So everyone should be joining us. I would welcome it's a good afternoon for the ones in Europe and below. And I wish a good morning to the people in the other side of the pump and the Americas. We try to organize the webinar at the time zone that would be convenient as much as possible for all of us and I will give a couple of minutes before I start the formal part of the introduction. So Hans, I mean you're virtually at the institute but practically are you in the Netherlands? Yeah, yeah I am close by. Close by me too. I am around let's say 10 kilometers far from the office physically but virtually I am in. I checked the office today so it is the same as Montpécro. Good. And how is it with the Euro experience? We are not doing that well. I mean we have all the coins now for Belgium. Yes exactly for me I lost from all sides from Netherlands, from France then I am in between now I am in Belgium I think or maybe Switzerland or okay that's fine. But you're still doing better than us but we didn't travel at all for this event. I think they didn't do a good job. Well individual they are supposed to do better but the worst not real team work I think. And that's where we are getting ready and I would officially kick off. I wonder how predictions would work for our soccer games and if these catastrophic results were predicted by artificial intelligence either in short term or long term. I think I mean can give a story about Beijing's network and Barcelona. Let's start with that a story about Beijing networks and Barcelona. This is a good warming up for a webinar as I welcome everyone that is joining. Let's talk soccer then in that sense. I know big teams like Liverpool and Barcelona that are using Beijing network too. They have a special team in artificial intelligence and big data just like any physical preparator, psychological preparator, then they are analyzing the data now even to see who is the key player who gets more balls how to prepare the strategy and the tactics just playing with Beijing network. And there is a couple of I know also even I think IX last year tried to do something similar just to playing with graphs and vision network find probabilities the critical path in the team. It's really now is not just skills or physical preparation or money is also knowledge. Football nowadays is moving to knowledge in that sense also. And there is lots of science behind it and there is lots of data science or computer science. That's what I hear you describing and I think that this is exactly what we want to cover at this webinar. So welcome at the webinar focusing on emerging risks and in particular looking at emerging risks that are coming to affect an overall system. And it's going to be very interesting. Let me briefly say who I am. I am Nikos Manusialis. I'm the founder and CEO of Fagrano. I've been working in the space of food and agriculture data data management and algorithms that are trying to predict or suggest things to users since 2005 which means a lot of years. I'm working on the field. My PhD was on agricultural data management. But it had a very important algorithmic component looking at the interactions of users which were the information sources that were interesting and trying to suggest things that could be of interest to other users. So my heart is really very close to the topic that we will be discussing about today. And as an inspiration for this webinar and for some other webinars that we are organizing with other colleagues is something that about six months ago a colleague from the industry told us in one conversation where he said there are so many models out there. There are so many solutions out there that are trying to predict the future. But what they don't focus on realistically are the actual problems that we are facing. So plenty of solutions but not clearly defining their problem. And this was the inspiration for starting something together with some colleagues from Belfast as an informal interest group but now is growing and is creating interest and is a space in which most people from the industry but also from the academia are sharing experiences and practical applications with the interest group on predictive analytics of food integrity. This is a group where we are sharing knowledge, ideas, models, systems that people can play with or concepts upon which people are requesting people to contribute with requirements or validation or other things. And we have invited all the members of this group to join this webinar. We have plenty of people joining us today. And in this conversation one of my favorite simple diagrams that help us decompose the problems is this one which says that we're not trying to answer a question being it a scientific or a business question by trying to calculate some predicted indicators. I have to select the right variables, the right indicators for which I will calculate their future values and it's an important step selecting these indicators because they will be the signals that I will be using to give answers to my question. And then I have to go and see what kind of data can I feed into my model and which is the right model, the right method that I will select. And this is exactly at the heart of what we will be covering today, asking the right question. And today the question is about long-term risks, not the short-term prediction what will happen next week or this month but looking a little bit ahead. I want to welcome our speakers, Hans, Marvin and Yamin Buzabrak from Vaheningen Food Safety Research. We're working together at the Food Safety Market Initiative. We're looking into ways in which we can take advantage of lots of data so that we can support some important food safety decisions. And they're going to talk about two complementary topics, the scientific approach behind predicting emerging risks and the way that we can use AI technologies to support solving such problems. This is the core of the webinar and we'll have some time for questions and reflection at the end. So Hans, the floor is yours. I will stop sharing my screen and hand over to you. And you can start by also telling us a couple of words about you. Thank you very much. Yeah, my name is Hans Marvin. I hope I think the first slide should be up. Oh, that is the wrong one. Okay, I hope you can see the slides now. Yeah, my name is Hans Marvin. I'm a senior scientist at Vaheningen Food Safety Research. I started working in Food Safety in 1999. Before that, I was working on the whole supply chain, more looking at industrial application of industrial crops. My background is chemist. I've studied chemistry and PhD in it. And now I, since a couple of, let's say seven, eight years, together with Yamin, we started introducing big data and AI in food safety research. And in this presentation, I will show you why we started with it. And with my presentation and the one of Yamin, you can see what you can do with it and how it helps us to be more proactive in measures that we can take to prevent food safety risks. So this presentation is together with the Yamin Busenbraak and it's called System Approach of Predicting Food Safety Risks. And Nikos, thank you very much for this invitation of an opportunity to present this approach. And I hope all the whole audience would like it. And first we'll say why I started doing this with a system approach. And it happened really when I started working at Wageningen Food Safety Research, or at that time it was called RICO, say in the beginning of 2000. And I will explain you how it works and I will give you a demonstration about the methodology. So why did we start? When I arrived in 1999 in our institute, which is dealing with food safety, we are an institute that only does research on food safety, either for the government or international organizations and also certain conditions also for the industry. At that time there were a lot of incidents described in the media. I had a lot of media attention and that caused a lot of concern by the broad public about how the safety European food supply was arranged. So there was a big concern. And of course that also initiated a new revision of the legislation in Europe. But that was not an ideal situation. And when we were in that, and also our institute was very much in the analysis of food safety components or contaminations in all this product. And we had a 24-7, let's say, availability there because when it is a crisis, we are doing the analysis for the authority.  So that was not an ideal situation. And so we were trying to figure out other ways why, first of all, are we only behind the facts. When we do analyze all the monitoring and the early warning systems that were in place at that time, they were all hazard focused. So they were following a measuring, monitoring a specific hazard, known hazard. And when you find that have measured, basically most of the time then there was a problem. Because then you have to take measure if it was a really serious problem. You also can, there were also monitoring programs and a system available that follows consumer and animal health. The rapid response monitoring code. These systems give you a little bit more time. Because if animal gets sick, you know, okay, that is not necessarily food safety risk, but can turn into food safety risk if, let's say chemicals or treatments are used and you have elevated concentration of residues. We realized that we have to think out of the box and maybe try to develop a holistic approach. There was nothing of this kind of system were available at that time. So we had to develop ourselves. So what we did is, okay, quickly, of course, food supply chains are not completely isolated from the rest of the world. First of all, they are international. So there are a lot of connections throughout the globe. But there is, of course, a lot of direct and indirect interactions with other domains, like the science and technology environment, the climate change, the government, the politics, for example, legislation. These legislation can certainly make that some activities that you did in the past certainly cannot be done anymore. Health and welfare, agriculture. So all of these domains here have an impact direct and indirect on the food supply chain. And when we analyzed all of these past incidents, and we looked at whether there were changes or indicators that you could say in one of these domains around the food supply chain, and if we were able to, if we would have known and would have followed those, would we then have been in time to take measures to prevent the food risk to occur? And we have done that in many of these incidents, dozens of them. And we found that many of these indicators can be identified, either in science and technology, in human behavior, in nature environments, in legislation economy. Some of them are really directly linked, in the Netherlands, for example, in the legislation of the environmental release of components. Many of these indicators and related data that were identified were generic, but also case-specific. The conclusions that we had, because this was done by us in 2008, is that there are signals in domains around the food supply chains that precede the food safety incident. However, we much more research is needed in order to identify these drives of change, how to model them, and also to consider the complexity, because all of these indicators they have, yeah, that's not a direct interaction, but it can occur month or maybe year afterwards, or also there's a web of interactions. A study done at that time, also related to emotional risk and to identify the drivers with the international expert. And this was the result of it. Here, they will ask, what is the most important driver of immersion food risk in your country? And this was a very international, I don't know exactly how many countries, but more than 30 were in full. And you can see it was a scale 1 to 5, and it was done twice, two rounds. And you can see that war and terrorism were identified