Almost a decade ago, a shocking statistic put Katherine Sizov on a new career path.
Sizov was doing neuroscience research at the NIH but knew the role wasn’t right for her — she wanted to see a more immediate impact than is typically possible in academic research. Then she stumbled on an article saying 40% of food in the U.S. is spoiled or tossed.
Sizov wanted to learn more. She marched down to her local grocery store to pepper a woman stocking peaches with questions about food waste, which led to inquiries with players across the supply chain.
Food, she learned, is considered a commodity. “But it’s alive — it’s a living, breathing organism,” Sizov said. “And our supply chains aren’t designed for that. So as a result, we’re treating food like an iPhone or semiconductor.”
In 2019, Sizov launched Strella, a Seattle-based ag tech startup that uses sensor-based hardware to monitor produce as it’s shipped and stored en route to consumers.
Strella uses IoT devices to measure gases including ethylene, a plant hormone released by ripening fruit, as well as machine vision to examine the produce. Its software interprets the fruit’s real-time conditions plus data including country of origin, packing date and varietal type to let operators of packing houses and grocery store managers know the condition of their produce.
The 21-person company has raised $22 million from investors and is close to profitability. The business started by building an expertise in monitoring apples and pears from Washington state and expanded to 26 countries. It’s now adding citrus fruits and avocados to the lineup.
Keep reading to learn more about her journey, starting as a 22-year-old CEO and working to spark systemic change across the food system. Her quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
On launching a startup in pursuit of professional fulfillment: It’s been way harder than I thought — even though everyone tells you starting a company is hard. The hardest part about it is you have to get better yourself, personally. Your leadership style is a reflection of who you are and how you behave and stuff like that. And so I’ve just had to grow up.
Stepping into your first CEO role: It takes a degree either of ego or naivete to say, “Oh, as a 20-year-old, I want to be a CEO.” You can imagine the quality of the work when you first start out. And so it’s a constant pattern of tearing yourself down and trying to rebuild, but also teetering between the edge of not completely destroying yourself and your personality.
What keeps you going: I couldn’t work a job that was just purely profit motivated. If it didn’t feel useful to the world, I definitely couldn’t do this. The whole point of why I think I’m alive is to hopefully do something good for society.
I wanted to pick something that aligned with profitability, too, because I don’t think fighting an uphill battle is always the right answer. I wanted to pick something that people could sign off on in a capitalist way, but that also ended up creating the positive impact that I want to see, and that’s super important to me.
Thoughts on lasting impact or legacy: I definitely want to get our food system into a more 21st-century model. That involves a collaboration between technology and the way things have been done for a long time.
You can’t come in as a startup and be like, “We know everything you know.” A lot of the people we work with are 11th-generation growers and they know a lot. So it’s a collaboration between all of this knowledge that humans have, coupled with technology that leads to a better, more resilient supply chain.
On a smaller, individual level, I hope that people like working with me, working at my company, feel like they’re doing something that matters and want to come in every day.
The intersection of climate and tech solutions: These problems are really, really large, and they don’t necessarily impact one single organization. So in food, for example, you’ve got so many different — I call them guardian angels of food — as it passes from hand to hand. And the problem of waste is optimizing the whole thing.
One of the big challenges with climate is that you have dozens or hundreds of different stakeholders, and they might all have completely different interests. And the challenge is to figure out how to align everybody to this common, large goal.
