Angelo Esposito [00:00:11]:

Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're here today with Jake Simon, the co founder and CEO of Connected Fresh. Jake, thanks for joining us.

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Jake Simon [00:00:21]:

Yeah, thank you for having me on. Excited for this?

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:25]:

Absolutely. I'd love to start off with the origin story. So just understand, you know, what is Connected Fresh and like, what sparked the idea into getting, you know, starting that company in the first place.

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Jake Simon [00:00:36]:

Overall, Connected Fresh is about taking sensor inputs and other inputs from around the restaurant or grocery or produce, distribution or whatever it is. Right. All under the umbrella of food service. And we're taking these inputs and being able to find inefficiencies or things that aren't working or things that are going to stop working in the restaurant and notify people so that they can fix the issue before it actually becomes a problem. So this will make a lot more sense once I go into my background. Right. So my co founder, Tushar and I were working together at Deloitte Consulting. We were basically building their industrial IoT sensor platform.

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Jake Simon [00:01:15]:

Right. And capabilities. Right. So we were going all around to customers from Ford's F150 line to food production plants and things like that. Right. And really tying into those machines and processes to identify where are there issues that are going to potentially happen. Right. So there are things that, you know, something has occurred and therefore notify someone that it's occurred because then they can fix the problem swiftly.

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Jake Simon [00:01:41]:

Right. But then there are also those things where it's scheduled downtime is your friend when you're trying to fix something. Right. So if you can predict that something is going to fail, can you take care of it in a routine basis? Right. So ultimately we're, we're working for Deloitte. We were doing this kind of thing and we, we had a friend who's, whose family had a produce shop in St. Louis and they were losing a ton of product, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a product.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:09]:

Yeah.

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Jake Simon [00:02:10]:

Of tomatoes and things like that. Right. Just because they had aging equipment, aging refrigerators and, and they were going down. Right. And, and the thing that really, really hurt them the most was, you know, the guy was around the corner, right. On the off days, on the weekend. They were close, close on the weekend. So it's like, you know, if I knew that something was going out, I could go there and, you know, either fix or mitigate that issue in some way.

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Jake Simon [00:02:31]:

But it was literally happening as he was on the couch watching tv. Right. And so it was like, just give me a real time view into what's happening. In my coolers. Right. In my operations and then I have time to react to something. Right. So that's where we started and then started looking at these.

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Jake Simon [00:02:47]:

You know, today most people are taking manual logs and literally going into a cooler every X amount of hours and writing the temperature down. Right. And it's not helping them in several ways. Well, one, the person who's actually doing it doesn't really want to be doing it. So not that. Right. But you know, you'd see a lot of those temperature log lists and tomorrow's is filled out or yesterday's isn't filled out. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:03:10]:

So they're not the most trustworthy data inputs. But best case scenario, someone is taking it properly and something is over temp, it's up to that person to say, oh, this is over temp, I should go report this. Right. And then even if they do that, which is not necessarily the norm. Right. How long has it been out of temp? Is it something where I can still serve that food or I really have to throw this away because it's been out for X amount of time? Right. So that's where it started. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:03:36]:

Realized that restaurants have a ton of this kind of stuff. So that's really where we started to focus among other segments of call it food service. Overall, you know, restaurants, we start getting into, you know, fully automating cool down logs and pulling in doors and energy consumption and all this kind of stuff to be able to find issues and inefficiencies and you know, focus people on the work that they should actually be doing instead of this tedious kind of stuff. Right. Which falls very in line with what you guys do. Right, Exactly. You know, refocus that person, reallocate that time. And it's, it's significant in terms of the hard dollars saved of food waste, but there's also huge gains in productivity of, you know, positioning that person towards something that's actually impactful.

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Jake Simon [00:04:20]:

So, so anyway, that's our origin story in a little bit of a nutshell.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:25]:

Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's funny because, you know, just speaking about food waste, obviously something I'm passionate about at Wisk, we help restaurants. At bars we started very much on the alcohol side and it evolved into the food side. So now it's full food and beverage. But one of the biggest things is really identifying losses, helping them reduce waste, especially on things that are perishable. So for us it's more like operationally not over ordering so much because it's not going to last forever, whatever but you're hitting it right where it hurts, which is a big piece of it, which is, you know, is it. Is it going to spoil? And I have a concrete example.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:53]:

My dad's in the grocery business and his freezers went down. This was actually like a month ago. The timing was horrible. It was like my brother's wedding day of. I see my dad's wedding.

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Jake Simon [00:05:01]:

It's always the worst possible time. If you're a restaurant, it's Friday night during service. And if it's a grocery store. Yeah, it's.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:08]:

So I'm in Montreal. My brother's getting married. It's the day of. We're all excited. I see my dad just, like, outside. He looks kind of like, I can tell you, stressed. But I'm like, it's. It wouldn't be about the wedding.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:17]:

He has five kids. Like, almost all of us are married already. So I'm like, something's off. I went to go see me. He's like, ah, the freezers went down. I'm like, how much inventory has gone bad? It was all the, like, frozen, like, in the grocery store. So, like, the. The ice creams and the frozen foods or whatever, and the meat, you know, he's like, pretty much all of it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:32]:

So it was like thousands of dollars. I don't know the exact number, but tens of thousands. And it made me think. So, like, just thinking about that, I'd love to ping you. I know there's things out there that maybe will just. You could see what your temperature is at. But what I heard you say, and I'd love to explore a bit more, is like, not just the reactive of, like, oh, your freezer's down. But it sounds like a bit of the predictive side, but if I understood correctly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:53]:

So tell me a bit more about, like, how can your. Can your sensors have helped, let's say someone like my dad's, to get a bit more, you know, concrete. So he's got freezers in his store and obviously backstory, too. What would have happened, let's say in the best case scenario, if he was leveraging, you know, connected fresh.

