Last month signaled the climax of nearly 10 months of radical change for our company. In February, we launched our new product: an infrared hive grading solution called Verifli. This was not your typical product launch. We didn’t send out endless email blasts begging everyone and their mother to try our shiny new thing. We didn’t make a media push to reach millions of eyes. We didn’t slap any sexy branding around it. In fact, we hardly made much noise at all. We kept our heads down. If you’ve only been following us publicly, you probably have no clue what our company even does anymore. Well, we’re writing this to catch our faithful followers up to speed.
THE PROBLEM
Around last May, our team had a collective “Aha!” moment. In the months leading up to that lightbulb flash, we worked tirelessly trying to figure out how to scale our company, our technology and obviously, our bottom line. We landed on almond pollination.
Each February, three quarters of the nation’s beehives are shipped to California, where 80% of the world’s almond are grown. Over 2 million beehives congregate in California’s Central Valley to pollination roughly 1 million acres of almond trees. At an average fee of $200 per hive, beekeepers in the US gain a healthy influx of cash early in the season while their bees enjoy a head start to the year.
But there are a few key issues. Although bees don’t “hibernate” as we usually think of it, they close up shop for the winter—shutting down the queen’s egg laying, booting non-essential bees from the hive, conserving nutritional storage and clustering tightly to retain heat. Since many big-time bee operations are located in areas with harsh winters, most beehives are at their weakest point in the year around the start of almond pollination.
But the best pollination comes from hives that are in mid-season form, not fresh out of spring training. To compensate for this, growers reward the beekeepers who can build hives to mid-season form by paying top dollar for strong bees.
But this highlights another key issue: the only one way to verify that you’ve got strong bees is by cracking hives open and checking. If you rent thousands of hives, this process can take days, perhaps longer if the weather doesn’t cooperate (like this season). What’s worse, a strong hive can contain anywhere from 10 to 15 THOUSAND bees. There’s simply no way the human eye can distinguish an 11,000-bee colony from a 14,000-bee colony—but there’s a significant difference in terms of pollination output. At the end of the day, an inaccurate hive strength assessment means someone’s leaving money on the table.
Now, to break up the wall of text, here are some amazing photos from our first pollination season (photo credit: Deftly Creative):
OUR SOLUTION
We saw this disconnect between beekeepers who are doing everything they can to build strong hives and growers who are willing to pay whatever it costs to get them. We figured there had to be a better way to reconcile their interests and evoke transparency and understanding.
We decided to develop a product to help growers and beekeepers measure the strength of their bees faster and with greater accuracy and objectivity. Our product, Verifli, uses infrared image analysis to map out the heat signature given off by the bees. Using physics and data science paired with real-time weather information, we can deliver an accurate assessment of each beehive with a single infrared photo of the outside of a hive.
With Verifli, there’s no last-second panic when a beekeeper finds high winter losses in mid-January; he can check the bees throughout the winter and give a heads up to his grower if they need to rent extra hives. With Verifli, a grower can set up a true incentive program to reward his beekeeper for every high-strength hive, not just what they find in a 10% sample. With Verifli, a grower can know exactly which parts of the orchard have low-strength hives, so he can shuffle around pallets to maximize pollination.
Our goal with Verifli is to foster transparency. Growers and beekeepers depend on each other— and for the most part, they share similar goals. By creating a common language around how we measure pollination, we hope that Verifli can become a resource for growers and beekeepers to communicate expectations and avoid conflict.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that you see the rationale behind our decision to pivot, I want to tell you about how we came up with a plan to launch a product in under 10 months. Check back next week for part 2!