some of those principles is something that you use a little bit in your education as well and you know thinking about them. If there's a physical system, you often have to sanity check yourself and you know the calculations that you've done. Is that actually something that makes sense? And using those you know general rules in physics, in mechanical engineering, you can kind of get to this, this viable solution. But of course now when you're it's problem solving, you use those a little bit more in terms of getting back to what's actually the root cause of a problem and figuring out solutions from there. I mean, sometimes as an engineer or as anybody else, essentially you can kind of get caught up in all the details of a big problem and sometimes get lost in that. But as an entrepreneur I think it's important. But I think entrepreneurs in general are quite good at getting back to. You know what is the core of the issue and, looking at you know how to solve those issues.

0:05:36 - Harry Duran

Yeah, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the culture in Denmark, but also in sometimes, in what you see in Europe is this idea of I've heard it described, and maybe this is something specific to the Netherlands with tall poppy syndrome, where people are standing out and they're, you know, making a name for themselves. It's something traditionally that's not been looked upon favorably and I'm wondering how that culture has changed, because you know, people see America as the land of entrepreneurs and all the companies that have been started here, and I'm wondering how that culture is changing, how entrepreneurship is viewed and supported lately now, from what you're seeing.

0:06:12 - Christopher Thomasen

I think in general in Denmark is now quite a good place to be an entrepreneur. At least there's a lot of pop culture around entrepreneurship and wanting to do something like that and particularly with, you know, shark Tank and Dragon's Den and all those shows. I mean that helped quite a bit, I think, to make it a little bit mainstream. But I think I don't know the term that you mentioned from the Netherlands. But I think there's something different in Denmark called Jendelong, the law of Jentis, which is from a story where it's basically about not getting too far ahead of your skis and not thinking you're something special. There's a little bit of sentiment in Denmark there. It's getting better. I think. You know, influencing a little bit more from American culture is reducing that effect a little bit, but it is still something that rules a little bit in Denmark.

0:06:58 - Harry Duran

Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about the experience that you've had. You know, not the whole CV, but coming out of uni, what you were studying. I don't know that maybe indoor farming was on your radar back then or how you were thinking about it, but I'm curious a little bit of the things that you studied and the jobs you had. That sort of prepared you for season eight.

0:07:22 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, of course I had some student jobs alongside my studies and one was in the process industry where I worked in high-tech membranes so essentially it was silicon carbide membranes and it was a company here in Denmark building out filtration systems for purifying water for all types of industrial applications. It was from the oil industry for having to clean the water coming out of that process, from fish producers, fish oil producers and for paper industry. Basically their entire mission was to make reusable filters that you can use with a high flux to essentially get more clean water faster with less impact. And that was really interesting. I got to learn a lot. It was a fairly small company, like 40, 50 people, so learned a lot about the process of essentially filtration and all that, the different sub-processes there. So super interesting that that for about three years got to learn a lot and filter oil and manure and take part in all kinds of interesting EU projects. But essentially I also wanted to get into a more commercial role and I kind of knew that a little early on about the bachelor level. So I did a short stint in consulting for the breweries, so essentially a process engineer, slash consultant for the ABNBF in Calisburg and all of the different DOJO, the big breweries in the world. And then eventually I got into something that I found super exciting, which was the asset management of renewable energy assets and basically making sure that the wind turbines and solar parks that this company had erected and built that they would earn money and make sure that they get to change a gearbox when it broke breakdown on an windmill and all that type of stuff. So that was quite exciting to try out. As an engineer, you don't really get to sit with cash flow budgets and do these commercial analyses and stuff like that, and that was very interesting to get to learn, and my boss there, the COO, was a mechanical engineer himself, so I think he had a thing for engineers. So I'm very happy about that and he gets to learn me quite a lot.

Of course, at the same time I was in that job, we slowly started up seasoning and as season started we really had a vision of essentially doing a whole lot.

We wanted to build vertical farms with mobile robots in them to essentially alleviate all the labor costs in there. So of course, as any entrepreneur, you figure out along the way that you might be stretching a little too far. So we built the farm, headed for about a year and grew some Japanese herbs to kind of get a market niche in here in Copenhagen and eventually shut down the farm after about a year's operation because we could see that the mobile robots was really what was giving all the value to our solution. So we had a lot of other vertical farms popping up that essentially also are building interesting technology and might be better at the growth process in itself and actually operating a vertical farm and building the biotechnology that you need to get that system up and running. So the robotics was really where we had all the knowledge and what was special about our solution. So we focused in on that in early 2020. So that's when we did the pivot.

