Spira creates functional ingredients from algae to replace petroleum and animal compounds in the food supply.

The team of students will work to understand the agricultural supply chain, construct financial models, develop organizational processes for managing the logistics of shipping from our farming network, and work to quantify and analyze data, particularly the net carbon emissions and absorption, from our farms to develop systems to continuously improve on our supply chain management. In addition, Spira aims to share the stories of our partner farms through marketing pieces to better attract new clients.

Students will start off by learning about Spira's farming partners and directly conversing with some of our partner farms via video chat. Next, the team will build out supply chain and logistics spreadsheets based on contacting logistics providers in order to build models to account for the sourcing, transport and carbon emissions of the raw spirulina prior to the processing done by Spira. Using this data, they will construct competitive analysis of shipping options to come up with the best options for the company. In addition, they will use this data to build a cost-of-goods model to input directly into financial projections and future cost projections as the supply increases and create suggestions on which regions and farms are the best to work with. Lastly, the students will work to build a marketing deck around the supply chain and conduct market analysis to determine which corporate partners would appreciate the supply chain and would be best to partner with to market Spira's spirulina ingredients both in the US and abroad.

REQUIRED PREREQUISITES

• Background/interest in agriculture
• Love of food
• Background in logistics / shipping
• Background in scientific communication is a plus
• Experience in creating dynamic spreadsheets, presentations