Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to the Make it. Move it. Sell It podcast. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products—and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.ai. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today we’re talking with Keith Bradley, the vice president of Information Technology at Nature Fresh Farms, which, if you ask me, is probably the best grower of greenhouse tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers that I know of. I am super excited to have you here, Keith. Welcome to the podcast.

Keith Bradley: Thank you for having me, Adam. I’m happy to be here.

Adam Honig: I’m a big fan of Nature Fresh Farms. For the listeners, can you give them a little bit more insight into what you guys are up to?

Keith Bradley: Nature Fresh Farms: We are a grower of bell peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We grow everything we do in the greenhouse. Everything we do is grow peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries all inside a controlled environment. It’s not a traditional farm or large field. Nope. It’s actually an enclosed space under glass growing them. It takes a lot of technology to control it and make things grow, especially when you get to the size where we control 250 acres of greenhouse all at the same time.

Adam Honig: Tell me a little bit about the thinking behind the greenhouse. Why is that important for growing these types of products?

Keith Bradley: Well, it gives you a much more stable, controlled environment. You can not only control the environment that the crop is in, but you can also grow year-round. In Canada here now, we get a lot of cold winters, but in December and January, we’re still growing product, we’re still shipping out strawberries, and we’re still shipping out cucumbers. It allows you to grow in locations that a traditional farm couldn’t grow.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. A lot of the produce does come imported into the U.S., where I am, from South America or Central America. This is a way to keep everything more local.

Keith Bradley: It’s a nice treat to have a nice local-made bell pepper and stuff like that and enjoy it within a day or two.

Adam Honig: You’re the VP of IT. I think when most people think about farms, the first thing they don’t think about is the IT department. Is that pretty common in the industry?

Keith Bradley: Yeah. It’s always a very common thing when you hear the term farm; you don’t think about technology; you don’t think about innovation. You don’t think that. The first thing that always pops in your head is a kid pushing a little John Deere tractor down the road. We’re not a farm per se, but we’re much different than what we are because basically, think of the plants now that we control everything from their irrigation to their lights to everything. Technology is a huge part in allowing us to control it at scale where without being able to control that, you’d have thousands of people being able to do it. We just have more technology than you ever can think of some days. I’ve always done many tours, and people are always amazed at how much technology we have in the greenhouse.

Adam Honig: We have a lot of people in the manufacturing industry who listen to this podcast. For those folks in the manufacturing business, it’s almost like you guys are a manufacturer of these products, but the means that you go about making them is just different than a traditional assembly line or something like that.

Keith Bradley: Yeah. If you go to the manufacturing part, we still do a fair bit of similar manufacturing where we still have to take your bell pepper, grow a red, a green, and a yellow, and put it into a package. We still have to build, combine, and make all those. When we take a package of our strawberries, the Sweet S’NAPS peppers, you still have to package them. They don’t grow next to each other, so you have to combine all the colors into a package. We are taking three or four different products and moving them into one.

Adam Honig: Now I want to talk about the Sweet S’NAPS, but I want to talk a little bit more about the technology behind the operation first. There’s a big effort, it seems to me, to make sure that you guys are doing as much automation as possible, and that extends from the growing side to the business side. Is it sort of a common theme across the organization?

Keith Bradley: Yep. Growing the best bell pepper, tomato, or whatever crop we are growing is always something we’ve always thought. Our owner Peter Quiring has always said technology will help lead us there and help us do better than anything else. Right from the day we started, we’ve always embraced technology. We were one of the first greenhouses to have a central computer controlling the whole environment. That’s going back almost 25 years now. Before people even thought of things like that. The main reason we really dive into it is that he felt that technology could help him produce more, save on energy, and help the whole process.

Adam Honig: This is a tech-forward business, is what I’m hearing, like right from the very get-go.

Keith Bradley: Yeah. First day, and we’re always there pushing the edge every day. What’s new? How do you do something better? We’re always looking to reinvent things right from how to use technology to how to grow a bell pepper.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. You’ve been at Nature Fresh Farm for a bit and have seen a lot of change over the years with the technology. What do you think has been the most impactful that you’ve seen?

