We all depend on the cold chain to keep our foods, vaccines, and medical equipment safely chilled from production to use. This energy intensive process requires constant monitoring. As CEO of Therma, Manik Suri deploys small mobile sensors that monitor conditions to optimize energy efficiency and quality along the cold chain. His work is infused with his family’s legacy of service to others, and his team is dedicated to leveraging technology to improve the well-being of both people and planet. In this episode, Hilary Langer is joined by Therma CEO Manik Suri to discuss the impact of the cold chain on human health, food waste and the planet.
We all depend on the cold chain to keep our foods, vaccines, and medical equipment safely chilled from production to use. This energy intensive process requires constant monitoring. As CEO of Therma, Manik Suri deploys small mobile sensors that monitor conditions to optimize energy efficiency and quality along the cold chain. His work is infused with his family’s legacy of service to others, and his team is dedicated to leveraging technology to improve the well-being of both people and planet.
In this episode, Hilary Langer is joined by Therma CEO Manik Suri to discuss the impact of the cold chain on human health, food waste and the planet.
Links:
The Role Of Businesses In Creating More Environmentally Friendly Cooling Systems (forbes.com)
Episode recorded September 13, 2023
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Manik Suri: If we can provide technology to make those cold chains more reliable and ultimately easier to deploy, we're just an enabling tool. It helps get those compounds to the people that need it most. I think there's a huge international opportunity to expand cold chain and technologies that make it more effective as well.
Hilary: We all depend on the cold chain to keep our foods, vaccines, and medical equipment safely chilled from production to use. This energy intensive process requires constant monitoring. As CEO of Therma, Manik Suri deploys small mobile sensors that monitor conditions to optimize energy efficiency and quality along the cold chain. His work is infused with his family’s legacy of service to others, and his team is dedicated to leveraging technology to improve the well-being of both people and planet.
Hilary: Manik, thanks so much for joining us on Climate Positive today.
Manik: It's a pleasure, Hilary. Thanks for having me.
Hilary: Before we get into Therma, I wanted to touch on your background and this thread of interest in technology as a climate solution. You've worked on government issues in a number of different roles, but you seem to be drawn to technology. Why is that?
Manik: Yes, it's a great observation. I had never thought of it that way, Hilary. Maybe it's proximity. I grew up in the Central Valley of California in an ag town called Fresno, which is about an hour from Silicon Valley. Maybe it was just the appeal or the idea of tech. Growing up, I think Stanford was an hour and a half from where I lived and I used to visit. I got very excited because my friends in college and some of my colleagues got involved with technology early on in some of the internet 2.0 and social media companies that scaled. I got to see the impact that tech can have at scale. At the time, I wasn't thinking I'd pursue it as a career.
I really thought I was going to move into law government in a more traditional ways of trying to make an impact. I went to law school, worked in government, and got inspired. I was listening to a woman in DC giving a talk. She was the deputy CTO in the first Obama administration. She had gone to law school and had gone to Harvard undergrad 10 years before me. Her book, the first book that she was giving a talk on was called Wiki Gov about how tech was transforming life, social and commercial, but big public problems weren't being tackled like governance, and sustainability, and safety.
That idea that you could take technology and deploy it or build it for social impact really appealed. That was a decade ago, and I decided to move into tech first in a nonprofit academic setting and then as an entrepreneur.
Hilary: What is her name?
Manik: Her name is Beth Noveck. Oh gosh, I've told the story a few times but she's an inspiration and a mentor and someone who I credit a lot of good things to, Beth. She teaches at NYU and elsewhere.
Hilary: That's fantastic. After working in the White House, you co-founded the governance lab at New York University, again, leveraging technology to solve some of these pressing challenges of the world. What was your excitement about that space?
Manik: That was exactly the moment in which I joined forces with Beth. She convinced me to leave government and join her. She teaches at NYU, at New York University. She had raised some capital from nonprofits and we were building out a center. She basically articulated this vision that I aligned very much with, which is that technology can be deployed in service of many different objectives, and it's a powerful force for change but instead of focusing on making pizza delivery faster or photo sharing easier, what if we could use it to help improve sustainability or governance or public health and safety?
