S12E159 Conner Tidd/Just Vertical - Democratizing Indoor Farming: Mission Unveiled

Harry Duran: 00:00:00

So, Conner Tidd, co founder and CEO of justvertical, thank you so much for joining me on the vertical farming podcast.

Conner Tidd: 00:00:06

Yeah, thanks. I am excited to be here and share our story.

Harry Duran: 00:00:10

I guess given the time of year we're having this conversation. The first thing we talked about was the weather. As soon as we got where's home for you?

Conner Tidd: 00:00:18

We're based in Toronto, so we got a few feet of snow outside right now. Not nice.

Harry Duran: 00:00:24

And that was. I feel like I have to share current weather with people. Nowadays. It's minus 4 Fahrenheit, minus 17 Celsius. I think you're a different appreciation for the cold because I grew up in New York, so there was. It was kind of cold there. But I think Midwest and Canadian cold is like, next level.

Conner Tidd: 00:00:41

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's funny, you talk to people from around the world and the. Just the idea of a negative scares them. I'm like, no, no, we can get to like negative 30, negative 40 on a bad day.

Harry Duran: 00:00:52

Yeah, yeah. And I think I lived in Los Angeles prior to this. And so it was. You'd get to, you know, 55 Fahrenheit, and as long as you had a hoodie in the back in the trunk, you're like, you're good, you're covered, you know, for a cold. For a quote unquote cold day at the beach. So I had to actually upgrade my boots, my coat for the level of cold that it gets here.

Conner Tidd: 00:01:14

Oh, God. It's funny, I don't know if you found this, but how quickly people adjust to the local climate. Like when you. I got family moved out to California and it's like they forgot they were Canadian within.

Harry Duran: 00:01:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'll go out, like to take the trash or the recycling out and I'll notice that I'm in a T shirt and it's like probably, you know, 30 degrees or something, which I never would have thought I'd be, you know, used to. I did my first cold plunge, which was the water was 35 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's next level stuff. I don't know if it's a big thing there to be jumping in cold lakes, but it's at Midwestern thing for sure. And it probably helped that we did the sauna ahead of time. So we got a super hot sauna get, you know, really sweaty and hot. And then you just get out in your bathing suit and go into the lake. It's really strange for people who are not from here to even think that human Beings would want to do something like that, but it's crazy.

Conner Tidd: 00:02:04

Oh yeah. Polar plunge.

Harry Duran: 00:02:09

Okay, I'm saying here, are you born and raised there? Did you grow up there?

Conner Tidd: 00:02:13

Yeah, grew up here, lived across the country, you know, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, so Montreal, Toronto, Calgary.

Harry Duran: 00:02:21

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:02:22

And then spent some time in Europe and Switzerland as well. So I've never been able to live somewhere warm. But, you know, appreciation for the coldness now.

Harry Duran: 00:02:30

Conner Tidd: 00:02:49

Yeah, I'd say never felt it was leading in an entrepreneurial direction. You know, I worked at Bayer, worked at a few other larger organizations and you know, there's something to be said for a bit of a cushy corporate life, but my mindset was always around where can I make the most impact? Specifically from the point of view of, you know, environment, sustainability. And it's, you know, I looked at agriculture. Okay, we got to feed more people. Yeah, there's no more land do so like, we're not getting new farmland. How can we solve these challenges? That's why I went to Bay Original was to look at that and that's what led to the vertical farming side. Was really trying to tackle that challenge around how do we feed people? You know, it's 125. I don't think anybody should be going hungry.

Harry Duran: 00:03:31

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:03:31

With the tech and the food we have now, but that was the angle. I never thought I'd be in a startup, but ended up here somehow.

Harry Duran: 00:03:38

What was the impetus for you to study this or why was that something that was important for you? This idea of like feeding people and this fact that, you know, there's only a finite amount of resources in terms of land. What was happening in your world to make this, you know, something that was top of mind for you?

Conner Tidd: 00:03:53

Yeah, it's. I mean, I grew up and worked on some small scale organic farms. You know, I've been around different types of agriculture. I grew up, you know, not in the city, but outside of it, in the border on a forest. I'd seen some of that gobbled up as farmland growing up and then, you know, moving to the city. You see homelessness, you see the demand on food banks. So, you know, that kind of set the stage for me mentally for, okay, these are real problems that we need to solve. And I was doing my master's at the University of Toronto, the master's of science and sustainability management. I saw Bayer, saw what they were doing, but my co founder was actually working in the Arctic teaching indigenous youth, and he saw the price of food out there, and it's, you know, we're talking 20, $25 for fresh produce that's already on its last legs. But he was also working on the hard research around vertical farming. At the same time, he's like, you know, the technology exists to grow food anywhere in the world.