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Jake Simon [00:06:07]:

Let me start out by maybe giving some people who may not have a dad in the grocery business or who are doing this professionally, right. To understand, like, what we're talking about when we're talking about, like, how much can actually be lost in one, you know, one cooler be going down, right? So we just, to use an exact example, right, we actually deployed to a grocery chain in the Southwest, right, About two months ago. And so within Three weeks of them coming on with us, right? And then deploying to all those stores. They had one week, had two stores that had coolers go down. Just happened. They weren't near each other. Just happened to be like that, right? For a total of between 65 and $70,000 worth of product. That was SA.

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Jake Simon [00:06:45]:

One was. Yeah. One was about 35,000, and I think one was about 25 to 30,000. So it was. It was quite significant in terms of the amount that they were able to save just by receiving an alert ahead of time. Hey, this is starting to trend out. And they were able to completely. For one of them, it usually takes a repair technician 2 hours to reach that spot.

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Jake Simon [00:07:07]:

That that particular store was fairly remote, right, from their operations. And the person happened to be in the area. And so they could come right away, right. Once they knew that this was an issue and they were able to fix it and not have to throw anything away, right? These savings can be significant, right? And your dad. Your dad stressing out, right. Isn't just about. It's not just about losing the food product and those, you know, savings of literally the cost of the food, right? It's not being able to serve something to customers, not having the right image. Right? There's an opportunity cost, but there's also, you know, the labor or just like, the amount of organization that it takes to respond one of these types of things, right? And this example of, like, you know, very much tens of thousands of dollars in one incident is not abnormal at all, right? I mean, people.

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Jake Simon [00:07:52]:

And people listening who have refrigerators know how much is in their refrigerator. It can be a very, very small refrigerator, right? We work with some chick fil a locations. One of them, this is one of my favorites. It's. It's, you know, within 24 hours of going into that franchisees, chick fil a location, they, you know, they start getting a bunch of alerts, and they were like, the system's not working like it's supposed to, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:14]:

Like, oh, my God, must be a glitch.

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Jake Simon [00:08:15]:

What did I get myself into?

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:17]:

Right?

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Jake Simon [00:08:17]:

And they go and they check it out, and turns out someone had gone to clean one of the refrigerators that was, I think, was defrosting chicken, right? And so they pulled all the chicken out, they cleaned the refrigerator, they put all the chicken back in, right? But in the process, the refrigerator had become unplugged, right? And they didn't know that nothing was online, right? And so it started trending out, right? And that was. That was a small cooler, but that was still $800 of product within 24 hours. It can be quite substantial, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:46]:

These things add ups. Yeah. Especially when you're talking produce and meats and like.

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Jake Simon [00:08:51]:

Oh my gosh.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:52]:

Quite expensive, right?

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Jake Simon [00:08:53]:

Yeah, exactly. Not to mention, you know, the chaos of doing it. So. But when we talk about. You had also asked about, were you, were you asking about like, how does it actually.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:03]:

Yeah, the idea would be like, let's say for our listeners, just to paint the picture, right? Like I'm using my dad as an example just because it comes to mind was literally a month ago ago that this happened. But like, just to kind of paint the picture, what would be the contrast of, let's say he was using you guys, what would it look like? You guys go in, you implement and then that day when that happened, what would have happened? It's almost like restarting the story. But now they're using Connected Fresh. What would that have looked like?

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Jake Simon [00:09:25]:

First of all, everything comes pre configured, right? We use this technology called Lorawan, which is an open protocol that basically allows for super long range, very low power. So sensors like this for people who are audio only, it fits in the palm of my hand, right? And these are able to work for five to 10 years on a single battery charge. And be, you know, you basically, you press the button for five seconds, it's going to activate. Everything is already pre configured for you. You just put it in the cooler, right? And so because it works off of that kind of hub and spoke model of, you know, a gateway being able to send to a sensor or connect to a sensor, right? You can have tons of different sensors in an environment and once you have the gateway, all you have to do is add a sensor, right? So if you start with temperature monitoring and then you want to do energy consumption or doors or leaks or you know, fill levels or anything like that. It's just a matter of adding different sensors and literally just turning them on.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:17]:

So that's so cool.

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Jake Simon [00:10:18]:

That's, that's the start of it, right? So one thing that you're getting at though is, you know, the temperature monitoring overall is not incredibly unique, right? So like it's our least differentiated thing that we do, right? Temperature monitoring overall as like a, you know, Iot connected something has been around for decades, right? I mean that's, it's, it's come down dramatically in cost and effectiveness and things like that or improved effectiveness, right? But, but overall it's not a new technology, right? But there are vastly different approaches in which people implement it, right? So the most common one that we see in the market, call it for restaurants, just to segment it, right. Is that you have, you know, these checklist tools, right? So something that's going to help you with your haccp or something like that, right? Which are great. They're, they're really, really good in what they do. And what they'll do is they'll sell you a temperature sensor as an add on to that, right? So it'll fill a line item, which is good. It's great. People, people, you know, it's helping people for sure.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:19]:

Yeah.

