Technology use in the produce industry increases every year, but it hasn’t yet made a digital transformation like some industries.
Rao Mandava is the chairman and president at Inteligistics. He hopes to lead this transformation. The company sells supply chain technology, and its clients include Driscoll’s, Del Monte, Dole, Church Brothers, Fresh Express, Taylor Farms and Walmart.
“I want to bring technology from the industries I’ve worked in, to the produce industry,” he said.
These two industries are the airlines and nuclear energy. He thinks that producers can learn from these examples.
Mandava worked as a mechanical engineer at Boeing before joining Inteligistics. Later, he was employed at Westinghouse in a group that converted the nuclear control area from analog to digital.
He claimed that after the project was complete, the cost of running a nuclear power plants dropped by nearly two-thirds.
“It used little internet and no cloud, so we created our own network and artificial intelligence,” Mandava says. “We went from using over 10,000 cables to using about 100.”
He didn’t start a technology company specializing in fresh produce by chance. He was born in a farming family…
