CHARLOTTE, NC — About 75 industry professionals from various stops along the supply chain gathered here Feb. 4 for a one-day Tech Talks sponsored by the Produce Marketing Association to embrace change and banish fear of failure, and to learn about emerging technology, as the moderator put it, “that can change the face of the industry.”

“Food production needs to go up 70 percent in the next 10 years, and change is already upon us,” said Cathy Burns, PMA president,Bob Whitaker, PMA chief science and technology officer, and Cathy Burns, PMA president. introducing a video that showed indoor farming operations in Singapore and Japan, the latter producing 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. In England and Scotland, she said, there are automated fruit and vegetable vending machines. In the United States, she said, Amazon.com has spent seven years testing a system where customers order fresh produce on a mobile system and it is delivered to their door the next day.

Julie A. Busha, president of Nicole Foods of Cramerton, NC, supplier of Slawsa, the new slaw and salsa condiment, outlined how she introduced a new food product to grocery shelves. “People shop with their eyes,” she asserted, describing the redesign of the packaging to attract nature-minded millennials and hot-dog-chomping baseball fans. She now understands that the best place for Slawsa in the grocery store is not the relish section, where it started out, but the meat department, she said, where people can pick it up to go with their hog dog and bratwurst purchases.

Today, Slawsa is on the shelves at Harris Teeter, H-E-B, Albertson’s, Lowe’s, Walmart and Ahold’s, she said, and poised to enter Canada, Germany, Mexico and Switzerland. As Busha put it, the success of the new product has been “Slawesome!”

Other presentations included wearable sensors; 3-D printing; drones; supply-chain visibility to reduce loss, theft, spoilage ($35 billion a year in produce wasted worldwide) and contamination (76,000 illnesses a year); fertilizer that uses less water but increases yields; and a tractor-on-tracks system called Farmbot that robotically handles tilling, irrigation and fertilizing.

Along the way, the high-tech conference developed a number of technological glitches in its audio-visuals, prompting Bob Whitaker, PMA chief officer for science and technology and a moderator for the conference, to observe, “You are seeing the exciting side of technology and the frustrating side of technology.”

Ernesto Mier of Performance Produce in Salisbury, NC, said he had a number of ideas to take home from the one-day workshop, including the idea of supply-chain visibility, “So we can know where a particular batch of produce has been, when it was picked and how it has been treated.”

Kevin Hardison, a marketing specialist with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, liked “the wide variety of topics covered, the great resources.” He found the 3-D printer a practical tool. “If a farmer is harvesting and a small part on his tractor breaks, he can print a temporary ‘smart part’ and finish the harvest,” he said.

The closing session was a creative modeling of the change process, with participants using modeling clay to create monsters, changing places and monsters on command.

Whitaker said the next event in the PMA technology offerings is a Tech Knowledge Symposium later this spring in Monterey, CA, May 11-13.