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Jake Simon [00:11:19]:

However, their core competency, that company is about, well, temperature to fill this line item. They're not seeing the whole picture of what other types of sensors, what other types of experiences, right? Because you know their core business is not sensors and the platform, right? Their core business is hazard checklist systems, right. So it puts the customer in a position to where if it's not their core focus, maybe it's not to be too specific but you know, some of them are not very advanced, right? So you're going to get a bunch of false positive notifications and those really, really kill it really fast, right? Because as soon as it noise you just lose people, right? It's like if something, if I set my alarm to go off at 44 degrees, right? And it touches 44 and then it sends me an alarm, it's like, okay, but it was going through a defrost cycle or I was loading in product or something like that, right? And it's like you, you have to be able to flush those types of things out, right? So that you're not delivering something that has, you know, false notifications, right? You're just going to lose them, right? So there's analytics involved, there's a lot of like advanced rules involved and that kind of stuff to weed those things out. But overall, right, the biggest challenge to you know, the kind of add on approach is that okay, well now I want to do something else now I need another vendor, another solution, doing another thing to be able to do that, right? And maybe, or maybe not that has sub checklist provider just to use that as an example, will share that data, right? So it's not necessarily given that if you're doing my temperature monitoring and I found someone else that'll do energy consumption, it's not a given that you can marry those two pieces of data together because one's from one vendor, one's from another, right? Having the opportunity to just like add a sensor and all this kind of stuff is Hugely beneficial. And we're not manufacturing anything, just to be clear, right. We're using off the shelf products. So it gives us, you know, had a customer the other day ask for CO2, right. And we do CO2 for some places.

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Jake Simon [00:13:18]:

But I could just pull it off the shelf. I don't have to go create a product and do all that market research, development and all this kind of production, all that kind of stuff. I just grab a sensor, here's a fill level sensor and it's super tiny. This energy consumption sensor just goes around the cord and just reads the throughput of the cord. Hardware is hard. We're not going to go through it, right? We're going to, we're going to take these inputs from not smart sensors, but digital sensors is what they are, right. We're going to take those inputs and actually do something with it, right. And then that's most importantly from my perspective is then send it to other platforms to do other things, right? So if you have a work order management platform and something hits a critical level alert, go open the ticket automatically and go send it to them with all the information that's needed, right.

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Jake Simon [00:14:06]:

We've, we've done studies with some of our partners that are in the space and the amount of time between when something actually starts having a problem and how long it takes them even to just input it into the system is immense. Right. And so this kind of stuff of like it's automatically going to trigger that. And sure, you can have approval processes and things like that, you know, you're not accidentally spending on things you don't need to, but that's just the automation component that, you know, corrective action systems. If, if you have something that's not cooling down to the right temp by the right time, it needs to have a corrective action to it, right? And so you can just send it to that system where people are already onboarded, connected, fresh, does everything end to end. But yeah, we integrate in a way where that vendor basically just tells us the way that they want the message formatted and the endpoint and then we just send it, right. So like we don't have all these rules about like here's exactly what you need to be able to integrate with us. It's like it just makes it so crazy easy.

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Jake Simon [00:15:04]:

So to go back to your question, right, there's a lot to it, but there's, you know, if you take something like temperature monitoring, it's going to be incredibly vast in terms of like how advanced a solution can be, right. And if you, if you do start with kind of a platform approach and you say, hey, I want temperature and now I'm going to add energy consumption. Now that walk in refrigerator is 38 degrees and you're like two thumbs up. That sounds great. What if it's pulling way too much energy to get to that point? Right. The energy consumption sensor can identify that. And you know, there's anomaly detection and machine learning going on in the background. So now you know.

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Jake Simon [00:15:40]:

Okay, well either, so something could be showing early failure, right. Of that asset pulling more energy or doing more cycles or whatever it is. Right. But it's also driving up your utility bill at the same time. Right. So how can we prevent that kind of stuff and prevent the issue of well, the temperature is not going up yet, but it's going to. Right. And so that's a lot of the kind of stuff that can make a huge, massive difference not only in just like saving product, but also, you know, going back to your dad's example, he didn't want to be doing that at his kids wedding.

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Jake Simon [00:16:11]:

Right. If he could be doing exactly what he was doing just at a time that he picked. Right. That would make a world of difference.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:19]:

Yeah, that's, that's really interesting and out of curiosity, right. We have a lot of restaurants or hospitality folks that listen in, so I'd love to also maybe highlight like what are the, you know, I know I was checking out your website like you said, you mentioned a few. There's temperature control and there's, there's energy consumption and I think there's like you know, seven other eight other things, whatever it is, but, or maybe even more. But what are the most kind of common ones that you can see restaurants leveraging. Like I'd love to maybe zoom in on those. You mentioned like a chick fil A but like let's go through that just so we can be like, hey, for people listening that are listening in that, that are wondering, okay, this sounds cool. Let's hear it straight from Jake, you know, CEO of Connected Fresh. What are some great things to start looking into in terms of, you know, this, this, this connected side, I guess.