I love pizza and I really enjoy sharing photos. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, so I appreciate the power and the value of those kinds of consumer products but as someone who grew up in a culture of service, my parents are doctors, three of my grandparents are doctors, my wife, my brother are doctors. I had a lot of service in my family DNA. The idea that one could use technology in service of solving these big problems seemed really appealing in 2011, 2012. Particularly at that time, two things were going on. One, there wasn't a lot of legislation getting passed because the Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree on anything in the period that I worked in government.
The debt ceiling, that was the first time that there was a lack of alignment on the debt ceiling being raised, which is one of those typically noncontroversial moves. It was the beginning of the end of legislation by consensus. It was the beginning of this super-polarized period that's been going on. That was really disappointing for me, at least as a young idealistic wonk. I thought I'll go to DC. I'll help work on really important and interesting legislation and regulation but nothing was getting passed. It was just a political stalemate. Then in parallel, technology was achieving hyperscale in many areas.
You could just see I joined Facebook the day it started. I think I'm like user 103, and I saw platforms like Facebook.
Hilary: Did you get anything for that?
Manik: I did not get anything for that. I did not join the company. I had an opportunity to join the first 10 or so people, but I passed on that to go work in business as an investor. I got to see some of these stories close and realized that tech could be and was changing everything even faster than historically had been true in combination of mobile and the internet and cloud.
Hilary: Now as the CEO and co-founder of Therma, you've applied the technology to the cold chain. Can you tell us about the cold chain and how Therma addresses it.
Manik: Yes, absolutely. It comes full circle. Sometimes life makes sense in the rearview mirror, as my dad likes to say. It's kind of a, you're driving down the road, you don't really know where it's taking you, but it all makes sense when you look backward. I was visiting my folks in the Central Valley in Fresno a few years ago, and I was talking to some family friends about problems they were dealing with in their work. Most of them, these folks I was talking to were in ag and food. They were describing how there's lots of inefficiency in the supply chain, particularly because everything is analog. People aren't using digital tools.
One of the big pain points that we were talking about and discovered was the way in which perishables are managed, farm to fork, and perishables, whether they're food or, this is pre-COVID, pharmaceuticals require refrigeration. Refrigeration is essential for the delivery of two of the most important things, food and pharma, around the world. I was just struck that everything was analog, still using clipboards and paper and pen in a time when mobile had penetrated so much of the world and data was being used. That's how I started thinking about refrigeration in the first place, that maybe we could use sensors and structured data to get a better and more effective signal out of these boxes.
I think as I was reading more about refrigeration, a friend who's a climate-oriented investor sent me an article about climate impact. It was a report by Project Drawdown, which studies global warming and every year stack ranked solutions. They had ranked food waste as the number 4 solution out of 80 to global warming and climate change and solution number 1 was refrigerant management. I was just shocked by that refrigeration touches on two of the most significant solvable problems in climate change. That was an aha moment for me because I didn't know anyone working on refrigeration. I couldn't find anybody working on it.
That also seemed like an opportunity, the unsexiness and the obviousness of it, the fact that it's everywhere, but we don't really think about it and it's causing warming. It was an irony there too. The warmer the planet gets, the more we need cooling, but cooling is causing warming. It's vicious feedback loop just felt very worthwhile to look at. That's how Therma was founded and born.
Hilary: I remember being shocked when I saw that list from Project Drawdown. As you say, you don't really think about refrigerants as a driver of climate change, but it's so impactful.
Manik: Yes. I think some of these obvious and ignored areas, they're waiting for us to think differently because for 100 years, I think the entire 20th century we were able to build and deploy and use resources with a mindset of plenty and abundance. Then in the 21st century, we're starting to shift into a mindset of scarcity because the planet's paying the bill for all of that overuse and overconsumption. Some of these assets and some of these ideas like, "Hey, we can just cool things," and it doesn't matter whether they're connected or intelligent, we just let them run forever. Or if they break and fail, we just replace them. That mindset is shifting and it needs to.
Hilary: It's a good time for it. Tell us about the Therma solution. What does a Therma technology look like?
