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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Podcasts

Podcast: How Kingdom Supercultures is Using AI to Create a New Generation of Novel Ingredients

Last week, Kingdom Supercultures, a company that assembles new novel combinations of naturally-occurring microbes into a new class of ingredients called supercultures, announced a $25 million funding round. The new funding round comes after a $3.5 million round the company raised in 2020.

Unlike many computational biology startups that have emerged in recent years, Kingdom doesn’t use precision fermentation technology or genetic engineering to build its new ingredient building blocks. Instead, the company is applying artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to analyze a massive database of existing cultures to discover new and interesting potential microbial combinations that provide new functionality, flavors, and more.

“What we’re building is really trying to recapitulate what we already find in nature,” said Ravi Sheth, who sat down for the latest episode of The Spoon podcast with cofounder Kendall Dabaghi.

To do that, Kingdom has assembled what the company claims is the world’s largest biobank of cultures in the world. The goal, according to Sheth, is to create a much faster path to discovery than traditional microbiology.

“It’s not dissimilar from a farmer cultivating different crops and choosing the best ones and putting them in the right places in the field and growing them and delivering them,” said Sheth. “In a very similar manner, we’re looking to nature embracing and learning from everything that natural biology has to offer. And we’re applying cutting edge kind of approaches in science and technology and computation, to then select them intentionally, really accelerate this process that we’ve already been able to do as a society.”

In a way, the company’s fusion of advanced computational techniques with culture development is largely a product of the two founders’ backgrounds. Dabaghi co-founded a cybersecurity firm in the early 2010s which used advanced computational technology to scan websites for security vulnerabilities. Sheth was on a more traditional microbiology academic track, pursuing his Ph.D. with aspirations to become a professor. However, the two met at Columbia University and, after working on different research projects in the area of microbiome, started to discuss ways to work together.

“I knew that I very much wanted to try to build a skill set that was at the intersection of both computation and microbiology,” said Dabaghi. “Which I think is reflected also in Ravi’s background and the way that we think as a company, which is that we don’t want to repeat a lot of the manual microbiology approaches that have been that have been like the primary focus of industry for the last like 50 years, but instead to use all of these new advances in computation, artificial intelligence, different statistical approaches to basically then be able to scan through all these microbes in different potential combinations and a much more efficient manner.”

You can hear my full conversation with the cofounders of Kingdom Supercultures on the latest episode of The Spoon podcast. Just head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just click play below.

Podcast: Talking Cell-Based Collagen with Jellatech’s Stephanie Michelsen

Over the past few years, a number of startups have popped up to develop new and more sustainable alternatives to animal-derived collagen.

The reasons are obvious: Collagen is used everywhere, from cosmetics to food to health and wellness applications, and because animal-derived collagen is a by-product of the animal farming industry, it has all the same downsides as factory farming.

While some companies, like Geltor, use precision fermentation technology to create animal-identical collagen, a relatively new arriver to the alt-collagen space by the name of Jellatech is using the same cell-based technology powering many of the new cultivated meat startups’ products. Only instead of using bioreactors to reproduce animal cells for consumption or microbial hosts to generate collagen protein (like Geltor), Jellatech instead uses cells to produce collagen and then harvests the collagen produced by those cells. In other words, the cells are not the end-product, but instead the engine producing Jellatech’s collagen.

It’s an interesting new approach, so I decided to catch up with the CEO of Jellatech, Stephanie Michelsen, to hear more about this young company and its effort to reinvent the collagen industry.

You can listen to the podcast here or just head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: Building Food Robots with Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen

In the mid-eighties, Adam Lloyd Cohen was in Paris working on a documentary about ancient robots as a project during his senior year in college. After steeping himself in the history of automation during the day and dining on French cuisine at night, he began to think about how we might use robots to make food.

Nearly forty years later, Cohen is finally bringing his vision to life.

In 2018 he got to work on a beta prototype of a food-making robot that he and his new company Now Cuisine trialed in late 2020. That trial helped him secure a deal with a popular burrito chain in Texas called Freebirds World Burrito to run a three-month pilot with six new automated robotic kiosks called Takeout Stations. The robots will be deployed in different office buildings and multifamily housing units throughout Dallas.

Cohen sat down with me recently to discuss his decades-long journey on the Spoon Podcast. In this podcast we discuss:

  • How he came up with the idea for his food robot
  • Why he decided now was the time to bring his vision to life
  • The deal with Freebirds and how he sees his robots being deployed in the future
  • The business model for his unattended food making robots
  • Where he sees the food robotics industry going

You can listen to my conversation with Cohen below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Podcast: Creating New Categories in Kitchen Tech With Scott Heimendinger

Scott Heimendinger was ready to talk about his plan.

I’d just spent a half hour talking to the longtime culinary innovator who’d spent much of the past decade bringing some of the first consumer sous vide and steam oven products to market, and after telling me about his journey through starting a company, working for Modernist Cuisine and later Anova, Heimendinger was ready to raise the curtain on what he wanted to do next.

Well, almost.

Heimendinger was ready to talk about the type of product he wanted to build (a category creator) and how he wanted to do it (by doing lots of prototyping and researching). However, what he wasn’t ready to spill the beans on is what he is actually building.

I can’t blame him. The kitchen hardware market is notoriously competitive, a space where something goes from novel to commoditized in a matter of a few years. Heimendinger had that experience with his own company (Sansaire), where he’d helped create one of the first consumer sous vide appliances.

“It’s only a matter of time until you could walk into a RiteAid and buy a sous vide machine on the same aisle that sells the Oster toasters for $25,” he told me.

One way to prevent that fast move towards commoditization – or at least make money before it happens – is to lock up the intellectual property first by filing patents (something Heimendinger has already done) and keep quiet about what you’re building until it’s ready (something he’s doing now).

So while Heimendinger wasn’t ready to give me all the details about the new product he hopes will be a category creator, I was happy to hear about his motivation for starting a new kitchen tech company.

“I’ve realized over my past experiences with MC (Modernist Cuisine),with Sansaire, with Anova and doing my own thing, even with my time at Microsoft, is that I really love zero to one,” he said. “I really love the part that I’m in right now, which is that I’m making something new.”

In other words, Heimendinger likes inventing things. Navigating the unknown.

But while he loves the ‘zero to one’ part, what he doesn’t like is taking a product beyond that. For that, Heimendinger knows he needs a team.

“When I get through prototype and spin up some flashy PowerPoints, bug all of the friends in my network to test this thing and give me feedback and listen to my stupid pitch over and over and over again, then I would like to go to companies that might be able to commercialize it,” he said. “And do what they’re really good at, which is make sure that it can get successfully manufactured and priced right, and marketed right, and distributed right. All that stuff.”

And then what?

“Hopefully, go back to the next zero.”

I caught up with Heimendinger for the latest episode of the Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear our full conversation, just click play below or find it at Apples Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to see Heimendinger at Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 virtual in November talking about how to build category creators, get your ticket here.

Podcast: A Conversation With Kevin Brown About Innit’s Google Cloud Partnership

This week I caught up with Innit CEO Kevin Brown to talk about his deal with Google Cloud.

Like a lot of Innit’s deals as of late, the partnership is focused on the grocery space. Late last year, Innit inked a deal with Carrefour to power a personalized nutritional score for 40 thousand products sold online by the European grocery giant. Before that, they’d announced a deal with SPINS to add personalized data to grocery retailer’s websites.

And after this week’s news, Innit is likely to be plugged into more grocery retail partnerships as the food and cooking digitization platform partner for Google Cloud’s retail team.

You can listen to my conversation with Kevin below or any of the usual podcast places.

Koby Nahmias Knew Cell-Based Meat Had Huge Potential But Was Too Expensive. He Set About Changing That.

Something was bothering Yaakov Nahmias.

The longtime bioengineer had been sitting alongside the Charles River near MIT drinking coffee when he got a call from an investor in Israel who wanted to know what he thought about Mark Post’s famous quarter-million euro hamburger.

“I told him, it’s probably the silliest idea I’ve ever heard,” said Nahmias, who also goes by Koby, in an interview with The Spoon.

It wasn’t the science itself Nahmias thought was silly – the longtime bioengineer knew making a burger in a lab was an impressive scientific feat – but rather the idea that consumers would pay hundreds of dollars, let alone hundreds of thousands, for a burger no matter how science-forward meat the meat is.

Sitting there, Nahmias began to think about what it would take to bring down the cost of growing meat in a bioreactor to result in prices approachable enough for the average consumer.

It wouldn’t be easy. As the founding director of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a longtime consultant to the pharma industry, Nahmias knew that this type of complicated biotech cell-reproduction work was hugely expensive and – the way things were structured back in 2015 – totally impractical for producing low-cost consumables.

Yaakov “Koby” Nahmias

But Nahmias also thought that maybe it didn’t need to be this way. After all, he had colleagues who ran an insect farm, which had a much lower cost per unit of biomass produced. So why, he wondered, was creating meat using cellular agriculture so much more expensive than other forms of biomass production?

