TechTalk: Cold Chain Is Hot: Bay Area Startup Reimagines a Smart and Zero-Emissions Future for Transport Refrigeration

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Thank you, Fritz. Really happy to be here on this podcast with you today. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Awesome. I understand that you've experienced multiple startup journeys, both as a founding engineer and executive and also a founder. Could you briefly share a bit about your background with our listeners? 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Yeah, absolutely. I personally grew up in a manufacturing family. I moved on my own at the age of 15 from Amman to British Columbia on a scholarship. Attended a United World College, which is a global educational movement that's focused on instilling values of peace and sustainability in their students, which is something that stayed with me throughout my life. I then got a merit scholarship, attended Cal State College in Minnesota. I studied computer science, mathematics and studio art. I moved back west and joined a startup called Ubermind, which was later acquired by Deloitte. Then I finished my master's at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was there that I was recruited to lead mobile products at Zillow. And it was there that I really developed real passion for data and machine learning and how it applies to the physical world. So when I got recruited by Google to lead applied machine learning projects from zero to one, I jumped on that opportunity and moved to the Bay Area. 

After a few years at Google, I joined the investment team at Gradient Ventures as an executive resident. And I got to work with a number of really amazing startups as an exec at Sapling and as an advisor at companies like Oura Ring. I then jumped back into building my own company at a venture studio called Area 120 at Google. Then took a little break after that with my second child and got back into the game with Voltaire. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Wow. Quite a rap sheet you have there and some big names on that list too. Very impressive. So let's move on to a little bit more about Voltaire. Can you tell me what's the core mission and how you see Voltaire impacting the future? 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Yeah, absolutely. So Voltaire is a public benefit company, so that means we care very deeply about our mission of sustainability. At our very core, our mission is simple. We just want to preserve access to fresh food and medicine, and we think that an environmentally friendly way to do that, to move perishables, can be both operationally and economically better for our customers. So we want the default green choice to be the better choice anyways so that people do it because it's what's best for them and for their business. Refrigeration in transport is one of these areas that's still very fossil fuel heavy. It is right now facing kind of a bigger deal as fleets start to electrify. If you currently have kind of a fleet of Sprinter vans that are reefer vans, it is a very daunting task to meet carbon regulations right now. And think about how you can electrify that fleet and keep it refrigerated at the same time. 

And what does that mean for your routing? What does it mean for your charging? What does it mean for all of these operational complexing that come with regulations? So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is what we believe will happen to food and medicine as these perishable categories move to e-commerce. Think about what happened to books, what happened to shoes. That means physical access to these goods become less available. A lot of stores become dark stores. You may have noticed that in your neighborhoods, stores becoming micro fulfillment centers. And right now it's very expensive to deliver perishables. And so if that continues to be the trend and we continue to push more and more of perishables onto e-commerce, and with most of the food chain in the US and food suppliers in the US being large corporations, we're going to see less access to fresh food if you can't deliver it for real cheap. 

So that's one thing that we personally really care about. So one aspect is how do you electrify kind of urban fleets, but then how do you electrify cold urban fleets? And then how do you do both of these things while maintaining access to food and medicine, to fresh food and perishables? So what we want to do really is create more dynamic transport solutions and open up a host of new delivery programs, overnight programs, curbside pickups, mobile locker style pickups, refrigeration solutions that fit into existing fleets on the back of existing trucks and ones that can fit into new modalities such as 1099 or geek driving fleets as well. So that's what we're working on right now. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Oh, that's so interesting. And it really hits home for me because I personally have a client that is in food and beverage distribution here in South Florida. They're one of the top five producers in the state and they have over 1000 leased trucks, all reefers, all consuming fuel driving day and night. You can see them every day. So it's very interesting that you guys are looking to solve a potential economic and an environmental problem that this fleet would cause. So could you tell me a little bit more about the technology and how these solutions are unique to the market? 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

I think cold chain is one of these areas that it's so important to our economy and we just have not really invested in it very much. Although now it's kind of changing and I think Lineage is helping. Lineage operates these cold storage houses all throughout the country and it was one of the hottest IPOs last year. And it's bringing attention to the cold chain as an industry of what are the potential there of that. So the cold chain technologies right now have been around for a long time. You have big names like Carrier and Thermoking. The problem really with the cold chain, especially in the last mile, is that it's a very fragmented industry. Meaning if you want to create right now your very own last mile fleet for your B2B operations that is refrigerated, it's very hard to come by those vehicles that you need. You usually have to rely on upfitters. 