Manik: Absolutely. We do two things at Therma. We use sensors and controls to turn cooling up and down and to monitor it continuously so we can control and optimize cooling assets, cooling being air conditioning and refrigeration. We work on those two areas. We expanded into air conditioning last year realizing that our approach applied to both refrigeration and cooling. Then the second thing we do in addition to turning these things up and down, is we use intelligence to get better and better at knowing when and how long to turn things up and down and to predict or catch when they're going to fail.
If you think of it as a body, sometimes I describe it to friends using a human body metaphor. There's the arms and the feet and the limbs. Those are the hardware-enabled parts of our business, IoT sensors, and controls. Then there's the intelligence, which is the brain and the mind. That's the knowing when and how long to turn stuff off, using a whole bunch of signals, energy, price, utilization the type of business, the weather, zip code, et cetera. We do that to save businesses money on their energy costs and to lower their spoilage or food costs, while also catching equipment issues so helping them with their equipment costs.
Hilary: Clients will sign up for this technology that they can install the sensors themselves, and then Therma provides long-term management and monitoring, correct?
Manik: That's right. The sensor products entirely do it yourself. You can get up and running in 20 minutes. The joke is a 20-year-old can get it up and running without talking to a technician or a technology vendor so it is self-installed. The optimization controls, we actually have technicians installed so if a customer decides to purchase our energy optimization product, we actually send out a technician to do the install in a couple of hours.
Hilary: If they install this sensor in their refrigerator, for instance, that's then replacing the clipboard with a piece of paper that would otherwise be on the front of the fridge. Tracking the temperature and making sure there's no food spoilage whenever somebody thinks to check the temperature.
Manik: Exactly. It's replacing the clipboard. It's also giving you remote monitoring. Lots of times if these locations aren't staffed and we can catch issues that happen during nights and weekends in particular. Then there's a whole bunch of outlier events that happen that we can catch that a clipboard wouldn't pick up. For example, if the utility cuts power because of a brownout, we can catch those that happened in Northern California a bunch during wildfire season over the last several years, and we're able to save tens of thousands of inventory for customers who didn't know brownouts were going to hit their locations.
Or there could be human error. People unplug stuff to cool it and clean it, and then forget to plug it back in. That happens a ton. There were a bunch of reports of COVID-19 vaccines being lost because of coolers and chillers being unplugged and not plugged back in. We catch those. Then we can also predict in some cases, when equipment might fail, looking at the data, which a clipboard couldn't do.
Hilary: What role do you think AI will play in the long-term monitoring of this equipment?
Manik: I think it's a very powerful moment for anybody building technology. It's powerful because AI as a general set of technologies could supercharge existing models and existing algorithmic approaches. What we're doing today with energy optimization and equipment prediction uses a set of techniques that are part just econometric and just regressions and part applied machine learning. Essentially we're building profiles of locations and using how that location operates and performs in real time to get better and better at knowing when and how long it can turn stuff off.
Without AI, that's just using applied ML. I think what we're seeing and hearing from friends and colleagues in other sectors is that the results from applying AI to other optimization functions those results are pretty impressive and are in many ways outperforming existing models. I think there's the potential to go from high school to the Ivy League here with the intelligence or from generation one to generation two in terms of getting more and more efficiency and getting more and more savings out of these boxes. We'll see how those technologies develop and how you can harness them. That's a big frontier.
Hilary: You've said that Therma sees refrigeration as untapped batteries with controllable loads. Could you elaborate on that?
Manik: Yes, absolutely. It's a bit of a funny or kind of non-obvious concept. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a fridge as a battery in the beginning. Basically, if you imagine air in a physical space, you bring cooling into that space. You're basically using energy to cool down the temperature. That's the basic principle of cooling. That's true of a fridge or an air conditioner. When you've cooled down that space, energy is stored inside the space in the form of cold effect or colder environment. What's I think interesting is if you turn off the cooling, if you turn off the fridge or the air conditioner, the space starts to warm up.
