All posts by Angela Hermantas

CSE Issuer Stories, Magazine

Israeli Food-tech Company Helps Alleviate Health Concerns Related To Commercial Frying

Beyond Oil (CSE:BOIL) is aiming to improve the health of untold numbers of people who enjoy the occasional guilty pleasure at their favourite restaurant: deep-fried food. Diners will probably never be aware of the healthier cooking going on behind the scenes thanks to this revolutionary technology, but it is important and deserves recognition.

While it took nearly 15 years to perfect, the company now has a powder that addresses the degradation of frying oil. Harmful carcinogens such as acrylamide, as well as free radicals with the potential to cause cell damage, can build up in oil used for commercial frying. Customers and kitchen staff are both exposed to serious health risks as a result.

Beyond Oil’s powder absorbs harmful elements and extends the oil’s lifespan while maintaining its quality. First tested and now selling commercially in Israel and Canada, the product has been shown to improve food quality and support environmental sustainability.

The next phase of the growth strategy calls for expanding adoption of the product across North America. In an interview with Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine, Beyond Oil Vice President Robert Kiesman discussed the company’s origins and its efforts toward achieving this important goal.

What inspired the development of Beyond Oil’s solution for improving the health profile of oil when it is used for cooking?

Our Founder and President, Michael Pinhas Or, is the inventor of the product, and he started it due to a personal health condition related to acidity. Like many Israelis, he approached the issue as a layperson, learning everything he could. He studied intensively and spent about seven years in his backyard shed going through trial and error.

Or invested his family’s fortune into developing the product. After his “aha” moment, the inventive breakthrough, he secured a patent, as well as clearance to sell from the FDA and Health Canada. Since then, he has remained heavily involved, and his son, Jonathan, became Chief Executive Officer after the company went public.

One of the reasons Beyond Oil is such an easy story to tell is because it connects to something universal: food. Everyone, no matter where they live, eats fried food, whether it’s fries or other items unique to their region.

When people see the photos comparing black, smelly, smoky oil to a jar of clean Beyond Oil, the reaction is clear. They don’t want to eat food fried in dirty oil; they want food cooked in clean oil. These visuals stick in people’s minds, which is a big reason why our story is catching on so well.

Can you explain how the technology works?

It’s a powder that needs to be filtered out. Most restaurant fryers use built-in filtration, external filtration or paper filtration. The good news is that Beyond Oil works in all three contexts. We are classified by regulators as a filtration aid, not a food additive, which makes it much easier to get regulatory approval in many countries.

The process is simple. You add the powder at the end of each day, the powder mixes with the molecules of toxins and attaches to them and then it all gets filtered out, which removes the toxins from the oil.

These toxins include trans fats, total polar materials (TPM), acrylamide and others. There are dozens of these toxic compounds.

One reason oil smokes when it gets old is that plastic-like molecules form in it, meaning you’re essentially burning plastic into the air. Beyond Oil works to clear that out.

Is there a rationale for restaurants using Beyond Oil’s product aside from serving healthier food to their customers?

The biggest part of our story is that we offer a legitimate health solution with positive ESG outcomes, and we also save restaurants money because they don’t need to replace the oil every two or three days. They can use it longer because the oil stays cleaner. How many stories do you know that have a positive health outcome, provide an environmental benefit and save businesses money?

The environmental benefits are clear. Producing oil requires water, electricity and fuel. By extending the oil’s life, we reduce the demand for oil, meaning less oil production, transportation and disposal. So, in addition to the health and cost benefits, there’s also a legitimate environmental impact.

Could you elaborate on the specific markets you’re targeting?

We’re focusing on two main uses for Beyond Oil. The first is restaurants, and the second, which is much larger, is the industrial frying market. These are large industrial factories that use thousands of litres of oil and typically freeze the fried food before sending it to retailers like Costco or Superstore. This is a much more sophisticated context for us to be working in, and while we’re publicly focused on restaurant deals and the rollout, we’re quietly advancing into the industrial market as well.