as potentially drivers of an immersion risk. And the population growth was a migration, increased diseases, economic recession, at that time as well. Also, very high negative impact on occurrence, so that it stimulates impact of immersion risk in the country. However, both rounds, it was seen that the technology, maybe AI, would be a driver that could help prevent food safety risks to occur. So that was a positive expectation. So expert consultation is an important aspect of identified indicators and drivers of change. And we have tested many of those, and also optimized which one you best can use in which circumstances. So we can use interviews, focus groups, descriptions, questionnaires, Delphi method, FMEA, failure mode of effect analysis, where you score the FMP, which is the severity times occurs and detections, just in order to rank the different impacts of indicators. And we analyzed in a big project which one you can use best in which circumstances for immersion risk identification. And that has been published in last year in transit food science and technology, if you have interest. So the troubles that we are facing is that, okay, when you have identified the drivers, there can be many, and you don't know the mode of actions because that's often not known. And also you have identified the drivers. You want to connect them with the expert knowledge about the food supply chain, but also other expert knowledge about trade flows, about prices, and so on. And you want to connect that with the, let's say, the food supply chain. And how to integrate that, we started eight years to use artificial intelligence to use that to predict food safety. I will demonstrate how this out of the box holistic approach works in order to predict the food safety. I will use the dairy supply chain as example. And this was done in an FSA funded project called Demeter, which also has been published. What we did in this project was first started a literature search on drivers and indicators that experts think have a direct or indirect effect on the performance of a milk supply chain. We identified experts in academia, industry in a country of interest in Europe, because we won't focus in Europe. And these are the major milk producing countries in Europe, in the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, France, UK, and Poland. We sent experts, questionnaires for the experts, and we asked them about a lot of questions on emergency risk, drivers, and indicators. And we also asked them to rank. In total, we were managed, four of them were ranked high within total 12 indicators. We searched for data sources of the indicators and we were able to find all of them. So this suggests for you to have an idea about what we are talking in this case. Drivers were in the environmental domain, the social domain, technical and economic. And the indicators, which is said, this has an effect on the development of an emergency risk in the milk supply chain is the use of antibiotic in the dairy sector, the average precipitation in the country, share of land use of pastry, we group them under environmental, then the social toll, inhabitants per country, the average age of the dairy farmers, the population per country, and so on, economic, the raw milk prices, the feed prices, the incomes of the farms. And we have various number of data sources that we identified that will provide information about these indicators. Just to be short, to show you one of these indicators, and this is the milk price as an example, because when you have a data source, you can also, you try to collect as early as possible, and we were able to check back prices from 2008 to 2020. And for all of these countries, we see the fluctuations of the price on a monthly basis. You can do a statistic analysis to see when a price increases or decreases above a seasonal effect or what you can consider as a normal deviation. And that's what we call anomalies. And these are the filled dots within these graphs. You can see for all the countries, there are anomalies found. And our question was, isn't an anomaly in one of the indicators, in this case the price, be a warning of a potentially full safety risk later? Here you see as an example, the number of anomalies that we found in some of these indicators. And for the different countries, so this is the indicator, these are the countries, the number of anomalies records found. So here we found in the period 2008, 2019, we found 2008, 1997 and so on.  And indeed, with a statistic, we could find that these anomalies have a direct link. This is an example of Germany and everything above this gray plate is a significant correlation. And you can see the window was preceded about 15 months of the same full safety incident as reported in RASF. Here is a summary of that information. These are the indicators and here are the different countries. And you see for all milk price, there is a lack of, for in Germany, for example, of 10 months, which are positive correlated. In France, it is 21, Italy 22 or positive correlated to the Netherlands 10. So there is a time differences, let's say, more than almost between a year and two months, two years before this. So this is based on data from many different sources all over the world. First, of course, you start with manually, but then we wanted to do it automatically. So we have now a workflows installed in our high performance infrastructure that automatically collect from all of these data sources to data. It cleanses, it checks every month, whether they're on a week, depends on how often it is updated, whether there are new ones, even data from tables in a PDF. And we have made scripts that are able to do that. Then there is the calculation of abnormality. And if there is some abnormality, then this is visualized. And if there is abnormality, automatic color is given. We can also do the same with the basis network for combining that. Let's say a basis network, I mean, we'll tell you more about that. And there you can easily combine these different steps. We also included a basis network in this workflow. That means that also when there's an abnormality with the Bayesian network, it also gives what type of hazards you can find. So here you get a warning a year ahead. And this also says what you can expect, what kind of hazards. Conclusions. Expert elicitation in our experience is a crucial step in the system approach for the development of future prediction. Animalities in many different various different indicators show significant correlation between lag times and rush modifications. And basically, it gives you more than a year. We have created workflows. We use open source software 9 that allows to do it all automatically and also give warnings when a problem is at hand. And this also suggests that early warnings in indicators can precede a real incident. I'm not doing that a lot. We have a team of seven now with two new persons coming in that have worked on this topic. And thank you very much for your attention. And if you want to learn more about what we are doing, you can approach this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hans. And as we are switching to Yamin, I will make the observation that apart from computer science, there is also a social science component. I saw that is essential in understanding which are these signals that show that have a proven correlation and that we can use as input. Yeah, you always have to use experts. That's a very interesting point. Okay, Yamin, are you ready? Please unmute. You see, that's why it's always nice to give justice in you. Thank you so much, Nikos. Do you see my screen? Yes, you're good to go. Super. Just to put this one on the top. And this one in the corner. Yeah, Nikos and the Bruno guys, thank you so much for organizing this webinar in this very interesting topic for us, which is our business basically. I can introduce myself shortly in that sense. I'm Yomi Buzenbrek. I work in Wagner Food Safety Research with Hans now for almost seven years together, trying to implement AI and the system approach in food safety. This is really our expertise. We use everything that is available in AI and new technologies specifically in food safety. We apply AI and food and machine learning to keep and make food safe. This is really our mission. And thanks for all our participants that joined us from everywhere in the world. I hope people will get really nice questions and discussions. And thank you so much for joining us and giving us this opportunity to share with you our findings. As already introduced by Hans in that direction, I will just show you two cases that we think are worth to share with you, which were we applied system approach and AI. Yes. What I will show you of course is thanks to all these guys that things were really in practice happening. Thanks for Anna, Nijin, Ljunika, Lukas, Rota and Hans. And basically the two stories that I wanted to share with you. The first case is about combining the system approach and the patient network to predict food safety hazards in fruit and vegetables, like a case. Then the second one where we use natural language processing and text mining to identify completely unknown things in food supplements. Because in addition to prediction, like prediction in short term, tactical term or strategic term, which is covered by the first block of the case, we have in food safety questions the things that are unknown for us, really. In the end, I will conclude with what we learned from these two exercises in that sense. Let's start with the first one. I think Hans already explained everything about system approach. We see the problems in food safety. It's like a system where everything is interconnected. That's very important. Where we should look at things at the world, right in the system, the whole food chain, all together, they're either just a group of independent part who is here. We focus on this or just take this like parameters for us. The system is a system, the food chain, the food system that we include in our models. It means looking to the bigger picture first. Then if you have a farther or deeper questions, you can dive in. And here, how we cover the operational level and the tactical level and the strategic level of our decision. We take everything and we take the historical data. Then if we want to predict the long term is already in our system and covered for all parameters, then if you have other scenarios or new questions in operational level or tactical level, they are already in the system. You can go with the system in weekly level, monthly level or yearly level. It depends on the questions that you have. It's built like that. It's the whole system, the whole history, and the daily operations, what is happening daily. For us, it's a full system that you can implement using Bayesian network. I like this first example. This is a few cases that we implemented using Bayesian network. The first one, as you see it here, this was really our first one where we learned from a food fraud case where we were involved in food integrity project, which was an EU project. Can you see here the name of our institute was written in that time. I like it even it was small, but it was the first model that we learned from it. From there, we started implementing the system approach and AI in very, very complex cases. We have now even more than 20 different applications in different domains for different questions also. The one that I would like to share with you today is the BN model for fruit and vegetables. Generally, the BN modeling steps, as you can see on these figures, have four steps. The crucial one that Hans already mentioned is the identification of the parameters that you are going to include in your model. Then you go to target which data to collect. Then collect the data, process the data. Then you need to develop your model like a third step and is the validation. It depends on your result of validation. It continues. It's a