Issue #17 — TRIC Robotics

Right now in California, a robot the size of a tractor is rolling through a strawberry field in the pitch dark. No driver or headlights. Just the underglow of ultraviolet (UV) lights, like your modded Mazda RX-7 in Need for Speed. This thing creeps down the rows, fighting mold and bugs while everything else on the farm sleeps.

It’s essentially giving the pests a sunburn at midnight, when they can't pull off the voodoo magic they normally use to regen in the sun. That’s not exactly how mold and bugs recover… but it’s close enough.

The company is TRIC Robotics. But to explain why this matters — and what the heck I'm even talking about — I have to tell you something upsetting about the strawberries in your fridge.

Strawberries are keeping a big ole secret from America. They're the most pesticide-heavy item in the produce aisle, and nobody knows it. California, which grows the vast majority of the country's strawberries, has been measured applying somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 pounds of pesticides per acre. For reference, corn — what most people consider a pesticide-heavy crop — comes in around five.

But wait, there's more! A big share of that load isn't even sprayed on the plant — it's pumped into the soil before planting to sterilize it. One of the main ones, chloropicrin, was used as a chemical weapon in WWI. For us shoppers, the concern isn't really chloropicrin sitting on your berry — it's whether the system should rely on fumigants this toxic at all, given the harm they can do to the farmworkers and families who live near the fields. And that goes for most chemicals used in farming.

And before you go blamin’ farmers… don't. They aren't the villains here. They’re just stuck. Skip the chemicals, and mold and bugs can take a whole field; whatever survives ends up scarce and pricey. Going fully organic at this scale mostly doesn't math — it either can't hold the pests back, or strawberries start running Erewhon prices everywhere.

WHO IS SHOPPING AT THAT PLACE AND WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?!?! John, we need some intel on the infamous smoothie there.

So farmers spray because right now it's the only way to get a cheap, good-looking berry into your cart.

Nobody's untangling the whole food system overnight. It’s an incredibly complex system — as we know from our feature on Apeel Sciences — with a million players all pulling in different directions. But TRIC is after the piece of the chain they can solve today — the chemicals that get sprayed on the plants all season long. And the way they're doing it is a win across all parties.

Here's the "explain it like I'm a five-year-old" version:

Mold and mildew run on DNA. Hit them with a particular slice of UV light — the kind our atmosphere normally screens out — and you damage their DNA enough that they can't reproduce. The twist is that these organisms can repair that damage… but they generally need daylight to do it.

So TRIC does the obvious move: it hits them at night, when there's no daylight for them to repair the damage. Researchers spent years showing that well-timed nighttime UV can keep the disease in check about as well as the usual spray routine. TRIC's bet was simple: the science existed, but nobody had turned it into a real business. So they did.

TRIC runs two tractor-scale platforms, Luna and Eden. Both drive themselves down the rows, carrying UV lights over the plants a couple of nights a week all season long. Luna can also haul vacuums that physically suck the bugs and mites off the plants — because while UV knocks out mildew and even kills mite eggs, the adult mites (and other bugs) need a more hands-on approach. The founder's go-to analogy: a giant Roomba for the farm. One that doesn't get stuck under the couch for months.

The founder is Adam Stager, a robotics PhD who pointed all that engineering at one deeply unglamorous problem: getting the chemicals off your strawberries.

The origin story has some Good Will Hunting vibes. After early tests back in Delaware, a grower basically told him: if you're serious, you have to move to California, where almost all the country's strawberries are grown. So like Will Hunting, Adam and his co-founder strapped two garage-built robots to the roof of an SUV to see about some strawberry fields. The pair drove across the country and spent roughly eight months Airbnb-surfing while running those robots in real fields. Two robots, one SUV roof, and the American open road.

The entire company runs on one rule: listen to the farmers. That bug vacuum? It exists because a farmer pointed out that they were already coming through twice a week, so why not run the vacuums too? They added it. That's the whole philosophy in a single anecdote. Build in the field with the people you're building for.

"Chemical-free" is the direction, not the finished story. The UV robot replaces a lot of the in-season sprays — but not the pre-plant soil fumigation, which is a separate beast. So the honest version is "dramatically fewer chemicals," but not "zero."

A big question here is whether a company like TRIC can scale. TRIC is a small startup (for now) that builds and oversees every robot it owns. And it's playing in an industry run by giants. You've got the chemical companies whose whole business is selling the sprays TRIC wants to replace, and the John Deeres of the world who already make the equipment and know every grower by name. Deep pockets, deeper roots, and a real interest in things staying exactly how they are.

Here's the thing though. Maybe now, more than ever, the tech actually exists to make everyone win at once. The farmer gets the same (or better) crop without the chemical bill or the regulatory migraine. You get a cleaner strawberry. And the workers and families living next to these fields — the ones breathing the drift we talked about — stop being an afterthought of mass production.

Better crop for the grower. Cleaner strawberry for you. Cleaner air for the people next door. Technology almost never lets everybody win at once. This might.

Just under a year ago, TRIC raised a $5.5M seed round and has been scaling its fleet across California ever since. But the strawberry is just the beginning.

Once you've got an autonomous robot living on a farm all season, you can keep handing it new jobs — weeding, scouting crops, releasing the good bugs that eat the bad ones. Basically leveling up your MyPlayer in NBA 2K.

The endgame? The most chemical-drenched fruit in America gets cleaned up by a machine that works the night shift, so nobody has to breathe the alternative. That's a future worth rooting for.

TRIC is hiring, and who wouldn’t want their office to be a California strawberry field? They're after robotics engineers to build the things, plus Robot Field Operators to actually run them out in the rows (some roles flat-out say no experience required — they'll teach you). If you'd rather get your work covered in dirt than in slide decks, this might be your spot.

Real robots, real fields, real bugs getting vacuumed, and real problems being solved. Beats a standup meeting.

Open roles → https://tricrobotics.bamboohr.com/careers

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