Bill Birgen, founder of SAVRpak

Allan Gray

Welcome to the DIALed IN Webcast. Thanks for taking the time to visit with us this morning.

Bill Birgen

Hey, Allan. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Allan Gray

Looking forward to getting to know you a little better and understanding a little bit more about this company called SAVRpak. Bill, I've done a little bit of research. You're a fascinating guy. You have done some pretty amazing things during your career. In fact, I'm going to guess that there might be some things that you've worked on in your career you maybe can't tell us about. But I wonder if you might just give us a little bit of a sense of who is Bill Birgen.

Bill Birgen

Allan, my career, really, has always been in aerospace and defense. I've been a reluctant entrepreneur. My day job is pretty sweet. It's a lot of fun, very interesting. That's aerospace and defense. I've certainly worked on pure rocket programs. Nothing as trendy as SpaceX or NASA, but I've worked for Aerojet, Orbital, and Pratt & Whitney. Both of those are pure rocket engine companies.

I can't talk at all about the Aerojet work I did, but the Orbital work I did. No, you're absolutely right. … Top secret is not a joke. But it's never been a problem for me compartmentalizing my work. You just learn to not talk about work. It's what I've done my whole career since I first started.

A lot of, I'll say, regular aerospace stuff, not rocket stuff, that'd be with Northrop Grumman and even Pratt & Whitney, and Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas. Airplane systems. Stratolaunch, that's the largest airplane ever made in the world. Stratolaunch was funded by Paul Allen. It's a massive airplane, 138-yard wingspan. You can play football on the wing. I was chief systems guy on that down in Mojave.

Allan Gray

That airplane, it launches rockets, doesn't it, or something like that?

Bill Birgen

I was in charge of the rocket systems that are being mounted to it, as well as the systems on the mothership. That'd be hydraulics, pneumatics, fuel, anti-ice, all that stuff.

Allan Gray

How long in that career, Bill, have you been doing that for?

Bill Birgen

Like 30 years. I still consult in aerospace and defense. I do enjoy it.

Allan Gray

Bill, I was talking with a friend of yours, Scott Nelson, who you know pretty well. He was telling me that SAVRpak actually has a lot to do with soggy lunches. Can you tell me a little bit about it? How did we go from rocket science and an aerospace to soggy lunches and suddenly SAVRpak?

Bill Birgen

You're right. There is a connection. I was working on this DARPA project. .... My office was five stories underground, and so I wasn't really going out for lunch. Even getting to the cafeteria was a hike, so I would brown bag it. I'd bring my lunch to work, and I would notice when it was lunchtime that my salad, my lunch was covered in condensation. If anybody has experienced spinach, when it gets damp like that, it gets slimy. It's inedible.

The first time I experienced that with my lunch, I immediately recognized the problem and then the solution. Because my background, one of my specialties is thermodynamics. I saw this condensation. I'm like, "You know what? I’ve got to make this thing. It'll be a cold substrate. They'll be absorbent. I'll put that in my lunch box. It'll force condensation, and my salad will be saved.

I didn't do any R&D. The epiphany and problem and solution all at once. I made basically a SAVRpak that night in my kitchen, and I started using it. I used it every day for many, many years. Like 15 years, I ate my lunch like this. I'm like, "I won. My lunch is great." I didn't do a victory lap. I didn't tell anybody. I just ate my lunch like a happy idiot while punching the clock at a corporate aerospace job.

It wasn't until DoorDash and Grubhub and these things became so common that I saw the application with food service. I'm like, "You know what? I'll file a patent for this technology that I've created," and then the patent was approved.

All of this is me being a reluctant participant, a reluctant entrepreneur. I got the patent, and I'm like, "The next step is to validate." I apply to Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. It's a food tech venue. I was shocked that I was accepted to pitch. They had, I think, 10 or 12 teams, startups, to pitch their food tech solutions. I was even more surprised to win.

