James Le installs solar panels on 3D feed bin sensors at the Kitchener, Ont., offices of agtech startup BinSentry on Dec. 22, 2025.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
For much of the past century, swine and poultry farms have gauged the amount of feed on hand by climbing ladders and peeking inside storage bins. Sometimes a hammer will do – an echo means it’s time to buy.
This is not only an imprecise and dated method, it’s also an uneconomical one.
Feed is generally the top production cost across livestock, accounting for 65 per cent to 70 per cent of the cost of the good sold. And feed prices can fluctuate throughout the year. Keeping an accurate inventory list is key to a lean chicken or swine business.
And yet, even as poultry production has scaled from small family farms to consolidated, vertically integrated mega-operations that rear flocks by the hundreds of thousands, feed inventory methods did not keep up.
A Canadian company based in Kitchener, Ont., has found a way forward. The solution: high-end Swiss cameras and artificial intelligence.
A group of 3-D feed bin sensors built by BinSentry.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
BinSentry’s technology gives chicken and swine producers up-to-date volumetric readings of the inventory inside the bin. Since launching eight years ago, the company has grown at a breakneck rate. It is now partnering with some of the largest poultry producers in the world, raking in tens of millions in sales and securing hefty sums from institutional players – on Dec. 18, CIBC Innovation Banking offered BinSentry US$25-millon in growth capital.
“We have crossed the chasm of proving that the tech works,” said chief executive officer Ben Allen in an interview. “And that we can answer real problems for real customers.”
BinSentry is a unique success story in the Canadian agricultural technology space. Few Canadian agtech companies make it past startup, and even fewer stay in Canada to scale. In this way, the sector is a victim of its own success. Large-scale consolidation of producers is key to affordable food for consumers, but scale also creates a chasm between these businesses and the innovative, small-scale companies that offer the solutions they need.
In BinSentry’s case, the issue was that livestock feed is not a consistent substance.
Something like sand always has the same angle of repose, so you can make informed guesses about how much is in a given vessel.
Imaging equipment on 3-D feed bin sensors at the offices of BinSentry.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
But an industrial chicken’s diet is a carefully calculated smorgasbord of various grains (85 per cent), animal proteins, fat, macro minerals and vitamins.
When the feed is unloaded into feed bins, which are big metal tanks, it does not form a clean pile. It has varying densities and moisture levels, making it almost impossible to calculate using traditional camera technology. This gives farms little control over their supply chains.
And that’s why the inventorying of feed has been a hard problem to solve, Mr. Allen said. It requires the right hardware and the right software.
BinSentry maps the entire surface of the interior of the bin and the inventory inside using time-of-flight cameras imported from Switzerland, which capture 3-D images by emitting a beam of light and measuring how long it takes to reflect back. And then the company uses artificial-intelligence algorithms to create highly accurate models.
A completed 3-D feed bin sensor unit.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
The technology has been picked up by major chicken producers around the world, including the third-largest in the U.S., Wayne-Sanderson Farms, and Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods (whose spun-off pork division is now called Canada Packers). BinSentry is also moving into Brazil with agricultural behemoth Cargill as their exclusive distributor.
BinSentry is 10 times larger than it was 3½ years ago and now has 130 employees. The company is monitoring more than 51,000 bins across North America and adding more than 3,000 each month.
And it is still headquartered in Kitchener, with parts from Europe, Asia and across Canada delivered and assembled on site. Mr. Allen described Kitchener as a “hotbed of engineering talent,” largely thanks to the University of Waterloo’s globally recognized software engineering program.
BinSentry is an unusual success, said Evan Fraser, a professor at the University of Guelph and the director of the Arrell Food Institute.
Agriculture is a tricky space for startup technology companies because there are few clients who occupy the middle ground between big and small. For example, dairy farms across Canada are often independent, small, family-run operations, while meat processing is highly consolidated – just four companies process more than 95 per cent of the beef in this country. This means startups either have to contend with a patchwork of small, disparate clients or somehow fight to get the attention of a global conglomerate.
“There’s a lack of a Goldilocks zone,” Prof. Fraser said.
Nathan Hoel, co-founder and CTO of BinSentry.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Allen credits BinSentry’s success to its focus on the needs of those big companies.
“We had to be disciplined as a company – if we’re not working with a big company at scale, we’re not interested.”
But building a business for scale – without catering to mid-sized companies – requires substantial funding, said Dave Smardon, the CEO of Bioenterprise Canada, a national accelerator focused on food and agriculture technologies. And Canada has a shortage of private funds.
“We don’t have a robust investment community in Canada,” he said, because “very few investors know anything about agriculture.”
BinSentry was fortunate to receive funding through venture capital funds in the U.S. and Canada – St. Louis-based Lewis and Clark Ventures and BDC Venture Capital. Its most recent round of funding is from Lead Edge Capital.
Sky Chen assembles pieces of a 3-D feed bin sensor.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
But with an overall shortage of agriculture-focused investors, it requires a great idea, good leadership and then good luck to get off the ground at the right speed, Mr. Smardon said. Government funds exist, but in smaller chunks – and fragmented. A company in Alberta cannot apply for provincial programs in B.C.
Canada has to look at the whole ecosystem, Mr. Smardon said, and connect it.
For example, Canada could make it easier for homegrown agtech startups to connect with large-scale clients through what Prof. Fraser calls a centrally funded “concierge service.” It would act as a common storefront for agtech companies and promote relationships with the big players. Canada’s network of experimental farms – a nationwide program that’s been around since the 1880s – is an opportunity for these companies to scale testing and gain credibility.
Because scale and relationships with major players are key to long-term success, Mr. Allen said, BinSentry’s latest focus is technology for grain silos. (Many of which are operated by the same companies.)
“It’s a three-legged stool. The technology really has to work. And then you have to be able to roll it out at scale and support it at scale. And you’ve really got to be able to support the relationship and provide true value. If you can do those things, you can win.”