Harry Duran: 00:04:53

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:04:53

Just, you know, it hasn't been fully leveraged yet, hasn't been deployed. And that was our idea. Like, okay, how can we take that cool technology and put it together in a way that's accessible to people? And that's how we started and started completely as an academic project and spun out company.

Harry Duran: 00:05:09

I saw that you also had some earlier experience in restaurants. You worked as a sous chef as well. And I'm curious, I've had a couple of people who've had considerable experience in restaurants, and I think it helped them give them a firsthand experience to how food is sourced, what food costs and how much waste goes on. I'm curious what your experiences were like back then, now that you're looking back at it.

Conner Tidd: 00:05:28

Yeah, absolutely. So I worked in restaurants from the time I was about 12 to 22, so I got about a decade in there. Everything from starting out as like, the busboy, toaster, toastmaster at a breakfast place, all the way up to fine dining and then, you know, an upscale vegan restaurant. And. Yeah, you know, especially in those later years where I was a sous chef, you know, you see what goes into sourcing.

Harry Duran: 00:05:54

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:05:54

You also see, like, the different approaches to mitigating food waste. And, you know, one of the fine dining places I was at also catered weddings. We had a venue on site. And just the amount of food waste that would come out of these is remarkable. And, you know, you might get 2am cleaning up from this. Like, you know, you don't want to be wasting this, but, like, there's nowhere to bring it at 2:00am yeah, there's no real way to solve that. A lot of it too is the order. And like, you don't know what you're going to need that day necessarily. Give it your best guess. Sometimes you're under and you end up going to the grocery store and just getting kind of rinsed on prices as a restaurant for it. Then other days you weigh over order and you've got waste. So, you know, you really see what goes into the food supply chain and how complex it can be.

Harry Duran: 00:06:41

Yeah, yeah. It's sort of eye opening when you start to think about the waste and how there's probably, you know, there's better solutions for that now. There's food banks and people that now make the rounds or some of these restaurants and pick up some of this waste as well. But I think what I'm seeing from the vertical farming side is also the connection you have with chefs as well who want to source some of the best produce or, you know, some of these more exotic like leafy greens or microgreens or things that they traditionally would have to source from somewhere else at a more expensive price. And I think what we're seeing, some of the farms are having success partnering with some of these restaurants in town. And I'm. And I'm wondering if that's something that's part of just vertical strategy or if it's something you've been looking at as well.

Conner Tidd: 00:07:26

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember that one restaurant, the one upscale vegan place I worked at, this would have been, you know, 2011ish, 2010. And they were sourcing microgreens from a local farmer, which was revolutionary at the time. We were right at the onset of the microgreen hype, and it was sunflower sprouts, which are relatively simple now, but at the time it was like, oh, they couldn't get them anywhere but from this one farmer. And, you know, it was a great relationship. They're way cheaper than trying to get them anywhere else. You got to see the impact of working with them. And now with just verticals, one of the number one questions we get, because we get a lot of people come to us, they want to set up their own farms. They're bought into the idea. They've got the capital, they've got the space. And the question, what am I going to grow? What should I grow? And we always tell them the simplest way to do this. Take a walk through the grocery store, see where things are coming from. Identify what's coming from far away. That's a great starting spot. Also, go talk to your local restaurants. Ask them, what do you have trouble getting? Where is the quality lacking? You know, you'll find those things. Sometimes it's something niche like sunflower sprouts and specific microgreens. Other times you'd be surprised. It's just, you know, simple things like crisp lettuce. Yeah, keep it in stock or quality's tear on a little, or, you know, the price Fluctuates, So it's something farmers deal with all the time, especially with indoor farming.

Harry Duran: 00:08:46

Yeah, for sure. We'll definitely get into like the origin stories around just vertical. But I was curious about the time you spent at the center for International Sustainable Development Law. Like how did that come about and what was your interest there?

Conner Tidd: 00:08:58

Yeah, so, you know, going back to the impact mentality, I originally thought I wanted to be an environmental lawyer.

Harry Duran: 00:09:05

Okay.