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Jake Simon [00:17:01]:

Yeah. So two things to start with. One, the website definitely has some of the more common ones there, but it's by no means exhaustive because we don't manufacture these sensors. We start with. This goes back to our consulting background. We're starting with a challenge in finding a solution. Right. And this was the second thing I wanted to mention is that we're not giving people a bunch of Sensors and saying, now you have a connected restaurant, now I have a bunch of data and like what do I do with that data? Right? I can even send it to my BI platform.

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Jake Simon [00:17:27]:

But like, how does that actually help me? More data isn't better, right? More, more specific things that help solve your existing challenges. Those are better, right? Or things that you didn't even know were happening, right? Like energy consumption. Did you even know that something was pulling more energy than last month? We really try to start with the. What's the challenge? Here's the solution. So with that, a lot of people do start with temperature monitoring inside of a cooler because you're able to, you know, this is something that can clearly help solve an incident, right? It's, it's reducing the, the labor component of them having to do that, right? Refocusing them on better tasks and it's super, super easy to do, right. I've been doing the same thing for 50 years. You know, here's, here's something that I can totally start with that'll give me what I need. So a lot of people start with that.

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Jake Simon [00:18:13]:

But we're not very pushy in that. You know, you don't have to start with everything. You start with what you need and then keep adding it. Right. Like I mentioned, once you have that gateway in there, once you have that hub, adding a new sensor is literally just turning it on. Right? Because we pre configure it all. So but with that, right. Some of the most common ones have to do with temperature monitoring for sure, right.

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Jake Simon [00:18:31]:

Cool down logs is massive for us right now. Automating, you know, basically take a probe from something that's in your refrigerator. You're going to put it in that piece of chicken or whatever it is and walk away, right? You're not taking a tablet and starting something or some process. It's automatically recognizing that it's there and it's now doing your time temp, making sure that it reaches the right temp by the right time. Checkpoint one, checkpoint two. If it's going to fail, it's going to tell you that it's going to fail so that you have time to intervene instead of having to just throw that food away, right? So that one is becoming massively. It's being adopted very quickly. That's one of our newer ones this year.

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Jake Simon [00:19:08]:

And something that's hugely, hugely impactful. We actually just finished a rollout across all Luna Grill locations, for example. They have it in every single restaurant. And it's, you know, they, they were one of the ones that helped kind of co develop a little bit of it. And they, it's just made a massive difference for them, greater than they had anticipated the program doing so. So that kind of stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:29]:

That's awesome. Okay, so temperature control, cool down logging. Yeah, I saw the website. I'm curious to pick your brain. I saw there was like door analytics, like tell me more about the common use case on that one.

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Jake Simon [00:19:40]:

Yeah. So doors. So if you can imagine the door sensor is just a door sensor, right. There are so many different things you can do with it, right? So there's the walk in refrigerator, for example, right. Where you're, you're understanding if something is opened or closed or hasn't been left open for too long, things like that, right. We actually, there was an el pollo loco location that we were working with that basically the door latch was broken, right. So when it closed, it didn't actually close, right. So someone would go in, the walk in, they would do their thing, they would come out, they would throw the door closed behind them and they would keep doing what they're doing.

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Jake Simon [00:20:10]:

If you looked at it, if you stopped to look back, right. It literally just bounced back, right? And just open. Not, not all the way, right. But a decent amount. And so this was actually highlighting to them again, this was one of those instances where they put it in and they were like, I think this thing's broken, right? And it's like they went to go check it out and it's like, oh my gosh, the latch is broken. It's, it's showing open because it's always open, right. And that was leading to like a huge amount of energy consumption savings, right. And was huge risk to temperature going up, right.

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Jake Simon [00:20:39]:

So walk ins. It can do that kind of stuff of, you know, has something been left open? Is something open during the wrong time, right in the middle of the night, why is it showing open? That kind of stuff. But then it's a door sensor so you can put it on any door or anything that opens. You know, we, we went through a techstars accelerator last year. Future of food with Ecolab in conversations with Ecolab folks, right? They also do pest control, right? And restaurant teams will spend all this money on pest control services. They'll seal the doors, they'll do all this stuff and then someone's like, it's really hot in here and they just prop the door open, right? So it's, it's, that's a really good example because it's, it's not about notify, notify, notify it's not about, tell them over and over and over again in the moment. But if you're a larger organization and you have X amount of locations that are under you. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:21:26]:

Well, can I focus my training resources on specific locations instead of just doing these massive programs of training everyone Again, because, you know, there are issues where people leave the door open. Right. So being able to really focus that training is huge. And then last example I'll give is like, you know, restroom doors, right. You know, you're obviously not going to put any sort of camera system to identify how many times things are open and closed, right. But a simple door sensor can do that. Right. And so you can start doing things like count how many times it opens and closes and after a certain amount of times then go send someone to go clean it.