One reason was that cells produced make a lots of toxins like ammonia. And, unlike insects which have livers to remove these toxins, cells produced in bioreactors “essentially grow in their own urine,” Nahmias said.

When he looked around for systems are good at ammonia removal, the obvious example was the aquarium.

“If you’re growing fish, and and you are giving them too much food, there is too much protein that breaks down into ammonia,” said Nahmias. “The only way to treat it is by adding zeolites that will bind the ammonia relatively fast. So using that type of insight, you can design a process that will do it at scale.”

Another early insight Nahmias had was that pharma bioreactors often grew one type of animal cell – hamster ovary cells – which are commonly used for vaccine development. While hamster cells grow easily in traditional bioreactors, that’s not the case with meat like beef or chicken.

But perhaps the biggest challenge Nahmias saw was the cost of growth medium used to feed the cells. After consulting to the pharma industry for the last decade, he knew it took about 10 liters of culture medium to make 1 kilogram of biomass. At what he estimated to be $20 per liter for medium at that time, he thought even with the world’s most advanced tech, they’d start hit a cost floor of around $200 per kilogram.

He would spend the next six months focused on reengineering the process of cell-based meat production. But this was only the beginning. Nahmias knew that it would take some time to commercialize his work.

So not long after, he would start a company called SuperMeat with a couple of other cofounders, where he further developed these early ideas. That company would eventually split up a year later and Nahmias would go on to found his current company, Future Meat Technologies, where he set about creating a scaled system for making low-cost cell-based meat.

Fast forward to today and he’s doing just that. Future Meat regularly makes news about reaching ever lower prices for its cell-based chicken, which is why I wanted to talk to him about how he achieved cost milestones that many have thought wouldn’t be achievable for at least half a decade.

You can listen to my full interview with Nahmias on the latest episode of The Food Tech Show. Just click play below or get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Food Tech Show: Mystery Food Boxes, A Tiny Dishwasher and Restaurant Tech

Need something to listen to on your Monday morning commute?

Good news: The Spoon gang got together after a little summer podcast break to talk about some of the top food tech stories of the week.

The stories discussed on this weekly food tech wrapup include:

Click play to listen to the podcast or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Food Tech Show: Talking Alt-Meat with Better Meat Co’s Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro wears lots of hats – CEO, founder, advisor, podcaster, author – but the one constant through in all those roles is that of evangelist.

This is obvious to anyone who follows Shapiro on social media; the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World will cheer on pretty much anything and everyone who is working towards the end of factory farming.

This goal of moving to a post industrial animal economy is also what drives the Better Meat Company, Shapiro’s startup that sells plant-based ingredients for food companies. The way the company does that today is through creating ingredients for meat producers like Perdue to create hybrid meat/plant-based food products (plant-based and meat in one product). In the past those plant-based ingredients relied primarily on pea protein blends, but as the company moves forward they are hoping many of these new meat products will be based on their proprietary fermented fungi-based protein called Rhiza.

I sat down recently with Shapiro to talk about the creation of their new mycoprotein production facility for Rhiza and how the technology works. We also discuss the current state of plant-based proteins, how those who work in plant-based space need to overcome their own biases and whether cell-based meat skeptics like Pat Brown are correct.

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking play below. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Tech Show: Talking Food as Medicine With Dr. Robert Graham

You get sick, you take a pill right?

Not according to Dr. Robert Graham. As a Harvard trained physician and a trained chef, Dr. Graham wants to get at the root cause of our illnesses through diet.

Ever since I met Dr. Graham in Japan at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, I’ve watched him work with food companies and retailers to build scalable approaches to food as medicine and have realized he’s perhaps the industry’s leading advocate and voice for food as medicine.

Dr. Graham joined me on Clubhouse to talk about food as medicine where we discuss:

  • The current state fo food as medicine
  • How new approaches like DNA-driven medicine and microbiome testing fit within food as medicine
  • The role food brands and retailers play in food as medicine
  • And much more!

As always, you can find more Food Tech Show podcasts at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Red to Green Podcast: How Cultured Meat is Ripe Terrain for Conspiracy Theories

Qanon. The Deep State. 5G microchip injections.

We live in a golden age of conspiracy theories. These circular reasoning belief systems once relegated to the fringes have entered the mainstream, fueled by social media, validated by politicians and celebrities and calcified by repetition and confirmation bias.

Food is no stranger to conspiracy theories. Whether it’s worries about GMOs being used to hurt our health, that KFC breeds mutant chickens or that there was once a great fondue cheese cartel (or wait, that one’s true), these food conspiracy theories are just as pernicious and persistent as those that plague politics.

And here’s the problem: we’re only getting started. As we move forward into the world where more and more of our calories are from impressive and hard to fathom technology, it’s safe to say we say we’ll likely see many more food-based conspiracy theories.

All of which is why found this conversation Red to Green’s Marina Schmidt had with Dr. Daniel Jolley, a professor from the UK who researches conspiracy theories and their impact, so fascinating. Schmidt and Jolley go deep on how future food, particularly cultured meat, is an area that is ripe for conspiracy theories. And, as discussed by Schmidt and Jack Bobo in the previous episode, this means that the companies behind this new food need to think seriously about preparing for a polarized world where they need to work hard to counter false beliefs about their product.

You can listen to the full conversation here, download it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or read the transcript of the conversation below.

Marina Schmidt

Yes, finally, conspiracy theories. What an interesting topic, while we do focus on the term conspiracies, the basic principles we talk about also apply to the questions. How do we convince skeptics? How do we engage in communication? How should we deal with issues like fake news that will arise? Once cultured meat gets the attention of mainstream media more and more. There hasn’t been much researched on, on conspiracy theories until recently. And professor Daniel jolly from whom you will hear today is one of the people leading this field.

He’s a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at  North Umbria university in the UK, his research focuses on the consequences of conspiracy theories and has been featured on BBC in the New York times, the guardian financial times, Huffington post, et cetera, et cetera. In 2020 to date, his media engagement has had an estimated reach of 1 billion people.

I haven’t seen the topic of cultured meat, conspiracies discussed anywhere else in such detail. So I’m excited for you to listen in. Let’s jump right in.   

Daniel, it’s really lovely to have you on red to green.

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Marina Schmidt

You know, oftentimes people, when I talk to them about conspiracy theories in the field, some say, well, why would you care about what’s some weird people talk about in their niches, but then at the same time, it seems that conspiracy theories have become way more widespread. What would you respond to that?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

I think that it’s a good stereotype and a good mix of separation. And indeed that was the perception may 10, 15 years ago, where it was suggested that only a small number of people believed in conspiracies and they were on the fringes of society. They had no impact in essence, but actually polls have demonstrated that they are widespread.

In the UK, 60% of people believe at least one conspiracy. Similar findings have been found in America. So this is a significant body of people who are subscribing to the viewpoints, where they believe in that there’s peripheral groups that they’re doing something sinister.

And typically they’re believe something sinister to do with a large event or large issue. So it could be to do with climate change, could to do with vaccines and COVID to do with COVID 19. So that one group is conspiring against the other.

So in essence, what you find is that when people are drawn to these viewpoints, they can actually change how they act in the world. Because of course, if you believe that climate change is a hoax and it’s not happening. Why would you reduce your carbon footprint? If you believe that vaccines are dangerous because doctors or nurses cover up the dangers to make a profit, why would you vaccinate?

And particularly it’s very prominent right now with, of course the COVID-19 vaccine. Again, if you think it’s all a hoax or you think that so many, the sentence too is going on, you are less likely to want to vaccinate yourself.  But of course, the basis is not in truth. These things are not true. COVID-19 is happening.

Climate change is happening. Vaccines are safe. They will help us be COVID 19. These are things that are based in facts. If people for different reasons, going down the line of, ‘well they’re dangerous X, Y, and Z’… that could impact the smooth running of society. It could impact how me and you engage.

And of course, cultured meat is a new field. It is something that even me personally, I’m still learning about, but it has all of the key ingredients of conspiracy beliefs to flourish. And we can obviously get into that during this podcast, but it certainly, to me, looking from the outset, potential flourishing ground for these narratives to really develop.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, definitely. And that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you because that aligns with my beliefs about the field. I think it’s quite exciting that right now we are witnessing the emergence of a completely new product category. When I talked to some people from the field about it, I sometimes get the response ‘any press is good press.’

Do you think that’s true?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Hmm. So we know with conspiracy theories that once people are exposed to them, they can be very resistant to correction. And also they can be very influential, straight away. They can impact us without us realizing. I mean by that is research has shown that when you’re exposed to this, these narratives, it makes you think differently about that event, whilst it wouldn’t impact your behaviors immediately, of course, because you need to digest information, it takes a bit of a time for you to actually impact your behavior.

For example, you vaccinate, or whether you use that product, t it would initially make you more skeptical towards that product. It will change your opinion towards it. Arguably, a one-time exposure on a Twitter feed is probably going to have a minimal impact. It will probably  fade away.