I was going up against classic, like I'll say, hard tech, augmented reality, virtual reality, AI, wireless, robots, hologram menus. It's like serious tech and I won. Then talking to the judges afterwards. They were unanimous. It's like, "Look, I don't need a hologram menu. I need to eat better food. I need the food going into my face to taste better." It was that great validation. Really something.

Allan Gray

Bill, I’ve got to imagine you're a scientist, you're doing great things, working for companies, DARPA, doing things that are pretty amazing, but you're in this corporate world, and suddenly, you're going to go to a pitch competition. At that point, do you even really know what a pitch competition is or what it is that you're about to get yourself into?

Bill Birgen

I've been on a number of startups, but I was always behind the scenes, CTO guy. Everybody's got an idea. I've got a lot of friends. "Hey, Bill, I got an idea." I'll help them with the MVP. I'll help them with the patents. I'll help them with solving the technical problem. That's in exchange for equity. None of that's a paycheck. I've got a good paycheck at my day gig.

But I never wanted to be the voice or the face of anything. I prefer to be behind the scenes. But if you have an idea, no one's going to explain it better than you. If you have a story, no one's going to tell that story better than you. I resolved myself to my fate. I've got to tell the story.

I present certainly to Generals and to people at the Pentagon, executive guys, but these are technical solutions that I've been a year or more working on. When I go into a room of these 20, 30 people, and I am the subject-matter expert, and they've paid me to tell them what's the way to go, the path forward, standing in front of 500 strangers on stage is very different, especially when it's a new idea.

I don't know the audience. I had some trepidation that someone was going to call me a fraud. When you go to pitch competitions, everyone is there to learn. It's not like that at all. Eventually, I did get comfortable with that. With the competition element, I do get a butterfly anxiety.

Allan Gray

As I think we all do in those situations. In competitions, there's something on the line. In this particular case, there really is something on the line to have real impact on humans in the end. That's pretty exciting. All right, Bill, let's get into it. Tell me how you keep my French fries from being soggy or my spinach crispy.

Bill Birgen

There are slightly different embodiments of the same product, same technology, and that is leveraging the dew point temperature. If you've had a beverage on a cold day, you'll notice moisture, water droplets forming on the glass or the can or the bottle. That's because the temperature of your beverage is below the dew point.

This is how you defog your windshield in your car. You may not know it, but the air conditioning turns on. You actually blow cold air across the inside of your windshield, and that cold air is coming from the coils. The air blowing across your air conditioning is forcing condensation, so the result is drier air. Now it's cold because it just went across your air conditioning coils, but it's dry.

We do the same thing in airplanes. We need to defrost or defog the windshield as you land into a humid environment. You dry the air by turning on the air conditioning. It's the same idea. Because it's cold, it's below the dew point temperature, moisture wants to form on the cold surface. What I've done is I've put a little bit of ice inside of basically an absorbent napkin. Let's call it paper napkin. It has a small amount of ice suspended within the absorbent structure.

We've got to put an adhesive on one side for hot food delivery. You peel and stick this absorbent napkin to the inside lid of your food container. It just came out of the freezer. It has a little bit of ice. Because it's cold, it's below the dew point. But it's not a huge amount of ice. It's calibrated against the condensation that we know we're going to extract from the inside of a food container.

We all know when ice melts, you lose heat, but that's an endothermic process. But I think what most people don't appreciate is when condensation forms, it releases heat. It's exothermic. You have the endothermic melting of a small amount of ice balanced against exothermic release of heat when condensation forms. The heat released through condensation is actually 6–7 times the heat loss through melting when you consider ounce to ounce, pound to pound.

We end up with a thermodynamically neutral solution, even though there's some amount of ice that is suspended inside of our pads, which then go into the food container that have your French fries. We can remove 50% of the air moisture less than a minute. Because this is cold, we're forcing that condensation locally where we have this absorbent structure. That condensation forms and it's wicked. It's wicked inside and trapped. That's the hot food solution.

