Words from the CEO: The Beginning, Continued

Our story continues in a conference room in the basement of a hotel in DC. My co-founders and I started this company because we saw a problem and we thought we might have a solution. We were attending a meeting in Washington DC associated with the Global Cold Chain Alliance Assembly of Committees where the concerns about an inefficient supply chain and the lack of cold storage surfaced.  I say surfaced … but I mean grabbed our heartstrings and played them like Jack White punishing his guitar.

Surely, we could help in some small way.  Surely, we could make a difference.

This conversation led us to table, a pen, and a napkin… and SolarX|Works was born. We sketched out a platform (literally doodled on the back of a napkin) that blended our backgrounds in solar energy, logistics, and in cold storage… looked at each other and thought “hmmm – we might actually have something here.”

You will hear various statistics depending on what sources you access… for example: from one third of global food production is wasted post-harvest to 50% of post-harvest yield in developing nations is simply thrown out. However, you slice the numbers a significant enough percentage of food harvested never reaches a table … and a large contributing factor is the lack of storage (particularly temperature-controlled storage).  Add to this the expected increase in food demand (an additional 33% of mouths to feed by 2050 or a 60% increase in food supply) and the shifting climate patterns and we have a dilemma.  How do we, as global community, solve for this?

Well, our SolarX|Works platform can help. Are we the solution to global food issues and climate change? No. But we sure are PART of the solution.

Blake Barthelmess

CEO