But of course, prolonged exposure where you find yourselves, maybe in a Twitter algorithm or on the YouTube trending page where there’s different recommended videos, you may find yourself in essence, in a bit of a rabbit hole. Where you you’re then be recommended similar videos. That, of course, will then reaffirm that, that prior belief and suddenly your belief may indeed then become much more resistant to change.

And as we see with social media, interesting research recently highlighted that Amazon books also play along along with algorithms. Whereby if you were searching about cultured meat or the myths around that, I suspect there will be recommended books or articles that may be a bit more conspiratorial.

The caveat is it’s just not one post. It’s stuff over a period of time. It’s not just that you read one thing and suddenly you’re a changed person. That, of course, isn’t true. It’s that prolonged exposure that I think is more problematic.

Marina Schmidt

Yes. And also how it fits into all of the previous information that has been propagated. I mean, partially that’s actually an interesting point that was raised in our episode four with Jack Bobo. You’re saying that, by attacking the animal agriculture industry for being sinister, for having toxic ingredients in their meats or for not following regulation, eit undermines the trust in the food system. Ironically, which may over the long term hurt the cultured meat industry or the alternative protein space overall. So how would you see the cultured meat conspiracies fitting in with macro trends before that? For example, the overall distrust in the quality of food, et cetera?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

it’s a good question.  in essence, it’s all going back to that distrust of biomedical therapies, which of course is slightly different here, but of course it’s science-based and it’s science driven. I mean, know that people who believe in conspiracies favor the alternatives, they favor herbals, they favor organic foods herbal supplements.They pull back from vaccines.

In general, if you believe people that are involved in plots and schemes in general, in the world, you are likely to believe in multiple types of conspiracies. So typically someone who believes that the climate change isn’t happening are also susceptible to believe that vaccines are dangerous, that the Americans didn’t go to the moon, that potentially cultured meat.

Is actually some kind of conspiracy to kind of  change the world population. Or it’s dangerous, or that it’s made to make profits.

So  with the modified food. A poll a few years ago found that actually  12% of people believed  in the conspiracy that (GMOs) are being used to shrink the world population. Only 19% have actually heard of that conspiracy previously.

If you think of other kind of medical conspiracies, but for example, that governments are hiding the cure for cancer as a way to keep making profits. 63% of the sample had heard of that conspiracy, where 37% of those people believed in it. So just from that example  of the modified food, this area is not as widely heard of. People aren’t aware of these things occurring. And of course this isn’t even asking about culture of meat. So I suspect if we can kind of predict the future a couple of years where cultured meat is more in our mainstream.

So I’m thinking when it’s mentioned on the news more regularly, when it’s something that we can see and actually pick up in supermarkets, I think there’ll be much more of uptake with people being skeptical of that food because they believe in an essence of conspiracy beliefs.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah. In a previous interview, I think it was episode two of the season with Isha Datar, we mentioned this uptake curve. So you have the early adopters and then you have at getting into the mainstream and you have the laggards, et cetera. And it’s this bell shaped curve, somewhat of increasing adoption. And I’m wondering how you would see this, considering that once things reach the mainstream, there tends to be an uptake in negative press and criticism and fake news potentially. So how do you see this bell curve actually being shaped?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Well, when I think about  this area, I can see similarities with technology advancements. So thinking of 5G. 5G is a very topical thing to be talking about, and there are a whole range of misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories.

With COVID-19. there was an uptake in people believing that COVID was caused by 5G.  And then that then led to people trying to set a light to these 5G towers because they thought if they could stop the 5G towers, then that would stop COVID.

So for me, I’m seeing kind of similarities here with potentially the emergence of that technology. And I think potentially people listening now could learn from the communication strategies of people in the phone industry, from the governments trying to tackle misinformation with 5G that is still ongoing.

I think from my perspective, it was a very kind of similar journey with this that they (wireless carriers) thought, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine. We’ll just put X and information to say what 5G is, what 4G is, what 3G is, and that will be fine. People will just be happy with that.

But of course it’s been demonstrated that that is just not true. That when people have these suspicions of the government of people in power, that they’re hesitant to engage in these new technologies.

Thinking back to, 1900’s where Spanish flu came, people thought it was due to the telephone. That it was a telephone that was causing this flu. So these kind of links with trying to understand the issues because events are always kind of comes from some kind of advancement, something that the government is potentially trying to roll out.

So I think with this. Potentially, it could be a very similar tactic being used in that people may think it will be taken on automatically when that actually might not be true. So for me, it’s thinking about what can we learn from the 5g roll out now?  I’ve seen so many great campaigns, for example, in Australia, where I think it was Vodafone were having in essence  misinformation campaigns to try and highlight 5G doesn’t cause COVID in essence. So potentially trying to prebunk people’s misperceptions about this meat and, in essence, trying to highlight the positives. If there are any criticisms, to try and tackle that to try and be up front with that, to try and highlight.  how this meat has, of course, has been developed, because of course that would be a question.

People wouldn’t go about people wonder is it safe? So I think by being able to work through and see good practice from other things that I’ve unfortunately had a very similar journey, I think will be really positive.

Marina Schmidt

Hm. Interesting. I feel that in our industry information is seen as the great balm to nervous minds. So when in doubt, just throw information on it or educate people. Once people understand the technology, once they understand the facts, then they obviously will like it. And once they try it.

In another interview of the season, we touched upon how GMOs actually got a bad one reputation by the companies over-communicating. The big safety measures they’re using. Publishing these long form papers, describing the technology and risk assessments and digital data. And that was again on the spectrum of over-communicating making people wonder, well, if you need to publish all that stuff, it seems to be quite dangerous.

So it’s, so counter-intuitive, it’s fascinating how irrational this is.  So where do we strike the balance between we need to be upfront with what we’re talking about, but also then if we talk too much ourselves about the potential dangers and risks, and also arguments against cultured meat, then we are drawing attention to these things?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Hmm. I think what you raised there is this, the science communication and how it really needs to be targeted to the particular audience where the average person is unlikely to sit through and read a 20 page risk assessment, because not only is that quite dry material for any, most of every everyone, it’s not going to be motivated to read that instead, it needs to be a much more accessible.

Fun, arguably humorous way to get them engaged in the content. So the example I mentioned earlier  with 5g and Vodafone. These adverts are shorter, they’re engaging. They were fun to watch, but they were also informative they’re in essence, using humor as a way to educate.

So people were therefore engaged to learn about this topic. Of course, if people wanted to learn more about the Pacifics that can exist as well. In essence, potentially  the campaign is to have multiple passage to it where you’ve got the more public facing, engaging content that in essence can.

Demystify some of the, fake news based around  that particular area. And also then more the scientific where they can go through the risk assessments or indeed whatever it is.

The majority of people would not engage in conspiratorial thinking about this particular issue. It would just be a small arguably minority who are more susceptible to engage in this type of thinking. So it’s trying to work out how detrimental could that be?  the NHS in the UK.

Put a campaign about vaccines AIDS, but in the comments on their Facebook or on their Twitter feed are then conspiratorial. So you’ve then got, you’ve even got the concern of, well, do we, as the organization or the charity or whatever it is, respond to those comments or do we ignore those comments?

Problem with responding is you’re then given. Light to these issues and you’re debating,  that particular point. If you ignore other people are then reading the comments and they’re seeing that those are being ignored. So does that mean that it’s true or false? So I think potentially how the campaigns that Harvest had the strategy comes deals with those types of situations is something that we need to kind of understand and.

I know from some people that I spoke to, they, when they have those comments, they try and respond privately to those people and to try and offer Cantu arguments and try and discuss with them that by that particular issue to do the vaccine or whatever it is.

But of course that’s problematic in its own, right as well.  And then in essence has been aware of that coming and thinking of ways to try and catch argumented.

So, yeah. Do you go ahead and you pre booked some of these myths and then potentially people who are then commenting, you know, with conspiratory narratives, you then can link to videos linked to infographics that explain  what has happened or indeed under the root. 

Marina Schmidt

In one of the other interviews of you, I remember you were talking about the issue that conspiracy theories. An overall negative controversial press has a POL it’s attention driving, and to be able to contract that we need to possibly create storylines and narratives that are even more engaging, even more interesting.

And. I mean we do focus on conspiracy theories, but when we talk about that, I always also think about just overall our media landscape and how journalism has become so attention driven, like quick attention driven, as we know, bad news sells more than good news. for example, from talking to people in the field, I’ve heard that even if they would talk to journalists and send them.

Nice pictures and tell them how to talk about it. So not call it Frankenstein meat, not call it lab ground, but call it cultured or cultivated meat. The end result would be the magazine, especially the mainstream outlets, publishing the stuff that gets people more anxious and angry. So do you have any best practices of how to deal with that?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

That’s a good point because of course we know in general that anxiety and anger can breed conspiratorial thinking, because in essence, when you have those feelings, you’re trying to make sense of that particular issue with that particular topic or that event. And by believing that conspiracy, Oh, it’s the government always doctors or whatever it is, can at least.