So aftermarket upfits, which makes it a very fragmented process. You have a vehicle OEM, you have a body shop that needs to do body shop modifications, add curtains, add new flooring, add insulation to it. You need to go get an IoT supplier like Samsara, and then you need to get your SaaS suppliers for routing and so on. So you end up with a large number of providers that you need to corral together. So the upfront cost for acquisition is very high, and then the operational cost is also equally high. Here in the Bay Area, one of our first customers is a seafood provider. They have right now about 25 of these vans in their fleet, and they're thinking about how they're going to expand into new locations outside of the Bay Area. And finding these vans has been very difficult. They are broken quite often, and when something goes out, like for example, your Samsara temperature is off, it's very hard to figure out who is responsible for that. 

Is it my Samsara that's going bad? Is it my insulation that's going bad? Is there a problem in the diesel line to the vehicle? Is the vehicle having a problem? Is the alternator having a problem? So you need to troubleshoot the entire vehicle from top down, and really it results in a lot of downtime for these vehicles, a lot of operational headaches for these vehicles. Even if it's leased it's the same exact problem, how do I figure out what is responsible for what. And also emissions-wise, it's highly polluting because it's an aftermarket fit into your diesel line. Even if it's going now off of the alternator, that still means in most cases that the vehicle is on running. For example, a reefer sprinter, if you need to get it to frozen temperatures, it could be idling for two hours to reach temperature before it can be loaded. 

So we want to remove all of this operational complexity and we want to remove fossil fuels from the equation completely. And so what we do is we rely on a combination of solar, battery, so electricity and our proprietary AI/ML systems that do a couple of things. One, they manage that integration of our IoT system and figure out when there is something going bad ahead of time. So we could do predictive maintenance. And because we are a singular vertically integrated solution, we have visibility into everything in our system from our IoT to our integration into the vehicle, to what is exactly happening to the goods in transport. And we can proactively not just monitor what is happening to the goods in transit, we can proactively change the set point, which is the temperature at which the goods are being transported. And so having that as a fully vertically integrated solution, as a fully software defined vehicle, is hugely advantageous and we are much less complex for our customers. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Interesting. So tell me what exactly is the product that your customers are buying from you? 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

We right now have both a hardware component, which is, think of it as a fridge on wheels. So it has many formats. It can fit in the back of an existing cutaway truck or it can go on the chassis of a trailer, but it's basically a refrigeration system that is designed to hook into a vehicle or a vehicle platform, an EV platform. Either an existing truck platform, EV LCB chassis, or on its own trailer chassis as well. And with it comes that SaaS component, which is like the software as a service that both kind of manages the, you use it to define how the vehicle is set, what temperatures, what temperature zones. So the fact that the asset is dynamic, so I can use it as frozen one day, as refrigerated the other day, as dry the day after. And then the machine learning layer with just two things, it helps you manage the actual charging of the fleet and to make sure that operationally we start to learn the patterns of usage so we can bring up all of the fleet to temperature ahead of time. 

Utilizing lower rates for charging and lower rates for bringing the refrigerant to temperature ahead of time. Reducing that two hour time that we talked about for the Sprinter van to come up to freezing temperature to right now about 18 minutes, is what we can do in our current prototype. 

Fritz Spencer: 

So interesting. So you're learning the trends of not just the truck but the whole industry at that time, at that business that you guys are selling into. And then learning their patterns, their habits, and basically predicting not only maintenance but preparation and a lot of these trucks are loaded at night and they wait overnight and they go out in the morning. So there's a lot of different timing variables to it. It seems like all that's built into your model, and it sounds like maybe there's a driver who's has access to an iPad and their car and they can monitor all of these things. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Yes, the fleet manager can monitor all of this, can monitor anything they want about the fleet, can set the temperatures remotely. But our goal is to have this be completely hands-free, like you set it a few times and then we learn over time when you need it and how you need it. And we can bring it up to temperature before it is needed. And then if the set temperature needs to change, then that's fine. We can bring the temperature down, but we have all the cooling all the time that it needs has happened ahead of time and without the vehicle being on and without the driver being there. So we're focused on better asset utilization as well as better driver time utilization. We want to reduce the cost from there. This is a food distribution. We always say that it's a low margin industry and that's because there's 30% of waste built into it, both wasted labor time as well as wasted product. And so there's a ton of margin there to kind of build a lot of value and reduce the waste in that industry. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Yeah, I know it firsthand because... And the chain of custody when it comes to frozen and cold goods is so important because the first thing that a customer does when they open your truck is take a temp. And if the temp is off, they're returning the whole truck. And if it's a quickly perishing item, it's going into a dumpster or it might get donated at the very best. So it's a huge waste issue and that's why margins in food and beverage are one, 2% at the end of the day because there's so much inefficiency built into it not only with fuel, electricity and then food waste, but all the above. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

The operational loading procedures are very complex and those get rushed. And that's where you get your fluctuation in temperature is people do not want to wait the two hours to load the truck. So they start loading before it reaches temperature. And if you go on the Reddits, you'll see drivers talking about being forced to try to get rid of that, some sorrow log by a bad manager or so on. And just having all of that be remotely controlled and visible and log directly. And not reliant on the driver noticing a temperature change and having to stop and go physically change it on their carrier or thermal current unit, I think is a huge advantage. So we can monitor and proactively keep an eye on the set temperature for them and on their behalf. 