circle. It depends on your result. Are you satisfied with the result, like the quality of your model? Then if not, you need to maybe add other parameters or collect more data. It depends really on your, but it continues always. You can do better or improve or go to the next steps. I want to dive into each step of this, of the BN modeling part. Expert consultation for this case of fruit and vegetables. Yes. The first question, which factors are you going to put in your model? Then we check the literature. We ask experts related to food safety hazard and food safety in fruit and vegetables, specifically companies involved in fruit and vegetable chain, and they identified for us the main parameters are relevant to predict food safety hazards, like climate parameters, rain, temperature in the origin country, the use of pesticide, and all kinds of chemicals that you can use in the farm level, agriculture index stress, the prices and the important export data parameters. You will see later in the model how many parameters and all the factors that we had in the model. After identifying your factors, you go to the next one, which is the data collection. For this case, we used RASF data, where they notify the different food safety cases. I will give you in the next slide a short introduction to RASF data for those who doesn't know what RASF means. We extract all notification related to hazard and fruit and vegetable from 2014 for the main producers or the main exporters of fruit and vegetables to Europe. Then the last step is linking all notifications that you have in this database to the indicators that the expert defined, like climate, agricultural data, economical data, and all the parameters defined. As I mentioned just this is a short jump to what is RASF. RASF features a central system required by food law, managed by European Commission, and all EU national food safety authorities, EFSA, Norway, Leuchttinstein, Iceland, and Switzerland are in. The objective is to provide food and feed control authorities with an effective tool to exchange information about measures taken responding to serious risk detected in relation to food or food. If you type Google it, just type RASF portal, you will get to the system and the open access to everyone to see what is happening in food safety and feeding. In numbers, what we had notifications for fruit and veg in that period was around 6,000 cases. For the main countries like Netherlands and Turkey, India was around 4,000 cases. And the main product was figs, pepper, okras, apricot, pears, tomato, and the main has basically mycotoxins, pesticide, food additives, and flavoring, foreign bodies, and so on. Yes, we constructed the model. Yes, of course, we split our data to training and learning data set. We used 80% of the collated data to train our models and we used machine learning, arguing to build the BN model. And the remaining 20% of the cases randomly selected from the full data set was used to test and validate the accuracy of our models. And the accuracy for this one was really, really nice. It was higher than 96% in the quality of prediction of the hazard category. This is how it looks like, the fruit and veg basin network. In short, how I can explain it to you in an easy way. You see all these ellipses are the parameters. The green ones, for instance, the economical factors. You see yearly production, yearly import, monthly prices, agricultural GDP of the origin country, sown area in the origin country, agriculture index, prices yearly. This is also strategic operational and it depends on your A menu model and the production volumes, for instance, yearly. The orange ones here are related to the climate like mean temperature, monthly, precipitation yearly, precipitation days, minimal temperature. And the green, blue ones here are related to chemical use like insecticides, fertilizers, fungicides, and herbicides used in the origin country. And the ellipses, the white ones are basically the parameters given in the system like product name, the year, the origin country, the month, and if there is above emerald or below emerald. And the output parameter, what we were predicting was the hazard category. And you see here, like in these rectangles, you have the states here, the hazard category name, and the green bars are the distribution of your probability. And the numbers here, like 26 percent is pesticide residue, 57 is micro toxins, and so on. And like product also here, you see all the products that you have in your model. And it's the same for the other parameters. How can you use this model? You can play the power of it. You can play all scenarios that you have in mind. What if scenarios, what can happen before or in one year, next month, or given the parameters that you have now, what is the most, probably most likely hazard will be, will occur. And how I have some scenarios for you here, just for a few parameters because of sick of time. Here, for instance, I played the scenario where we imported figs from Turkey and we made just a variation in price, from zero to 1,000, 1,000, 2,000, and higher than 2,000 per ton. And you can see here, this is the output, which most likely chemical, if you have a question, okay, knowing the price of my figs today, which chemical should I check? Or if your question also is yearly, if I know the price of my figs in Turkey next year, this year, which chemical should I check next year? Then you will see here the effect of a price on your outcome, the things, the chemicals that you should check. For the first classes, when it's about zero to 2,000, it's always microtoxin, almost 100%, then when it becomes really higher than 2,000, really expensive, two times the normal price, you have foreign buddies that you see then questions of fraud and it's not only microtoxin, but you will have other food safety issues. Another scenario here is the same country, the same product, but the variation I was changing, the import, the volume, how much we are importing on tons. Then you see, for the first category from 1,000 to 5,000, it was microtoxins, then the second class microtoxins, then microtoxins. When you achieve a certain level of volume that you are importing from that country, you start, there is a limit for it. It becomes completely, you will have other aspects of hazard, non-patogenic microorganism, then organoleptic aspects, other completely other types of food safety hazards, and microtoxins becomes like below 40%. You can, what mice with this model, how we can use it. In that sense now for our authority, given the condition next year in the origin countries, you give me the temperature, the estimation, how much they will spend in agriculture, how much they will show on which product. We can give you 95% ahead, which product you should check and which chemicals also in your monitoring plan for next year. This is like strategic decision for one year. If you implement, as Hans mentioned, the system in real time, as we have it in our infrastructure, you can see any parameter if it's changing today, what is the effect of that one or which chemicals you need to check or you need to change your strategy with chemicals to change or which product. Yes, it depends on the dynamics on the market and the influence of these parameters, how they are moving daily. All this work was published and they are in open access. I think both of them. The first one of a daily case that Hans shared already with you in the first case and the second case, it's open access. Just type it and you will find it there. Yes, this one was about fruit and veg. Now let's move on to completely another AI approach, which is natural language processing. And to another topic, which is food supplement. And when I say food supplement, it's just, yeah, I think all of us, we know what is stimulant. It's a drug that produces a temporary increase of functional activity or efficiency of an organism or any of its parts that are used to treat obesity, increase focus on alertness, decrease appetite or decrease need for sleep. Yes, what's the problem with them? The market is really growing, especially after in this pandemic period, the consumption is increasing, the market is moving very quickly, and there is a lot of fraud and illegal compounds are sold as food stimulants. And the issue there, if they are illegal compounds, this means they can harm the health of the consumer, which becomes an issue for us, like a food safety institute and for the food safety authorities. Then there we had some research questions, which are, are there other compounds that should be added in our monitoring? When we say monitoring, we have a set of stimulants that we are checking daily to keep our stimulants and food safe for everyone. And what is being used and are there compounds which are not aware of what is happening in literature is something, what is happening in the markets is another thing, what is happening daily also is another story. Then the idea, like when we designed it, how to deal with this problem, we came up with this strategy, use text mining to mine Twitter, collect all the stimulants, tweeters and use sentiment analysis and text mining to get something from there. Another data source was a European media monitor that collects media, media reports worldwide, what is happening, sorry, what is happening in the world in media and mine that text using machine learning and consult with experts, you will get a set of new stimulants. And we use Drasaf also to see which ones are emerging in that sense, like an information and knowledge. And the last one that I would give more details about it, which is using scientific literature also, what is happening in science, in publications. And like data source, we used Europe PMC, which is a big database even bigger than PubMed. It collects scientific literature data with synonyms from chemical databases. Let's go to what we did, how we mined literature. We used like Europe PMC as our source of literature, which provides a signal point for access for the abstracts row, PubMed, PMC, full text and additional five millions. It's like if you take all scientific literature databases, Europe PMC is one of the biggest ones. And our aim is to find new stimulants in scientific literature that are currently not yet monitored by us using word embedding like an AI technique. All scientific literature that contained one or more of the compounds that we have and the synonyms in the title and the abstract were collected from 1990 to 2019. And the result of the harvest was 2.1 million articles, which is in size, there's no scientists who can read all this material and which is really a big data set. And the word embedding model was trained with this data to try to understand if there is any new stimulants there. Just here a short introduction what is word embedding is an AI technique used to identify words that occur in the same textual context. It's what is word embedding, is a high-dimension vector of numbers instead of text and converts all words into a vector of numbers based on all other words in the data set that you use to train your model. In short, we used word to check another network. Then when we trained our word embedding model, we used stimulants like a vector and for stimulants we find which compounds were interacted for were close to stimulants. And from this set, the compounds from the original four to eight compounds, the set of the chemicals that we have in the list and the synonyms were removed from that. And the top 15 found compounds were checked for the validity. From that we found this is how it looks like if you see your word embedding projected in 2D or 3D dimension here and the stimulant is here in the middle and you see all these compounds were close to stimulant. And from the trained word embedding model of science on this exercise, 15 new stimulants were found. In addition to that, mining EMM like a system, not the literature, but what is happening in media, we using text mining, we found 