In the industrial sector, we’ve conducted pilot programs with several large, multibillion-dollar companies in North America. We also announced that we signed a letter of intent (LOI) with a multinational company that designs and builds highly sophisticated filtration systems for these large frying factories. The goal is to run full-scale pilots with these industrial operations because our powder seems to be compatible with their filtration systems, which is a significant breakthrough for us.

What kind of feedback have you received from these initial industrial tests, and how do you plan to scale this system globally?

The feedback has been tremendous. First, I want to highlight that we have two main distributors – one in Canada and one in Israel. Both distributors, who are now selling our product commercially, made strategic investments in our company during the first six months of this year. This is a significant achievement for a small-cap company and indicates their strong confidence in our product.

We’ve received a range of positive feedback from end users. Firstly, our customers report a decrease in oil consumption. Secondly, they find the product healthier due to fewer toxins. Thirdly, the food tastes better because the oil is cleaner, resulting in crispier, fresher and lighter food that isn’t soaked in oil.

Additionally, we’ve received unexpected ancillary feedback. Customers need less warehousing for oil and experience reduced steam and smoke. Multinational customers examine the outcomes in great detail and are providing valuable insights, such as improvements in flavour. Overall, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with no significant negative comments.

What catalysts can investors anticipate in the near future?

We’re expecting catalysts in all three areas of focus that I’ve outlined: expanding into the West with the two multinational fast food chains that we are now selling to in Israel, adding new U.S. chains as customers and getting fully commercialized into the industrial frying market. I’d also like to point out that we have hit major milestones on a consistent basis since the beginning of the year. 

But as impressive as our performance has been this year, it’s not going to be a major success story until we hit it big in North America. The plan now is to take the success that we’ve had in Israel and Canada and really push it west into Europe and then into the U.S. We have all the regulatory approval we need in Canada and the United States. Success in the U.S. is unlike success anywhere else.

This story was featured in Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine.

Learn more about Beyond Oil at https://www.beyondoil.co/.

CSE Issuer Stories, Magazine

VSBLTY Groupe Technologies: Helping brick-and-mortar retail fight back with superior consumer insight

In the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, a perplexed Tom Cruise enters a futuristic Gap store and is immediately greeted by a friendly face on a digital screen welcoming him and asking about his recent purchase. Twenty years ago it seemed like a far-flung idea, but today Cruise’s interaction is well within the realm of possibility for the modern shopper.

In a sense, the futuristic shopping experience is an early example of the use of proactive digital display, a technology that Philadelphia-based VSBLTY Groupe Technologies (CSE:VSBY) is pioneering for the retail and security sectors. Artificial intelligence and machine learning comprise much of the horsepower behind this transformative product.

“Everything in that movie is absolutely what we can do right now without any stretch,” says VSBLTY Chief Executive Officer Jay Hutton. “Right now, we are gathering metadata, or non-identifiable information, to aggregate and collate at scale.”

The idea for VSBLTY came together in the minds of Hutton and business partner Tim Huckaby, a developer at Microsoft and now VSBLTY’s Chief Technical Officer. The two believed the big players in digital display had failed to innovate over the last decade and that the industry was poised to undergo significant disruption.

Was there a way to create digital signage that contained computer vision software to measure quantitative and qualitative engagements and interactions? Hutton and Huckaby knew that previously uncaptured metrics such as the characteristics of individual shoppers could provide valuable insight to retailers.

Enter VSBLTY’s software. The key lies in marrying digital displays with real-time measurement, allowing retailers new revenue opportunities by delivering the right message at the right time to a specific audience.

For today’s retailer, traditional point-of-sale and out-of-home advertising provides limited engagement with the consumer and does not generate data to analyze. The VSBLTY platform integrates signage, security and analytics to optimize opportunities throughout a store.

“The physical store supplants the internet as a premium place for brands to deliver impressions because the shopper is in a place where they can buy the product being promoted – it’s instant gratification,” Hutton explains. “Brands will re-vector internet spend to stores because the store is more measurable, more instantaneous and more connected to upselling, or sales lift.”