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Jake Simon [00:22:00]:

Right. Instead of these arbitrary, you know, cleaning schedules, do it based on the actual plan. Tons of different things. As you can see, there's kind of a mix between front of house and back of house. Things that we can do ultimately, you know, we solve for across operations, food safety and quality and facilities. Right. And we can, we can bring them all together under, under one platform. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:22:19]:

And reuse the same sensor for, for multiple types of roles in the organization too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:24]:

It's really cool. And it's funny. Yeah. The door one, my brain was going like so many different ways. I was thinking about the bathroom bunny enough, but I was also thinking about like rough guest counts based on like people walking in around and you can do that.

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Jake Simon [00:22:35]:

There's. But there's, there's also a mix of, there's other types of sensors that you know, because just because the door opens doesn't mean, you know, how many, doesn't.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:41]:

Mean it's a guest. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:22:42]:

And maybe the door is being left open and maybe, you know, there's. There's tons of variables there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you can have, there are other types of people counting systems that work with this technology, right. That you know, it's, it's. It can be using cameras or laser or whatever it is, right. And you know, the sensor itself is high tech, but like the installation is just like placing it. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:23:09]:

But, but it'll do things like it'll understand if someone came in versus out, right. And if two people left at the same time, it knows that two people left and not just one person went through. Right. So that, that type of technology is certainly available for people counting. And then the last one that you know, has a ton of potential is things like fill levels. So like little Tiny sensors. Right. Can understand, you know, is something getting further and further away from it, and therefore it's dropping in terms of inventory or, you know, the trash can being full or things like that.

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Jake Simon [00:23:42]:

Right. Or is it getting closer up or, you know, has it hit a certain point in which you need to trigger something? So, you know, there. There are locations doing, you know, the front of house for a qsr, you have these trash cans. And in surveys, people have said one of the things that turns me off most from a restaurant is if I go to throw my stuff away and the trash can's overfilled. Right. Really, really bad luck. Right. And if that trash can is overfilled.

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Jake Simon [00:24:06]:

Right. You can get a notification and someone can go take care of it. Right. And that's even, even more so done by, you know, we're. We're working with a company that does, like, airport. They operate a lot of, like, travel destinations and airports and concepts within. And they have trash cans that, you know, sometimes they're in a parking lot or something like that. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:24:26]:

And they have to send someone out to go do that. Well, from a risk perspective, they don't want to keep sending that person out. Right. But also they need to send someone out just to go check to see if it needs to be right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:36]:

Right, Right. Literally, they see.

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Jake Simon [00:24:38]:

No. Yeah. If they know exactly what they're doing, I mean, there's. It's. It turns into a safer environment. It turns into something that is more definable. Right. And it's enhancing your operations and to be honest, making that person's job even more impactful.

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Jake Simon [00:24:52]:

Right. So. Yeah, yeah. For them and the business. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:55]:

That's cool. And there's two I just want to highlight. I'm curious because I'm thinking restaurants. The two that I saw on your website, one was the wine coolers. Tell me a bit about that one. Is that mainly temperature control or what is that? Exactly?

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Jake Simon [00:25:07]:

So it's temperature monitoring, certainly. But that same sensor that I was showcasing earlier, that fits in palm of your hand, that does temperature, it also has humidity. Humidity starts being a larger thing. There were even some. Some places during COVID Right. You had some restaurants that shut down, of course. Right. Or closed the doors.

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Jake Simon [00:25:31]:

Right. Maybe more fine dining, things like that. They had a wine cellar or whatever it was, or a wine room, and they actually had. Because the temperature would go up because they didn't have all their H Vac running, all this kind of stuff. Right. They actually had bottles that started exploding because the temperature would go up and therefore the Corks would become dislodged and you would have just the natural process of that kind of stuff expanding. Right. And so, sure, that could be realized with temperature, but also humidity.

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Jake Simon [00:25:59]:

Right. And you start getting into humidity with wine, also with grain storage. Right. We're doing projects around that kind of stuff of places that are holding product temporarily.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:10]:

Cigar rooms, humidors, man.

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Jake Simon [00:26:14]:

Yeah, we were just talking to someone like a couple of weeks ago about that. Yeah, that's super cool. There's a lot of this kind of stuff and if you can imagine, right, like these types of applications can be vastly different in what they're doing, but the actual insight itself doesn't necessarily change so much. Right. And so that's what allows us to serve. You know, we're focused on food service, but we also, you know, do. Within food service, we're also doing warehouses. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:26:40]:

And it also translates to worker safety. Right. Of is this area too hot to be in for a worker? Right. Or just tracking it over time. And you know, a warehouse versus a refrigerator, they're vastly different. Right. And the use case is vastly different. But you know, the platform supports both.

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Jake Simon [00:26:57]:

Right. It's a temperature sensor that's giving you an insight or combining with a different type of sensor. So. So it's really quite versatile and we definitely take that platform approach and say, yeah, we also just have the humility to realize that, like, we're not going to solve for everything. If you already have a piece of software that does something, we can just send that data, right? We're not going to be the end all. Be all. We're going to be an open player that, that is able to put the data. You know, it's, it's your data.

