282. Innovation Doesn't Sell Itself w/ Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis
In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis, co-founders of Next Step Solutions. Between them they bring nearly six decades in horticulture: Jennifer spent more than three decades introducing products across six continents, including the 60X scale-up of Hydra fiber while building the horticulture group at Profile Products, and Ted grew a Dutch substrate company from €40 million to €200 million in turnover across 11 operations in nine countries. We get into why innovation doesn't sell itself, and why grower economics decides whether a new product gets adopted no matter how good the technology is. We walk through their Innovation Journey framework, the five steps from unvalidated technology to validation, commercial proof, funding, and scale, and Ted's point that real strategy means being clear on what you won't do. We cover the substrate market itself: the Wageningen University projections for global growing media demand through 2050, where the missing volume comes from, and the place of peat, coconut coir, and wood fiber alongside emerging materials like rice hulls, sugarcane bagasse, miscanthus, hemp fiber, and hydrogels. We also cover the costs growers overlook, from disease pressure to the 10 to 25% sell-through loss tied to pay-by-scan in North American retail. We close on predictions: fewer but larger operators, food security pulling India, China, and Africa into controlled environment production, and the new crops surfacing from wasabi to cacao. The case that a market has to be built before it can be scaled runs through the entire conversation.
