Fruitminder: Being on the ground bears fruit

When orchard owner Mike Casey first approached Seb Chapman with the idea that would become Fruitminder, the business they co-founded, Chapman could see the potential through the lens of his own farming background, albeit in a different sector.

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“Mike, my business partner, has an orchard just out of Cromwell called Forest Lodge Orchard and he was talking about wanting to have a sort of ‘CRM’ for his trees,” recalls Chapman.

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“I was thinking back to when I was dairy farming and we had ear tags for the cows, which contained all sorts of information about each animal that you could pick up at any time … So it made sense to me that there should be an option like that for fruit trees.”

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Fruitminder is a smart app that allows orchard owners to create GPS-mapped digital twins of their orchards. Each tree in an orchard has its own tag with a QR code, which allows orchardists using the app to track information about each individual tree and assign tasks required for its management.

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Chapman is originally from Levin and had been living in Queenstown for around seven years, drawn to the area for its mountain biking, prior to co-founding Fruitminder. He was working at a software development agency when Casey came calling with the ‘CRM for fruit trees’ idea and, sensing the scale of the opportunity, Chapman decided to go all in and is now Fruitminder’s CEO, as well as a co-founder.  

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Fruitminder is based at Mt Pisa at Forest Lodge Orchard, which is the world’s first 100 percent electric, zero-fossil fuel orchard. As well as being developed on-farm there, Fruitminder’s technology is also being beta-tested at half a dozen other local orchards, and Chapman says a wider release of Fruitminder is planned around March next year.

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What difference has it made being physically close to users of the product at this stage in Fruitminder’s development?

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We've got half a dozen beta customers who we've been testing with. They're based around the region and we have some really good keen growers who are passionate about getting this stuff working to a point where it can be rolled out to the masses.

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These guys are really active; we have a beta customer group chat and they're really active at posting things there. But you just can't beat face to face. I know this product intimately, but then when you speak to someone face to face, you get to understand the nuances. You may have an idea in your head of how a certain flow should work, or you build something and get it functional, but then when you roll it out to these customers early on, you pick up on these little nuances of user experience. It makes so much sense when you hear it from their point of view and I just don't know if you could get that level of detailed insight without being in there.

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Forest Lodge Orchard in particular looks like a hotbed for horticultural innovation. How has being located onsite impacted the company’s development?

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They have a lot of visitors come through and Mike is super-helpful in terms of leveraging his time to just get the software in front of people.

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Also, what we’re doing fits into a bigger picture. The growing style that Forest Lodge is using is called UFO – it stands for ‘upright fruiting offshoots’ – and it's one of the new growing styles that are looking to be frontrunners for automation. One of the tools that they're using is an electric autonomous tractor. So for automation, if you start with that piece of the puzzle, it makes a lot of sense because labour is really hard to come across.

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But if you automate things, you’re probably going to run your tractor more. So the electric part starts to make sense because diesel isn't getting any cheaper. Then the next part of the puzzle is, okay, if you're taking the farmer off the tractor and you're sending it out to do all these jobs, how do you know what's happening on the orchard?

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That's when working with some monitoring stuff starts to make a lot of sense. We've been working fairly closely with the University of Canterbury, which is doing some pretty amazing stuff with 3D models and computer vision to get accurate information about trees. We're trying it out with a block down the road, where the guys have done a scan on it and we're going to feed that data into Fruitminder. Then we’re looking to have the ability to bring up the 3D models of each individual tree. All these pieces of the puzzle start to make sense once you zoom out.

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What local agencies or other organisations in the area have been helpful?

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The Mountain Club has been exceptionally helpful. They run a co-working space in Queenstown that I've worked out of and they host a bunch of kiwiSaaS events. They're very founder and startup friendly, and it's just a really good ecosystem of smart, like- minded people.

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Horticentre in Cromwell has also been really helpful offering feedback around the software and then connecting us with growers that are interested in this sort of technology. Also Plant & Food Research in Clyde – we’ve just started talking to them and they've signed up for the software. We're mainly set up for cherries, so they've been helpful in discussions around how we set this up to work for other fruit types. It should be fairly straightforward, but it's always good to get that input.

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How about the need to travel? Is that an issue being based where you are?

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I do a fair bit of travel; I've just been up to Nelson this week and I’m now in Dunedin. Travel is annoying wherever you have to do it from, but we're pretty lucky that Queenstown's got an international airport, and it's 45 minutes away. So there’s a bit of driving, but nothing too bad.

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What about other challenges, particularly related to starting up from your location?

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I've been speaking to engineers around the country, and it is hard to find people that would want to move to the region, which is interesting because it's such an amazing place. But unless you're really interested in the sports and those lifestyle things it has to offer, or viticulture or orcharding, then it's a very expensive place to live.

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So while it's not necessarily an issue at the moment, the main issue that I see going forward is access to good engineers. I think I'll have to seriously consider where the company is located because, personally, I would like to have an in-person office rather than a work-from-home set up. The little gems of magic that you get when you're working next to someone, that can't really be replicated from home. So whether that's going to be possible down in Central Otago or if we have to go to a main centre – or at least set up an engineering team there, and then have sales in the region – that’s something to think about.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes

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