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Jake Simon [00:27:22]:

Where do you want it? Right? That's, that's, that's really cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:26]:

That's really cool. And so let me ask you this. So like, just to paint the picture of people listening, right? Whether they're restaurants, hotels, etc. Listening. And they're like, this sounds good, right? We talked about wine room temperature control, doors opening, closing. There was even leaks. I saw on your website detecting leaks, which is huge in restaurants and grocery stores too. What does the process look like? So you, you know, guy like my dad comes to you, he's got, you know, a couple of grocery stores like, hey, this sounds good.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:49]:

Like what, like what's the process? You go in, you do an audit, you, you know, do they come with their main pain points and you focus on that. Like, I'd love to hear, just to kind of paint the picture for people listening.

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Jake Simon [00:27:59]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:59]:

What does it look like from, like this sounds interesting. I want to learn more and see if this can help my business to like, hey, we're getting you set up. And then like, you know, here's a login, here's your dashboard. Like, love to kind of just see, see that, that what that looks like.

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Jake Simon [00:28:14]:

For the most part, don't ever need to physically be on site. Right. That's what allows us to also keep these costs low, Right. And do that kind of thing, Right? Because, I mean, we were, we were at Deloitte and Deloitte is really, really good at what they do, but they're very, very expensive. And part of that is travel. Right. And it's a huge, huge portion of that. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:28:30]:

So we're, I mean, we're talking a few hundred bucks to get a restaurant getting set up, right. In terms of hardware costs, right. It's, it's not that much. Right. But obviously if you, if you do site visits, if you do all this kind of stuff, you know, there's a more effective way to do it. And that kind of remote mindset is something that we try and take in as much as we can. Once someone starts to engage with us again, going back to, we're not just going to give you a smart restaurant or a smart grocery store. We're going to figure out what those challenges are.

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Jake Simon [00:28:57]:

Some people know what their challenge is, some people have no idea what their challenge is. Some people think it's one challenge, but it's actually what's the root cause? It's something else, right. So we, we spend a little bit of time with them just in the discovery phase, right. Of just making sure that we're giving you a solution that's going to return a significant ROI for you, right. I mean, they shouldn't be just be paying for themselves, they should be paying for themselves multiple, multiple times over connected. Fresh.com Savings has multiple savings calculators that we sometimes point people to where they can just input their specific operational, you know, how they do things, how much they pay the person doing it, that kind of stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:30]:

Right.

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Jake Simon [00:29:31]:

And it's going to help you understand how much you're saving in the short term and the long term. Really, it's ROI focused, it's impact driven. So that's usually where we start. No one's doing this just for the fun of it, Right. They're doing it because they want it to make a huge difference and that's what we're focused on. But once they do that, right, You Know, it's a, we send them a couple of forms to fill out if we don't already know the information. Very, very easy stuff. And we pre configure it, we set up all the logins, everything, you know, it's, you get a box 100% ready to go.

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Jake Simon [00:30:01]:

So.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:02]:

Okay, that's what I was going to ask. Setup wise, is it daunting? Because you know, people hear hardware. I know you know, your connected fresh is the software side and you'll use any hardware you have to. But you know, people listening hardware. I don't, I don't want to, you know, you picture installing I don't know, a Google thermostat or what it's called the Nest or something, you know. So what does that look like? Is it something that like once you send them the stuff, it's pretty easy to set up. It's like a couple hours of work or a day of work or like what does that look like?

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Jake Simon [00:30:26]:

Every sensor is going to come fully pre configured. The most you're going to have to do is push a button to turn it on and you know, use some zip ties to adhere it to something. Something. Right. Like, and that all comes with it, right. Any number of sensors is going to connect to that hub, that gateway. Right. That gateway is what actually connects to the Internet for us to be able to collect this device data and send it up.

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Jake Simon [00:30:49]:

Right. So usually it's as easy as, you know, it comes with a USB C charger and a ethernet cord and you just plug it in. Ethernet, right. A lot, you know, we ask people to segment it on the network, right. If that, you know, just for data, security wise, but that's it. You just had to plug it in. It's like you're not connecting to it, you're not setting anything up, you're not downloading an app to do it. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:31:11]:

We do have an app for notifications alerts and viewing your dashboards and stuff like that, but it's not for setup. Right. Everything is totally and completely set up. With that said, we also offer cellular versions of the gateways. Right. So if you just, and all this equipment by the way is just pass through for us, right. We're not, we're not making a buck on this. We're, we're just trying to get it in for the lowest price because that's our means of being able to provide our core services, which is the software.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:35]:

Right.

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Jake Simon [00:31:36]:

So you know something like cellular, we're passing it through and so you, if it's on cellular you literally have to plug it into power. That's it, right. It boots up, it does its own thing. It starts connecting the sensors immediately. You don't even have to say this sensor connects to this gateway, right. If you have a dead zone, right. Say you're a big production facility and you have an area in the back that you know this gateway can't connect to, right. If you just add another connection, fresh gateway, it just acts like a mesh network.

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Jake Simon [00:32:04]:

Just, you know, if, if two gateways hear the same signal at the same exact time at a millisecond level, one of them is going to drop it and one of them is going to push it up, right. And so you're, you, you don't have to assign, hey, this one connects to this one or that one connects to that one. And then even more so. So we're, we're go to market partners with AWS for this technology and food service. And so one of the things that's come out of that is roaming partnerships as well, right. So if you, you know, for example, we have, we have a company called Buncha who works with us. They do grocery Delivery, right. In St.

