Mitch Eviston, CEO and co-founder of Meristem Crop Performance, recently appeared on The Scoop podcast.
For the past year, Meristem has been building out its vision for a new way to supply crop inputs, specifically yield enhancement crop additives.
On the podcast, Eviston discusses what the company has learned so far, its milestones to date, and where it’s headed.
Here’s an overview of the interview:
We’re approaching the year mark that you guys launched Meristem, could you tell us a little bit about the story of the company and what this company is looking to achieve in the market?
After 30 years of participating in this industry on a really a national and international basis, one thing I’ve noticed evolving is the need for a new channel. Our channel today as far as crop input and supply has worked great for decades. But as agriculture continues to evolve, I believe that supply chain needs to evolve with it. We believe that there’s been a massive investment of infrastructure locally, over the last 20 years in US agriculture, which has made some of the supply chains a bit redundant.
We’re multiplying costs and duplicating costs in a lot of areas of the supply chain today, and Meristem was created bringing forth best in class crop inputs channel free. So instead of taking our products to the traditional distribution supply chain in agriculture today, we circumvent the traditional supply chain. And we create linkages and partnerships that put the end user directly in contact with us the manufacturer, eliminating a lot of redundancies in the supply chain. That allows us to stay very hyper focused on local markets, local needs. And we do so at an economic value. Much unlike anything else really you see anywhere else. When you take out the multiple steps in the supply chain and all the costs and overhead associated with it.
Meristem’s path the market is not around new innovation or new products. We sell products that farmers have been using for the last decade on their farm. We take those same products and we bring them through a Meristem channel that typically allows us to pull about 30 to 40 points of costs out of products that farmers and retailers are using today. We do that by feeding it through a new supply chain that we’d like to refer to as channel free. We take out all the added value that was once needed. And we’ve created a supply chain that links with the new supply chain at the farm gate and the local retail in agriculture today.
What product categories are you currently supplying?
We focus on that yield enhancement crop additive space. So you’ll find Meristem in the starter business, the plant growth regulator business, the nitrogen stabilizer business, the seed treatment business, the adjuvant business including water conditioners, crop oils, drift and deposition, as well as foliar nutrition products that farmers can apply. We do not outside of seed treatments participate in hard chemistry.
What have been the milestones so far?
And the milestone is the people. We’ve built an amazing team of extraordinarily talented agricultural professionals over the last year at Meristem and that’s what’s making the difference. It’s people with a vision and an understanding, and a purpose to drive costs out of us agriculture and operate as efficiently for the farmers as we can. And surround yourself with people that believe in that and wake up every morning with a passion to really help agriculture, help ag retail, help the US farmer, that’s the biggest milestone.
What was it like officially launching a company during COVID-19?
Well, you just do it. There was the income statement didn’t allow you to put the brakes on. So we pushed through. I had COVID in August and three of our management team members right now are currently out of the office with COVID and taking care of their current condition. So it’s hit us hard as far as infection rate goes. We respected the quarantines. I respected a two week quarantine, but we work the phones during our quarantine period. And when we’re out of it, we mask up and we go to the country.
How can you help describe the type of network that you are building?
Well, it’s really an infrastructure network. We take our products through our channel to end users that have the infrastructure to do it on their own. So once a farming operation or an ag retail operation has the infrastructure to go direct, that’s where we come in. We take out all the traditional linkages. We right size the supply chain, and that’s how we take 30 or 40 points or cost out. Things get shipped once, not twice, or three or four times. We have a very, very clean model. So if you have the infrastructure to steward products, we’d love to talk to you.
We go to market in two ways. We market the Meristem brand directly to farmers. And we support non-nationally aligned ag retailers be it independents or co ops. And what we do with them is we take them on a journey. We create local brands and local go to market strategies for ag retailers. We take the portfolio products they’re selling today, we help them streamline the cost position. We assist them in building branded portfolios locally. It’s all in an effort to help that retailer today that’s not nationally aligned. If you’re not nationally aligned, right now you’re buying through another point of service and distribution. When we can eliminate those layers in the supply chain and go directly to an ag retail partner, we can again we can reduce their procurement costs by 30 to 40 points. We help them build their go to market strategies, we build their collateral, we build their websites, we register their products, build their labels, we turnkey their portfolio for them. But not in the Meristem brand because a lot of times the portfolios we build ours are just a component of. So while we’re not in the crop protection– herbicide, insecticide, fungicide arena–our partners are. So we’re a part of helping people create new go to markets strategies in an attempt to serve today’s farmer at an economic level that traditionally has not been available to farmers.
What’s next for the company here during the growing season of 2021?
We’re up about 4x in the last 12 months in revenue. And the team’s growing every day. Our business partnerships across the United States are growing every day. And what’s next for us is continuing the vision that we brought to market when we started this company and that vision is creating real economic value by taking real costs out of the supply chain. That’s our mission, and that’ll be our mission five years from now.