10 compounds were completely new stimulants. This work was just published I think this week and it's available online in open access for everyone if you are interested to have really the details of the approach from A to Z, not just a short one like I gave it now. And what I can to conclude, let's say, as mentioned by Hans and Nikos already AI and system approach are really needed, not only needed for us, we believe that it's a must in food safety, where you can include all these factors, economical, climate factors and social factors, technology factors, all the factors that are in the system. BN is one of the best approaches when you want to use system approach and AI, because you can explain it to expert in food safety, especially in food safety in a conservative area. You need interaction with the expert, you need to explain what is happening in the system. And always they have new questions, then you can play easily what if scenarios and ask strategy, operational and tactical questions in seconds and without going back to build any other model. In addition to that, using NLPs we succeeded to find a way, now we are developing this area also finding unknowns, we did it for stimulants and we are doing it for other food safety hazard. And the same technology also can be scaled up to any product or a topic or hazard easily. You need just to do the same exercise and retrain your models. In addition to that, we have like you need to later on if you want to make it in real time, that's you will have other issues related to your infrastructure, the power of computation, data governance, what you can share, what you cannot share and such kind of new challenges that are raising in food safety generally. Yes, again I started with a team, I will close my talk with the team. Thanks for all these guys who really added the big value to this work. And thanks for all of you for attending and looking for your questions and a nice discussion. Thank you Yamin, thank you. I have a couple of questions and while I will be asking a couple of questions I will give the time to our participants to submit their own in the chat. Let me see if I can share again my slides, perfect because my questions are around the practical steps or challenges in putting this in operation in daily operation. So what I hear you describing is first of all an essential step in involving the experts and their knowledge in identifying the key factors that can serve in a reliable way as potential data signals to consider in the model. So this was an essential step in what you are describing.  If we want to look at a particular area, how much time do we need in order to decide on the key factors that we should then incorporate in our model? Shall I address that Yamin? Okay, I guess if I would estimate of the project budget 60% is used for this. This is the most important part of it. The modeling is and the validation is the least part. We also have investigated to what extent can we use the extract knowledge from the experts because when you have the Bayesian network, for example, you can also influence the direction of impact. I mean this is only the main impact that you see in the figure, but you can also manipulate in first the direction of impact. For example, if they think it is not logical. Often when we do that and the expert says, yeah, that's not logical. I would expect this and this and this and if you ask them, okay, do you have proof for that? No, got through it. When we do it, then all the time the model performance decreases significantly. We learn from that and we also have done together with social scientists also in the office study on it. The reason for it is the experts are really experts on a very narrow knowledge path. But in a questionnaire or in an interaction in an expert elicitation methodology, you ask much more of which they think they know, but not 100% sure. And when you have a let's say a complex interactions where these direct paths and the rules are not clear and are not published and well established, then you come into this domain and then we prefer to say, okay, we use the experts for let's say what things around out of the box things should be considered and and and let the data speak for them for itself. And because when we do it in that way, the models that we produce when of course with the data set that we use that we have has the highest prediction, but also it's it remains often very high the same level in the future data that we don't have. Let's say when we let's say when we do the same thing, try to predict with a model that is four years old with the data that is now, then we have we achieve more or less the same prediction accuracy, except if something really strange has happened like the COVID for example, that's something that you that is out of the ordinary that has an impact in the whole system that never has something similar in the past, then then you have something then you have a different situation. And how much time does this take?  So checking the literature that costs a lot a couple of weeks, then you summarize and and then you have to identify at the same time you start at the same time identify the experts and in in the domain itself you contact them and you try to figure out which domains they think is relevant and you find experts in these domains then you have to draw up a questionnaire if you do the questionnaire and interviews also really good because then you have a more interactive but then of course you have fewer number of experts that you consult and Delphi is a different way to do it but that's more costly so but if it depends so much money you have available let's say for the consultation easily half a year. So it's half a year and some investment has to go in identifying the initial the starting factors and then what I hear you describing is that the data can come and complete the picture but we have a starting point by getting the the experts and the right experts in the process. Yeah I also wanted to yeah please I have another question that is also practical. Yeah but you need to know which methodology, expert elicitation you want to use in what purpose and where so you need an expert on that so I just not just sending out a question. I understood that this is clear that the social part the social science part is very important as and complementary to the computer science part and when we're looking down the road in terms of how far you can look at you talked about yes the future you talked about the real-time day-to-day updates of probabilities in terms of hazards in given product categories what did your model show in terms of some years months or years down the road how far can you go right now with the models that you have for sure a year what but we haven't checked all of them we have checked one that we developed on food fraud and the prediction what we did five years ago was a forecast of something that was going to happen in the in a specifically in China we made a forecast of China they also made a forecast of others but this case was in China and we supposed that something what's based on the let's say implementation of food safety regulation and so on that some of the parameters and the food safety control we would improve and that was I think six years ago now but we and we say okay supposing five years time this and this and this a situation is happening we would expect that this and this and this in the food fraud and we did the simulation I think last year with this data and it was exactly the same so the prediction was accurate so for the typical question of the largest organizations in the industry that look three to five years down the road you say that we can trust the models enough but it's something to further develop yeah I mean yes you see the question as you know in any modeling modeling is very important what do you want to do your model you cannot have a model that does everything or answer all questions that's not possible but if you want to integrate the operational and the tactical and the strategic level in your model you can do it by designing the beginning because sometimes like you see in all our models here we add a year even the expert says I am not interested in the year is not one of the factors but for us like an authority we know we need to prepare the sampling plan of next year and the year after then we need the year like parameter to play the yearly decisions to see what will happen in two years three years we have the weekly one we want to decide weekly then if you want to go to daily level which is like predicting price or whatever then you need to include those parameters in that sense you should know in addition I am predicting food safety I am going to use it for strategic questions let's say it depends on your horizon as Hans mentioned in food fraud for us it was five years we have it already the years were there then but if your strategy is one year then you need to include those parameters like not factors that influence the output but factors where you can play scenarios what if in that sense so here they should be in your model different models or different factors in different versions of the model in depending on the horizon that you want to cover the future horizon that you want to go yes and it depends on the complexity of the questions you always start with simple yes then if you don't don't say yeah the ideal scenario you will get my result from the first one of course but it can happen also that you will get poor results in that sense then you need to separate the tactical the operational and the strategy from each other then you can put them in sequence instead of having them all of them together it depends on the complexity but yes the bn is one of really in my in my life like a modeler is one of well it's a it's a big machine really yeah I can say we helped to implement it in other domains in Wageningen where we predict let's say yields we predict animal disease outbreaks and they are quite accurate well it's a bit baseless so this is the the view that we have in especially looking down the road in large organizations but there is also a question that is very very interesting from our audience and I'm going to the questions from our audience that talks about smaller organizations because what you were describing in terms of data collection training the model and putting the model in practice requires some resources what would you recommend to people working in smaller organizations like a small fast developing company which part should they implement or can they implement in-house and which part can they use from other sources from external services or from your services okay I can answer maybe a part of the question look there is different ways of building a patient network what we describe here is expert-based way where you consult with the expert you need to collect and there is data driven one 100% from data then if like a small company he wants to analyze his quality control data put them in the model to predict which ones to okay which okay I have a product coming from this supplier which quality aspect that they have to prioritize which ones to tackle first if you have the data there then it's straightforward that's clear because you don't need you are the quality expert and you have the data in-house then yes the being can be really quickly decided just concerned with your expert quickly you have the question and you are doing maybe modeling other techniques then you know the question already then that one is data driven automatically and quicker but if you go to complex questions where you have different factors you need expert interactions and combining both together I think also the data availability if you have your own data it is easier and combined with external and then it can be made much more rapid if you have daily data or yes and you can you can have also small models if okay if you are a small company it depends okay if you want to use it in quality