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Jake Simon [00:32:38]:

Louis and Denver and soon to be Detroit. They are, you know, they have refrigerated vans and they don't even, they don't have a gateway at all. Right. Those sensors, they turn them on and they connect to these roaming networks. And so they're, you know, they're geofenced grocery delivery vans. And once they leave their geofence, it starts doing all the temperature monitoring and has a GPS on it. So they know exactly where it is at any given time and you can literally follow it throughout the day. This kind of stuff is so versatile and these public networks make it so that, you know, if I'm, if I'm doing catering, if I'm, you know, going between a grocery distribution center and a grocery store, right.

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Jake Simon [00:33:14]:

I can get a signal. And if I don't get a signal, it's just going to hold onto that record and then when it connects again, it's going to upload it, right. So that's awesome. So, you know, but none of that, zero of that is any customer customization or configuration, right. Like you receive something, it's ready to go, partially because of what we do and just partially because of the technology itself.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:36]:

I love that. And then just kind of a quick segue, like on the hardware side, because it sounds awesome and saying like you said, most of these things last five, ten years, what's, what happens after. I know that's a long time coming. But is it just, they just replace it or they just buy new ones? Like is it, is it that the battery or the battery needs to be changed? Like what happens after the 5, 10 year mark?

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Jake Simon [00:33:54]:

So when we're looking at something like temperature sensors, as you can imagine temperature being very common. Right. There are tons of different manufacturers around temperature sensors. Right. One of the things that we seek out is ones that are called sustainable. Right. Or are not going to require you to keep having to buy hardware. I mean, just order magnitude.

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Jake Simon [00:34:13]:

This is going to cost you 40 bucks.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:15]:

Right.

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Jake Simon [00:34:15]:

So it's not incredibly expensive, but we also don't want to be, you know, there's, there's a, an element of coordination that's involved in that. There's an element of, you know, there's, there's all this kind of stuff. Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:24]:

And so just adding friction every time you change it.

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Jake Simon [00:34:27]:

Yeah. This one you just replace the battery and so you can replace the battery for this one that does cooldown logs. Right. You know, it's a probe. Right. But you know, someone breaks this probe. Okay, well unscrew it and go put a different probe in. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:34:42]:

Or go put two probes in. Right. And use two for one device. So we specifically focus on ones that are going to not be a continued, you know, we call it a one time cost, but you don't want it to be a continuous one time cost. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:57]:

Right.

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Jake Simon [00:34:57]:

That's right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:58]:

Right. That makes sense. I love that. Okay, this is, it sounds exciting because it's super reasonably repriced these things. So, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure it obviously depends on the use case, but is there any idea you can give someone listening in terms of like what this might look like in terms of cost? I know it probably depends because like you said restaurant versus a warehouse, but are we talking hundreds a month, thousands a month? Like is there, is there or is it a range?

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Jake Simon [00:35:22]:

It's a range just based on the scalability of it. Right. So if you were to come to us and say, hey, I want a temperature sensor and I want one of them and we decide to help you out. Right. It's like, yeah, okay, 12 bucks per sensor per month. Right. Okay. That's the high of it.

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Jake Simon [00:35:42]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:43]:

Okay.

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Jake Simon [00:35:43]:

And then it's going to come down from there. Right. If you have multiple locations. Right. Which, which everyone does or most people do. Right. You know, the software becomes even more impactful because you log in and you see a map of all your locations. You want someone at A different level.

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Jake Simon [00:35:56]:

They log in and they just see their location. All this kind of stuff. Right. They're paying. Sometimes it's based on sensors, if you have a lot of sensors in one area, sometimes it's just based on per location pricing. Right. Because obviously we don't want to get it out of hand and we don't want, you know, as much as we can. Like if you're trying to figure out like, does it actually make financial sense for me to cover this beverage cooler? It's like, yeah, cover the cooler, right.

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Jake Simon [00:36:21]:

It's going to be, you know, we're going to have caps per location.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:24]:

Right. You don't want to sway someone not to do it for.

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Jake Simon [00:36:26]:

No, we want it. We want them to be getting this data in these insights more than anything else. Right. And so we, we realize where we have flexible methods in which we're able to do that. One big thing though is that we're not asking for super long term contracts. Right. You know, it's a. If you're happy, we're happy.

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Jake Simon [00:36:42]:

Right. We've always kind of had the Netflix approach to things. Well, Netflix before it started kicking people.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:46]:

Out, but double pass debit.

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Jake Simon [00:36:51]:

But you know, it's per month, right. If you want to do annually, that's great. And you know, we have, you know, discounts for that kind of stuff, but we're not.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:00]:

Yeah, we're the same way. It's like if your product's good, don't, don't handcuff people. Right. And I'm a big fan of that, so that's really cool. So for people listening that want to find, you know, as we kind of like slowly wrap up, number one, I want to give you a chance to just plug away, you know, no, no pun intended, but basically like website, if you have any other resources, you know, social, whatever you want to plug. And we'll also put it in the details and we'll put, you know why it in our newsletter. So don't worry too much. But just a chance for them to find.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:26]:

So let's start there. Where could people find you find Connected Fresh, et cetera.