Fritz Spencer: 

One last thing for them to think about as they're in daily traffic, let alone... That's stressful enough for me. I wouldn't want to be driving and thinking about is my truck 90 degrees, especially down here in Florida. And the little nuances of frozen product is so interesting how if you put chicken on top of steak and the chicken thaws, everything underneath it is bad. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Yeah, you have to take into account the thermal mass of the load that you are transporting and what temperature it is being transported at. And that loading procedure is meant to reduce that. But the problem is people don't want to wait two hours and rightly so. That is two hours of your driver time, of productivity time and now add electrification to that problem in transit. And now your driver has to think about where I'm going to charge and if I miss my charging, then that could start affect the temperature of my loads. So we have a separate battery that is managing that. The solar helps keep charge in transit. So providing a redundancy system in our software helps the driver figure out when and where they should be charging, so that they don't affect the next load, next drop and they also can make sure that they are maintaining the battery at optimal health. 

Fritz Spencer: 

So you touched on a couple of buzzwords there, productivity and efficiency, security. What are you guys tracking? What defines success in not only for you but for your customers? What are the results that you guys are seeing? 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

In terms of what we are tracking for our customers is that cost per delivery really. It's just can we bring down the cost per delivery for each customer in a meaningful way? And that can include both driver time optimization, asset utilization optimization, reduction of utility of fossil fuels, but potentially completely changing the operational model for them. A lot of these services right now, like the hardware piece, if you're buying your own fleet because you have to modify it, a lot of people especially SMBs, end up having to purchase these vehicles. So going into a hardware as a service model has been also very appealing to our customers because it reduces the financial burden on them, allows them to try something different. And integrate all of these different charges that come to them into a single provider that can provide both the hardware and the software pieces for it. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Tell me a little bit more about your customer base you mentioned. Who finds this to be of the utmost importance, not only environmentally but for their bottom line. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

We're starting right now with a food service distribution customer base. So this is a $320 billion industry here in the US. You have our SMB customers, so they are facing the need for more frequent deliveries, faster deliveries because of the change in the consumer habits. That we now expect our groceries and medicine to be delivered within an hour and that has a ripple effect on the B2B side and on warehouse operations as well. So SMB food distribution, specialty food providers, so think anybody who makes sushi and sells it to your grocery store or packaged salads, especially for Indian food that you see in your grocery store. So these types of customers that deliver to grocery stores, SMBs, to restaurants, cafes, campuses and so on. And we're starting to make headway with some of the larger customers, customers for food distribution. You mentioned some of your customers that have those larger fleets. 

So what they struggle with there is what's called hotshots. So these orders that come in after the cutoff time for the larger truck, after the larger truck has left. And so having a hardware as a service option or a service option where we come and take those smaller loads, allows them to capture more revenue throughout the day that right now gets left behind or left on the table. So these types of customers, we're starting to have interesting conversations with medical and pharmaceutical but more on the kind of lab side. So blood samples have been transferred, so it's quest type of customers, lab board type of customers. But also hospitals that maintain a single cold room and then distribute to their satellite clinics. So think of the University of San Francisco, Sutter here and so on. So we're starting to have more conversations on the medical side. Of course, bakeries, floral, all of that can happen in the future as well. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Interesting. Yeah, I have a friend who works in the pharmaceutical logistics, critical logistics, if you will. For certain people when you're talking about senior care and getting drugs to living facilities and pharmacies, those logistics are tracked so meticulously that I think your product and your software sounds like a really good fit for them, because they can track everything that they need to track from not only a regulatory viewpoint, but for their own interoperational efficiency viewpoints. So that's really awesome to hear. And we're getting to the end here, I'd love if you could maybe leave us with some final remarks. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Let's say for the entrepreneurs out there, there's plenty opportunity in climate. So if you feel compelled, I didn't think I would go back to hardware, yet here we are. Sort of trust your heart and the rest will follow. 

Fritz Spencer: 

Glad that there's organizations like yours who are putting their best foot forward, and diligently working on making a small step in a long run that we have to make to get back to at least climate neutral. Jumana, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me today. It was an absolute pleasure. 

Jumana Al Hashal: 

Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. 

Fritz Spencer: 

And a special thanks to our listeners for tuning into Tech Talk, the entrepreneurs and innovators who turn to EisnerAmper for audit, tax advisory and outsourcing solutions to help their business forward. Subscribe to EisnerAmper's podcast to listen to more Tech Talk episodes, or visit EisnerAmper.com for more tech news that you can use. 

Transcribed by Rev.com