Conner Tidd: 00:09:05

I had so great experience. The center, csdl, they specialize in writing environmental, international environmental law, helping smaller nations negotiate at these big conferences. So if you've ever been to a big international conference country like the US or Canada, got a dedicated team of 30 people, they work on this one thing, whether it's climate change, poverty relief. Hell, if you're a small nation, it's usually one guy who does all of it and you get to the negotiating table and it's yes, we would help out the small guys. It was interesting. I had to see a lot of things like the Sustainable Development Goals get negotiated. I get a peek under the hood and I'll, you know, I'll never forget the draft for one of the goals is to reduce at read now. The goal is to reduce inequality between nations. Our story within nations. It was originally written to reduce inequality between nations, but you got to imagine the big countries of Canada, the States, the eu, to be quite frank, they said we've got no interest in reducing inequality between us. And you know, Zimbabwe, happy to say we'll reduce inequality within our countries, but not between them. And you know, interesting work moves at a glacial haste. The impact variable, you know, whether these things work or not, you know, they're better than nothing, but, you know, really cool experience. But I kind of pivoted from that. Say I want to do something that I can make a tangible impact on a, you know, five year time horizon, not a 50 year time horizon.

Harry Duran: 00:10:36

Yeah. So when you saw how slow things move there, it probably was a wake up call for you. Like, you know, if you really wanted to make the impact that you're looking to make, they probably wouldn't be there if you're looking to do it quicker.

Conner Tidd: 00:10:47

Absolutely. Yeah. It's, you know, they're doing great work, but they argue about a single word for like three years. And I think that would probably drive me crazy.

Harry Duran: 00:10:55

Yeah. And I think when most people hear about organizations like that and what happens behind the scenes and how long things actually take to get done and accomplished, that's probably frustrating for people that are looking, that are more like active and real, you know, who consider themselves change makers, like, they really got to move faster. And it must be frustrating to be in an environment like that.

Conner Tidd: 00:11:15

Oh, absolutely. You know, like, I get frustrated these days trying to get my board or a team aligned on a single goal.

Harry Duran: 00:11:22

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:11:22

Imagine trying to get the entire world's governments all to agree on one thing. Yeah, that's natural.

Harry Duran: 00:11:28

Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about the origin story for just vertical, like what was happening in terms of, like what you knew about the vertical farming space. You know, how much research had you done to what was out there already and how did you decide on the offering at the time that you launched?

Conner Tidd: 00:11:43

Yeah, so at the time I was more on the pure agricultural side. So, you know, you go out to Midwestern Canada or U.S. you see the average farm size is now well over a thousand acres. And that's what I was familiar with, the wheat, corn, canola, soy farmers. But I'd seen the struggles of people sourcing food that they eat, your lettuces, your expenses, your herbs firsthand. So I was aware of it, but wasn't well versed in the technology or the science of it. And that's where my co founder, who I met while doing my master's, he was my compliment on that side as the hardcore scientist. And this was our capstone project was, okay, how can we build an indoor firm and model that works? So originally we thought we were going to get towers and rent them out to people in their homes and they'd use them in the winter, return them in the summer when they had their outdoor gardens.

Harry Duran: 00:12:35

Okay.

Conner Tidd: 00:12:35

Didn't quite get there, but the kind of. The original thesis of the idea was how do we get the cool technology of this and build it into something that people feels like it fits into their homes? Because one of the things we said or discovered early on is a lot of people love the idea of vertical farm and hydroponics, but at the time there's a lot of tubes, a lot of light, and people didn't want the stigma of what looked like, quite frankly, grow off in their home.

Harry Duran: 00:13:00

Yeah. And so was that a conscious decision to go after the consumer market first?

Conner Tidd: 00:13:06

It was. So we started going after the consumer market on the, you know, we chose a bit of a higher end product. So we took all the cool technology around vertical farming at the time and built it into a piece of furniture and that became our AVA product, which we started out as targeted at the suburban kind of home. Followed that up with our Eve, the half size version for the condo dwellers. And that was the start of just vertical and, you know, helped us learn the ins and outs of the manufacturing because we actually manufacture all of this ourselves. We run a manufacturing facility here. Originally we made it all out of wood, so we were running a wood shop, which was, you know, for me, quite an experience of somebody who wasn't that handy at the time, but now pretty accomplished there. So. And then that progressed into what we now have as our commercial offerings as well, where we build entire farms.

Harry Duran: 00:13:54

And so talk to me a little bit about those early days because I know we have a lot of folks that are, you know, farmers and looking to get started with projects. But like, as I imagine a first time, you know, CEO and leader, like, how do you start to think about building a team and what are the pieces and the skill sets you look for? Because, you know, when you're first getting started, you probably need help on all fronts, but you probably, you know, with constraints on finances, you probably can't do that. So I'm curious about your thought process as you started that.