Keith Bradley: The biggest impactful thing that changed it, and it’s one of the things that everybody sees all day, was the start of smartphones. It now allows us to let our growers control the greenhouse from anywhere. They didn’t have to go to a computer, and they didn’t have to be at a station. They could be anywhere in the world and help optimize that environment. It’s a neat transition because when we first started on the technology journey, we went from having a grower sitting in the greenhouse moving things manually and stuff like that to now having a central computer. We’re now starting to transition away from that where they have a smartphone, they can be out in a greenhouse, they can do everything, but they’re still looking at this phone. The next generation is really just starting to hit where we’re letting AI start to make decisions for us so the grower can just be in the greenhouse and watch and look at his plants instead of having to focus on the day-to-day tasks.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. You said you have 250… how many acres?

Keith Bradley: 250 acres.

Adam Honig: If that’s something you have to keep an eye on, that’s a lot of acres, right?

Keith Bradley: Yeah. It’s a lot of things and a lot of moving parts every day.

Adam Honig: What I’m inferring from part of what you were saying is, to grow the best product, you really need to control a lot of the inputs, if you will, into them—the soil, the humidity, the water, and so all of that is available to people on their phones now?

Keith Bradley: Yeah, they can basically control that and change the environment as needed to do it. Even right down to we have shade curtains to shade the crop and to take some of the sun away and even lights to add light if it’s a cloudy day. We basically control to optimize that growth from the moment the plant arrives to us to a year later when we remove it. We control that plant because we want to make sure every second of its life is meant to be growing and producing that bell pepper or tomato.

Adam Honig: Wow. That’s amazing. It’s amazing that you can get that much information on each plant.

Keith Bradley: Yeah, it is cool. We collect a lot of data, a lot of transactional data. We can collect, on average, about 11 megs per week per plant. We have about 1.8 million plants at any point in time in our facility. That’s a key to things. We have data. We have information. You can make a lot of good decisions on that information.

Adam Honig: Yeah. It strikes me that with the changes in the weather patterns that we’ve been seeing, this is going to become an especially critical skill for a lot of people in the industry to have, right? I mean, here in the Boston area, suddenly it feels like the Pacific Northwest. We’re getting tons and tons of rain all the time that we never used to get. I imagine taking this kind of approach to food production is so critical for the world.

Keith Bradley: Yeah. Even when you look at what we can do, we recycle up to 80% of our water. It’s up to 90% sometimes depending on the crop. We recycle that water. Everything the plant takes in that it doesn’t decide it needs that day, we actually recycle right back into our system. It’s not just lost to the environment. That’s where we really gain the most we can, and we love to have nice weather. It’s a nice sunny day here in Leamington, so we really like that. It’s great for the plants, cuts down our costs, we don’t have to add lights, but at the same token, we can and have the ability to modify it no matter what the weather pattern is no matter what’s going on. It’s all computerized-controlled, and it’s a quick and easy reaction.

Adam Honig: I was just reading about Elon Musk and some of his plans for Mars. This is the kind of thing that he definitely needs, Keith, to get set up there. I would say he’s going to be calling any day now.

Keith Bradley: Yeah, a few years back I was at a conference, and we were talking to somebody from NASA. It was one of those conversations. Funny how similar the tasks we’re doing are to what they’re doing—like controlling the light, controlling the irrigation, how you do things. We basically have a fully sustained environment. We just look to take the outside to our advantage. Is it nice outside? We’ll use that naturally. Is it sunny? We’ll use that natural sun. We can go the exact opposite and turn the lights on and keep those plants growing 24/7 if we need to.

Adam Honig: Wow. Amazing. Now you mentioned the millions of plants that you have and the volumes of data that you’re collecting from them. That just says to me artificial intelligence is needed to be dealing with all that. What are you guys doing with AI in the business?

Keith Bradley: One of the main things we do with AI is allow it to optimize our greenhouses. We allow it to make predictive responses on how to get the greenhouse to the temperature that the grower wants to get it to. He wants the plants to get irrigated five times today, and it looks at the weather patterns and decides, “Hey, how do we irrigate to take that off to the optimal method? It looks at how do I heat? Do I need to open the vents? When do I open the vents? Is the wind on the north side? Oh, I don’t want that vent to open because the wind’s coming that way and it’s going to let the cold air in.” It makes those adjustments for them because there are so many variables in what we do that they have to be there to help make that. AI and inferencing from our past help us make a better decision for tomorrow.