The produce solution, the challenge is a little bit different. We're not trying to remove moisture and create a dry environment for 30–50 minutes. We're trying to keep a dry environment for a month or weeks. Where that works, it's about cold chain breaks. This is interruptions to refrigeration. Produce is refrigerated from harvest to retail, and then from retail have to purchase to the home where it goes into your refrigerator.

There are many interruptions between harvest and retail. You can call them border stops. You can talk about refueling. The truck driver needs to eat. Every time you have this loss of refrigeration, you have rapid condensation.

This is where the moisture inside of the SAVRpak is not frozen. It goes in the packaging at ambient, but it gets refrigerated along with the produce. We're not pre-gaming the pad like we did with the hot food delivery where we freeze it before we peel and stick it inside.

The produce solution could be a drop-in. We could use the adhesive as well. We could put it up high, we could put it down low. That doesn't matter. But it's below the dew point temperature when you have these interruptions to refrigeration. You have out-gassing, you have the produce heating up, and this is where that condensation is forced onto our pad.

After 30 minutes or refrigeration is generally restored. Our pad is, again, refrigerated and chilled, ready for the next interruption. We can have many interruption cycles, many condensation cycles, and we have more than enough capacity to absorb all the condensation created during those interruptions. Drier air stifles the microbial activity, and it's that simple. That's how we impact produce.

Allan Gray

That's fascinating. I read, Bill, that you tested and sent produce from Chile to China on a ship. That's a pretty big SAVRpak, it seems to me.

Bill Birgen

We work with smaller packaging. We can create a pallet-sized solution, but generally, the consumer-sized packaging is generally done at the farm. Sometimes they do final packaging at the destination. But for that trial that was done, they were packaged for retail. That's when they left Chile.

Allan Gray

By the time they got to China, they're in good shape.

Bill Birgen

Yeah. It's an alternative to air freight, which is untenable. Air freight is no way to deliver produce.

Allan Gray

It's expensive. Tell me, Bill, why is this an important problem to solve?

Bill Birgen

I'll tell you, post-harvest shelf life extension, food waste. This is the problem. Food waste itself is a $2.6 trillion a year global problem. Anything we can do to knock that down. We're not just talking about the food loss, we're also talking about the greenhouse gases as a result of that food loss. It's somewhere between 8% and 15% or higher, depending on who you ask, is the percentage of greenhouse gases created from just food waste.

We're also talking about creating opportunity for rural farms. Smallholder farms can't get to market because their produce goes bad before they get to market. The other side of that coin is food deserts. Food doesn't last enough to make it to these underserviced communities. If you can make produce last longer, you can affect… Both of these sectors are somewhat disenfranchised. You have the smallholder farm who cannot get to market, then you have people in these food desert communities not serviced because the food just doesn't reach them.

If you can make food last longer, you can increase the business case and the opportunity. You can make the business case, so produce can be introduced into these food deserts, but then also the smallholder farm can themselves reach those markets that were maybe too far to reach before.

Allan Gray

So fascinating, Bill. Relatively simple technology. Not simple. The science is complicated, but this is solving a real problem around the world that's very, very important. The food waste. We're going to continue to feed many people as we're trying to feed on this planet and stop people from being calorie deficient. This is a great part of an overall big problem.

I think I've heard you say this before. I've heard you somewhere else say, "We're not going to solve food waste by ourselves at SAVRpak, but we're a good part of the solution. We have a real solution to help with part of it." I think that's really a noble cause.

Bill Birgen

Thank you.

Allan Gray

Bill, I’ve got to tell you, I'm at Purdue University. Been here a long time. Work with a lot of scientists all across this campus, some really brilliant people. But we often have this conversation, technology is not a business. Tell me a little bit about a scientist who has a great solution and a technology. What does it mean for that scientist now to have a business out of that?