Conner Tidd: 00:14:24

Absolutely. You know, the biggest thing I could say from the get go is you've just got to start doing it. You got to try a lot of this yourself because like you said, you don't have the resources to hire out. And even if you did, you know, it takes a certain level of experience to know whether the person you're hiring is even doing it right. You know, are they putting out a good product? And sometimes you got to get your hands dirty and do it yourself. So the first version we bought up ourselves built them out of foam and wood from Home Depot. They were not pretty by any means. Barely functional, I would say, but it was enough to get a good grasp of, okay, here's what we want to do, here's what we know works, what doesn't. And immediately we started looking for complimentary skill sets. People who are smarter than us and had functions that we didn't know at all. So we're fortunate. Early days, we got an angel investor in who was an expert in manufacturing and design for manufacturing, who helped us say, okay, the concept's great, but we need to get this down to a price point that's going to make money, it's going to be affordable for people. So look for that. Look for people who can help you without necessarily a huge outlet of finance from your side. So could be angel investors, advisors, incubators, friends. You know, you might swap equity if you're building a business there for that help. But it's, you know, get your Hands dirty and find people that are willing to help you and have those complimentary skill sets.

Harry Duran: 00:15:53

Yeah, I think that's a, some, a tough lesson for founders, you know, or the realization that you probably have to do a lot of it yourself when you're getting started and you have to learn the things that you're not a subject matter expert in. And there's probably, you know, several failures along the way. And being an entrepreneur myself, I think you learned quickly how to just dust yourself off from those failures as opposed to just wallowing in self pity and be like, oh, that lost a ton of money there, but I just got to try the next thing. And I've heard it described as, now, you know what doesn't work.

Conner Tidd: 00:16:20

Absolutely. If you got to mentally prepare yourself, you're going to do a lot of stuff that doesn't work.

Harry Duran: 00:16:25

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:16:25

And you know, we always say everything's fixable as long as we know about it. And that's, you know, we emphasize that with employees now. But even early days, like the first few indoor gardens we sold, like, watch the leak, they spilled onto people's floors. Like we short circuited stuff. The worst thing we could have done would have been to kind of shirk responsibility and try and hide from those customer calls. It's, you know, we knew we had to address it head on. We like personally show up to their houses, like, troubleshoot and shake, said, oh, wow. Yeah, we're lucky. We had some good support of early champions who probably went through three or four different gardens with us while we fell. Shoot it a lot because your customers always managed to find something wrong with the product that you dealt with.

Harry Duran: 00:17:08

I love that example because I might have shared this example a couple times here, but in the early days of Airbnb, I remember this story. The founders, they saw that listings that had nice pictures were doing better. So they flew out to New York City and they started knocking on doors of people who had listings on Airbnb and saying, hey, you know, we'd like to like, improve the quality of your photos. They would go and take pictures of their apartments and they went around the city. I don't know how many they did, maybe like a couple hundred or something. But talk about doing something, you know, that doesn't scale. Right. But you have to do that stuff early on. And it sounds like that's the mindset you had as well.

Conner Tidd: 00:17:42

Yeah, absolutely. So we still do things that don't scale all the time when starting a new initiative. And nothing beats that firsthand experience, especially if it's Anything public facing, anything to do with customers, like, you gotta get that live feedback, you gotta see firsthand because the amount of stuff that theoretically should work, that doesn't. And you only realize that when you're the one there looking at it and being able to touch it, feel and understand it.

Harry Duran: 00:18:08

What I noticed about the products is they're, you know, they're very aesthetically pleasing. And there's a focus you made on like, you know, whether you went to actually Home Depot to look at wood and to create the first products and you know, now there's different types of wood you can get or colors of wood. Why was that important for you from a form function to have that as a way in terms of like the design of the system?

Conner Tidd: 00:18:31

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because both my co founder and I like don't own a single designer piece. You know, we're very like simple guys out of here. But it was a realization early on that like, if we want everybody to be growing at least some of their own food, you got to build something that's going to look and feel like it belongs in their homes. And the truth is people spend a lot of time thinking about what goes into their house. And we don't want, we never wanted this to be another gadget that kind of sits on the counter, you use it for a few months and gets thrown away. So our idea is, okay, let's make this a statement piece. Let's make it something that looks great. By doing that, people have, you know, a built in incentive to keep this farm growing, to keep it well obtained, keep it growing. And you know, to this day we got people who are like five, six years into those original units that are still coming to us being like, oh, you restock our nutrients, my seeds.