Try and make me feel less anxious, could try and make you feel less threatened. So potentially an article that presents this area in that particular way, may indeed drive the conspiratorial narratives. So I think as you say back to the point, is it, the communication strategy potentially is really important as a way to ensure that the language that is being used, is it going to breed conspiratory beliefs?

Because of course, people may already be coming into this area. A bit intrigued, but also it’s skeptical of  how will this work? How is it being designed? Is it safe? Which of course are legitimate questions to ask. They are questions. I’m sure we will all ask. It comes conspiratorial.

Of course, when you have those questions, but then you think, wow, it’s, it’s some kind of government conspiracy. They’re trying to make money wherever they say, well, it’s all part of the conspiracy. And then they, in essence, you discredit any evidence and you stick to your prior beliefs. So potentially  people ask questions with different motives in a way.

And of course  fake news is different to conspiratorial beliefs because, so it could just be fake. And not conspiratorial. It could suggest, you know, that this, this meat has to be made by doing weird to it.

I think an example, but do sit with there isn’t someone covering something up, which of course will be really a payment to someone and potentially someone who’s feeling anxious. They also pick up this as well. So I think it’s been trying to be clear with what this is. And has to be developed and in essence, dry and pre bunk, some of the, of the deceptions.

So it could be potentially just, they get out loud, like have a good focus group with people to talk about their concerns or their questions and potentially to see, well, okay. How widespread are these questions? Could we try and preempt some of these questions? We’ve some potentially engaging PR or indeed conversations.

Marina Schmidt

Hmm. A lot of that is inherently logical. I’ve heard you stayed in a different interview. Conspiracy theories are inherently logical. Also when people believe in fake news,    there’s also this pattern of, I don’t believe any mainstream media. So I believe this single block on the internet that has all the answers.

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Yeah.

Marina Schmidt

The tricky thing is that the reason for these beliefs is so entirely irrational. So how do you address that? Can you fix that even with logic? 

Dr. Daniel Jolley

So people who are already skeptical of biomedical therapies in general, Maybe would be skeptical of these type of new technology in essence, because there were believe that the scientists have doing something shady behind the scenes.

And in essence, it is all down to that high status power person or group rather who kind of supports this viewpoint. So, so we trusted research found that a biomedical therapy that will supported by a low power source or seemed to be quite favorable. But as soon as that same therapy was supported by a high power source, favorability dropped the floor.

So in essence, it was the power source, who was the one influence in that belief. In essence, whether . high power source was, seemed to be conspiratorial or dots. So potentially if a Revit of stakeholders are talking about cultured meat, not just the government, but for more low power sources. So I think your charity secret people who haven’t necessarily got a vested interest in this area.

They indeed, maybe more trustworthy, but I think for that bit of research that could demonstrate that actually,  is it really biomedical? That is the issue or is it the power source who’s supported that particular approach is that the issue potentially, and by having a much more larger stakeholders involved in the communication, we be able to get a more diverse range of people involved in that area.

But I’ve always found that research really interested in how that same product could be viewed very differently, depending on who supports it.

Marina Schmidt

That’s quite interesting. You spark the idea in me that maybe especially in the cultured meat space, there’s an opportunity to tell founders stories because it does come not from the corporations, which makes it different from the GMO case. But it does come from a lot of individuals that come together aligned around.

Values like animal ethics, environmental concerns.  a belief in innovation and improving the world. Right?  there’s an opportunity to build trust, not by arguing through hard facts, but by arguing. for stories.  over the millennia. we have been passing on information through powerful stories . regarding the connection between conspiracy and and science. In episode four Jack Bobo argued that companies should not use science in there. Product argumentation because science is inherently polarizing and it will drive away a certain part of the population instinctively.

And then I also talked to Rafa, who is the CEO often alternative dairy company called formo who argued that in their communication, they focus on science on the one hand. It is because they are addressing early doctors. but. In a broader scheme. He believes people don’t trust science, that’s something he wants to change.

So he wants to communicate. science is awesome. Look at what science can enable. What do you think about these two viewpoints?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

I think it’s really interesting. I suppose it makes me think about COVID-19 of course. And the head of vaccine has been talked about in science communication, whereby there’s been at least in the UK, a lot of push trying to understand. The how the vaccine have been developed and at the start lots of questions about, well, how has it been developed so quickly and understand which of course were not conspiratorial.

It was just legitimate questions, which then scientists were then going games. And for example, using their own Twitter feeds to explain in essence how that vaccine was developed and then got the NHS staff talking about the success of the vaccine and how they’re seeing the impact in the hospitals. So I think potentially that science communication where it’s directed and trying to make it accessible, I think is really good.

Of course, when you’ve then got it much more complex. So we mentioned earlier about releasing folder where you’ve got. Tired is a page as any arguably of different risk assessments that we’re not missing, that you can digest potentially it’s both. If it gives someone that sort of information, they may push back on it because they just don’t understand it.

And then they may indeed think, well,  what do we need or this? if someone was to send a journal article to me from, you know, a cell background where it’s the.

This is the science of how this meat is formed. I wouldn’t understand it. I wouldn’t want to understand it, but instead, and much more interactive seminar interactive, video, something on YouTube, even just using the platform Tik Tok to communicate in a very, more accessible, fun way will be really dynamic to, of course, that kind of reminds me as well is when we’re thinking about communication, you thinking about  the adults, but we’ve also got young people.

These arguably the young people are the ones who are going to be using this type of technology. They’re going to be using this type of meat, which means that maybe each targeting communication towards your groups.  So by trying to demystify, and even from the early stage, he’s targeting teenagers could be a really interesting marketing strategy whereby.

We know from research that I’ve done recently, that age 14 seems to be a peak time for  young people to believe in conspiracy theories. Because at 14 it’s, when people are relying less on their family, that they can walk to their friends are really, that’s where they can get a social media account age 12, 13, it’s where people are relying less on their emotional regulation and much more relying just on the emotions. So in essence, they’re not thinking about how they’re feeling that was kind of acting, which means that the anxiety, the threat, the uncertainty, trying to look to see what others are doing, can make them more susceptible, to believe in conspiracies.

And I think it’s good to communicate science. It’s just making sure you communicate science in a very accessible way, such as podcasts like this.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah.  the topic is so vast and I think we’ve touched not just on conspiracy theories. We also talked about fake news. I think another topic that will be important is crisis communication. There will be a point in time at which something will go wrong. And some company will have a mishap and then the media will be all over it, covering it in depth.

And I think an important part of the discussion is that consumer adoption and consumer acceptance is not a linear progression. So people start eating things and they stop eating things that can change their mind once they try it, it doesn’t mean that they are one over. And they’re going to continue only eating cell cultured meat.

The thing, another thing that’s really nerves me as I, as I’m thinking about these topics is with no GMO and no gluten and no soy.  it’s such a phrasing question because suddenly soy becomes something that is inherently bad or gluten becomes something that’s inherently bad because why would you otherwise buy products where there’s a label of no soy, no gluten.

Right. and it’s all these small, psychological influences that will accumulate into. How much impact this field is going to have over the longterm.  if we want to have a big impact, we want to have the majority of people switch to alternatives in a way from conventional agriculture products.

So lots, lots of things to talk about.  what other case studies or examples would you recommend to listeners to look into, to learn about how to address conspiracy theories, fake news or crisis community?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

So there’s actually quite a bit of literature that has come out of COVID-19 because eight speed, a flourishing van for conspiracy narratives, because in essence, it has all the key ingredients for why conspiracy theories, flourish, anxiety, that 4s join uncertainty big event, which means that they’ve been on a lot of interests.

But I think what we are learning is that it’s a challenge. And that, of course, people who have these beliefs, they really hold onto them. They, they come. That’s social identity, which means that people are motivated to defend their beliefs and they would engage in dialogue to defend them.

So potentially it’s thinking about ways that we have a much more productive conversation with someone. And it’s not a case of going in and saying, you’re writing home, you’re writing over wrong. That’s the only way you’re wrong. And I’m right. It is going in and trying to have a conversation is trying to understand why did that person have those particular polices start with, why do they believe?

For example, if, if they do, if they really cultured meat is some kind of conspiracy to make profit, why do they think that, Oh, then and dry and kind of. Tease apart, some of their psychology, is it all based in anxiety that they’ve all read about what they eat potentially? Are they just trying to offer some kind of reassurances to themselves about the world, the world that they live in?

And of course, it’s also promoting people to think more critically about the information they digest, where for me on personal level, I try and think about the emotional reaction that I have to things. So, as I mentioned previously, if I, when I read something and I feel really angry or really happy by reading it, it’s worth thinking, do I have this reaction?

Because it’s true because I just like what it says.  it’s biomedical, it’s biomedical therapy. Ish. It’s obviously at the same thing, of course, but it’s very much in the same pot in my view. And of course, people who believe in conspiracy theories push back on that.