check or suppliers before you import something or in your production line saying which default or I can have in the product then you are recording already your data then you can use just those parameters that you have in your daily data that you are collecting to predict and to become more efficient more targeting more everything better in that sense then it's straightforward good good okay thank you for the answer and I think this was the question that we have enough time to answer we had enough time to answer from the participants I see people saying that they would like to to contribute more and this is an excellent way to contribute which takes me to the call to action be part of the interest group feel free to register at the interest group so that we can have more opportunities for continuing the conversation more webinars exposure and testing and playing with systems and models like the one that you presented I would wrap up I want to thank both of you Yamin and Hans for this very very interesting set of presentations you you have put you have set some light in areas that were not clear to me as well the social science part was an important part that I didn't know of and that now I understood much better I also like a lot the way that you have used scientific literature to mine the unknown hazards and the upcoming hazard so to feed in the hazard taxonomy or catalog with new ones coming from scientific literature I don't know if you have any last words closing Hans it was another to present this and I hope it has inspired people and if they want to learn more please contact us I'm happy to respond thank you Yamin the same for me thanks Nikos and Ola Grono guys for inviting us and for all our participants for attending and for all your very nice questions let's hope to see you in another webinar or wherever where we can share our results and discuss about food safety thank you very much it was a pleasure and an honor to have you with us I want to thank all the participants enjoy the rest of the day or the starting day and enjoy the month as well and keep in touch and stay tuned for more things that will come thanks a lot thank you so much bye bye


This is Startup Store Front, canned octopus, mussels, and squid. In Europe, canned seafood is a delicacy, but here in North America, consumers don't eat as much canned fish. As a matter of fact, most people only know of canned tuna, and that's it. Scout is a craft seafood company that is bringing this tradition back to the North American table. They can lobster, trout, and mussels and take it from the Startup Store Front team. Tastes delicious. Today, we're talking with Adam Bent, the co-founder of Scout. We discuss, why tuna is the number one canned fish in the United States? How kelp became the new kale? Why every major seafood brand is being forced to change how they fish. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Adam from Scout. Thanks for joining. For people who don't know, what does your company do? Thanks, Diego, for having me. Well, we're a craft cannery. Right now, we're focused on trying to get Americans to eat a broader variety of seafood. We started with canning it, so putting fish in a tin and growing it from there. The reason I wanted to talk to you is because we got an email from someone on your team, and I was like, canned fish. Is this the thing? It made me really curious. You guys had sent us samples, and we had the lobster one. I had the lobster one, I should say. The salmon, the mussels. The salmon one, the mussels, and the tuna. I had the lobster one because I thought it was delicious. I thought, are there people like me that have an adversion to the idea of canned seafood? Obviously, everyone knows canned tuna. I think we all grew up with that. But it was like, can there be a company that exists that has canned tuna and some of these other products? It was actually really delicious. I'm glad you think so. I say actually, which is shocking in some way.  To me, it's like, wow, I really want to chat with this person about how did you get to the point of making it so good? Even just going down the road of why this problem? What did you see in aquaculture or in the fishing environment that you said, there's an opportunity here in the canning space for something to take off? What was the thing? Most emerging CPG categories as young brands, we're coming in typically mission-based and we're trying to affect change in the system by offering better products, better or better for you, usually better for the planet and actually stand for something and seafood was this white space that didn't have really any innovation happening in it. If I asked you what your favorite seafood brand was, now that it's out, what is your favorite seafood brand? It doesn't exist. It's not something that comes to mind, right? But protein bars, the RTDs, the Auroboros we have in front of us right now, a chocolate bar, ice cream, everybody has favorite brands and multi-product categories, but seafood was this outlier that didn't really have any brand affinity with customers. And then when I looked at... True, very true. Okay. I like it. And then when you look at the brands that serve the category, can I name some of them? Like Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea, Starkis, these are billion-dollar companies, right? Legacy companies. Yeah, they've been around for a while. Big time. And I mean, all of them have moved most of the operations offshore and a lot of them are involved in supply chain practices that are not honoring people on planet and are profiting immensely from oceans and waterways, but not really doing anything to connect consumers back to ocean health or climate action or making sense of the ocean and let alone trying to get consumers to eat a broader variety of seafood. We have mass consumption of chicken, beef, and pork on land. We have shrimp, tuna, and salmon as the sea versions of that, right? So we got to get consumers to eat a broader variety of seafood. It's actually a function of helping to protect our oceans and waterways so we can expand the palette and the space. That makes a lot of sense. Also, a huge blind spot for these companies in some way, which is interesting. And then what is your first step in doing this? And so do you go, okay, let's just make a tuna to compete, or do you go, no, we got to go like a CPG company that knows what they're doing. Let's have a line. Let's have four, five products that we can push in the market and sort of release at the same time. What's the, what's that first step look like? When we launched, we didn't set out to even do tuna. We now have tuna and I'll get to that, but we really wanted to showcase the variety of product species that you could consume. So we initially launched with trout, mussels and lobster. Okay, you have a mollusk, a crustacean and a finfish, two of which are aquaculture farmed in different ways and one of which is wild caught. And it really showcases the biodiversity that exists in seafood, what we could be eating. What we found out as a year and a half kind of went in post launch, it was actually necessary for us to bring tuna to market because we're kind of shooting ourselves on the foot. If you want to get more people to trust the brand and try new products, we got to meet them where they're at with what they know. And then we all grew up eating can tuna. It's a bread basket item, right? It's like milk and bread and cheese and it's something that's ubiquitous in the American household. And you don't even really think of the brand behind it. It's just there. Yeah, I didn't know it was bumblebee until we were actually talking about it. Until you said it. And I was like, oh, yeah, I remember that now. And folks shop it on price primarily and that's the way the retailers have thought of it. It's a loss leader in store, it's, you know, profits and sense. And it's really been built on trying to offer the cheapest product, not necessarily the most responsible product. But if you flip on over to Europe, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, canned seafood or tin fish is like charcuterie wine and cheese. It's all about the craft of preservation, way more products being offered from, you know, artisanal manufacturers that have high degrees of quality and oils and herbs and spice blends and packaging. And it's not treated as something cheap and cheerful that you drown in mayo and then put the two pieces of bread. Now I sound really, or I feel really dumb. And so it sounds like because Europe is already doing this or at some point maybe has mastered this, is it difficult to get the taste right? It is, yeah, especially for. Because it's sitting there, right? It's like in a can for a while and so things can happen in the can. Yeah, it's at room temp, generally. And so it can't be that straightforward. One of the beautiful things about fish is like the natural oils that exist in the product make it really great for preservation. And it can actually kind of highlight and bring out new flavors and textures. And with some maturity and some aging, a product can transform. We all like to eat some sushi or like cook fish filet at a restaurant. And canned fish is just a similar, sorry, it's a different, it's a different way, even though it's the same species to enjoy seafood. There's some texture and flavor profiles that you can get from the method of preservation that don't exist in consuming, you know, cooked product that's just plated. And every seafood species is different. I mean, what you have to play around with to make a muscle taste good and it's very different from a salmon or tuna level on a lobster. So there's a lot of product development that goes behind time and temperature. And then we have the added complexity of, you know, the FDA or CFIA, putting a lot of controls on these things because you can make people really sick from, from canning fish without proper oversight. So there's a lot of limitations that we have in Europe, way more relaxed. Like you can cook at a lower temperature, a lot less time. You can get a higher quality product in other countries that are allowed to import here, but with domestic production in Canada and the US, we have a lot more rules. So creatively, we want to do a ton, but we do have really kind of critical control factors that we have to work within. With tuna, we, we've all heard about overfishing of tuna populations in the world and also with lobster. I know that the price of lobster has pretty much skyrocketed over the past like couple of years or whatever. And like you said, like the tuna is like the meeting people where they are in the lobster is like the way to like get them to recognize the brand as a whole. With those two items being kind of on the surface, difficult to get to, or at least like provided a value. What other fish on your repertoire is kind of like the, the one that you're trying to push people towards the one that maybe they're not familiar with and what makes it that way. So maybe I'll circle back to the example of those bigger brands. Right. Think about the, the species that those companies offer. It's like 50 skews plus of just tuna. None of them have bothered to use their vast marketing resources to try to popularize other species, because they'd rather pump out the fiftieth skew of tuna and a new flavor than trying to actually get adoption from, from consumers and trying new species. And it's, it's based on profit. It's what's going to drive the most amount of sales. We've taken a different approach and, you know, we're constantly looking at data and trying to figure out what species make sense to bring to market that have enough familiarity to it's called the average consumer, but are not so unknown that they're never going to buy it. And then we won't exist as a company. So it's a sweet spot for us of trying to make sure that we have the right amounts of products that are familiar, like a tuna, something that you typically might have going to the east coast, like a lobster boil and you're remembering a trip with your family to Maine or something. And you're going to recognize a lobster as a celebratory type of premium product. And then trout has, you know, some, some familiarity.  