Harry Duran: 00:19:24

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:19:25

So it was all about if this is going to be in everybody's homes, you got to build the different form factors, different colors to fit into everybody's home.

Harry Duran: 00:19:34

You mentioned you've got the, the Eve Tower Garden, the AVA indoor farm and the Eco Living Green Wall. Can you talk a little bit about like the different segment and how you think about targeting those and like who those different farms would be a good fit for? Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:19:49

So across our three products, the Ava was our first one and we really built that for kind of the upscale consumer conscious choice because, you know, we knew they had money to spend on this. They were after our survey market starting out so found a lot of success. And people who wanted that statement piece, 40 to 65 age group. But while we were Talking to them, what we found is it took a little bit of education. They weren't so familiar with indoor growing at the time. And what we saw was a lot of enthusiasm among younger people, but they weren't buying. And part of it was price point. The other big thing we found was young people move a lot. You're kind of that 20 to 35 age group play. You're going to be renting, you might be a student, then you get your first house and you move again. Again, until you get that kind of like family home. So that's where the Eve came from. It was kind of the apartment size version that people could move. They would feel okay with it. You know, you carry one yourself. And then finally, ecowall, we came up with just recently, in the past year and a half as a response to the rising price of fruit is what we saw from a lot of our customers was, I love it. I love how it looks, how easy it is to use, but I want to grow more. So the E of grows 12 times. The Eva grows 16. The Eco Wall grows 88.

Harry Duran: 00:21:09

Wow.

Conner Tidd: 00:21:09

So the eco wall is. That's the one. If, you know, it goes beyond just a head of lettuce here and some garnish, too. You may not need to buy fresh produce from the grocery store ever again. If you're running this right, the form.

Harry Duran: 00:21:23

Function on the living wall doesn't look like it's much bigger than the Ava.

Conner Tidd: 00:21:27

No. So it fits into the same footprint.

Harry Duran: 00:21:31

Okay.

Conner Tidd: 00:21:31

The lights do come out a little further, so you've got about a foot of depth there, a little over a foot. But we've again tried to keep it small, keep it compact, and by keeping everything operating like truly vertical harmonic here for, you know, folks hearing this over the audio, it's. We're not talking about stacked shelves here. It's, you know, truly vertical, straight up and down, growing out right in your face there. So it also looks visually really, really cool on your wall, where it's almost like a living piece of art as things grow.

Harry Duran: 00:22:02

Yeah. And so what's the variety of crops that people have had success with on the walls?

Conner Tidd: 00:22:08

Yeah, we do a lot of your leafy greens, so your lettuces, your kales, your chards. The herbs are super popular because great bang for your buck and freshness and herbs makes a big difference. And then we also see a lot of success with your cherry tomatoes. Cucumbers. Strawberries are a bit of an exercise and patience. They're a lot of fun to grow. And hot peppers have been quite A hit.

Harry Duran: 00:22:31

And I'm curious also, you had a recent announcement of a partnership with New Leaf. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Conner Tidd: 00:22:38

Yeah. So we started on the consumer side of the business and as we grew we started re expanded into the commercial side using the same technology where we now build large scale farms around the world. Anything up to 100,000 square feet for other people. New Leaf is one of our partners. They're based out in Calgary and they do all the Iot for us. So we're hardware guys in the sense that we manufacture the hardware, we can design the space, we can renovate your space, make recommendations around H vac, but we don't manufacture controls. So they're a control system provider and we work with them on a ton of farms. Just did one out Alberta for a food bank. That was, that was great. They're growing a ton of trips.

Harry Duran: 00:23:24

Means that they're now what's been the biggest shift for you? Moving to like direct to consumer and now, you know, working in, now in the commercial space there's different challenges. Obviously you had to partner with someone like New Leaf who had that subject matter expertise. What else has been like new challenges, new questions you've had to ask yourself?

Conner Tidd: 00:23:42

Yeah, I mean it's scale in a different way. Right. Where we've got thousands of direct consumer customers, which they present a scale challenge, for example, on support. But you know, it's easy. Like the manufacturing just, it's the same thing over and over again in different colors. Like we're really good at building those. But you know, when we go in and build a, you know, a farm that can be tens of thousands of square feet, it's an intricacy and a scale challenge on making sure all the hardware works together, making sure the systems talk to each other and the stakes are a lot higher. Right. If you kill your plants at home, it stuck. People do it. If a farm shuts down, this is somebody's livelihood, if that's down for a day, that's got a real tangible dollar value that has a real impact on people's livelihoods and getting people fed. So the stakes are a lot higher and you can't make any mistakes there.

