Costa Group Taps WayBeyond’s FarmRoad to Power Blueberry Variety Innovation

WayBeyond’s enterprise platform supports Costa’s Variety Improvement Program in Australia, helping identify the best new berries for commercial success.

San Francisco and Auckland – June 11, 2025 – In a strategic expansion of its digital agronomy capabilities, Costa Group, Australia’s leading grower, packer and marketer of fresh produce, has adopted WayBeyond’s FarmRoad platform to support its blueberry Variety Improvement Program (VIP). 

This marks the first time Costa Group is using FarmRoad for its breeding operations in Australia. It expands on the existing relationship with Costa Berries International, which uses FarmRoad commercially across farms in Morocco, India, and Laos.

FarmRoad provides Costa Group with a scalable, data-driven foundation for its Variety Improvement Program in Australia. By integrating localized climate and yield data into the breeding workflow, Costa can now make faster, evidence-based decisions on which blueberry varieties show the most significant potential for commercialization across diverse growing conditions.

“Data and technology play an important role in enhancing our capacity to mitigate the risks of extreme weather and to pioneer new agronomic practices, such as growing berries out of the soil in substrate under protective cropping,” said George Jessett, General Manager of International Horticulture at Costa Group. “Insights from FarmRoad will enable us to continue to be more efficient and targeted with our resources on the selection of varieties for commercialization.”

While FarmRoad supports daily decisions on Costa Berries International’s production farms, its role in the breeding program is focused on variety evaluation. Through the VIP deployment, Costa can:

• Collect climate data tied to varietal performance.
  
  
• Compare results across trial sites.
  
  
• Identify the strongest candidates for commercialization.

“This milestone confirms the original vision behind FarmRoad—to be the data backbone for globally ambitious horticulture leaders,” said Darryn Keiller, CEO of WayBeyond. “Working with Costa’s elite breeding program shows what’s possible when R&D and digital agronomy combine. It’s not just about more data—it’s about better decisions, and better berries.”

“Costa Group has a long-standing commitment to innovation, and it's been a privilege to work closely with their team as they expand into data-led breeding,” said Lotte Bayly, Global Accounts Director at WayBeyond. “The scale and ambition of this deployment reflect not just what FarmRoad can do, but what’s possible when technology and trust go hand-in-hand.”

Costa Group’s Variety Improvement Program builds on more than 25 years of blueberry R&D. With FarmRoad, the team now has a digital foundation to match its ambition.

About WayBeyond

WayBeyond is a global AgTech company that helps large-scale growers and seed producers harness data to make smarter decisions in complex growing environments. Its flagship platform, FarmRoad, delivers real-time insights, AI-powered agronomic support, and scalable infrastructure for enterprise horticulture.

To date, FarmRoad has tracked over 2,259 crop cycles—equivalent to more than 2,500 years of production data—analyzed more than 31,000 irrigation readings, and captured over 3.5 billion individual climate and plant data points through its global sensor network.

Customers and partners include Costa Group, African Blue, HM.CLAUSE, Belher, Bayer Crop Science, Limagrain, Santi-Agro Maravatío, Azura Group, Syngenta, Eliven Tropical, Afrifruit, SPMS and BearBerry.

WayBeyond is backed by BASF Venture Capital GmbH (BVC) and other strategic investors. The company supports growers as they shift from reactive farming to predictive agronomy.

To learn more, visit www.waybeyond.io

Media Contact:
Jennifer Hicks
jennifer@studiostoryology.com
+1 929 442 9696