Adam Honig: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. What I’m also hearing is that there’s a person there who’s basically setting more of the strategic direction for it, right? The AI doesn’t know what the optimal condition is. That’s kind of set by some individual. Is that right?

Keith Bradley: Yep. That’s what our growers are for. That was kind of the whole goal of what we wanted to do—let them leave that computer instead of constantly changing all the vents and making all those little changes. We want them to be out in the greenhouse to say, “I want it to be this today,” or “I want it to be that tomorrow,” or “I want to do more like that” and free up that time for them to be in the greenhouse with it.

Adam Honig: Do you feel AI has helped produce higher quality or increase the yield? What was the business result from that?

Keith Bradley: I would say it’s helped contribute to the yield and benefit that we get. It allows a human being to go out there and look at what needs to get done and then allow AI to help make that decision of how to get there instead of somebody manipulating it in the background. It just happens. We’ve turned our greenhouse from being a reactive system to a proactive one. Now it knows how to change before it happens. Is AI leading to where I think it’ll start to make more decisions? Yes, there are all kinds of things happening, but it’ll start to be able to make general decisions. I’d like to get to the point where it’s making suggestions based on past criteria. It’s making things to eventually make it learn and do a lot on its own. It still comes down to a human that knows that feel and touch of that bell pepper, not tomato.

Adam Honig: Yeah, that makes complete sense. You guys, as we’ve discussed, are very technology-forward in the way you’re doing things. Do you ever have a struggle internally getting technology projects approved? Is that a challenge? Or is this your DNA? Is that just part of the lifeblood of the organization?

Keith Bradley: In every department, we have our wish list. We have our hope list. We’re very forward-thinking, so our leadership usually allows us to do the technology that we need to, especially when it can have a benefit. If we can help increase the yield by half a percent, it’s a lot of food that we can produce more. Every time we can think of something new, it’s something that helps. They understand that, and they understand that not everything works out, but they’re there to help us and support us and make sure we’re making the right choices.

Adam Honig: We speak with a lot of companies that are excited about AI, they’re excited about digital transformation, but they have trouble figuring out what to do. It sounds like getting really strong sponsorship is probably the first goal. If ownership of the business is not committed to it, it’s going to be a hard road no matter what.

Keith Bradley: Yep, sponsorship is needed, but the only thing that’s needed, I would say, is a small use case. Start small; don’t want to go to the moon first. Let’s just get off the ground first. That was one of the biggest things I’d like to say we did very well. As you know, we started small. We started with little use cases. How do we optimize that? How do we optimize this? Not looking at how big we get, but just where we come from.

Adam Honig: Did you find like it was easy to pick out that first area, or was there a lot of debate for that?

Keith Bradley: You know, it was something actually more of an internal IT thing that we just started doing. I said, “I think we can do this.” Then we launched it, and it’s like, “We like this. Can you do more?” That’s how those conversations always start: once the clients and the people in the company see what I can help them with, they start to embrace it more and more. Even the growers, they’re always very, “Ooh, technology, it’s going to control everything.” It’s a little scary for them, but once they realize, “Oh, this actually makes my life better,” it changes how we do things.

Adam Honig: Now, a lot of people are still concerned about how powerful AI can be. I often talk with people and I try to set their expectations that it’s amazing technology, you can do all kinds of crazy things. It’s not ready to take over the world. What’s your perspective on the state of play in AI today?

Keith Bradley: AI is still something young and new and exciting for everybody. I think it’s going to shift and change a lot, but it’s going to help impact how we do things. I think it’s not going to change the world, but it’s going to change how we do what we do. It’s going to make some things easier and some things a lot harder, but I think at the end of the day, it’s a product that’s going to stick around.

Adam Honig: Are there things that you would not recommend using AI for today?

Keith Bradley: Not using AI today, I say you’re dealing with a lot of things that are hard to do. If you want to make a huge decision and you’re a small company, you can’t do it yet. It’s not there. You don’t have the infrastructure to do it. You have to set your goals within what you can do. That’s what we do each day.

Adam Honig: Yeah, that makes total sense. For companies that are thinking about AI, they’re thinking about digital transformation, your advice is make sure you have sponsorship, keep the scope of the project small at least initially to make sure it has success. Those are the key elements for you.