Harry Duran: 00:24:40

Conner Tidd: 00:25:01

Yeah. Our big thing that we always push is accessibility and easy use in this technology. It's we view our role as understanding all the really cool science that goes into making great LED lights, great control systems, great nutrients and integrating that into a package that is easy for farmers to use and grow with. You know, we've seen unfortunately too many big firms fail because they just to over complicate things. And you know, you get these capex, you know, the cost to build the farms runs into the tens of millions of dollars and they ignore the unit economics and what it is, you know, still farming, we say, so our big thing is, is it easy for them to use? Does it make sense and if something is wrong, can they fix it? That's really what we push is farming, still farming. We're going to make it easy for you to do, we're going to give you a plan and your success is our success.

Harry Duran: 00:25:54

Do you feel like the ones that have success or someone who makes an ideal partner or farmer for you is someone who's got a solid plan about not only growing it, but what they're going to do after the crop is grown? Because that's obviously a big part of it, right? Like what's the market, what's their go to market strategy? You know, what are they going to, you know, do they have a plan for that as well? Because I think farmers can be strong farmers, but may not be the best marketers and salespeople.

Conner Tidd: 00:26:19

Absolutely. We always say lightly, you know, when we're in the first calls and the hardest part is selling it is we'll make sure you're growing well like that. That's an equation of do we get the electrical, do we get the H Vac, we get the nutrients, all that. We've done that before, we know how to do that. It's all about the offtake markets and how you're going to sell this and is it going to make sense. So one of the first things we like to do with it is a financial model and say, you know, let's go ahead, let's make sure you know where this is going to go, how you're going to sell it and at what price. Because the worst thing we see is people who think about it backwards and say the growing is the hard part. You hate to see somebody same thing. What can often be a few hundred thousand or millions of dollars into a facility and then kind of lose their shirt on. I think this happens in any rapidly expanding tech Industry. There are a lot of people unfortunately who are willing to just sell, sell, sell without the regard to that end customer versus for us it's you know, our best advocates we know are going to be the people who are successful. So it's, we're invested in making sure they're successful down the road. And one of our biggest channels of growth is expansion firms for people who are growing, they're profitable or expanding.

Harry Duran: 00:27:33

When you look at the folks that have had success that have partnered with you on the commercial side, what are the traits, you know of someone that's a, either a farmer or someone who's coming to you? Like what are you looking for to see if they have a good chance of success?

Conner Tidd: 00:27:47

Yeah, it's you know, your basic qualifiers like okay, are they going to be able to do this properly? Like in terms of space capital? The worst thing that we can run into is somebody wants to cut corners. So we often see this where somebody's got an idea where they want a 10,000 square foot fire with 100,000 plant sites. From the get go they may only have half the capital. So they say, oh I'm going to buy this odd off the shelf uncertifiable H vac system from overseas. And it's like no, please don't do that. Like you know, often advocate start smaller, work your way up to it. Like you don't need to go big right away. So people who understand that kind of stepwise fashion. So we get a lot of people who say they buy you know, two or three commercial racks from us, get their feet wet, work it out and then expand, expand, expand. And you know you gotta have that diligence, you gotta have that long term view that this is not gonna be a, it's not a get rich quick scheme by any means. It's, you're still a farmer, it's hard work and it's gonna take some time.

Harry Duran: 00:28:48

Where are you seeing the most growth in terms of like regions? Are you staying local or they're just. All the markets are open to you right now?

Conner Tidd: 00:28:56

Yeah. So we've done projects all around the world. We just wrapped one up on the Ukrainian border. So if I would, you know be can build days in all around the world in kind of active conflict zones. What makes the most sense and you know, related to this and who makes an ideal farmer to often people who have an unfair advantage for some reason. And that may be anything from they've got on site power generation. So then these partnered with solar farms or data centers and maybe that they are going to be the end consumer anyway. So. And we've got projects where it's going into food banks, like we said, or partnered with restaurants where they're already paying a bit of a premium, or it's somewhere where they've got the space for cheap and they've got an existing labor force. So we can do these projects globally. But it's often people who are looking almost at a vertical integration play.

Harry Duran: 00:29:48

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:29:48

Say how can I own and control over my supply chain? Or finally it's. It's somewhere where food is very expensive. So food deserts, remote areas, etc.

Harry Duran: 00:29:58

Yeah. Congrats on those new projects. How did the project in Ukraine come about?