And so I suspect there will be a similar pushback on this competence.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, interesting side note, the GMOs for example, are more accepted in a biomedical setting than they are in a food setting. So people tend to be even more queasy about anything that is in their food and that they consume on a regular basis. to get to some of the ending questions, if you would have 50 million in what businesses, what you invested in or in what initiatives.

Dr. Daniel Jolley

So I suppose, because I’m really interested, biased in fake news can split theories with information. I think it’s trying to develop different strategies to help people think more critically. So of course, it’s that balance of wanting to make sure people can ask questions. And to question everything, but to be able to have the skill sets, to think through what they are being exposed to.

Having children’s schools think through evidence and be able to give them the skill sets. There could be really useful, in essence, do studies to work out what is the best way to intervene.  Regarding food, sustainability or agriculture. What is an unusual opinion that you hold that many people would disagree with?  I felt like I’ve learned a lot by engaging in this podcast. I didn’t really know much of a cultured meat really  it’s kind of bypass me a little bit, and that’s why I talked about at the start that I think. These are the kind of the key ingredients for a conspiracy theory to blue in the future when it comes more mainstream, when people are more aware of this area, because let’s say even me, who’s tensely a bit more aware because of my research area wasn’t really tapped into it.

That’s probably why I’ve not really got anything controversial to say, because I don’t really know about it. Maybe that’s controversial. It’s on, right? The fact that I’m a guest here and I’m learning, you know, through the process.

Marina Schmidt

Daniel how can listeners connect with you?

Dr. Daniel Jolley

So they can find me on Twitter @DrDanielJolley, or they can just search in Google and you’ll find my website or videos or anything else that I’ve suggested.

Marina Schmidt

It was really, really interesting to talk to you. Very insightful and very happy. We got to discuss this topic.

Dr. Daniel Jolley

Pleasure. Thank you.

Food Tech Show Live: Restaurants Are Back

It’s been a while, but The Spoon team (sans a vacationing Chris) recently got together with food tech investor Brian Frank to discuss some of the top stories of the week.

The first story was about no matter where we look, signs show restaurant traffic is headed back to post-pandemic levels. Not only are we seeing it with our own eyes as we all head out into the world, but the data is showing it as well.

The only problem is restaurants can’t find enough workers. While there are lots of reasons for the shortages restaurant operators are experiencing, one of them is that many workers left during COVID-forced contractions and found jobs in other industries. We discuss whether they are causing operators to consider new technologies as a solution to their staffing problems.

Other stories we discuss on the pod:

As always, you can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just click play below.

Jack Bobo on Why Some Alt-Protein Products Hit the Zeitgeist and Others Fail

Why do some alt-protein products succeed while others fizzle?

According Jack Bobo, a long-time food industry consultant and author of the new book “Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices“, it’s a matter of timing and what customer segment you are targeting at a particular evolutionary stage of a market.

“One of the biggest challenges that most food companies have is how do you go from being a product for the innovator or early adopter to scaling to the early majority,” said Bobo in an interview with Marina Schmidt for the Red to Green podcast. “And that’s important, because that’s the moment when your relationship to the consumer changes.”

Bobo points to the early success of the Impossible Burger and how a more established company such as a Monsanto would not have had the same success. That’s because, according to Bobo, the early adopter consumer who embraces the very different product that the Impossible Burger may simply not have wanted it from a big multinational like Monsanto.

And while post-mortems may have pointed to the fact the hypothetical Monsanto burger was labeled as a genetically modified product (GMO), Bobo thinks it’s more about the company and its relationship with a particular consumer. Early adopters were okay with the buzzy Impossible, in spite of its long and exotic ingredient list.

But that relationship is changing as Impossible grows says Bobo.

“When Impossible Foods went from being $20 a burger in high end restaurants and only rich people could afford it to going into 18,000 Burger Kings when poor people could afford it, that’s the day the pushback happened,” said Bobo.

As companies grow and scale, Bobo believes one of their biggest challenges will be making that transition and figuring out how to the bridge that divide when it comes to market positioning.

It’s “important to understand that that’s the moment right when you’re trying to go from early adopter and innovator to early majority is the moment of risk because your relationship to the consumer changes.”

You can listen to the conversation between Schmidt and Bobo below by clicking play or finding it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also read the full transcript below.

Marina Schmidt

Jack, good to be talking to you.

Jack A Bobo

Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Marina Schmidt

So I’ve looked into some of the speeches that you have done on the topic of how to communicate alternative proteins. Let’s start on more of a general level. So how do you see alternative proteins being communicated in the field?

Jack A Bobo

Well today, there’s a lot of conversation around health and wellness in these foods. And yet when consumers look at the ingredients, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between how the products are marketed and perhaps some of the reality of the products. But I also see that a lot of products are developed by people who are doing it because they are animal rights activists or that they have a particular philosophical view of the world.

You know, they’re trying to create a world that’s free of, perhaps, animal agriculture. And they’re so passionate about that, that they want to market their products based on the beliefs that they have, which is perfectly reasonable. But that doesn’t always resonate with people who don’t share their beliefs.

And so it sort of leaves one with the question: if you’re trying to sell a product, do you only want to sell it to people who believe the way you believe, or do you want to sell it to everybody? And that’s a question I think that these new companies need to answer for themselves.

Marina Schmidt

So in a previous interview, Isha Datar was saying that we should avoid the trap of veganism and vegetarianism. So it’s not a trap in and of itself. It’s more a trap because it got a bad rep like being vegan and I know that because I was vegan for a while myself. It’s kind of controversial and it becomes this that splits people apart in a way.

So would you say that it’s crucial for alt protein companies to get out of this sub-category?

Jack A Bobo

Well, in the end, I feel like companies have to make their own decisions. But what I do is I advise companies that are interested in reaching a broader audience and are trying to de-escalate the tension in the food system. Some people just want to throw bombs and get things going and mix it up.

And you know, that’s a choice, but for many companies, they know that some of these larger food companies are their investors and are potentially going to be partners, are going to acquire them. And so,  you have to think about, what is your long-term strategy, not just your short term.

And so I’m often called by venture capitalists who say, hey, we’ve got this company, and the CEO has gotten themselves into a little bit of trouble. Can you help them to talk about their products in a way that’s genuine and authentic, but doesn’t create the pushback that makes it harder for them to achieve their goals?

And so, I’m happy to do that because I tell people that my personal mission is to de-escalate the tension in our food system so that we can all go about our business of saving the planet in our own way.

Marina Schmidt

Okay, Jack, so you are talking about de-escalating the tension within our food system. Well, that goes against the grain of a lot of communication that we’re seeing so far where there’s actually also a sort of excitement of we are revolutionizing the whole food industry. We are putting everything upside down. And it also creates a sense of coolness. Like it’s cool to be part of something that’s revolutionary and to possibly be a consumer of something that is putting everything upside down. So how do you marry these two concepts of something being cool, and at the same time, you don’t want to create all the friction.

Jack A Bobo

Things are often cool because you’re part of a group and being part of a group, you know, the more insular the group is, the more unique you feel. And so, there’s a question about, do you only want to reach the innovators or the innovators and the early adopters, or do you want to reach everybody in the food chain?

And so, by the time you reach everybody in the food chain, it’s not going to be the same kind of buzz that you’re going to have, when you’re Oatly, you know, and you’re just hitting the market. And so one of the biggest challenges that most food companies have, or startups, is how do you go from being a product for the innovator and the early adopter to scaling to the early majority. And that’s important because that’s the moment when your relationship to the consumer changes. And I can give you an example. So think about, for a moment, what would have happened if a company like Monsanto had created the Impossible Burger? I think we could guess that it probably would have failed. And if you had read the newspaper articles after it, every article would have said, what were they thinking? Nobody will ever buy a GMO burger. Well, of course that’s not actually true. So it’s like everybody would have assumed that’s why it failed, but it might’ve failed because people didn’t want it from a large multinational company.

And so, the reason people think things happen, and the reason they actually happen can be quite different. That’s an important lesson because when Impossible Foods went from being $20 a burger in high-end restaurants and only rich people could afford it, to going into 18,000 Burger Kings when poor people could afford it, well that’s the day the pushback happened. It didn’t happen when rich people were buying GMO burgers that were ultra processed. It happened when it actually reached the masses. So, that’s important to understand that that’s the moment, right? When you’re trying to go from early adopter and innovator to early majority is the moment of risk, because your relationship to the consumer changes, and every company that wants to scale has to bridge that divide.

And they have to understand how to position their product, not just for the early adopter, but for a larger audience. And if you don’t do that, what happens is, I talk to startup CEOs all the time that say “this big company came in and stole my market.” No, they didn’t. They have the majority and you have the early adopters and the innovators, and you never made bridge the gap. You left that market to somebody else.  

So understanding that is important. And for large companies, it’s important as well, because if they want to play in this space, they should know who is their audience as well. They might not want to try to target the early adopter and the innovator. They might want to target that early majority. I can give you two examples. People often talk about Chobani coming along and just crushing Yoplait in the yogurt wars. And in business schools, they talk about how Yoplait just didn’t see Greek yogurt coming. They missed this opportunity, but if they had come out with a Greek yogurt, consumers might’ve said, what’s this, this is not sweet.

