Hazel’s New CEO Focuses on Life Extension Product Diversification and Geographic Expansion
Today, it produces the life-expanding startup Hazel Technologies named Parker Booth as its new CEO. Booth, who has had a diverse career in product distribution, direct farming, and a position as general manager of Washington State Correctional Industries, takes on the new role after serving three-plus years as the company’s chief operating officer.
Booth, who has held the position of CEO for a while, has held it permanently as he replaced Aidan Mouat, who was involved in an accident in September last year that left the company’s chief executive fighting for his life. The accident, in which a car driver hit Mouat while out walking his dogs (both dogs died in the accident) in the Chicago area, left Mouat unable to fulfill his role as he recovered. According to Booth, Mouat will remain an advisor to the company.
I caught up with Booth last week to talk about the state of the company and where he sees things going under his leadership.
Can you give me an update on Hazel and what has been going on over the past year?
We’re an eight-year-old company, and we’ve gone through the ‘does our technology work?’ It has been proven that it does. It is now one of customer acceptance and making our plans to scale up. We are happy about that. We added a new technology with the acquisition of the company’s equipment last year that extends the shelf life of berries, and large berry growers are holding on to this.
How is this new product different from Hazel’s sachet product?
The intellectual property is a sheet about 10 inches x 10 inches. If you take a pallet of a product like berries, you put this big bag on top of it, seal it, and inject CO2 into the membrane. Also, it is very similar to the idea of breathable saddlebags, since it allows co2 to pass through that membrane and to a certain extent that prevents the rotting of berries, especially raspberries. It’s a really proven technology, and we’re excited about that. We will look at bananas in Southeast Asia. It has a pallet option, but it also has a carton option, a small bag with a thin membrane. And so that gives us a lot of conversations with customers.
So Hazel is now a life extension technology company, essentially, with a variety of tools.
Well, so far in our lifetime, we’ve had 5 billion pounds of product that we’ve applied our vision technology to, and we’ve eliminated 400 million pounds of waste. We like to track that metric because that’s our goal.
But it is. Shelf life extension that reduces yield loss. And that becomes the real, objective point of the product owner’s data. So we can say we’re going to save you ‘X dollars per box’ or per shipment by using Hazel. That is an important advantage for them. That savings goes directly to the customer’s bottom line.
Can you give me an update on the sachet business?
We had our first customer five years ago, and it’s been growing ever since. Another change we made is that initially, we produced our product in-house, made our own secret sauce, and packed the bags. About two years ago, we started outsourcing the manufacturing to a third-party contract manufacturer that specializes in this. They use our recipe, they use our quality standards, and we test them on all of that. We did this because they can reach the volume we need to keep up with the business.
For those who are not familiar with your sachet product, can you explain how it works?
There is a component there called 1-MCP (short for 1–Methylcyclopropene). It’s been around for a long time, and what we do is combine 1-MCP in that secret sauce – with different types of ingredients – into a bag, and that becomes a very slow release. That is the advantage of our product. What happens is that we attach things with vapor to ethylene (the natural ripening hormone in the fruit) the receptors actually remove the ethylene from the product and stop the ethylene from being created.
What other products do you have?
We actually have a product called Datica that is sensitive to ethylene, sensitive to 1-MCP, so it’s a quick answer for long-term apple. It is a device connected to the Internet with software that tracks the levels of 1-MCP and, as a result, obtains a real-time level of ethylene.
Another product called Hazel Trex focuses on pre-harvest harvesting. What you do allows farmers, say, kiwis to predict within a day or two with accuracy when the bud will bloom kiwis. Now, why is that important? They can hit it with nutrients before then if they know exactly when it will be. So it is cost saving for them.
Is one of the goals after the last round of financing to diversify the product portfolio as you become a mature company?
It was to build our bases, and to expand our product line, but also to expand our countries. We are trying to increase the footprint. It is very important in the world of production that you are in the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere. That way, you get a year-round cycle, a year-round supply of, say, table grapes. A farmer may have table grapes from Peru, which are just finished now, and now he is moving on to table grapes from California for the US market. We have a plan that in the next five years we will be in 23 countries with different products.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