0:10:32 - Harry Duran

So talk to me a little bit about the conversations in those early days which are co-founders, I'm curious how you move from having the interest and experience in engineering and what you saw specifically about the move into robotics and why that was the pole specific and how you could integrate that with vertical farms.

0:10:51 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, sure, so it's important to know that our technical co-founder, saralip he has a degree in electrical engineering and actually worked with mobile robots previously, so he had that industry experience and knew a little bit about how to program those and did that before for one of the large robotics companies here in Denmark. So there's a reason for going the mobile robot way, and then we had the knowledge there already, I think, when season started and that interest in the sector came from. Essentially, savin and I are talking a lot about space technology, which was kind of interesting. I think SpaceX was just landing the first couple of rockets in 2017, 2018-ish, so that's when we started talking about space technology and what was really interesting about that and there are some people working on rockets, also in the university, and we could see that there's a lot of other technologies in this space that was quite interesting.

And one was food production. And what do you do when you actually land? You need to set up base and you need to have a life support system and you need all these different technologies. So food was one of the interesting ones and we could see that this was really taken off around the world. You can see some of the big companies that you know from vertical farming. Today is we're raising the first couple of big rounds and series B's and C's, so we could see there's lots of stuff moving here. So we took a closer look and, of course, immediately saw the problem of all the people driving around and says the lifts and how that could be quite a labor, heavy process. So of course mobile robots made a whole lot of sense for us right there.

0:12:21 - Harry Duran

How has the technology advanced in a way that allows you to piece together the pieces and the components that you need to build a system like you have now? Is this something that you think would have been possible Five years ago, or do you see the growth in the industry coming to a maturity level that allows you to customize now these solutions specifically for vertical farming?

0:12:40 - Christopher Thomasen

I don't think the technology in itself is really the key problem there. For at least five years ago, I think, the technology was there five years ago and we you know Sabin was coming out of one of the companies that were building mobile robots already and were quite successful at doing so. Also, the founder of the company and CTO is actually an investor in our company today. So you know the technology was there, but I think the sector in itself needed a little bit of development. We have seen the vertical farming develop so so much over the last five years. I mean we are actually starting to see a structure of how this sector is going to be moving forward, with system suppliers and not vertical farms themselves developing everything themselves. We're starting to see technology suppliers find their place within this value chain. So I think that's one of the more important things, that that is helping our business in the coming time.

0:13:32 - Harry Duran

For folks that are watching or listening and that are new to Season E, how would you explain the current product offering?

0:13:39 - Christopher Thomasen

So Seasony is offering a mobile robot. We named it Watney and it's a mobile robot to handle all the logistics in a vertical farm. So essentially what it does is it handles all the logistics of taking trays of plants in and out of these vertical farms and it does so by essentially being a little self-driving car inside these vertical farms, so it drives around obstacles and it drives around people and there's a lift on the robot, so of course you can lift all the way up to 10 meters and here you can essentially put everything you'd like on top. We've built a couple of logistics modules to help everything get started so we fit into the majority of the vertical farming systems that we see out there today. So essentially it's all about automating that.

You know amount of labor that you see in vertical farms and then there's a lot of benefits coming, you know, right after that, as we have a robot in there within the racks and driving around the plants. We have added a couple sensors to the robot so we constantly gather data around the growing environment, like temperature, relative humidity and CO2, and RGB cameras as well, so we can constantly gather data from everywhere in the facility and start showing that back to the farmers to help them, you know, give some insight into how is the growing environment actually close to the plant. This is where you know you actually see the yield increases if you can actually control and show what it is, you know the actual environment has been for each individual plant. So this is something that we see as a huge opportunity for us in the future and a little bit further down the line, of course, we want to be a platform for all kinds of technologies.

As I mentioned, it's a mobile robot with a lift and on top of that you can put a whole lot of things, and there's a lot of great companies working with amazing technology. All throughout the indoor farming sector, like Garden, has these cameras where you can tell something about the, you know, the health of the plants. You can use multi-spectral cameras, robotic arms for harvesting fruits and berries and pruning. There's a lot of different technologies that can be used in indoor farm and can provide a lot of value, but what we want to have is essentially the piece of infrastructure that can actually, you know, take these technologies throughout the farm.