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Jake Simon [00:37:30]:

LinkedIn is a great way to connect Connected Fresh dot com. Right. I'll maybe send over my calendar link. Right. And anyone can book some time. Right. Because my big ask is always, we would love to be able to help in terms of, you know, getting you set up for something like temperature monitoring, for example, just to start with. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:37:50]:

And you don't need to be doing all the different things. Right. It's like if Energy monitoring isn't the right time for you. Like, don't do it right now, right. But you have the ability to do it when the time is right. Because I mean, coming from the industrial space, it's coming, right. It's just not common yet. Right.

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Jake Simon [00:38:06]:

But it's super, super easy to do. So if you decide to do it later, you have the ability to do it later there, right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:11]:

That's awesome.

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Jake Simon [00:38:11]:

My big request to people is if you're curious about learning more about this, schedule a call with us, right? And so because at the end, during those calls, right, we will help provide our perspective, our expertise when it comes to like these types of things. And like, what questions should you be asking and how should you, you know, how you should be, what you should be looking out for, right? Because not all these solutions are created in the same way. And so worst case scenario, we don't have an opportunity to work together, but they leave having learned something and we always learn something from them, right? And we're big, I love that. Huge. Advocates of feedback. So it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's a win, win, it's never a lost cause, right? It's always, there's always something great that comes of it. So, and we're just, we're just trying to get more feedback here. You know, if we, if we don't solve for X challenge today, you know, maybe it's not that difficult and would you, you know, kind of co develop it with us and we'll, we'll do it for you or we'll, we'll tell you point blank, right.

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Jake Simon [00:39:06]:

And we'll, we'll be very straightforward about it. That's, that's definitely our promise.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:10]:

That's cool. No, and I love that I want to echo that last point you said because it's like it's something funny enough, I'll smile when you're saying because like I'm a big Adam, a big fan, like proponent I should say, of, of also like getting people to join demos. And what I always say is like join just to see, right? Like we're not gonna push you, we're not going to force you. We're not one of those companies going to call you every day and try to, hey, come and see at least you know what's out there. The worst case scenario, you spend 20 minutes, 25 minutes of your time and you at least know. And like you said, you have better questions, you're better informed. And even if the future, if you're like Ah, it's not. WISK is not the right solution.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:40]:

When you're talking to other companies, you at least have a different perspective. And so I'm a big fan and, like, some people think I'm crazy for this, but I even recommend, like, other companies. I'm like, I'll tell them, like, if you're looking at competitor abc, I recommend, like, I'm like, please book a demo with them so you can compare. Like, I actually want you to see what's out there. You'll make a better decision and you won't have regrets. The worst feeling is, like, you go to one company, they pressure sell you, and then you're like, did I make the right decision?

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Jake Simon [00:40:05]:

You know, especially with this kind of stuff where there's a hardware component to it. If you're investing whatever amount, however big or small, right. In hardware, it's like, it's not that easy to just, like, switch. Right? So, like, what we often see is, like, you know, they feel like they're trapped. Right. Or they feel like they were taken and, like. Right. Obviously, that's not the experience that everyone has.

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Jake Simon [00:40:25]:

Right. Similar to you. Right. We will be very straightforward and say, like, you probably have something that's going to work for you. Right. Or, you know, here's what this can do if that's worth it to you. Right. This is.

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Jake Simon [00:40:34]:

This is what it would be to. Yeah. And sometimes we can even at the end of the day, because we're so open with the, you know, the inputs, it's just telemetry data. It's just sensor data to us. Right. If someone already has something that they've, you know, invested a lot into, we can just take that data in. Right. If whoever, you know, is their vendor allows for that to escape.

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Jake Simon [00:40:55]:

Right. Which is another thing that we're trying to solve for from an industry perspective, Dren is all for, but it's. It's never a lost cause. And it's always just a great conversation and everyone. Everyone ends up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:06]:

I love that. Super, super useful. I mean, I'm excited. I already got some people I'm thinking of introducing you to, and we'll do a nice feature for you guys because, like, I'm super passionate about just helping the space, period. That's why we do this podcast. Try to bring people from different spaces, whether it's marketing, loyalty, you know, connected devices, whatever it is, and just help. So we'll make sure to shout you out and we'll make sure we do a newsletter where we kind of summarize some key ideas from the podcast. That newsletter, when we kind of do your shout out, it goes out to 25,000 people.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:34]:

We'll make sure to, to, you know, plug, plug some links there. So for people who could benefit from this, it's like, why not book a time, see if it makes sense. And, and yeah, once again, for everyone listening in, you can check them out@connected fresh.com that's connected ed fresh.com so connected fresh.com you could even go to connected fresh.com I think it's savings or savings calculator. I think it was just slash savings. Either one. Great. And then you'll see the, you can, you can mess around with that. But don't worry, we'll put all the links there.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:05]:

Jake, with that said, I just want to thank you for being on the show. This was awesome and really cool to hear a part of Techstars. We were actually part of Techstars in 2018. So nice to be chatting with a fellow Techstars company. Yeah. And then I appreciate you joining the WISKing It All podcast. Thank you for your time today.

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Jake Simon [00:42:21]:

Thank you. And thank you for everyone listening in. Pleasure to be here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:25]:

If you want to learn more about wisk, head to WISK AI and book a demo.

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