Conner Tidd: 00:30:03

Yeah, so this was an interesting one. This. We partnered with a charity called Global Medic.

Harry Duran: 00:30:09

Okay.

Conner Tidd: 00:30:09

So they do emergency disaster relief around the world. Everything from, you know, the LA Wildfire recently to the conflict in Ukraine, projects throughout the Middle east. And they're all about, you know, in an emergency situation, how can we keep people fed. With this project, it's what they've seen is these refugees have come over the border and at this point, the Ukrainian war has been going on quite a while. They're almost permanent refugees. And in a food relief situation, we're very good at delivering your rice, your beans, your dry goods that are calorically dense. But what happens is you might run into nutrient deficiencies as well as, you know, on a human level, if you've ever eaten rice and beans for like months straight, it drives you crazy.

Harry Duran: 00:30:56

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:30:57

So it's. How can we bring fresh food into these situations as well as providing employment opportunities? So in this case, we built this farm in Moldova, which borders Ukraine, went into a relief program there where not only do they grow the food, but they also distribute it through food distribution. But it also goes into a local culinary school that trains people who are trying to reskill and re enter the workforce there. So it's interesting all the different ways, you know, vertical farming can meet their needs because they got a climate similar to Canada, where in our northern US where it's cold most of the year.

Harry Duran: 00:31:33

That's interesting. The education component is interesting as well, because I know that you've partnered with Seneca College and some other educational establishments. Can you talk a little bit about the work you're doing there?

Conner Tidd: 00:31:45

Yeah. So we span the education sphere from, you know, kindergarten all the way through like PhD research. You know, with Seneca in particular, we've done some really cool work with a container firm we built for them. They're doing research on the actual nutrient density within the crops and how you can either manipulate that with watering cycles, different lighting with different nutrients into the water. And that goes both into their culinary program as well as on their research side. We've got a, an upcoming research project with them where we're actually placing these greenwalls into different settings. Long term care, schools, food banks, to also look at the mental health well being aspects of it. And you know, as you go down the ages, it's with little kids it's often just about, you know, showing them where does food come from and it's not just from the grocery store and getting hands on experience. So education is a great venue. It's something people are really interested in and we're happy to be part of it because it really drives the industry as well.

Harry Duran: 00:32:47

Yeah, I imagine it's an interesting way for folks who are in the education space to get introduced to the vertical farming projects. And I imagine some of them, when they leave, it's something that's now top of mind for them and it's either something they may be interested in pursuing further as a farmer or as a business opportunity.

Conner Tidd: 00:33:05

Absolutely. And it's interesting because traditional agriculture is facing a bit of a crisis of not a lot of young farmers out there who want to be doing this. So it's interesting to see the interest in vertical farm, I think because it's got that tech spin to it. It's very cutting edge, it's revolutionary. So hopefully keeps youth interested and keeps that talent pipeline flowing because people need to eat, we need farmers of all kinds.

Harry Duran: 00:33:30

Where are you seeing the need for more innovation in the vertical farming space? I know that you have obviously because of the nature of the, your system, you work with seeds and seed pods is, you know, and I know there's people that are working specifically for, you know, creating strains of seeds that are for vertical farming. Because traditionally you take traditional seeds and use them in vertical farming spaces. And I'm curious what you're seeing in terms of any innovation happening on that front.

Conner Tidd: 00:33:56

Yeah, in terms of the seeds, you know, it's. We work with a manufacturer or a breeder who specializes in seeds for indoor farms. Whether that's resistance to things like powdery mildew or, you know, really simple things like changing the way the leaves spread on how to let us, let me harvest it, it can be harvested as a loose leaf a lot faster.

Harry Duran: 00:34:18

Oh, that's interesting. Right.

Conner Tidd: 00:34:19

These are things that fundamentally change the economics of farming. I think that's really what it boils down to when we look for Innovation is what makes it more profitable and affordable for farmers, both operationally as well as an upfront capital cost. So we work with our partners on lighting control system speeds. Then internally, we're always pushing for how can we reduce our cost to manufacture, how can we be more efficient in how we build these molds, how we manufacture, how we ship, how we package that, that actual starting cost is reduced there for the farmer.