So it's, it's as simple as that, even with just kind of anecdotally, what are people going to be comfortable with using a bit of data. And then once we see something working with those early adopter, like very foodie forward consumers that live in New York and LA and Chicago that are exposed to all this culinary juice all the time, you can see what might have some legs to actually bring to the mass market. And right now that, that product is trout is kind of a first great example of that. We are one of the only 10 trout products that you could find in the market when we started. And that has been well received and now works in mass retail. So the trout is farmed in Idaho, should I get into the full production of the trout? Sure, yeah, yeah, let's do it. It's farmed in Idaho from natural spring, like aquifers that are flowing through these farms. It's actually the natural, just like flows of currents that are going through these farms and then there's outflow, the water being filtered. The, the trout are not crowded. There's no antibiotic use at all. And they're a great shining example of a sustainable seafood product that's farmed. And it's very scalable for us because the inputs are controlled and we can get a static price on that. Unlike lobster, which is wild caught, fishers are going out there with traps, they're laying traps with bait. They got to leave them there for a little while, go back out, manually pull them into their boats. It's extremely labor intensive and mother nature is making the decisions there if there's going to be an abundant year or not. And there's all kinds of macroeconomic factors globally with the popularity of lobster in China on New Year's as an example that can skyrocket the price. So there's variables in wild caught, there's more controlables in aquaculture and we've course focused on the responsibly farmed raised species. Do you guys own the farm as well? No, no, no, we don't own any of our farms and we do not own our own canneries. We find great partners that are experts in production and see for cultivation or fishers and they work with them and become a function of their sales and marketing. Got it. So it's very much like a very CPG approach in that. We like to at one point. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of work. It's a different thing. Tens and tens of millions to get a cannery up and running. Who is your customer or even who's the early adopter? So you mentioned foodies, maybe chefs, but then at some point, who is the mass market that's purchasing these? You know, that's what we're trying to figure out right now. We're in this interesting transition as a company from having served that foodie forward, early adopter consumer that loves to eat out, loves to try new foods, isn't scared to try a wide variety of seafood, you know, really actually enjoys trying new things and is health and wellness focused and cares about supply chain and ethics. And that's a customer base that we serve very, very well today. It's how our company started and they have embraced the brand, but translating that now with our higher prices, our fair wages, our own production, our domestic sourcing, all of that. It makes our products two, three, four, sometimes five times more than a commodity product where there's a lot of hitting costs are not being paid there. So when we when we have a tune of product, that's five ninety nine to seven ninety nine, and you're comparing that product on shelf at one to two dollars, the average consumer, somebody who doesn't have the same foodie cultural exposure is going to have absolute sticker shock and be like, you guys are crazy. But then they taste the product like you did. They notice a substantial difference in quality. And if they were to dive into a brand a bit more, they would see all of our commitments around responsible sourcing and manufacturing and humans in our supply chain, taking care of that. And that's something we've been able to have tight controls on because up until now we've been entirely in Canada in the U.S. And this is the first year now that we're now venturing into production in Mexico and starting to go a little more international to look at our unit economics and figuring out pricing. So it's it's a journey and we want to be able to offer products affordably, but that doesn't mean making sacrifices around quality or human rights or supply chain. So it's it's it's a difficult balance. When you when you think about or even market your product in terms of like, how do you want people to consume it? Do you want them to consume it? Like I buy the salmon and then I maybe make rice or something at home and then I just place it on the plate at the end. Do you like, how do you envision and specifically in your head? How do you envision like each each one? Because I have my vision on the team. Like to say open and eat, like it's cooked. Yeah, we've already we've already done the work for you to make it taste good. It's cut. Yeah. I don't have to skin it or bone it or add anything to open the can. It's an awesome protein addition to a meal. That is literally seconds to open in place. So if you're making a quick rice bowl or you have a salad that you throw in together, even just a sandwich pasta, that's kind of quick basis, then scale products or any can see food product are such a quick and easy protein that's already cooked and adds great nutritional density to your meal. Do you even imagine like, again, we're just, we can do this all day. But Nadal ends a tennis match. LeBron ends a game. Locker room.  Oh, yeah. We're going right to the high time, big time omega threes. Because it makes sense, right? The snack is our launching, which launched January. Okay. It's 30 grams of protein each snack kit. What is a snack kit? So I buy a snack kit. What am I looking at? So you have a little pint shaped like an ice cream or a soup container. Inside there's a can of yellowfin tuna and organic olive oil.  And then we've created these textural blends, crunchy toppers. We have a chili criss-crunchy topper, Zatar crunchy topper and a chili jalapeno crunchy topper. And it's different seeds, herbs, nuts, dried fruits. And it's 30 grams of protein with a ton of omegas, vitamin A, B, E, selenium. There's great, great nutritional density of a meal that you get. And it's not a processed product like a bar or a protein beverage and you're getting 30 grams of protein, which is it's more than a bag of jerky. It's more than most products. Yeah, that's amazing. And is this for kids that you're like it's for LeBron. It's for LeBron. It's a snack kit for anyone. And what does that cost? Ten bucks? Ten ninety nine. Five ninety nine. Five ninety nine. And double the price. Enter Mexico. Yeah, right. That makes sense. The commodity snack kits are usually like tuna and emulsified ingredients to mimic like a tuna salad. So it's like a mayo base. And you've probably seen them with Ritz crackers. Sure. And they retail for like a dollar to three dollars. OK. And there's there's usually less than 15 grams of protein in those. When it comes to like when I think about your investor deck, I can kind of piece it together by just chat now. But I can be doing by chatting with you now. But when you're talking to investors, tell me the dumbest questions you're getting from them, right? They're like they're probably like Adam, Adam of all the things. Why? Like I'm sure that's one question. A second question toward the end is almost like I get it. Like I get it. I see the problem. But more so I see the opportunity. If you're right, this is actually pretty massive and has been a huge blind spot for these massive conglomerates. Big time. And so I like that. So I'm interested in those two things. But what what questions are you getting that you know you might argue are like really dumb. The biggest challenge that we had through developing trust and credibility for this category with CPG investors was just like education on oceans as a food system. It's like the wake of call that I always try to bring forward in my meetings and these discussions. It's like 70 percent of our planet is covered in water. It is the most regenerative food system that we have on earth. There's zero inputs. We don't require the same amount of water irrigation, fertilizer use, seeds, labor. It literally makes us free food, free plant food, free. It's an abundant food system and it's literally the most regenerative. But it's it's been pillaged by big commercial brands and big commercial fisheries that haven't really figured out how to have it a balanced food system just like we have problems on land. So I'm constantly trying to educate around the opportunity that the emerging consumer really does care about, you know, the food system and ethics. So pointing to a lot of kind of this like change in mentality that we have that people will pay more and more attention to where their food is coming from and who's making it and how and that there's this kind of huge white space has been left on the table by some of these bigger brands. How do you do that? So so I have a friend who's in private equity and all they do is buy farms. And so to me, if I'm you with the deck, I can say, look, look at the private equity interest in just farming, like fish farming, right? And we can see we can see that really simply where maybe 20 years ago, there was zero interest and over the course of the last maybe 10 years, that interest as from a dollar perspective has just skyrocketed. Right. And so we know if private equity is paying attention, the trend, we know the trend sort of right, we could be like, look, there's real interest, there's real money already happening. We're just helping them, these these existing groups that are already buying these farms, we're partnering with them in an infrastructure they're building. I'm just thinking about this like from a purely like there's other forces that work to not just not just the consumer that's getting more intelligent, but also aquaculture farming really kind of getting a lot of dollars placed on the investment side. I mean, they love aquaculture. It's real estate. That's a big one. Right. It's especially if it's land based, it's massive real estate. And then they look at it just like land based farming, they can apply the same kind of unit economics and modeling to aquaculture. And it's juicy, it looks attractive for investment. Truthfully, they're so figuring a lot out in aquaculture. There are some hard operations that are profitable. They're the ones that are typically cut in corners and there's the hidden costs that we're that we're all going to pay for later on, like feed inputs that are unsustainable, where we're harvesting more wild marine ingredients to feed fish that are farmed and we're not getting as much of a yield back. So that feed input ratio is thrown off completely. Those are those are one of the big issues there in aquaculture. But I think seafood overall has had an older generation that have really run the industry. The patriarchy really old school, often very blue collar, pretty rough. It's a hard job. And it's very male dominated. The new Bedford fishing industry. Yeah, man.   