I think unfortunately we all know that from this last summer and the last few summers, the warming curve, how quickly that space warms up is essentially the distribution of that energy. It's the release of that energy back into a warmer environment. If you step out of this or step back from this, and you think of that space as a thermal battery, you're loading the battery, you're charging the battery by cooling it, cooling the space and you're discharging the battery or tapping it by letting it warm up. What's exciting is that we can actually tap batteries. We can actually warm up spaces for short periods of time without affecting guests or product.
That's the potential, that's the opportunity to warm things up either when no one is there, or when there's low utilization, or because there's a latent amount of buffer. Sometimes things are colder than they need to be, and you can actually take advantage of that difference and let them warm up a little bit. All of those are examples of tapping the battery. If you imagine that in scale, there are hundreds of millions of these pieces of equipment around the world that are sitting there as untapped batteries.
Hilary: You're looking not just at the refrigeration of a freezer or a fridge, but also the HVAC units and the ambient temperatures.
Manik: Exactly. We realized a year and a half ago that air conditioning and refrigeration are a spectrum, philosophically they're the same concept of applying energy and using refrigerants to cool a physical space. It's just a spectrum. A cold storage warehouse is an interesting is it just super air-conditioned or is it refrigerated? Where does the line blur? The concept of tapping that space and using sensors the whole time to monitor the temperature, we realized that we could do that with an air-conditioned space as well as a refrigerated space using our sensors and our intelligence. That's how we added air conditioning into the platform.
Hilary: What is the ongoing relationship with a client like?
Manik: We're trying very much to be as customer-centric and as responsive as possible while taking advantage of technology. We've been fortunate and we pride ourselves on being very customer-oriented so having historically extremely low churn and high net churn. Meaning your customer generally expand with us and have expanded with us for years since we launched. We've been growing rapidly since early 2020 when we started commercializing. We're a young company, so we're starting to look at ways to use technology, whether it's through SMS-based notifications or providing customer support through in-app messaging.
Most of our customers work and provide services on nights and weekends. We work with the food service and hospitality and retail sectors. These are folks that are working at 11:00 PM on Saturday and 5:00 AM on Tuesday. They are not nine-to-five businesses, which means we have to be available in the background if things happen. I think that what's exciting is through a combination of modern technology, we're able to deliver support and then we also have 24/7 staffing, which allows us to be able to pick up the phone or answer a call. That's something we just added, kind of 24/7 staffing. As we grow and scale, we hope to be able to maintain that kind of high-touch service. Hopefully, people don't need it.
The goal is for the product to be set and forget. You only call us if there's a problem and make it as do it yourself as possible. Self-install, self-configuration, automation of the energy optimization.
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Hilary: Food waste is a huge space. Can you provide some estimates on how much food is wasted domestically?
Manik: Boston Consulting Group had a very rigorous study, which was cited quite a bit. It came out about five, six years ago now. The data is still fairly fresh, no pun intended. I think they analyzed all the sources of food waste and broke it down by problem area and segment of the supply chain. Roughly $1.6 trillion a year gets thrown out.
Hilary: Wow.
Manik: Which is a third of all food that's made, which is a crazy number. I mean a third. This is hard to imagine that a third of everything we grow, cultivate, produce ends up put back in the ground. Now off that 1.6 trillion cold chain storage and handling so issues around cold chain and storage and handling in particular, it was responsible for about 11% of that. That's still over $150 billion a year, which is one of those numbers that is hard to quantify because it's larger than the GDP of many countries. That's just from storage and handling of food.
There's many ways to slice and dice the food waste problem. We got inspired by the need or motivated by the size of the problem and say, "Okay, if you can make even a small dent in that small portion of the big problem that's a very large impact just because of the scale of the issue."
Hilary: Not only from the climate perspective but also in a time of food insecurity across the world could have a tremendous impact.
Manik: Yes. There are like 800 million people that are living without adequate food every day. Almost a billion humans out of 9 billion. It's like there's a humanitarian dimension to it. We have to rethink how we approach resources more broadly. We've got to learn to be a little more thoughtful and judicious about just not overconsuming and overdoing things. Of course, the planet is a big part of that as well, but I think diet and wellness, there's other reasons.