0:15:46 - Harry Duran

It's interesting the way you describe it it comes you mentioned earlier a bit of a modular approach and how looking at it from a system is integration perspectives is really interesting. I keep thinking about the Detroit and the automobile manufacturers as they matured and that industry matured. You found a lot of systems providers and parts providers and they provided the ecosystem for all these different car manufacturers and it seems like you know that's the direction where vertical farming is moving, especially with all these moving parts. And I love the fact that you talked about it from a modular approach because, to your point, you have now access, you have the robot in place that's accessing and has close proximity to these crops, and it's almost like a plug-and-play model, if I hear you correctly, like you can plug in the sensors, you can plug in the cameras, you can plug in the robotic arms as needed, and all in an ideal world everything would work in a modular fashion and would fit together well and work well together.

0:16:42 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, exactly that's exactly what we're aiming at, right, because what we see is, you know there's. I think it's important to have that separation of duties because if you have a one company, you know spitting on robotics and biology and growing operations and all of these things into one. Typically, what you see is happening is there will be others that are more, you know, more talented or at least more focused in their efforts to get some solution to market. And I believe that will happen as well in indoor farming space and we already do see it happen.

We've seen a lot of vertical farms maybe getting beat up a little bit for betting too much on automation, because you know getting all of that knowledge inside the company it's quite a big investment and you need to amortize that investment across multiple farms and you know getting the product out to multiple customers and when you're in-house that operation in a fairly small setup maybe one or two or three farms it becomes really difficult to amortize that investment. So I believe that there's going to be, you know, one is the financial aspect of what I just mentioned, but one is also just concentrating on all the talent in these hubs, right? So if there's a lot of robotics engineers that are working on a super interesting problem that tends to attract other robotics engineers to go to that same place because here they can exchange ideas and spar with colleagues that are in the same fields. So I believe that is an effect that is happening here in vertical farming as well.

0:18:03 - Harry Duran

Can you talk a little bit about who would be an ideal customer for seasonings? Size of the farm Is it determining about crops growing where they are in the maturity of themselves as a business? You know, could it be people that have tried automation and that maybe moved away. So I'm curious what you're seeing in terms of consistency across some of the clients that you're starting to work with.

0:18:23 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah. So to be fair, of course we don't have many, many sites up and running. So we have the first couple of customers and we're very happy about that and of course we're on that early commercialization journey. So we're expanding as where we are now. So that's of course quite exciting.

But the general rule of thumb is what we see out there is kind of a minimal customer is about 500 to 1,000 square meters in footprint, so that's maybe a couple of thousand square meters in grow area. That's typically the smallest customers that we see out there. Below that, these micro farms and kind of basement type setup are very local to restaurants. That's typically too small to start investing in almost any type of automation. There might be some packaging machines, seating machines that might make sense. But we typically go for medium to large customers and of course the number of square meters can cannot really become too high. I mean, that's typically a problem of putting in extra capacity and making you know, basically making sure that you have enough robots to cover the entire facility. So that's typically what we see. But if we had to define, like the average customer that we see, it is somewhere around 5,000 square meters in growing area. We see quite a lot of those in terms of what we see out there. So that means a handful of robots per site typically.

0:19:40 - Harry Duran

And what are some of the challenges that you see? Some of these farms or, as you think, about people that would want to work with seasoning. Is there anything they can be doing to either prepare their environment or to think about how to possibly begin thinking? When is the time when automation makes sense for them?

0:19:57 - Christopher Thomasen

Yes, so the timing, of course, is the sooner the better. Typically. I mean we would love to get involved quite early in the process, also in the design process, to help the vertical farms actually figure out how do they design for automation in the best possible way. Because we do go out to sites and see, you know, there might be very narrow corridors and there might be some structures that might make it a little difficult for the robots to actually be in there in any type of robot essentially. So there are some things that need to be in place in a vertical farm as well.

So we'd love to be part of the kind of the early discussions on how to set up a good floor plan, because there need to be at least some turning radius, the robots need to be able to drive around, turn around and they need to be able to open doors.