Bill Birgen

I'm telling you, I don't want to be the business guy. I said it before, I'm the reluctant entrepreneur, but I have to rely on my team. There's no question about it. I do not want to be the CEO. When I started, it was just me. Of course, I'm CTO, I'm CEO, I'm president. Everybody wears a lot of hats. This is, I think, the nature of any startup. I do rely on the team. We've got a CEO who has a great background in manufacturing and distribution. None of us are food tech. Scott Nelson would be the exception. He came out of the food industry with his experience at Panera Bread and then with DIAL Ventures there at Purdue.

We have some people that are there in food tech, but our sales guy, Dan Johnson, his background is computers, but international. He's very well-connected. Going from science to business, I like the science. I provide that support to everybody when we need to have a conversation.

I remember when we were talking to Purdue … the University in Arkansas, and Procter & Gamble, and Georgia-Pacific, they bring me out to talk to their nerds. The nerds are talking, and all the MBA guys are just sitting around. They're waiting to hear from their nerds what their take was.

They are just flies on the wall. They understand nothing while we're geeking out on thermodynamics. They said, "He knows what he's talking about. This is good stuff." The MBA guys go back, and we start negotiating the business side. That seems to be the format of a lot of these calls when we start talking to big corporate entities about SAVRpak. They want to know the technology is real, but they'll, like I said, geek out with their nerds and then get the thumbs up and then the business side proceeds.

Allan Gray

Bill, I must say that it's not surprising to me to think that companies, they want to know if the technology works, but then figure out whether the business side of it, what's that going to look like. Great to know that you have a team, although not necessarily a large team. This is a young company, right? Only about maybe what, two, two and a half years old?

Bill Birgen

That's correct. We officially launched in mid-2020, which, of course, is the right in the middle of the COVID apocalypse. That was a weird time. Restaurant, food service, everything was delivery. They literally shut their doors. But they had all this cost pressure because of COVID and switching to this new delivery-only solution.

That didn't necessarily translate to a lot of business success for us, not immediately, because the dust was settling. You've got restaurants that can't get chicken. They can't get forks. This is very basic challenges they're facing. Adopting a new technology, trying to implement a new technology when the whole industry is upended, they're not worried about crunchy French fries, crispy French fries. They're worried about other things, staying in business.

Allan Gray

Making payroll. Exactly.

Bill Birgen

Right.

Allan Gray

That's right. Bill, in this two-and-a-half-year period, though, SAVRpak has won a lot of awards, had a lot of recognitions, for such a small, young company, a few people. I think about this in terms of punching above your weight, if you will. What do you think has got you punching above your weight?

Bill Birgen

Having great tech. When it comes to the produce, post-harvest, shelf life extension, you've got about a dozen companies making ethylene gas absorbers, which is very old tech, and that would be Hazel Technologies and brands like that. It's really not patentable because it's such old technology, so they don't really have that innovation edge.

It's competitive because you cannot patent it. Now you're relying on trade secrets, which sometimes can sound like you're hiding something. When you're talking about food, people want to know what you're doing to their food: "I'm feeding my family. What are you putting in our food to make it last longer?"

This is also the challenge with Apeel. Apeel went full unicorn. They got money from Gates and Oprah. But now there's a little bit of backlash because now this is a coating that's going on to produce. People are suspicious. They can't patent it. They're relying on trade secrets. With food, people want transparency: "What are you putting on my food that I'm feeding my children and my family?"

With SAVRpak, we're not adding anything. We are removing moisture from the air. That is it. Drier air stifles microbes, stifles microbial growth. Our tech is fantastic. I think people think it's hilarious that this rocket scientist found a way to make his lunch better, and he might solve food waste. It's like, "Oops, I didn't mean to."

I have chef friends now who basically call me an idiot. They're like, "Bill, you solved this problem all these years ago, keeping it to yourself, what were you thinking?" It's a funny narrative, but punching above our weight, I'd say it's because our tech.