Hilary: Can you tell us a little bit about what role you envision for Therma in the pharmaceutical cold chain? You've spoken and written passionately about vaccines and access to these life-saving drugs and hearing that you've got lots of doctors in the family, it makes sense that you would have that fire in your belly for it.
Manik: Well, definitely it's personal as well as professional. I think just growing up around healthcare and then being around it now my wife is a physician and academic. She teaches at UCSF and runs safety and quality for the health system.
Hilary: It's a good alignment of values.
Manik: She spends a lot of time thinking about problems around supply chain and pharmaceutical accuracy and frankly just many, many issues around safety and quality in healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic just shed a starker light on the importance of cold chain. 60 Minutes and 2020 both had specials on Operation Warp Speed and the need for cold chain to get vaccines all over the country and all over the world.
That was the first time that friends started calling me saying, "Oh, I heard you're working on cold chain." Like, wow, cold chain. Because it's really not a problem that most people thought about, but because the new mRNA-based vaccines were so temperature-sensitive, it became very top-of-mind. Therma, in some ways, right place, right time, we were able to provide a solution to some logistics leaders, and also to now we've got a number of customers that have healthcare facilities.
We work with some pharmacies, some blood banks, some fertility clinics. We're exploring a deployment with a hospital group in the southeast providing better technology that can help reduce spoilage and prevent issues with the compounds. These are temperature-sensitive products. I think it's just a way to help ensure that these things, these products get to people's families and to their bodies effectively. The last thing you want is to be injecting or consuming something that you're not sure what happened on the journey from production to your arm.
Really, Hilary, my hope is that we can deploy internationally. I think the big need for expanding access to cold chain for pharmaceuticals is international. We've got reasonable supply chain and cold chain in the US. Reasonable because there's still many gaps and it's not equitable in all places in the country. You look at huge parts of the world, I think Associated Press, AP, had article in late '20, early '21 that said about three billion people wouldn't be able to access a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for three years because there wasn't cold chain in their towns and villages. That's just crazy. That's a huge number.
I think that if we can provide technology to make those cold chains more reliable and ultimately easier to deploy, we're just an enabling tool. It helps get those compounds to the people that need it most. I think there's a huge international opportunity to expand cold chain and technologies that make it more effective as well.
Hilary: You've thought a lot about this international angle. How do you anticipate deploying the Therma technology for the cold chain overseas?
Manik: It's very personal as well. I think that life often is a blend of one's own lens, and then what happens. It's outside of our control. I grew up between the US and India. My parents had immigrated here in the early '80s. Then we moved back to India when I was seven.
Hilary: Interesting. What prompted that?
Manik: My parents were idealistic. They were young doctors. They'd gone to Columbia in Manhattan for post-medical school residency and specialization. They both wanted to go back and try and make an impact in the country they'd grown up in. As I mentioned, three of my grandparents are doctors. My mom's mom is 93 and was one of the first female doctors in the Indian Army. My dad's father was the president of the Indian Academy Neurology.
My parents thought, "We'll move back. We'll make an impact. We'll take our kids." I have a brother who's three years younger than me. We moved back for three years when I was 7 to 10. I think it was my mom who said, "I can't do it." The culture and the mindset at that time, this is late '80s, it was difficult for her as an independent-minded female physician, professional, and working mom. She just found it was very hard to adjust back to the culture. I think at one point she said to my dad, "I'm going back to the States and I'm taking the boys. You can stay if you want." That's when they decided to move to Fresno.
Instead of going back to New York and settling down there, they said, "We'll move to a smaller city, a smaller geography." Because I'd lived in India for three years and I go back every year, I think I got interested in global affairs and the reasons why places are so different, even though people seem so similar. I got interested in that from a young age. When I went to Harvard undergrad, I studied international relations, and then I got a fellowship to Cambridge at IR as my master's, and I was interested in global policy and global affairs. That's why half my friends are in DC so Therma is starting to deploy. We have customers in 10 countries.