So at simply manual door also can be quite tricky if you have some separated, separated grow rooms. So there's all kinds of things that we see out there. So if you have piping that going across the floor, then of course the robots can't really drive over the piping. So there's some design considerations that would be great, but typically it has been adapted to some operational flow for people in Sizzle Lifts. So often we see some of these things have already been thought out a little bit. But of course it can be made easier for automation throughout the entire automation chain, not only the logistics part. But of course there are some farms that you know that could benefit from thinking that in from the very beginning to be able to automate with buffer capacity, for instance, to make sure that you have some capacity going into the harvesting machine and out to packaging and cleaning and so on.

0:21:30 - Harry Duran

It sounds like it would benefit and this may be happening already, but from some standardization, right? Because if you talked about even just like the width of the floor space available, if this is where people are going to be looking for modular approaches to plug in different tools that maybe support them on their automation journey, all these things that you just outlined almost seem like a best practices guide. You know how to prepare, or even standardization, that people across all farms I don't know if are you seeing any progress with, like standardization of layouts or even just equipment, or even just some of this modular approach that we talked about, so that you know, regardless of what type of farm you have, you can get some more of a plug and play model.

0:22:11 - Christopher Thomasen

I think it's getting there. We have seen some standardization happening over the last five years. In the beginning it was a little wildest right, so everybody kind of designed their own system, and I think that it just the entire way that the industry has been shifting towards having system suppliers and then having operators that alone creates some standardization, right, because then you see that not everybody has designed their own system from scratch and designed their own trays for hydroponic growing and all that type of all that jazz essentially. So it's really great to see that kind of structure happening. There are, of course, still vertical farms that have developed some new proprietary systems that they believe is the key drivers to their success, and that's of course, fine.

But the standardization is something that typically helps automation, because that also broadens the market for the types of solutions that can come into the market. One day there will be a competitor very much like Seasony, or competitor to Seasony, and they will of course also benefit from the competition that you know or from the standardization that was happening in the industry, and that's ultimately good for vertical farmers, right. They get to pick and choose the right and the best solution for them, and if it's Seasony or if it's anybody else, they at least get to find the best solution for them. Whether it be on price or quality or whatever their metric, they are found most important.

0:23:26 - Harry Duran

I think what we saw in the early days is a lot of people were reticent to share any of their secret sauce or, you know, the proprietary systems, in the hopes that someone might copy them or steal them. And I think hopefully now, because of some of the change we're seeing in the environment and a lot of consolidation and a lot of concern about where we're headed as an industry, I think people are hopefully more open to have these conversations. Are you seeing any progress in terms of working groups, associations or people that are willing to just, you know, share ideas and share things that might help move the whole industry forward?

0:24:01 - Christopher Thomasen

There's, of course, more associations and there's more, you know, collaboration across the different suppliers in the industry and to kind of get together and build the best possible future for vertical farming. There's, of course, some still some proprietary stuff that people want to keep secret, and that's, of course, perfectly fine, but I think it hasn't gotten a little bit better, and I think it's also one of the effects of the value chain kind of forming a little bit in vertical farming is that people actually are finding their place in the value chain and figuring out okay, what is it actually? That is my secret sauce and my company's secret sauce, and I think this is ultimately good. We're starting to see in my eyes at least. I believe that the vertical farming sector will look essentially a lot like the greenhouse sector. You know, we have some technology suppliers and system suppliers that are very talented at what they're doing, and then you have these super talented operators that are operating a lean production and using the best possible tools that they can find in the market.

0:24:59 - Harry Duran

Is this your first role as CEO? Yes it is. Can you talk a little bit about that journey, what that's been like for you?

0:25:06 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, of course it's been super interesting. It's, of course, tough as to get a business off the ground. You know, no matter what role you have in the company as a co-founder, I think it's quite challenging. It's been definitely been interesting and I enjoy it very much. You know, I think it's super interesting every day to get to learn something new and basically see seasony grow. Typically, as an entrepreneur, you'll get a little lost in all the work there is, but when you look back and see how much the business has evolved, it's super rewarding. That's really what makes the day for somebody like me. It's super interesting to see how far we've come from when we found it in 2018.

0:25:42 - Harry Duran

Are there mentors or people that you've worked with in the past that have been inspirational or influential for you in terms of some guidance on how to make some of these decisions?

