Founder and CEO of Vivid Life Sciences Josh Krenz shares how he and the team built a business now marking its 10 year anniversary, and how the industry evolved under their feet as they set a foundation for its success.
What was the catalyst for founding Vivid Life Sciences?
Ten years ago, I looked at where the industry was and I felt like there was a gap and a changing time in the industry where there was opportunity for retailers to have more of their own branded product and control their portfolio when it came to micronutrients, biostimulants, and plant nutrition in general. At the time, margins on crop protection were really collapsing, so retailers were looking for place to build a business and micronutrients, plant growth regulators and biostimulants were not only profitable options but also good agronomic tools for growers.
What is your product portfolio today?
Primarily our business is private label, so we work with large retailers and wholesale distributors, and we take our expertise on how to position and utilize different technologies to create custom solutions for them. It all starts with good agronomics, and we’ve grown with those customers for the last 10 years ever since.
Who do you partner with today?
We work with a broad spectrum of different partners—some of our larger wholesale partners are Growmark and Winfield United, and we have independent retailers as partners as well, such as Finger Lakes Agronomy in New York. Our partners are mostly in row crops, but we also work in potatoes, strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, and watermelon.
Where are some of the most promising innovations happening in this product space?
Most of our commercial success is in the combination of micronutrients with biostimulants together versus looking at a standalone micronutrient product or a standalone biostimulant product. Where we’ve really helped retailers be successful and helped their growers be successful is when we’ve put together a package solution, and most times that package solution is in their own brand. Everything that we do is mostly liquid; we don’t deal in dry or bulk fertilizer, so smaller package, smaller amounts. Think about pints going across fields, not gallons. We primarily deal with liquid application in smaller packages. Specific to biostimulants, we’ve done a lot of work with seaweed extracts to come up with what ones actually work with the different combinations of micronutrients.
What’s been your biggest surprise with the business?
It may be what hasn’t changed. The grower needs to be serviced with local agronomic expertise and they need local agronomic folks to help them decide what products they’re going to use.The marketplace is really about service. It’s about expertise. You have to be as local as you can and customizing our products has been the evolution of that. Whereas it used to be your custom solution was one SKU that went across 48 states for one retailer. And what we’ve had to learn in the last 10 years is it might be multiple SKUs in the same product category, but it’s going to change based off of regionality, crop deficiency levels, farming type practices, all of those things.
Specific to biostimulants, how has that segment changed in the past decade?
When we were a startup, it was amazing how many startups there were in the in the biostimulant category. And there are very few that I can name that started 10 years ago that exist today. There was a lot of outside venture capital money that was put into agriculture and these start up companies. We were in this unique position as Vivid Life Sciences as we didn’t have one molecule that we had created and trying to market just one biostimulant. So all the single source companies or most of them didn’t make it.
How have you, as a leader of a business, navigated some of the issues that have been experienced with truth in advertising specific to this segment?
That hits key to heart on a lot of the issue here. There were a lot of single molecule companies that got venture dollars and they needed to turn a profit very quickly, so they skipped steps in the process. We’ve learned in the biostimulant it’s not a one year process, it’s a three to four year process for us to understand how a biostimulant works. If you’re going to position biostimulants in this marketplace, you have to understand the other agronomic and specifically nutritional components that are affected. So successful companies in this segment have an agronomic and nutritional core expertise first. Whenever a company has a goal of just adding another application or adding one molecule, that’s not how agriculture and farming works. We may still be a little bit of wild wild west in the biotimulant’s category as a whole, but it is not as bad as it was 10 years ago.
When you aren’t working, how do you spend your time?
Farming has always been at my roots as a fourth-generation farmer myself.Outside of work, I like to get my hands dirty on my own farm and put in a little tractor therapy.When not home, our family likes to spend time showing Highland cattle, Shetland sheep and Welsh cobb ponies.We also sell grass fed beef to our local community and the Twin Cities metro area.
