Grant and Marie conducted 10 interviews with local wine makers during the Hatch Program.

The key challenges they uncovered for wine producers during the winemaking processes included:
- Fermentation requires stable, low temperatures
- Different wines require different temperatures
- Freezing temperatures are required to stabilse the wine

The current solutions use refrigeration plants with coolant pipes/valves and tanks with cooling jackets.

Through their interviews, Grant and Marie identified that the key issues with current solutions were unstable temperatures, reduced quality and loss of product, inaccurate temperature readings and limited control resulting in many hours lost to tank temperature monitoring.

The team confirmed that winemakers all have the same core problem. There were also some different, less important issues, however, these all related to the primary issue of temperature management.

The interviews conducted gave pivotal insight into what base functionality the winemakers desired. Grant and Marie discovered that this was different from their initial expectations and gave them more of a focus on some of the technical decisions in developing their MVP, primarily having a system that can be controlled on-site without the need for internet or mobile devices.