0:25:51 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, we have a very amazing cohort of investors, which is super talented entrepreneurs as well, from founders of companies that sold for $700 million to one and a half billion euros. Super talented entrepreneurs that are helping and wants to help out, that find our solution and our company super interesting and vertical farming super interesting as well. And then we have a board that's very competent. We have our board chair. She's from the finance industry and comes with a lot of great commercial input and how to basically get the company a little further down the road.

And then we have the robotics industry was also on the board the founder of another mobile robotics company, and he's, of course, also great because he's seen all the things that you can see in building up the mobile robotics company. So he has all the cheat sheet for getting a mobile robots company off the ground. So that's, of course, really great to have that type of support. And then, of course, through our different accelerator programs and everything that we've seen underway, I mean we've had some great mentors as well. Justin Mandihei is one of the people we've been talking quite a bit with from Alchemist accelerator, who also had his own startup that got acquired a couple of years back. So there's all of these people that have been great mentors to us here in season.

0:27:12 - Harry Duran

Sounds like a really solid team with a lot of experience and has been through the trenches and I've seen a lot of ups and downs and I think when you have a team like that, it's just the supports you, it helps you and prevents you from making mistakes that they probably made in the past and give you some guidance. So it must be really good to have the support like that. How big is the team now?

0:27:31 - Christopher Thomasen

So the team is 11 people and we're currently onboarding a few more, so we'll be 13 people, and not too long.

0:27:38 - Harry Duran

As the CEO, how do you think about the deciding where to grow the team and where you have needs, because obviously, as a new company, everything seems to take precedence finance, marketing, operations. You know HR and I'm always curious for first time CEOs and you think about all the different pieces and all the different support and all the different personnel that you need. You have to have a vision for where you want the company to be, and so how do you think about making those decisions and how do you know hire the right people at the right time?

0:28:12 - Christopher Thomasen

I mean we are quite a technically heavy team. I mean we mostly have engineers, because it's quite a tech heavy product and it does take multiple types of engineers, like wheels. We have mechanical engineers, robotics engineers, electrical engineers, so it's really quite a broad suite of engineering power that we need to get such a product into the market. So quite an engineering heavy team. So for us it hasn't really been a very difficult decision.

I mean it's of course what type of engineer is the most relevant, for the period that we're in at the moment has been the biggest issue here.

And of course, this is something that typically is quite obvious when you're in it, because you do see where all the problems are starting to stack up and where the next six months focus really need to be. So it typically becomes quite clear. And of course, if you have a technically savvy person as a co-founder or just in the team in general, then of course they can help allude to where are the next challenges going to be and where do we need to put some more focus. And you can, of course, also spar with your. If you have a professional board, if you have some advisors again that has been through the same journey, they might also help tell you where to put your focus, and this is also one of the reasons why we onboarded Dan, our head of strategy, about a year back, because we knew that we needed some more commercial power, and this is really what he's bringing to the table. So that was our first commercial hire into the company, and this has really been quite amazing to have him join as well.

0:29:37 - Harry Duran

I got to connect with Dan at Verde Farm as well, so we had a nice chat and got to meet a couple of the team members there. How important is it to have some visibility at these conferences? Is that something you're thinking about as you move into the end of this year, next year? Because I think, based on what I saw, it was very helpful to have that walkthrough of the little tiny robot and just showing people what, envisioning what that would look like in their farms. And so what's been your experience so far from the conferences?

0:30:06 - Christopher Thomasen

I mean we've been using conferences quite actively.

I mean we're doing increasingly more work in that area.

Picking out the best conferences is one of the things that we're practicing more and more now, and we're looking forward to Green Tech Amsterdam next year.

It's, of course, going to be quite exciting and we're starting to bet a little bit more on conferences, because this is where the industry meets up and we do see the benefit of having a stand in these different conferences to just show what it is that we actually do, because there's not a lot of people that have seen this type of solution before, and in vertical farming, this is still something that has quite a lot of newness to it. So being able to show it and showing on video, showing on you know, we had a 3D print model with us as well. Bringing a two meter long robot might be a bit much, but hopefully sometime we'll have a stand that's big enough to be able to do that as well, but that's been quite good for us, and you know, being more top of mind is something that we're thinking quite a lot about, and you know how we basically get our name a little bit more out. There is something that we'll see quite a lot more effort going into the next year.