Results from successful activations have challenged long-held assumptions about shopper behaviour. One example, centred around the March Madness basketball tournament, started with the idea that men aged 25 to 40 would rather not cook a meal when they are watching games. VSBLTY’s software was deployed in the frozen foods aisle of a grocery store using five different products and measured on multiple engagement types such as traffic, coupon redemption and sales. The outcome? An approximately 500% increase in engagement compared to conventional signage in the frozen foods section, and three times the coupon redemptions. In an unintended result, the entire frozen foods aisle saw a sales boost.

The shift from wanting more impressions to more qualitative engagements is a seismic trend in the marketing world. Companies are using phrases like “customer intimacy” and “brand engagement” more than ever, Hutton says. “The companies know the only way to get to this ‘promised land’ is through digital means. It’s enormously disruptive.”

For companies, it’s not so much a question of if they can use it, but if they will. There are very real privacy – and legal – concerns associated with this type of technology, which Hutton acknowledges. He shares that one large brand eager to adopt the software believes customers are ready for it, but the company wants to navigate the legal complexities before it commits to installation.

But there’s a “clear runway” to adoption, Hutton says, as a new generation raised with the internet comes to the fore. Shoppers can opt in to the experience much the same way as they do by using a points card or a brand’s mobile application. It’s exchanging privacy for value, Hutton says. “I’m willing to give up some things that are germane and intimate to me in exchange for some value. That’s an open, ongoing dialogue in retail.”

The probability of the younger generation accepting this trade-off is much higher than with older consumers, which is partly why retailers haven’t adopted the technology en masse. “The brands know it’s a waiting game,” Hutton says. “If they do it now, they may only see, at best, 30% opt-ins, but years from now, it’s 75%.”

Retailers are expected to fully understand the model over time, and the same goes for using the displays to enhance security. Deployed in the public sphere, the technology could be used to help identify people with warrants out for their arrest or to pinpoint anomalous behaviour. “Our hypothesis is that we are overwhelming our operators with too much to look at,” Hutton says. “By letting the software analyze the information, we’re giving the operator some context.”

One of VSBLTY’s biggest deals was signed in 2019 with Energetika, an international provider of lighting solutions, to install thousands of security kits powered by VSBLTY software in Mexico City.

Energetika deployed cameras and VSBLTY ran the analytics, looking for altercations, fires, car accidents, persons of interest and gathering crowds. Around six months into the project, the crime rate has fallen by a significant amount in several of the city’s 16 boroughs. One of these, Cuajimalpa de Morelos, went from 11th safest to safest in about seven months. “It’s like a cyber neighbourhood watch leading to an outcome that you could argue is valid and reasonable,” Hutton explains.

The technology is also being deployed to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Hutton. VSBLTY recently teamed up with a cyber security product and building services company to provide advanced camera technology that enhances security and enables temperature screening before people enter office buildings.

“Computer vision has the ability to identify who you are, whether you’re supposed to be where you are and determine if you’re showing any fever symptoms,” Hutton says. “That’s a really interesting connection point between what we currently do and what COVID-19 is requiring us as a society to do.”

The company is looking ahead to a busy 2020 as its pandemic involvement adds more to an already full plate. In 2019, VSBLTY received more orders in the fourth quarter than it had in the first three quarters combined, and it saw its first seven-figure order in the first quarter of 2020.

The challenge now is to keep momentum going throughout the coronavirus pandemic. But Hutton still anticipates that 2020 will be the company’s first profitable year, offering revenue guidance of between $10 million and $15 million.

If VSBLTY’s success is any indication, that Gap store in Minority Report may become reality before we know it. “Brands are dominated by people who grew up on the internet and understand that impressions are best maximized where there’s measurement,” says Hutton. “What’s happening in that movie is not too far away.”

This story was featured in the Public Entrepreneur magazine.

Learn more about VSBLTY Groupe Technologies
at https://vsblty.net/.