Potato storage issues drive significant losses for producers in North America each year. Cellar Insights, an agtech company that uses predictive analytics and smart storage monitoring to deliver early warnings on potato spoilage risk, is working with EMILI on Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert to demonstrate the ability of its technology to monitor the storage quality of potatoes remotely.
Cellar Insights’ smart storage monitoring technology is an AI-powered remote monitoring and decision-support platform for perishable crop storage. The technology fuses real-time Internet of Things (IoT) and ventilation data, including carbon dioxide, temperature and relative humidity with Cellar Insights’ rot gas sensors, and provides early warning alerts and insights to producers through a mobile app.
“One of our main value propositions was remote monitoring, especially for people with legacy systems, so that they didn’t have to physically go to their bins located across their area and walk through them all to check settings and sensor readings. We would drop in a set of sensors to monitor the typical managed storage parameters and provide them applications on their phone or desktop,” explained Ryan McDonald, vice president of business development with Cellar Insights.
“But then one of the first things that happened was we realized that people still wanted to visit their bin, because they wanted to check if there was any spoilage. So we went to work and came up with a spoilage indicator, so they don’t have to do that anymore.”
Earlier in 2025, Cellar Insights installed its technology in several areas of a potato storage bin at EMILI’s Innovation Farms MacGregor site in order to refine its rot-risk alert system and advance its shrink tracking, spoilage detail and other key issue detection prototypes such as sprout detection. This real-world testing at Innovation Farms allows Cellar Insights to obtain season-long data sets from a prairie environment to train and validate its models under real stress, including warm and cold snaps, ventilation regimes and mixed equipment. It also allows Cellar Insights to receive feedback from a research oriented grower.
“The opportunity to work with a grower in a real operation for developing and tuning our new capabilities is hugely beneficial,” said Terry Sydoryk, CEO of Cellar Insights.
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