Page 6 - BusinessWest April 1, 2024

The Problem
30% of food is wasted, largely due to pathogens, toxins, pests and climatic stress.
Clean Crop Technologies graphic
“I wound up working for them for a few years in high school and college, and ended up spending most of my career working overseas,” he said, adding that he lived in Beirut, Lebanon for some time trying to get a hydroponic industry up and running there.
But he spent most of his career in sub-Saharan Africa, helping U.S.-based companies that were developing promising technologies to enable farmers and supply-chain operators to build market share. For example, he worked with a South Dakota-based company that developed a biostimulant that allowed farmers to grow the same amount of crops while using less fertilizer.
“They were interested in their applications for corn, bean, and other crop producers in Africa, and had no idea how to get it to market,” White explained. “So I helped them develop a go-to-market plan and figure out the regulatory pathways, and now they’re com- mercially active in six different countries on the continent and doing
quite well.”
It was during that time that he met Cavana-
ugh, who was working as a commercial manager for Cargill in East Africa, handling all its trading in corn and oil seed commodities.
“He really learned the post-harvest side of the business,” said White, adding that it was a ven- ture that Cavanaugh set up that eventually laid the groundwork, pun intended, for Clean Crop.
“He was tasked with establishing a peanut mill in Mozambique, which today basically just exports all its peanuts as farmer stock to South Africa, with very little value,” he explained.
“The original thesis was that, if you have a mill that would be able to do that primary process- ing for the peanuts in Mozambique, you could then extract more value from the export market, exporting them as grade-A processed peanuts rather than the raw farm stock.
“That ended up failing because of a wide range of things, including pathogens and toxins that are common not just to peanuts but a lot of other food categories as well,” White went on.
“Once they’re in the supply chain, there’s very few tools to solve them.”
Fast-forwarding a little, White and Cavanaugh essentially went about creating such technology.
“There’s a lot of ways to prevent contamination by these patho- gens; there’s a lot of ways to mitigate or exclude food that’s been contaminated from the supply,” White explained. “But there were very few tools that we were aware of that could actually turn back the clock on contamination that was safe and that would keep that food in the supply chain.”
This reality led them down a rabbit hole as he and Cavanaugh looked at many different technologies in this space that held prom- ise, including UV light, and eventually met Keener, then a professor at Iowa State University.
“Our long-term vision is that
we want our machines to be operating in every seed-processing facility globally as the first line of defense in crop loss.”
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