Harry Duran: 00:34:54

I'm sure the answer to this question changes every day, but what's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Conner Tidd: 00:35:01

Yeah, you know, it changes all the time. We're in such a. Such a dynamic environment with food prices. I mean, North America being based in Canada, there's a lot of tariff talk going on, fielding a lot of calls about, okay, if we have a 25% increase in the cost of produce going across the border, so how are we going to deal with that? Because you go through the grocery store, pretty much everything's made on our shelves is Mexico, Canada, us. So we're always dealing with that. It's always a tough question, like, how do we support that? You know, as somebody who comes at this from a sustainability, food security space, I'm always like, okay, let's go for the charitable initiatives, let's do this at cost. Like, how can we help out best? But you got to balance that with the business interested. We've got employees, we've got investors, we've got shareholders. It's okay. How do we balance that while still being profitable and growing as a business? So it's, you know, it's always a question for me, how can we make the most impact and get people fed while still being able to grow, support our employees and their livelihoods?

Harry Duran: 00:36:01

Yeah, I saw that. You also posted recently about the closure of Aerogardens, and I think, you know, that's top of mind for people as well. It's like, what's the model here and is it sustainable? And, you know, people probably get nervous when they've seen news like that. So why was it important for you to kind of address that head on?

Conner Tidd: 00:36:18

I mean, Hero Green was the name and consumer indoor growing. Right. Like, it's. Yeah, we saw them get essentially acquired by Scott's Mehru. Could grow. Like, that's. If you were to look at presentations given to venture capitalists by people in the indoor growing space. That's what they talked about.

Harry Duran: 00:36:34

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:36:34

So to see them shut down was pretty shocking for us, for the industry. But it's important for us to address, like, look, things happen. We get it we're here to stay. We've got a long term vision and you know, their downfall from our view is largely attributed to there's About a million AeroGarden knockoffs now on Amazon.

Harry Duran: 00:36:55

Yeah.

Conner Tidd: 00:36:56

And for us, that's why we are, it was important for us to be the manufacturer because we control the cost, we can control the design. There's no one who does what we do. Even if somebody tried to, like we've got that mode, that protection. And we also intentionally don't gouge on pricing. Like we do fair pricing to protect against that. And we just really want to reassure the market there's ups and downs. Commercial consumers seen it all. We're here to stay and we think this industry is going to make a difference in the world.

Harry Duran: 00:37:27

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that was helpful for people to see that. So as we wrap up this conversation, I like to leave a couple of minutes towards the end of these conversations for any thoughts you have. Because of the nature of this podcast, we get a lot of your colleagues in the space, other CEOs and founders in the vertical farming space listening to the show. Is there any thoughts you have or messages you have for the, you know, the vertical farming, industry controlled environment, agriculture space that come to mind for you in terms of, you know, thoughts you have in the spirit of like more collaboration?

Conner Tidd: 00:37:57

Harry Duran: 00:38:13

Conner Tidd: 00:38:14

You know, we're here to see the industry grow and collaborate with other folks like reach out. Like there's always partnership opportunities and you know, some of our greatest kind of advancements that were like leaps forward came from advice from our partners. So I think we move forward a lot better together, even separately here.

Harry Duran: 00:38:32

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it's consistent with the messages I've heard from other folks who've been on there. So thank you for sharing that. So website is justvertical.com anywhere else you want to send folks to connect with you?

Conner Tidd: 00:38:43

Yeah, if you want to take a look at the commercial stuff, it's just commercial.justvertical.com their links. Feel free to connect with us through there. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Conner Tibb. Always open to chat and if anyone's going to Indoor adcon, we'll be there in March, so.

Harry Duran: 00:38:59

Okay, I'll be there as well. We got to make sure to connect.

Conner Tidd: 00:39:02

Harry Duran: 00:39:07

Oh, great. Yeah, it'll be nice to see the units in. Are you going to have a unit on display as well?

Conner Tidd: 00:39:13

Yeah, we're going to have one of the. One consumer unit and then one of the commercial systems there as well.

Harry Duran: 00:39:17

Oh, that'll be great. Well, yeah, I'll be looking forward to connect and we'll have all the links in the show notes as well. So I appreciate making the time and sharing your story. It's always fun to just. I mean, there's so many interesting companies in the space and it's hard to keep up sometimes. So it's when I get a referral or people reach out or I see something in a news post. I forgot how we originally got connected. But it's exciting to see what's happening and exciting to see people that are succeeding in the space, especially of like you just mentioned news about Aerogarden and I think people that there is a way forward where companies can be successful and profitable and do good for the community and their consumers. And I think you've provided a really good model for how to do that. So I appreciate you sharing that inspiring story.

Conner Tidd: 00:39:55

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here.

Harry Duran: 00:39:58

Thanks again for your time, Conner. Appreciate it.

Conner Tidd: 00:40:00

Yes, thank you.