0:31:06 - Harry Duran

I think it is helpful because, you know, when people see all the applications from the AI and robotics space and vertical farming, a lot of it is just brochures or websites and there's something special about being able to have a conversation with someone in person, to be given a demo of the technologies and to see how it can apply in your farm. And I think you know from the conferences that I've been at. You know there's not a lot of people that are in the same space that you are, so I think having this ability to share the benefits of what seasoning can provide I think is valuable from an in person perspective. Yeah, definitely.

Can you talk a little bit about the environment in Denmark specifically? I'm curious how vertical farming is seen, what the history of it is there and if that's changed over the years.

0:31:49 - Christopher Thomasen

Sure, in Denmark we do have a couple of vertical farms. I would say it's probably a handful or so. A couple of big ones here, one in the Copenhagen area, and we also had InFarm for a little bit, while I think they've shut down their operations in the Copenhagen facility, but there's a handful of farms in Denmark, so it's not like it's exploded in any way. It's not like there's a huge vertical farming market here, and I think one of the effects is also probably due to in Denmark having a pretty strong greenhouse sector. It's not like the Netherlands and I mean the Netherlands. Nobody can compete here, in Europe at least. So we do have some strong greenhouse production, particularly in the middle of Denmark and Funen. There's quite a lot of activity there.

So the need for vertical farming has been, you know, maybe not that strong, but we're starting to see it more. Especially during COVID. We've seen, I think there's been a global, you know, priceization has been going towards a localized food production. So not, you know, importing greens from all over the world during the winter months is something that is particularly important these days. So we're seeing the focus shifting a little bit these days and vertical farming is now a little bit more in the public eye, so that's really great. So I imagine, over the coming years, that there'll be a lot more initiative supporting that type of food production and then there'll be a lot more of a new system and paradigm, so that's something that I believe will be much more on the radar for the coming years. We're starting to see a little bit more from private actors when they're talking about impact technologies and something that can really change the way that we produce food. They're mentioning vertical farming as one of the sectors that are super interesting.

0:33:28 - Harry Duran

So it's starting to shift a little bit more, I think. How has your perspective personally changed about the importance of vertical farming? And three years ago I didn't plan on what was going to happen with COVID and supply chain disruptions and the Ukraine more and so the more time I spend, the more you see how valuable this is and how important it is. And obviously it's still early days and we're not going to feed the world with leafy greens. We all understand that. But how has your vision and perspective changed personally for what you see as the potential for what you're doing here?

0:33:58 - Christopher Thomasen

To me, it's only gotten more and more important. I think in the beginning I saw it as a very cool technology that has a lot of potential and we refer to the technology being used in space and there's all of these benefits that we could see there. But I think here on earth there's a lot of benefits and very low practical benefits that we see out in the retailers and going all the way out to the end users. I believe very much in having fairly large food productions and near distribution centers, because this is typically where we see the economies of scale happen. The large producers tend to be able to invest more in automation, become more efficient and actually drive down price, which is something that vertical farms, at least, have been struggling with for some time. So here I see that being one of the big shifts that we'll see over the coming years, because there's a lot of benefits, not only just by using vertical farms close to distribution centers.

For retailers it's exciting because one is the food miles. You get to reduce the amount of food miles from going from place to place. You have the year-round production, which not only stabilizes the buying need for the retailers, but you also get to reduce cooling capacity and distribution centers. You get to reduce the cooling capacity out in the retail stores and you get to reduce the shelf capacity needed. So there's quite a lot of effects going all the way out to the retailers that are super exciting and I believe that's just how it's going to be in the future. It might take a little while, but I thoroughly believe that this is how it's going to look.

0:35:32 - Harry Duran

Yeah, all the trends appear to be moving in that direction, sometimes slowly and sometimes with some ups and downs, but I think the overall trend should be upward, which I think is very promising. So I'm sure you have a lot of challenges day to day as a CEO of Season E, but what is a tough question that you've had to ask yourself recently?

0:35:53 - Christopher Thomasen

That's a good one. I mean, I'm quite confident that what we're building here is super valuable for vertical farming. But vertical farming is in a little bit of an up and down period right now. It's a little bit of a down period, so that is something that is quite tough, and we do see technology companies that look a lot like us. They are starting to focus their energy elsewhere, and we do think we have a platform that can provide value in other sectors as well, like the greenhouse space or mushroom production or insect production, artificial meat.