Keith Bradley: Yeah. For me, on my team, one of the biggest things I do is make sure they’re going to have fun with it. If we have fun with it and we enjoy it, it’s something that they’re going to come back to, and they want to do it because we need that internal resource. We’ve picked on the University of Windsor, we’ve picked on students there, and we’ve got a couple that are really great, and they love what they do. That makes it easy for them to do what they do.

Adam Honig: Nice. What kind of things do you do to bring the fun into it? That’s awesome.

Keith Bradley: Just to have fun with what we’re doing. We laugh, we talk about what we can do, just having a good time enjoying the technology. A friend of mine once told me in university, “If you can find a way to do what you do for free each day and make money off of it, you’re going to enjoy your life.” That’s what I kind of do. I look for those people. They love playing with computers. They love tinkering. They like to adjust things. It’s one of the things I love to do myself, and that just makes it fun in itself. When you’re excited about it, it makes it so much easier every day.

Adam Honig: Right on. Well, I know you guys are currently launching a new product, the Sweet S’NAPS Peppers, that I had a chance to sample the other day and were excellent. Tell us a little bit about the logistics behind launching a new product like that. I bet there’s a lot of IT behind it, making sure that everything works properly.

Keith Bradley: Yeah, we have our whole R&D section. We even do and look at using more and more AI in our analytics. We actually even have a testing group within our company that has to actually try out to become a tester. You have to pass the tests. That’s what we do.

Adam Honig: This is a product tester like you eat the product.

Keith Bradley: Yes. We actually do it. We test the product. We make sure it tastes right. We can develop different varieties, but what is a consumer like yourself going to like there? How are you going to like that? We test, we try, we see, and we start to get it out there to the public to say, “Hey, this is really good. This is what you’re going to like.” Then we start really digging into the technology side of how do we grow it better, how do we market the shelf life, what temperature does it need to be at? We do a lot of R&D into these products before they even hit the shelf. You get that first taste that by the sounds of it, you really enjoy it.

Adam Honig: When you think about bringing a new product to market like that, is there any advice you would give people when you think about the logistics behind it?

Keith Bradley: The logistics internally of getting something out is just making sure you know where you want to go. You want to find a segment of the market that is new, interesting, and exciting. In the background, make sure that you have the development and the sponsorship to take the time to make the right product. We can R&D products, and we’ve had some out there we’ve played with for years to get it right before we’re ready to release it.

Adam Honig: I think the new product, especially being differentiated from other peppers as being crunchy and sweet, I think is a great way to go though. Definitely, I can see how that’s going to fit well into the market.

Keith Bradley: Yeah.

Adam Honig: One other thing. I just wanted to get your opinion. You’re in Leamington, Ontario, a couple of hours from Detroit. Not Silicon Valley, and yet you’re doing all of this AI and IT stuff. How do you find people and do that in this location?

Keith Bradley: Every company has its challenges for people. You know how to do it. Like I said, if you’ve found a team, you cultivate them and create the right environment, and people always seem to gravitate here. We always seem to have it. I’d like to say that you find the people that are passionate about it. If you have the passion, I’m always willing to teach you anything you need to know. That’s the biggest part for me is the passion for technology and the passion for what you do. Every company is going to struggle with finding the right person. It’s just a matter of finding that right personality and that great passion for what they do and then encouraging it to grow and making them a part of the company. Our company enjoys being together. We enjoy doing things. We got a company picnic this summer, a Christmas party, and stuff like that. We’re always looking forward to doing more and more together. It’s a good thing.

Adam Honig: Plus you have fun. Yeah. That’s great. Keith, it has been awesome having you on the podcast. I really love learning about all of the AI stuff that you guys are doing—maybe in an industry that people weren’t expecting it—super cool stuff there. Thanks for coming on.

Keith Bradley: All right. Thank you for having me.

Adam Honig: If people wanted to learn more about Nature Fresh Farms, where would you suggest they go?

Keith Bradley: You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also find us at naturefreshfarms.ca.

Adam Honig: Right on. Well, thanks for joining us, Keith. As a reminder to our listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. Be sure to subscribe. Keith, do you think maybe people should rate this episode highly or something like that? Maybe they could have their AI come and give us all kinds of extra likes and stuff.

Keith Bradley: I always liked the five-star thing. It always makes me feel good. That’d be great.

Adam Honig: Let’s give some five-star reviews, people. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to speaking to you on the next episode.