This fireside chat is from Day 3 of FreightWaves’ Global Supply Chain Week. Day 3 focuses on the food and consumer packaged goods industries.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: How to leverage advanced technology to optimize grain harvests from production to delivery.
DETAILS: Over the next 25 years, the world’s population will grow at a much faster rate than the arable land that’s needed to help feed it. Utilizing technology to optimize the value of global grain harvests will be crucial to eliminating $71 billion of annual global grain waste and ensuring the world has enough to eat. A combination of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can monitor each step in a product’s journey, alerting growers, brokers, importers, logisticians and transporters to opportunities and potential problems.
SPEAKER: Naeem Zafar, co-founder and CEO of TeleSense
BIO: Naeem is an electrical engineer and a serial entrepreneur who has been involved with several startups in Silicon Valley. He started TeleSense in 2014 to apply Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technologies to one of the largest markets in the world: agriculture. Naeem wanted to democratize the data for post-harvest grain — to benefit growers, grain handlers and traders worldwide. His previous companies invented the silicon fingerprint sensors (found in laptops and smartphones today) and chip design tools. He is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor at the Brown University Department of Engineering, his alma mater.
KEY QUOTES FROM NAEEM ZAFAR:
“Our job is to give you a heads-up” on potential problems before they happen.
“It’s not about spoilage. It’s about making more profitable decisions and to be able to hang on to the food we’ve already grown so we can feed the world.”
“The world’s population is going up by 25% in the next 25 years. The arable land isn’t going to go up by 25%. If you think we have problems now, think about what will happen if we don’t preserve what we grow and what we make.”