There's a lot of indoor farming that is not just vertical farming and of course, we have to ask ourselves that question. But I do thoroughly believe that vertical farming will continue to grow and we will stay here and essentially make sure that we are part of that movement to actually lift vertical farming out of that trough that we're in at the moment, because we can provide a lot of value and that is for sure. So this is one of the things that we've been thinking quite a lot about but have definitely found our place here.

0:36:51 - Harry Duran

Do you find that, with your friends and family, you're having to be now the spokesperson for vertical farming and explaining to people what actually it is?

0:36:59 - Christopher Thomasen

Yeah, that happened a lot. It used to happen much more, but now I think vertical farming has entered the radar a little bit, so now people know a little bit more about it. But I think three, five years ago, I mean, we had to explain it all the time, and even when doing the very first prototypes of our own little farm, we had to explain, you know, potential investors, that this is not toxic, we're not GMOing anything or we're not doing anything illegal or anything like that. So that was the early days.

0:37:27 - Harry Duran

So, as we wrap up this conversation, what I've been doing is leaving some space at the end of our conversation for you If you have any messages or if you have anything that you think would be helpful to speak or say to your colleagues in the space. As you know, this is. You know, we interview a lot of CEOs and founders and a lot of them listen to the show as well, and I think I've been interested in creating an atmosphere of you know, this idea of working together to this rising tide lifts all boats mentality. So is there anything that comes to mind for you in terms of a message that you have for the vertical farming industry?

0:38:02 - Christopher Thomasen

I think we've probably already touched upon it a little bit right. I think it's super important to find the place and the distribution or in the value chain, that where you fit in the best, and not be the expert at everything, but be the expert at where you need to be the expert, and think about automation early on, even if you might not be ready for it, think about how that might plug in in the future, because this is something that will if it's not a problem already, it will definitely be a problem to find the right people and retain the right people, and this is something that is going to be more and more of an issue and it's not going away anytime soon. So that's just one of the few things I want to mention.

0:38:40 - Harry Duran

So I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your story. I was really excited to meet the team and to see all the things that are happening in this space that are exciting, and new technologies always light me up and ensure that there's a promising way for the future. So any closing thoughts as you think about where we're headed as an industry, what gives you the most hope personally, like, as you think, maybe even just short term, six months, next year?

0:39:04 - Christopher Thomasen

I think we're actually in a good place and right now the spotlight might have basically gotten a little bit removed from vertical farming, but I think that's good. Now we can actually start making a lot of good progress. We've had a lot of stories about bankruptcies and high flying vertical farms, where it has been a very exciting adventure and they have done a lot for the industry. Don't forget that. But I think now we can actually start building in a little bit in peace, so actually build a lot of great farms and build a lot of great projects all over the world. And I know that we're already talking to a lot of vertical farms that are building projects without a whole lot of PR and not a whole lot of shouting from the roof, but they're building great things and I believe that will fuel a lot of vertical farms these days.

0:39:51 - Harry Duran

And then, do you have a schedule yet for upcoming conferences where you'll be at or where the team will be at?

0:39:56 - Christopher Thomasen

We've had a busy summer here, so we've had a lot of vertical farming conferences, but I think the next one will probably be Green Tech, so it's a little bit of a break here, until April.

0:40:05 - Harry Duran

Yeah, that seems to be the big one and I haven't made that one yet and I think I probably need to make plans because it seems to be the one that everyone has a reunion. That'll be fine, yeah definitely. So the website is seasonyio and is there any other place you want to send folks or listeners to connect with you and the team?

0:40:23 - Christopher Thomasen

Seasony and Iio is great and we have some old prototype video there and we have a lot of great videos and pictures If you contact us directly. I mean, we have had a lot of iterations since that video, so we have a lot of good things to show. But LinkedIn and that website is probably a great place to be.

0:40:40 - Harry Duran

Okay, we'll make sure all those links are in the show notes as well. Christopher, I want to thank you so much I know it's a little bit late there and Denmark, I appreciate you for staying up and sharing your inspiring story with the listeners. Thank you.

0:40:52 - Christopher Thomasen

It was great talking to you, Harry.