This isn’t what we expect of the brand. So it still could have failed. And the fact that Chobani succeeded was that it brought a different product that was inconsistent with the early product. We see another example of how a big food company did get there first. Quaker Oats actually came out with oat milk a year before Oatly really made a splash in the United States.

So they were there first. I’m sure they can make a pretty decent product if they want to. They’ve got, you know, endless money to throw at it. The problem is that the innovator walked into the grocery store and looked around, saw oat milk on the shelf from Quaker Oats. And they thought, oh my God, can there be a more boring product? What are these guys thinking? And they walked right out and the early majority, well, they don’t buy new stuff. 

And so there just was no consumer for Quaker Oats. They killed the product in January of 2020. That’s the month they should have introduced the product and they might’ve owned the oat milk world.

So the diffusion of innovation is what that’s based on and companies should understand what that means for them.

Marina Schmidt

Jack, that’s a really fascinating point because what the first part of what you were just talking about, it says that right now, if you look at the market, a lot of companies feel that cultivated meat is going to be very successful. Overall, there is a rather positive view on it also amongst the general public.

At least that’s the impression you can sometimes get, but then if there’s a go-to market and that works out pretty fine, it will probably in the mass media reach, mostly the innovators, the ones that are actually interested in the topic enough to follow it. So obviously there will be a good response.

However, when then cell-cultured meat gets more traction and reaches the broader population, that’s where we should expect the issues coming up. And how much do you see topics like demonstrations, self-proclaimed health gurus, fake news, conspiracy theories around cultivated meat to be something of concern?

Jack A Bobo

So I’m less worried about fake news and people attacking the industry because maybe it’s unhealthy or unnatural. I’m more worried about the self-inflicted wounds of the industry itself because how the industry talks about the product relates to consumer psychology. And if there’s a conversation about making the products cheaper than regular beef, in order to drive out animal agriculture, you end up with two situations.

One, if your goal is to eliminate animal agriculture, you’re going to get pushback from that industry. So you’re going to have to fight that. The second thing is that if you were saying that you were going to do that and you’re going to make it cheaper. Well, that makes a conventional hamburger the premium product.

So, as soon as you reach that inflection point, all of the early adopters and innovators who were driving consumption of the product, they just move back and say, you know, I really just want artisanal beef. You know, I want grass fed because you’re changing the perception of the product. So your goal is to become a commodity that wealthy people don’t want.

And will then be piling on the fact that it’s ultra processed and all of these other things. It’s worth keeping in mind that consumers are not fixed in their beliefs. If you’ll go back to 2019, Beyond Meat was the biggest IPO of the year, but the biggest diet trend was clean eating, which is all about whole foods.

And so, at the same time for consumers, the biggest diet can be whole foods and the biggest IPO can be ultra processed foods, right? So the world is big enough for both of these ideas to co-exist, but it does influence how consumers think about those products.

Marina Schmidt

So, with making it into a commodity, I mean, we need to also think about cultivated meat or alternative proteins, in terms of the separate brands. So there could be one brand which actually becomes the commodity brand, whereas another brand will stay more high-priced, more premium.

So does it actually really make sense to think about the whole field as becoming a commodity? 

Jack A Bobo

It does, if in the minds of the consumer, these are just cheap products. So before you can get that differentiation, you have already convinced the consumer that these products are cheap.  Right now that’s what the messaging is all about. We’re going to be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Instead of talking about, we deliver quality products that are going to be affordable. It’s the same thing from an economic standpoint, but it’s very different from a psychology standpoint. I think we also need to remember and keep in mind the bigger goal. We need to increase protein production by between 50 and a hundred percent by 2050.

So that means if we have a $2 trillion protein market today, it’s going to increase to $3 to $4 trillion by 2050. I think it’s quite unlikely that the alternative protein market is going to grow to a $2 trillion market in 2050, let alone a $4 trillion market. So, the reality is that what we’re really talking about is how much of that future growth will be captured by the alternative protein industry.

So, yeah, there’s competition with animal agriculture, but it’s competition for market share that doesn’t yet exist. By positioning these companies as a threat to the future of the livestock industry, I mean, you know, if that’s the industry you’re in, why wouldn’t you respond? If somebody says, they’re going to take away your job, why wouldn’t you want to protest that?

We saw that in the cell-based meat market in the United States; 28 states tried to ban the use of the term meat for a product that did not yet exist. And that’s entirely because producers took seriously the threats to take away their jobs.

Marina Schmidt

Okay. So, the question is actually whether the whole alternative protein meat industry would drop their fights against the conventional meat industry and say, well, we are just creating a tastier product, a better product, communicating from a classic food standpoint, how you would communicate most food products in terms of attractiveness to the consumer, would that actually eliminate the threat to the conventional meat industry, because it’s still there, right? Even if we don’t talk about it.

Jack A Bobo

Yeah, but  the beef guys talk to the pork guys and talk to the poultry guys every day. And yet, if you look at beef consumption in America, it’s down dramatically over the last 30 or 40 years. And almost a hundred percent of that loss has been to the benefit of the poultry industry, right?  So they’re strongly fighting with each other for market share.

And  they’re also able to get along as individuals. So my belief is that the animal ag industry is perfectly happy to have competition and it may even win some market share, but it’s how you talk about it that really matters. And I think a good example of that is the former use of the term clean meat to talk about cultivated meat, cultured meat, cell based meat.

And that was the original term that was being proposed. The Good Food Institute had done a lot of research that said, that’s the term that consumers like most. The problem is that they were doing it because they felt like it was kind of like clean energy, and it was going to be safer a product hopefully, and that it was going to be better for the planet.

The problem is that,  when you say that the cultivated meat is clean, you’re suggesting that the current meat is dirty, which is something they actually kind of liked that that implication was there. But it’s also suggesting that it’s unethical and most consumers don’t want to be having a conversation about ethics at the moment they’re taking a bite of food. So when you bring ethics into the conversation, you force people to deal with cognitive dissonance. And that’s how PETA and other organizations approach it. You know, how can you pet a puppy and eat a pig? And they want to create that dissonance because some people will say,  I guess that’s right, I should stop eating meat. 

But if you don’t go along, if people don’t agree with you, then you get something called reactance. And that’s where people will intentionally try to fight and undermine what you’re doing. Because you say they’re an evil person and people don’t believe that they’re evil people.

So it’s not at all surprising. Reactants can take many forms. It could be that they go out and eat a double quarter pounder to stick it in your face. It could be that they try to pass legislation that bans the use of the term meat for your product. And so that’s why I spent about 10 months working with the cultivated meat industry to get them, ultimately, to agree that they wouldn’t use that term anymore.

And, you know, I think that that was really helpful in deescalating some of that tension that had existed.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, I mean, you are also known as the guy who stopped the term clean meat. So maybe there is a legacy of communication. Once upon a time there weren’t good alternatives either. It was you eat animal-based products or you don’t. And now we are entering a new era where it actually becomes a viable option, both in terms of taste and price to have alternatives.

In the first era, the conversation was a lot about morals and ethics. You should stop eating that because it’s bad. And how do you see our shift to having alternatives impacting our communication around it?

Jack A Bobo

There’s definitely been a shift and right now we have this interesting situation where,  most of the alternative protein products on the market are plant-based alternative proteins and you have a bit of a disconnect. Ninety plus percent of consumers say they’re trying these products because they believe that they’re healthier. And yet most of these products are not healthy or not much healthier than the traditional beef. That disconnect, I think, is a bit of a risk to the industry. If you allow consumers to have that misconception, because consumers may feel tricked ultimately if they realize that they’re doing that, that they’re eating products that they think are healthier, that aren’t.

This gets into something called the halo effect, which is that once we think a product has one good quality, we just assume that all of the qualities are good. That’s why if you put low fat on a package or you say, low-calorie, people will eat an entire bag of low fat cookies.

Well, low fat doesn’t mean there aren’t calories. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t even more calories in the product. But people just assume that. If they have these misunderstandings and then they don’t use the product in the way that it really was intended to, then they may not achieve their personal goal.

And if the products don’t deliver on their brand promise, then they’re not going to be successful in the long run. So that’s why it’s really important for the messaging to help bring the consumer back to the actual brand promise and not allow them to sort of misunderstand what the brand stands for.

Marina Schmidt

So now let’s say the brand promise that we have discussed so far, it is not replacing the animal agriculture. It is not talking about ethics. It is not being the healthier product. At least I think that’s a point that can be argued about like, depending on how much one beliefs that conventional meat and processed conventional meat is bad.

It’s always a question of comparison, but let’s assume that we’re not talking about health. So Jack, what should we talk about?

Jack A Bobo

So it doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about the benefits of your product. It doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about that your company is a company that stands for improving the health of the planet. You can still talk about what your product is doing to be a better product for the planet.