We have shown the tech can work internationally. We're a small company we're a little over 50 people so we're not exactly a huge organization and we're based in the Bay Area in California. It's hard to sell and scale internationally as a small team. I think we've shown the tech can be deployed and I was really proud of our ability to sell and deploy internationally in the last few years. I think the need is there. It's a question of timing. We have a couple of international investors that have said, "Anytime you want to bring your technology to Japan, Korea, Middle East, and North Africa, let us know." We've deployed in Europe, in the UK and plenty of customers I think our interest elsewhere if we can just grow to where we can support that.
Hilary: The Therma sensors, they're mobile and they're relatively inexpensive to deploy, correct?
Manik: They are they're relatively inexpensive to deploy for the customer. For our customers, the pricing is very straightforward. It's on our website. You can access and sign up and have them shipped to you within 20 minutes or even less, probably 10 minutes. Just go on our e-commerce shopping cart and purchase and have them shipped to you. It's subscription-based pricing, and that makes it easier and simpler to deploy. There's no capital expenditure. You don't have to allocate huge budgets. There's no hardware costs, there's no implementation, installation fees. Part of what we're trying to figure out is, does that pricing make sense in every part of the world?
Obviously, willingness to spend and budget is different in various parts of the world but because we've been able to price so competitively our, core product was $10 a month per sensor for the last three years. We think that can scale internationally over time.
Hilary: Are you working with any of the domestic nonprofits like Gates or CHAI?
Manik: The CEO of CHAI is my best friend.
Hilary: Okay, perfect. [laughs].
Manik: My roommate from college, Buddy Shah, who lives in Berkeley. We meet up about once a week. He became the CEO last year of CHAI. We know the development community quite well both socially and professionally. We've done some good early partnership with Feeding America. Some of their food banks. We've been deploying technology to help reduce loss and to help improve safety. I love that organization. Just really good humans. Really important mission. I think one in seven Americans is dealing with food insecurity and Feeding America is a big part of the solution. We are working with a few other nonprofits.
ReFED works on food waste. It's a consortium of businesses and policy groups and love Dana and her team and we're exploring ways to work with some of the multilateral groups like the UN and even smaller more niche players in food and food supply but it's early.
Hilary: Yes. Lots of room for growth.
Manik: More problems than we could possibly solve in one lifetime but at least it is a motivation to keep doing stuff.
Hilary: Great. Before we move on to a couple final questions, anything you want to address that we haven't talked about yet?
Manik: No. Loving the conversation. I appreciate all the questions and I feel like you might know my life story better than most people except my mom so [laughs] thanks for asking.
Hilary: Sure. All right, so let's switch to the hot seat questions. When I need to relax or recharge I?
Manik: Hike in the Presidio.
Hilary: Good option. Nice to be there.
Manik: It's great. We're blessed.
Hilary: Other than Therma, a technology or a business that I'm excited about is?
Manik: I've been really inspired by the meat alternatives movement. I have a friend who works in a meat substitutes alternatives company. I think that the combination of saving animals and reducing emissions while delivering taste and quality, hard for me to say because I am a meat eater, my family's from North India which they eat a lot of meat but trying to become a more evolved person. I'm starting to lean that way. Anyway, Buddy, if you're listening, Buddy is a vegan and has been trying to get me there for a long time so yes. Love that community of people in their tech.
Hilary: Great. I saw the CEO of Impossible Foods. He took a sabbatical from Stanford and wanted to solve the biggest problem he could. It was food waste and meat.
Manik: That's great. I love that. To know that.
Hilary: I want my family to be proud of me for?
Manik: Dedicating my time that I'm not there with them to something that is larger than myself.
Hilary: Then finally, to me, climate positive means?
Manik: Doing good and doing well. Having your cake and eating it too. I really believe we can do both. I think we can deliver comfort and convenience and experience without overconsuming and doing dumb things and wasting resources. I think we're creative enough and intelligent and resilient enough as a species to be able to do both.
Hilary: Great. Manik, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really fun talking with you and I'm so excited to see where Therma goes.
Manik: Really a pleasure, Hilary. Thanks for having me.
Hilary: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please help us reach more listeners by leaving a rating and review on Apple and Spotify.
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I'm Hilary Langer.
And this is Climate Positive.