Crop Enhancement was selected among 1,000 applicants to join the inaugural 20-member Food & Beverage cohort from Plug and Play Tech Center, the world’s largest startup accelerator. The three-month program brings valuable exposure to Plug and Play’s network of 200 VCs and 180 corporate partners, which include Hershey’s, Molson Coors and PepsiCo.

You can read the press release here.

“We’re honored to be selected for the 2017 food and beverage cohort, and we look forward to connecting with the valuable mentorship and networking opportunities with Plug and Play.”

Kevin Chen, Ph.D
CEO, Crop Enhancement

We’d like to thank Plug and Play for the opportunity to advance our mission to improve crop yields, eliminate or minimize pesticide use, and enable precise and effective delivery of active ingredients and fertilizers. Crop Enhancement will demo at the Summer Summit on June 7th, 2017 in Sunnyvale, CA.

Crop Enhancement was recently featured on TerraTech, a brand new weekly podcast hosted by Jim Lane that covers new technologies in the advanced bio-economy. On the show, CEO Kevin Chen and CTO David Soane discussed how Crop Enhancement uses naturally occurring materials to protect crops, thereby helping to increase crop yields and reduce toxic pesticide applications for growers around the world.

 

Kevin and David also explained how their passion for innovation in sustainable agriculture technologies drives them and the team at Crop Enhancement.

You can listen to the full podcast HERE

“I always wanted to bring cutting-edge science to solve massive problems.”

          David Soane, PhD
          CTO and Founder, Crop Enhancement

 

We’d like to thank Jim Lane and the VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network for the opportunity to share about Crop Enhancement’s CropCoat® platform as well as our Tunable Release platform, and our mission to help farmers around the globe grow their bottom line while minimizing negative impact on the environment.

On September 13th, 2016, Crop Enhancement CEO Kevin Chen presented to 400 entrepreneurs and investors at the sold-out Ag Innovation Showcase in St. Louis, MO.

Established in 2009, the event connects entrepreneurs and investors around the newest innovations in global AgTech and sustainable agriculture. Crop Enhancement was one of 20 companies selected to give a presentation among a field of 100 applicants.

Kevin provided an overview of Crop Enhancement’s CropCoat® technology which helps farmers reduce crop loss by protecting crops with a nontoxic, microscopic coating to leaves, stems and fruit. He also shared early success from field trials in various crops including cacao.

Crop Enhancement won the People’s Choice Award in the Ag Inputs and Diagnostics category in an exciting audience vote.

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to meet like-minded companies and investors committed to reducing the impact of agriculture on the environment.”

       Kevin Chen, PhD
       CEO, Crop Enhancement

 

The Ag Innovation Showcase is a joint effort of the Bio Research & Development Growth Park, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Larta Institute. This year’s event will take place on September 11-13th, 2017 in St.Louis, MO.

 

Power Lunch: The Path Toward Sustainable and Pesticide-Free Cacao

“What if cacao production wasn’t so dependent on toxic pesticides? Is there a way to chart a course to a pesticide-free brand of cacao? A new crop protection technology, which leverages the latest scientific developments in materials science, offers a solution: a non-toxic, biodegradable crop protection product that can be applied not only to cacao but to all plant surfaces including fruit, leaves, stems, and seeds. The coating prevents pests and pathogens from damaging crops.”

Read the Full Article >>

Guest post by BEACN

The Bay-Area Environmentally Aware Consulting Network (BEACN) is a group of undergraduates who take on clients from the Bay Area and beyond for semester long projects. Our members solve everything from supply side sustainability improvements to brand strategizing and market sizing questions for environmental start ups. We work with clients, both private and public, in order to learn more about green business, environmental policy, and cutting edge energy efficient, low waste technologies. We as an organization give students an opportunity to develop their professional skills through consulting projects with institutions who share our belief in sustainability as a critical component to a thriving economy. The Crop Enhancement / BEACN team consisted of seven members: Project Managers Vineet J Nair and Palak Thakur, and Associate Consultants, Jessica Chow, Marc Cunningham, Augustin Hochet, Allegra Saggese, and Zach Woogen. We had the wonderful opportunity to work with Kevin and Dan this semester on a project investigating new markets for Crop Enhancement’s CropCoat® product.

When we had our first team meeting and Vineet and Palak introduced the technology to the team, everyone was in awe and excited for what the semester would hold. We have all heard of the problems with pesticides and the environmental problems they pose, and to see such a simple yet effective solution to the problem was really inspiring. In addition to the health and environmental benefits, it was also heartening to see CropCoat’s socioeconomic benefits, since it is expected to reduce costs and labor requirements for farmers. Our team was more than ready to explore this new field of the agrochemical industry and see the factors that play into successful penetration of the market.

A large part of the semester consisted of creating a crop database of 50 crops that would be an initial “best-fit” for Crop Enhancement. Some of the factors we looked into for each crop were specific diseases and pests affecting the crop, crop value in dollars per hectare, negative effects of current pesticides and total pesticide usage. Out of these 50 crops, 11 were prioritized after looking at location, total pesticide usage, and global market size of the crop. Following this selection, more detailed market entry analysis was conducted on these crops, where we further segmented the crop market into the largest growing countries in order to come up with implementation strategies specific to each region. The team collected valuable information on the pesticide and agrochemicals industry, key players (including competitors and potential partners) in the industry and different regions, as well as pesticide distribution channels in different countries.

We learned that certain crops are more pesticide intensive than others and that regulations and rules differ greatly from country to country. It was also interesting to find out how much pesticide misuse happens globally. The more accurate and reliable access to information on agrochemicals is, the more farmers could benefit from these products without producing the negative effects that improper application causes for human health and the environment. Learning more about the chemical pesticide and agriculture industries, their inter-dependencies, and the areas for improvement in education and regulation, we explored significant channels where Crop Enhancement could most effectively work to reduce the poor use of agrochemicals in some of the world’s most fruitful countries.

The team members have left the project with an additional set of skills, research techniques, and professional confidence in the agricultural marketing, policy, and distribution industries. One particular piece of learning we all had was the value of asking good questions. Because CropCoat is extremely versatile and the global agriculture industry so vast, narrowing down our scope and focusing on the relevant details became critical to keeping our research on track. Although we found many valuable resources with extensive statistics on individual regions and crops, asking the right questions in order to follow a path that produced valuable information for the Crop Enhancement team was always our goal, and we worked hard and discussed often to get there.

The research we did was very exciting because it’s very different from the material we learn in classes, so being presented with the opportunity to look into the agrochemical industry is amazing because it is a huge part of the world’s economy we do not all have exposure to in our academic careers.  The team meetings were always very fun and lively. Palak and Vineet would come back with the new information from Kevin and Dan after the weekly update calls and provide feedback for the project to date. We would then go around and share our findings at the beginning of each meeting and it was always interesting to see what information members had accumulated and surprising facts they found.

Overall, working with Crop Enhancement was an amazing experience. Kevin, Dan and the rest of the Crop Enhancement team were very responsive and helpful throughout the whole project. They were very flexible and open to new ideas and questions that arose from the team. On the final deliverable day, Kevin brought a sample of CropCoat to the presentation and we were all so excited to see the innovative product first hand! The product is well suited to a wide variety of crops and regions, and we look forward to following its rapid growth over the next few years.