But now a lot of these fishing businesses, processors, like vessel rights, all of that are being kind of passed down to younger generations. There's new blood in the industry. There's people who are coming with mentality that we all have, just to do better work and to protect our oceans and waterways. So there's a big generational shift and there's just this aha moment that a lot of consumers are having around ocean based foods. We're looking to reduce chicken, beef, pork, land based meats, not to get rid of them for a lot of people, but to reduce and to diversify our reading, we're increasing our plant based consumption. And we're all trying to also be more responsible to with the types of seafoods that we're eating. Seafoods are great protein. It's nutritionally more dense than a lot of those land based protein. So there's a moment like, you know, you've probably heard the comparison that that kelp is like the new kale, right? Who made kale cool? Nobody knows. It was the most genius marketing campaign where like suddenly this green vegetable that went as a garnish became the superfood that's used across menus everywhere. That same kind of thing is happening with kelp right now. And I think we'll continue to see other ocean based ingredients get that kind of attention. Yeah. What do you focus on from just a marketing perspective and getting the word out? Because there's so many avenues you could go, right? You could go foodie. You could go into like the will consumer. You could go I can think of like 20 viral moments where you open up a fake restaurant pop up and just serve people canned fish.  And you can have all these like different ways of creating or just getting people to think about the product in a different way. But how do you know, what do you guys focus on from just a marketing perspective and getting getting this out there? You know, this is a great question because we're still figuring it out. It's hard. It's hard. You have so much to choose from. And and seafood marketing, if we think about it, there's so much even just at a species level. I can't offer the same campaign strategy or messaging to make you want to try lobster in a tin as I can for tuna, as I can for trout, or a sablefish or a razor clam later on. When we talk about hundreds of species, we can be consuming each other own kind of education and intricacies that that need to be worked on. As a brand, though, more holistically, like kind of stepping out of that and just trying to more broad swath to get consumers to eat more seafood were in a constant spirit of experimentation. Like I said, those foodie forwards or the adopters, like the pop ups, the cool boutiques that were in, you know, the events that we're doing, the brand collaborations, that's all table stakes. And we are talking to folks in New York and L.A. very, very clearly. I want like the soccer mom in Utah to want to try our product. I want families who want to have more nutrition access. Jessica Simpson, great spokesperson. Jessica Simpson. I'm here in Jessica Simpson. Go call me. You know, if I may, when I when I think of this marketing problem for you, I actually go back to another episode. We had Haven's Kitchen on the podcast, and they were making all these incredible sauces, but they realized that the problem was that no one really knew what to do with them. And so they ended up becoming like this content arm within themselves where they showed people what recipes they could do.  But I feel like you're especially with your co-founder being a chef, I feel like you're missing an opportunity there to really showcase all of the things that you can do with these different types of fish, like literally show people. If you're not used to trout per se or whatever other seafood options that they aren't typically consuming on a weekly basis, I feel like by showing them the recipes, by showing them like this is what you can get at your grocery store that will pair with this. And here's how you can make this into a quick weeknight meal that the whole family will enjoy. I feel like that could go a long way. And just becoming that content arm will kind of serve not only like to grow your company, but also to promote the sustainable fishing practices that you are advocating for. Yeah, meal time is a big part of the whole strategy. And it's like translating what we've created as a brand in our earliest stages, where we are more specialty and more premium and not trying to make that makes sense with a more accessible price points and product lines. That's the hard part. To some extent, probably, yeah. And there's a lot of brands you'll see out there, including in our category, who like our like hot drop model, super sexy on D to C, like super content driven. But, you know, we're talking about trying to get to 10,000 shelves over the next over the next two years. And, you know, we can do vanity projects and create beautiful content that has amazing table stakes, but that's not going to make the average. Let's call them sometimes middle America consumer to want to go and try the product. They require different messaging, but we don't want to sell out either. We're not a corporate brand. We don't want to just go and repeat on what corporate brands have done to try to get adoption for their products. And that mealtime planning, that open and eat, the ease of use, the high protein, the nutritious, the responsible supply chain, we're still figuring out how to bundle that all up and try to share that on shelf. Right now it's our packaging that tells that story the most. Somebody in the middle of the States that's going to pick a product up in Nebraska is only going to pick it up probably because the packaging looks cool. But then we might get 10 seconds of their attention and they're going to read, oh, well, it's actually from Alaska. And they're going to turn around the packaging and they're going to hear more about our brand story and figure out that we're a B Corp, 1% for the planet member. And then we're starting to create that connection. So it starts with the packaging and then we can try to funnel them into our kind of digital ecosystem of storytelling and really focused on taste of place. When we started, we wanted to just source from Canada and the United States because like everybody trusts that it's our supply chain is domestic, it's local, it's regional, we can work with chefs all over. But the reality is people don't want to pay that price. So we know that there are amazing fisheries, aquaculture partners and whole fishing communities globally that have really great labor standards and want business. And we can do a great job at finding those partners in those regions and then sharing their stories and their supply chains, the taste of place of a sardine from Portugal, the taste of place from Yellowfin, Mexican tuna that we're sourcing for our snack kits. Are you where are you guys in the grocery store? And so where do they, where do they put your, where would you like to be? They're sticking us in Central Store in the K&C Food Set right now. Okay. And we've had some early wins of getting merchandise in specialty meat and cheese or deli and also the seafood counter. So being on the store periphery is a lot harder to win that space. And it takes a lot of data or a lot of dollars to be able to win that space than Central Store. So just by the nature of policies, we get shoved in with canned seafood, but we are constantly doing submissions to retailers and other departments and trying to pay for secondary placements. And again, we're still figuring this out, but early data shows us that we actually sell more among fresh food than we do in Central Store. Yeah. That's the fun thing about what you're doing because it makes total sense that that would work. But then it's the fight of getting there, right? Or just like convincing them to understand that your product is different and it doesn't, it doesn't fit the same, the same mold. But it might look like that or, you know, do you guys have like a, just an e-commerce arm? So if someone signs up as their subscription model, or they can just get all this wonderful product. We've tried all that too. I mean, we were super hot on DTC for like our first eight months and we sold a ton. Yeah. Chai of a million. And the novelty and the newness that we are bringing really drove that. But then eventually, like no one's going to buy lobster tins on a subscription for three years. I would love them too. If anybody's listening, that would be, that would be amazing. But, you know, once they've tried us, then they kind of get this exposure to the category. And our category is actually like buying wine and cheese and meats. Like you're, you'd like to try new things from new regions and new places and new brands. And it's almost impossible for us to keep that level of an innovation pipeline of new products coming at our stage. So we're trying to find that sweet spot. But when you merchandise our smoked albacore, right, which is cured overnight in salt and sugar, it's it's rinsed rinsed off the next day, then it's air dried, then it's hand cut, then it's packed with organic olive oil after being smoked with Canadian hardwood. It's a very manual artisanal process and that retails for $9.99. When you have like duck prosciutto at like $15.99 and then that smoked albacore tint is beside it, the consumer starts to associate that product with something that is more premium and more of an artisan product, but that is not scalable to mass grocery either. So what part of our business is going to be specialty and premium and that kind of brand building foodie forward component versus what we can scale into mass retail to try to expand our mission of more responsible seafood and nutritional equity in people's homes. Are there like grocery stores that align with your mission better than others that you know, obviously there probably are, but is there like a, I don't know, what are some of the top grocers that you'd like to be with? Well, we're we're we're about to launch globally with Whole Foods after working with them for the last two years in the Northeast. Very nice. So that's it's a big one. And they have the most, if Kerry is listening from the seafood policy team at Whole Foods, they have very, very, very strict policies and for good reason. Don't agree with all of them. And I really respect the work that they do. And it's been phenomenal to kind of see them get on board with us and our mission and help us grow. And they're a bit of a forcing function to other bigger grocery arms like Albertson Safeway, Kroger. A lot of them now are really wading into this ESG sustainability, diversity inclusion programs. And that is a bit of a DEI. We were just talking about this earlier. Yeah, it's a backdoor for us. Sure.  We'll use every chip that we have to get into retailers. We have to in this marketplace, highly competitive. And so there's there's some great programs like that. But on the seafood sustainability side, we also find ourselves often doing a lot of the education for these bigger corporate retail buyers. So it's an interesting place to be developing the programs. They're bringing in some experts, but they're still figuring it out. And if we can be part of that process, do they put you in a different category yet?  When I first started pitching to conventional grocery, like big, big grocery, like the stick of shot was out of this world. They were like just dropped. Like they could not believe that people will pay 799 for a can of fish. It's not a dollar a can. No, exactly. And they're just used to seeing that high velocity, cheap and cheerful. Let's keep it moving. Those brands are spending tons on slotting fees. So it's been an uphill battle, man, like to to get the adoption from and the buy-in from these retail buyers to want to support and try to validate that there's consumers looking for higher quality, responsible products in this space. Yeah, but it's working, it seems. It's working. It's working. It's on the marketing front to earlier questions, too.  