Plenty's Matt Barnard: "You’re eating year-old apples”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2017

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matt Barnard, co-founder of indoor-farming startup Plenty, to talk about building a ‘global agricultural utility’ (4:25), America’s outsized appetite (6:00), eating old apples (9:00), why tomatoes are terrible in Britain (11:20), building 500 city-centre farms around the world (14:30), luring Softbank as an investor (16:40), and Jeff Bezos (19:30), integrating with Amazon (20:20), why growing indoors works (22:50), using less than 1% the water that normal farms need (24:20), machine learning (26:30), selling cheap fruit and veg (28:00), recreating the Mediterranean in a warehouse (29:15), huge energy bills (30:15), and changing a 10,000-year old business model (31:30).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The people of Britain love their fancy blenders.
0:03.2	They've bought loads of them.
0:05.5	And luckily, if they bought them with Barclay Card, they earned rewards.
0:09.4	In fact, they'll earn rewards on all their eligible purchases.
0:13.1	It's a more convenient way to consume your fruit and veg.
0:16.6	What you buy is your business.
0:18.9	Giving you rewards on purchases is ours.
0:21.7	Barclay card.
0:22.7	Make money work for you.
0:24.3	28.9% APR representative variables subject to application, financial circumstances and borrowing history.
0:29.2	Tees and Cies apply.
0:32.4	Yo.
0:34.3	Technology.
0:35.3	What is it all about?
0:37.1	You know, do you want to try a chive?
0:38.3	Yeah, I'm a big fan of chives.
0:40.3	Are you? I was going to say, people don't eat them all that frequently.
0:45.3	Mmm. Oh wow.
0:48.3	Farming. It hasn't changed much since we humans first started
0:52.3	harvesting wheat and barley in the Fertile fertile crescent back around 10,000 BC.
0:57.0	Of course there's been advances, the plow, fertilizers, genetically modified seeds,
1:03.0	but broadly, farmers are still playing the same high stakes game they wore all those millennia ago.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.