It’s just, once you start comparing it in a way that brings in additional moral and ethical values;  you can elevate your product without trying to lower the other product. And I’ll give you an example. So a couple summers ago, Perfect Day came out with samples for their ice cream, and, I’m sure that the first thing that happened is that the journalists called up the dairy industry because they wanted to hear what does the dairy industry think about this new product?

And so if I were the dairy industry and I was being called to ask to comment on a product like Perfect Day, the easy thing to do would be to bash it as being unnatural, right? That’s just a natural response. But what you could say is, we were really interested in hearing about this development.

We believe that it validates the nutrition of dairy proteins. We believe consumers will continue to be interested in the full range of proteins in a glass of milk. And we feel like it’s a completely natural product. In other words, they could try to elevate dairy instead of trying to drag down Perfect Day.

I think that would have been a more effective response to the consumer than trying to undermine Perfect Day or these alternative proteins. So elevating your product, I think, is always taking the high ground versus trying to denigrate the opposition. Oatly talks all the time about how they’re growing so fast and they’re laying waste to the dairy industry by expanding, and the reality is that they’re mostly taking market share from almond milk.

And almond milk mostly took market share from soy milk. There might be some dairy that’s losing market share because of what they’re doing, but probably 95% of their gain is at the expense of their alternative protein competitors. So if you position your product as delivering this benefit for reducing animal ag and you’re not actually doing it, you know, again, I think that may be your goal, but if you’re not achieving your goal, then I think one should be careful about doing it.

You know, isn’t it enough to produce a product that has a better environmental footprint or that’s showing that you’re doing your part to make the planet a better place. I think that’s what consumers mostly care about.

So, I think that the idea is that these smaller startups have to decide what they’re going to be when they grow up. You know, they will either scale as independent companies or they will scale through partnership, or they will scale through acquisition. And that means that they’re going to work within the food system one way or another. If an alternative protein company wants to really dominate and, you know, be 20% of the market for, you know, protein, they’re going to be big food, right.

You know, you can’t sell, you know, $10 billion worth of product and not be a big food company. And so if you position big food as the enemy, well, that just means some other small alternative protein’s going to come along and say, we’re not big food. You know, we’re not Beyond Mea   with a $10 billion market cap, you know, we’re really the small guy.

And then you end up fighting with companies within your own sphere for the alternative protein market. 

Marina Schmidt

So pretty much the red line and all that you’re talking about is you could call it non-confrontational in a way. What if somebody says, well, but that’s boring. Like people like the attention, people like the friction, that’s what gets press. That’s what gets you interviews. So what would you answer to that?

Jack A Bobo

It’s okay to have some tension, a little bit of pressure, you know. Friction is the place where people get excited, as you say, but there’s a difference between making a controversial remark every once in a while and having a marketing strategy that is intended to create pushback that ultimately makes it harder for you to do what you’re trying to do.

Every one of these companies at some point will have to realize that the language they’re using can achieve one goal, but it might undermine another goal. And if the alternative protein industry continues to talk in terms of cheapness, they will achieve their goal of becoming cheaper and nobody will want their product.

Marina Schmidt

Hmm. That’s very, very controversial because that seems to be the end goal in a way. As soon as it has achieved price parity, or is cheaper than the conventional meat sources, isn’t that also the point at which it becomes a mass product?

Jack A Bobo

So I was reading a tweet by somebody from the Breakthrough Institute and they said that if alternative protein could replace ground beef, that American agriculture gas emissions would reduce by one sixth. And so I wrote back and I said, well, if you eliminate ground beef and you’re still producing steak, where does all the beef go?

Because you’re still producing it. And they said, oh, it’ll just get exported. Right. So eliminating ground beef, doesn’t eliminate ground beef. It just relocates it someplace else. So, I mean, again, we need to understand the economics of this. As long as there’s the same amount of steak in the world, there will always be exactly the same amount of ground beef in the world.

It’ll just go someplace else. And it might go someplace that actually needs more animal protein. And so maybe that’s a good thing, but the conversation around eliminating it, you know, we could produce no hamburger in America. We could export a hundred percent of it, but you didn’t eliminate hamburger. You just moved it someplace else.

As long as the same amount of steak exists in the world, there will always be the same amount of hamburger; it’s a by-product of steak. So all you can do is drive the price of hamburger down. You can’t make it disappear. Companies would give away hamburger if it didn’t have any value, right? If you couldn’t sell it someplace else cheaper, and people still wanted to buy steak. That’s the whole problem with this cheapness argument; is that hamburger can become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as long as people still buy steak, because it’s a by-product. So, it will find a market somewhere.

Marina Schmidt

Okay. Okay. Okay. But then we also need to replace a steak, that’s the core of this argument. Like you cannot just replace hamburgers because it’s being made out of the whole cow. If you need the steak, you need a certain part of the cow.

You still need a certain amount of cows that are not going anywhere. So we need to also replace steak to reduce actual cow production.

Jack A Bobo

And that’s if we were actually going to reduce animal agriculture, but you’ve got a $2 trillion opportunity that exists before you have to have this conversation. So, you know, in many ways the conversation is a threat to the livestock industry. That’s a theoretical threat that isn’t a real threat. And so why are we spending so much time and energy talking about something that can’t happen? Or if it does happen, won’t happen for 20 or 30 years. If you’re really telling people I’m going to put you out of business, but you’re not actually going to do it. Why would you create that kind of ill will? Alternatively, we could talk about, we need to produce 50% to 100% more protein, and we need to do it using a smaller environmental footprint than we do today. And what we need is the livestock industry to be dramatically more environmentally friendly than it is today. And we need to produce additional protein that is more environmentally friendly than if we just scaled animal agriculture. If we’ve achieved that, if we’ve gotten to 2050, without cutting down our forests and draining our rivers and our lakes and our aquifers, then we can have a conversation over who’s going to actually then control the market. But we have such a big task ahead of us that it doesn’t even involve anybody going out of business.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, that’s quite funny. Especially from cultivated meat companies. I mean, yeah, it’s early in the development. I think Paul Shapiro in the first episode we have had on Red to Green, he was saying something along the lines of cultured meat has been like five years away for an indefinite amount of time. Always in five years, we may say, well, it’s five years away and then it keeps moving on. So,  it’s this thought concept structure, all of the pieces in your arguments fit together and they build up on each other. Is there something that we haven’t covered yet on that.

Jack A Bobo

Yeah. So that’s a good question. I think, you know, understanding consumer psychology is just going to be very important to these companies. So, I would encourage all of the companies in this space to think about what this means. Just to give one example, we didn’t talk about insects.

I don’t know if your listeners think about insect protein at all, but this idea of cognitive dissonance is on display with some of the companies in this space. So, you’ll have some alternative protein companies that create the cricket bar and they put the cricket right there on the package and they’re telling the consumer “you’re eating insects.” Now consumers have to get over that sense of disgust that insects create for many Western consumers in order to appreciate their product.

On the other hand, you have other energy bars like the Jungle Bar, which says insect powered on the label, but it’s not really that noticeable. And they’re giving the consumer permission to eat the product without having to think about the fact that it’s made of insects. So they’re not lying about it. They’re not hiding it, but they’re giving you permission to not worry about it. And so when we think about how you want to position products in the future, think about what Eat Just is doing with their alternative egg product. They’re not trying to convince me to eat yellow peas, and they’re not trying to convince me to eat mung beans.

They’re giving me an egg substitute. So why is it so important that insect protein be called insect protein? Why not just give me a super, protein bar and if it tastes great and it accomplishes its goal, isn’t that just good enough? So too often, I think we get hung up on our own technology and our own innovation.

And that’s often not the thing that’s going to drive the consumer success of your product.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, quite interesting. So I’m saying interesting a lot because there are a lot of interesting points here. How would you say uh, we should be dealing with that in the cultivated meat space? We have the issue that it is a new technology and people are demanding to understand what they eat. They want to know what they put inside their body and it’s novel.

There’s so many questions to be answered. So it’s like a Pandora’s box. And there’s also an argument for being very transparent on it because as I think Britta, Britta from LegenDairy has said in one of the interviews GMOs, for example, partially has got a bad reputation because there has been a lot of unclear information around it and big corporations in that sense sparking a sense of skepticism around what are they doing there? What are they up to? So there’s a need for transparency, but how do we balance that with the need of being appealing?

Jack A Bobo

Yeah. So there are a few different ways to think about it. You know, one of the problems with GMOs is that they happened at a unique moment in time. For all of human history, consumers just did not care how we produce food. You know, they weren’t thinking about pesticides. They weren’t thinking about tilling practices.

They just didn’t care. And so I think the seed companies were slow to realize the world had changed and that consumers actually knew their name. And so that was a learning process. But I think we know now how important transparency is. And the thing is that you can’t be transparent after you’re asked about transparency.

You need to be transparent before anybody asks you the question. And so I give you an example, there were people at McDonald’s who were trying to convince the company to put their ingredients on the web, and, they just didn’t feel like they needed to do it, that it was important, but they eventually relented and they put all of their ingredients on the website and nobody visited the website.