There's a reason why it will be chicken to the sea and star cast and, you know, wild planet have only really pumped out tuna and salmon because it's it's the easier thing to do. Ultimately, it's the easier thing to do. It's what works. It's formulaic and it's what the palate knows here. But we are taking that challenge on but carefully so that we don't overindex and waste resources on trying to popularize something that's not going to work in mass retail. But it's taken us even two years just to figure this out with trout that it's got. It's got fins, got legs to to actually scale into into mass retail. And I think a reason of that is that it doesn't doesn't have a fishy taste. It's actually quite transferable from somebody who's used to the texture of tuna. They try the truck like, oh, this is actually pretty good. And then they get excited that they can try a new species in the category. And, you know, instead of having a tuna salad sandwich, they can have trout with dill and cold pressed sunflower oil. They throw in a bed of greens and more nuts. And it's like a two minute lunch. That's amazing.  Congrats. Thank you. When it came to closing the round, how difficult was it in sort of this environment with the looming recession, or maybe not difficult at all? I don't know. But you tell me, what was that? Yeah. What is it like? I mean, I'm I'm on a bunch of shareholder meetings for companies we invest in and it doesn't it doesn't feel good. I'll say that much.  Yeah, it's it's in, you know, I I'm in very close contact with a ton of CPG founders, especially in seafood. We all as emerging seafood founders are very closely connected and communicate a lot. And on top of it being a hard new category to build consensus around in CPG, it's just hard in general for any emerging brand right now.  You know, we don't need like CBD infused chips and we don't need like 2000 types of ice cream out there made from fake milk. Like it there's there's all kinds of products that are just unnecessary and are trying to jump on trends and buzziness. We're trying to offer up real nutritional food at an affordable price. It's going to take us some time. And luckily we've had investors that are super mission aligned with us. And I would call the more patient capital and I'm a patient capital, patient, more patient, more patient still want to return.  I like this patient capital where it's not growth at all costs.  I would say in CPG and especially with our investors there is a little bit more understanding of the supply chain and the complexities and that food systems are slower. So it was we had enough momentum and really great attraction to validate that there's there's really something here. And we got the investment to kind of take scout to that next stage and validate our snack kits. We need to move into more grab and go more affordable products to scale. And that's what we've done after developing these snack kits for the last year and a half. So the raise was primarily around that. But yes, this with the recession, having this bit of an outlook, start to pay attention about a year ago and knew that we would need to have more affordable products if we were going to start to really win shelves with with conventional grocers, which is the bulk of the American marketplace. Yeah. So we had the the foresight. The foresight. Yeah, you were aware enough to know. And our investors supported that. How do you view like even just the future of your industry or the future of fish like in a world maybe 10 years from now? What does it look like to you? Is it is that I go to a restaurant? Is it less fishing? Is it we open up a can of like if I'm at a restaurant and I order a charcuterie board, let's say, is it coming with fish on it from Scout? Seekudery. Seekudery. I like that. Did you try to mark that term yet? We try it. Yeah, it's been in like the public domain for too long, so you can't own the word. I'm going to start adding that seekudery to everything I do. And just yeah, it's elevated. Yeah, I've got some seekudery here. That's what happens. It's a huge use case for our products. And we have our products are used on charcuterie boards all over the place. But how do you do you like the future of the way people in general with fish like the experience fish changing in a meaningful way because of what you're doing or people in your category are doing or just canning in general, aquaculture in general? Yeah, the new brands that are entering the space are all mission driven and they're focused on on trying to bring new species to market. And then that biodiversity that I keep on talking about the established brands, the commodity brands in the space will will most likely just kind of continue business as usual with trying to bring the same species to market. And the whole industry has been built on the most amount of volume at the lowest cost. But we're starting to see species collapse, right? We have the snow crab of like disappeared from parts of Alaska. Yeah, they shut down the whole season. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's that's whole industries collapsing. Those are warehouses closing, those are processors closing, those are those are fishers that can't go out, they're losing their jobs and those big companies that typically profited from these wild fisheries, then suddenly have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars missing from their balance sheets at the end of the year. So they have to become more climate conscious and climate aware and they have to start paying more attention to what's happening with the oceans as a food system. If they want to have a business model in 10 years. So we're starting to see the more corporate brands in our category and seafood CPG start to adopt a lot of the same initiatives. For the first time ever, or rather when we launched, we were like the only B Corp company in seafood trying to be the responsible player in the space to show bigger brands that you could do better. We're the only one percent for the planet member. We are really driving our MSC certification partnership and we know working specifically with these certified sustainable fisheries, all that started to trickle up now to these bigger brands because they're all realizing. Yeah, they're paying attention. And you know what, if it's a function of marketing, because they want to sell more product, they look at us and they want to jump on the gravy, gravy train, great, then we're doing part of our job. But ultimately, like the oceans are a huge hyper connected food system. And something that happens in Russia has implications in British Columbia and all over the world with the oceans, with currents and with acidity and storms and the whole food web. So that interconnectivity, we're just going to start to feel it more and more and more. And I'm starting to see the associations, the NGOs, the corporate entities start to pay a bit more attention. So I'm hopeful I'm optimistic. And I think low hanging fruit is getting the American consumer to eat a wide variety of seafood and to stop overfishing tuna and to stop over farming salmon. We need to start working on popularizing other species so that we can reduce the stress being put on these farms or these wild fisheries from the same species over and over again. Yeah. So with that said, are you going to like I know you had to get into tuna, but are you looking to eventually move away from it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So with these three snack kits that we're launching, they're tuna. It's what it's what the consumers know with what the grocery buyers know. We don't have to go and advocate for trout and the tin. I mean, we still do that. But the tuna snack kits are that gateway fish. And the hope is that if you try the tuna snack kit, you fall in love with the flavor, the quality of the product and the brand. And you're going to trust us to bring you a new species. So I'd love to see us not even launch really more than another three tuna kits after the next three flavors that we bring to market would be to actually do species expansion. And hopefully that's a winning product format, the convenience, the gravango, the DIY, the texture being brought back in kind of assembling your little snack kit with 3d grams of protein. I love the protein angle is the one that gets me. That's the one because for me, it's like being busy is one thing and but eating right while busy is hard. And so like you're the salmon tin for me was it. It was like, this is it. It's easy and I'm done now.  You're converted. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really didn't take much. And then the lobster one for me, I was actually, I made lobster bisque like two nights before and I had bought the lobster. So I was already I already had it. Did you like boil it? Take the show off? No, no, like I get the reason I ask you about the subscription because I have a butcher box subscription. And so this one came with lobster claw and so but it's frozen. And so then I just thought and then I just make the soup. But when I had it in the can in your can, I was like, oh, this is like I could I could have just used that in the you know, the broth. And I was like, that's really interesting. And so then my brain just started going nuts with like because it tasted good. Right. And so it's almost like this thing is a gateway to chefdom in some way for me where it's simple enough. But it's also like a gateway to save time and the nutrition is there. It tastes great, which which I think is everything frankly. And so I just became a believer in the product because when I first got the email, I was like, there's no way this is like, no, I wouldn't be this crazy to go down the road of this. But it tasted amazing. Here I am. No, but I mean, I think that's, you know, it's my ignorance, too, of how hard or challenging this can be or not be. But but Kudos to you for creating a really delicious product. Thank you. We're rooting for you. I mean, it's a tough road ahead. But I think I think directionally correct. Big time. I mean, when Charlotte, my co founder started this with a vision in 2014, it was a side project. And even at that time, we were friends. And and I was looking at her like making canned food cool again. I know that's a hard mission and see foods even harder. But she had that vision in 2014. And we've been working hard over the years to popularize what we're doing and to to make it make sense. This is a great opportunity. That's part of that. And I think we're getting there. There's there's it's a viral thing on TikTok right now, even date fish, tin, tin fish date night on Tuesdays and tons of media are covering it. And it's just a wild thing to see how far we've come in just two years from the pandemic that celebrated pantry cooking again and always fine items, tin fish got its it's kind of halo then. And it's just kind of continued on over the last two years. Well, look, where people find you and buy the product and support you guys and all that good stuff. Tell tell everyone. Yeah, I mean, can head to our own site and then thrive market, which we all love, great, great ecom player, all the whole foods in the country as of as of January, as of April, be able to find us across all the H E B stores. There's not a lot since January or when here in Erwin. Yeah, nice. That's right. Pax there in January. It's a huge and you're the first people I really talked to about it in media wise or a bit more publicly, we're going to be at Nosh live over the next couple of days. We'll talk about it there. But I'm excited about the product format. Well, if we're any indication, if our team is any indication, all it takes is like one bite literally go buy buy some scout at the store, give it a shot, try it. It's it's mind blowing. Honestly, converted us instantaneously, new believers, like I didn't even want to share it. It was so good. I'm glad I had to. Thanks, I don't think you appreciate your time. Thanks for having me today. If you made it this far, I bet you loved the episode. So you should join our YouTube channel membership for only two ninety and a month. This gets you access to one, the whole unabridged conversation. Two, you get the episodes on Monday, one day earlier. Three, you get two additional entries to our giveaways. Check out our Instagram to see we've given away and four, you get access to seasons one through three. That's over a hundred episodes of wisdom and life changing advice. What are you waiting for? Join.