It's difficult to make something simple. It's a simple embodiment, but the science behind it is real. It's complex and nuanced. Thermodynamics is magic to most people. Of course, this is my specialty. It's what seemed obvious to me. I think that's how we got so much traction so soon, so quickly. It's because of the tech. I'd say it's because of the tech.

Allan Gray

Bill, this is my opinion, for what it's worth, your tech is fabulous. Your science is incredible, but your solution is simple. The reality is that it's simple. It doesn't disrupt people's normal daily life activity to have to do something, and it doesn't change the nature of the food in any way, shape, or form. I've seen this happen a few times when you have simple, when it could be simple for the customer in the end. Man, if I can take tech that's complicated, but make it simple for the customer.

That seems to be something I feel like you've really done a great job with at SAVRpak of getting the solution to be something that's really quite simple. Twelve years, you held it as a secret, even. I'm guessing when you're in the middle of COVID and everybody's doing delivery like that, you're wishing, "Man, I wish I'd have brought this out 2 years ago when people would have had a time to adopt it." That would have been great, wouldn't it?

Bill Birgen

Yeah. That was the catalyst that got me to file the patents. But I still wasn't sure if the patent would be approved because the thermodynamics is complicated, subtle, and nuanced, but the embodiment is simple. This is where I thought the patent office would be like, "This guy invented a fancy napkin." It's like, "How do I give a patent for that?" But again, there's a lot more to it.

Allan Gray

That's great. Bill, we talked a bit even before we came on the show here. You still do some consulting in the aerospace area and do a fair amount of things that keep you a scientist as well as being the scientist and the CTO and the co-founder for SAVRpak. A lot going on for you. Give me a couple of things here, a couple of nuggets. What are you working on? What's the super smart Bill Birgen working on these days.

Bill Birgen

I have another startup that won the XPRIZE. This is for a medical mask. The XPRIZE, for people who don't know, is a philanthropic crowdsourcing technical challenge that's meant to help humankind advance.

The first XPRIZE award, I worked on that just a little bit anecdotally. It was a reusable civilian rocket ship. That was the first, and that was a $10 million prize. It was crowdfunded. They got funding from different sources for the prize. Paul Allen, he ended up funding the winning team out in Mojave.

The XPRIZE, they had one for the medical mask. During COVID, we all recognize, I think, masks are horrible. I was working on making a better medical mask before COVID. I was working with some doctor friends, associates here in Phoenix. They saw some of the work I had done, and they thought there was maybe a crossover. But masks are horrible. I filed a patent for this medical mask before COVID in 2019, actually.

There are a thousand teams from 80 countries. Johns Hopkins Medical University, they took third. I took first. Me and my buddy Ron, we took first place with that. That was a million dollar engineering competition to make a better medical mask. That was funded by Jim Cramer and Marc Benioff, so the Mad Money guy and the Salesforce guy. They funded that XPRIZE challenge. My guys won. A medical mask.

I'm filing for some DARPA and SBIR grant money for a new surf-by-wire stealth hydrofoil water drone that I've invented. I'm also looking for SBIR funding for a vibrating gun magazine. It basically alerts you, like your phone. Your phone vibrates, it's silent. I basically put that into a gun magazine. When you’ve got five rounds left in the magazine, you get an alert.

The U.S. DoD is interested in that. I've already got orders lined up, and then there's a civilian market there as well. I've got other little things that I'm dabbling into. But SAVRpak is at the top of the list, followed by some of those other projects.

Allan Gray

Bill Birgen, the dabbler. He dabbles in this, he dabbles in that. What he does in the process of dabbling is that he tries to make sure humanity can eat and that they can breathe good clean air in surgeries and other things that he can do to impact humankind. Bill, it's been fantastic visiting with you today. Thanks so much for taking the time to visit with us here on the DIALed IN podcast.

Bill Birgen

Thank you, Allan. It's been a privilege. Thanks for the invitation.

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