And so the executives are like what the heck’s going on? You know, we did what you asked us to do and nobody’s visiting the site. And the response from the comms guys was, yeah, that’s great. Because when you ask people, they’re just happy knowing it exists, they’re happy knowing they could visit that website.

And so concerns about the ingredients declined just by making something available that nobody ever visited.

Marina Schmidt

Hm

Jack A Bobo

And so, you know, you want to make sure that your product is as transparent as you’re capable of being. And, you know, then when somebody says, well, what’s in your product, you’re like, well, it’s right here.

And there’s not really as much for them to get upset about because you’ve already answered the question before it was even asked, but there’s no amount of information you can provide when you don’t have trust. You know? I mean, think about it. If somebody asks, you know, is it safe to eat clean meat and you don’t trust me?

And I say, well, there are a thousand papers that demonstrate the safety of the product. You’re gonna be like, I don’t want to see your research because I don’t trust you. On the other hand, if you do trust me and I say, oh, I’ve got a thousand papers that show that clean cell based meat is safe.

You’re like, oh, that’s good enough for me. So, you know, in almost no situation is science really relevant. It’s always the trust that’s relevant. Now it should be backed by science, but you know, science at the beginning of a conversation, just polarizes the audience. Those who agree with you agree with you more.

And those who disagree, disagree more.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, it’s also quite fascinating how science itself has become more of a controversial topic in terms of people losing trust in institutions and our scientific process. So Isha Datar, in one of the other interviews, she was saying that her impression is that consumer research is possibly unhelpful because consumers, I’ll quote, “we are being informed by what consumers say, but consumers are always just recycling past experiences.” And another quote “I’m not so sure that companies should be not targeting their audience from the beginning.”

So on the one hand, the argument that consumer research is possibly going in the wrong direction and just making uninspiring marketing campaigns on the other hand that companies should zoom in on their target audience and that maybe a company decides to zoom in on the health people and another one on the ones that are into flavor and taste and weird experiences, et cetera, et cetera, segmenting their market and focusing on one niche of the market.

What would you respond to that?

Jack A Bobo

So I’ll start with the first on consumer research. I think she’s absolutely right that you have to be very cautious in what lessons you take from consumer research. Consumer research is still important, but I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, PepsiCo did a ton of research according to their vice president for science and research.

And the person said the single reason that consumers are no longer drinking diet soda is because of aspartame. That’s the reason, we figured it out. They took aspartame out of the product. Well, 10 months later, they had to put it back because it turns out that the reason that consumers said they didn’t want the product, wasn’t the real reason.

And it turns out consumers just didn’t know why they weren’t drinking diet soda anymore, but they had been hearing a lot about aspartame. And so consumers who still drink diet soda, they actually liked the product. Consumers who weren’t drinking it, they didn’t even know why they didn’t like it. And so, you know, so that’s part of the cautionary tale.

But social listening is still critically important. You know, it’s important to understand what people are saying, but you need to know also what people are doing because what people say they do and what they actually do aren’t always the same thing. But also actions eventually lead to thoughts, not thoughts lead to actions.

And so we need to actually realize that consumers often get it backwards. You know, we choose a product because a friend was using the product, but then when you asked me why I never say, oh, because I just want to be like my friends, you say, oh, because it’s better for the planet. Or,  I hear that it’s more nutritious. The reason we give isn’t necessarily the reason that motivated us.

To your question about segmentation, I think that’s critical. The world does not need 20 plant-based burgers that all do the same thing, all taste a lot like conventional hamburger. We need a cheaper version. We need the mid price. We need a premium product. But we certainly, you know, one company could deliver all of those things. So, if the industry is going to remain vibrant and include a lot of different segments, you know, they’re going to be needing to deliver different things to the consumer.

And that could be health. That could be nutrition. That could be sustainability. That could be local, you know, so there are a lot of different ways of competing that are separate from just tasting a lot like beef.

Marina Schmidt

And do you think that the nomenclature topic is chewed through.

Jack A Bobo

Um, I think that, you know, there’s too much attention paid to nomenclature. As long as the nomenclature doesn’t do harm, I think you’re just fine because people may know that the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger is plant-based, but it’s still branded as the Impossible Burger. It will be a Memphis Meat burger. And, you know, maybe it’ll have a little footnote that says it’s cultivated, but you’ll be leading with branding. And so I don’t worry as much about that as long as it’s not counterproductive. So clean meat had to go cultivated cell based, you know, uh, cultured, I think that’s much less relevant.

Marina Schmidt

Your points are quite unusual in that sense. And I do appreciate that. What are common push backs that you get or questions that you get regarding those , um, that we should maybe address?

Jack A Bobo

Um, so, you know, there’s often pushback, but I’m taking the long view that the more there’s fighting within the industry about cell based versus plant-based versus animal, the more we’re really undermining consumer confidence in our food system. Just to give one example, we, you know, we talk about the importance of alternative proteins and creating a sustainable future. If you look at what the World Resources Institute has said, they show like the menu of change necessary to create that sustainable future. And they focus on reducing food waste, shifting diets, alternative proteins, all of those different things.

And yet when you look at their bar graph, 61% of the improvements to our food system that must occur to get to the sustainable future are already baked into their assessment based on historic trends in traditional agriculture. So 61% of the improvements we need to do are going to happen because of big food and traditional ag that we’re already denigrating.

And yet they’re going to do 61% of the work. Why not look at it as they’re doing two thirds of the work and now these alternative protein companies and others are going to help to fill the gap?  It’s that sustainable future I’m trying to get to. And we can each play our part in getting there.

But if we spend our time and energy trying to tear down the other guy, then they don’t get to do their work, you know? So they spend communication dollars fighting you and you spend it fighting them instead of spending money on R&D and research and efforts to actually improve your product and help the consumer to understand it.

Marina Schmidt

Is there anything that you would like to communicate that we haven’t touched upon?

Jack A Bobo

So one thing I would encourage people to think about my new book that’s coming out, Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices, that’ll be available in bookstores on May 11th. It’s currently available for pre-order on Amazon and other places. But I mentioned it because the first third of the book is all about consumer psychology. 

Marina Schmidt

So to come to the ending questions, Jack, if you would have $50 million, in what businesses or initiatives would you invest in?

Jack A Bobo

I’m not the sort of person who places a bet on single industries or segments. I’m more of a total stock market kind of investor. You know, I want to help as many companies as possible to explore their opportunities, to improve the planet.

And I’m just confident that some of them will succeed. The next 30 years are not just the most important 30 years there have ever been in the history of the planet. The next 30 years are the most important 30 years there will ever be. If we can get to 2050 without screwing up the planet in many ways, we’re going to be good forever.

That’s how important this moment is.

Marina Schmidt

We touched upon quite a few but what is another controversial opinion regarding food tech or agriculture that you hold that people may be surprised by?

Jack A Bobo

Well, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of alternative proteins and things, but I’ve also worked with the dairy industry and the livestock industry. I think it’s important that we encourage those industries to be more productive and that we actually recognize how far they’ve come. The farmer today, the livestock producer today, is wildly more productive than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And there’s this feeling that agriculture is bad and getting worse, but by most measures, agriculture is good and getting better. And that’s important because if ag is bad and getting worse, farmers are the problem to solve.

If ag is getting good and getting better, but not fast enough, that means farmers are the solution to our problem.

If you tell 95% of people in the food system, that they’re the problem, why are they going to work with you? You know, why are they going to try to do things better? If we were producing food today the way we did in 1960 with the same technologies, we would have to have 1 billion hectors of additional farmland. That’s more than 25% of all the forest on the planet would have been cut down in order to produce the food that we have. So it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around the fact that agriculture is the number one driver of deforestation. And it’s the number one savior of forest. Those two things can be true at exactly the same time.

Marina Schmidt

Wow. Well, couldn’t one say that it’s not necessarily the farmer that’s the problem. It’s just then the system, that’s the problem. The incentive to have a very nature-unfriendly production system and incentive to do monocultures, to drive away small-scale farmers and replace them with large scale productions. 

Jack A Bobo

So I would say that, yes, but I don’t see that as the problem. I see that as an important feature in the system. So yeah, this is certainly a controversial one. It’s about trade-offs. If all of the farmers are small, they’re going to be less productive. If they’re less productive, food prices will be higher.

And if food prices are higher, more people will be hungry. The system we have has all of the negative consequences, you know, 40% of all the land on earth is devoted to agriculture. 70% of all freshwater goes to ag. 80% of deforestation is caused by ag. So those are things all true. But today only about seven or 8% of the people on the planet go to bed hungry.

But 30 or 50 years ago, a third of all the people on the planet went to bed hungry. And so that’s, you know, taking billions of people out of poverty is on the plus side. The green revolution had lots of negative environmental consequences, but it saved a billion lives. So there will always be trade offs.

The more intensively you produce food, the worse it is for your local environment, but the fewer forests get cut down in Brazil and Indonesia. So, you can’t have a system that’s based only on small farming. You know, Europe is driving towards that but their 2030 goal of having 25% of agriculture be organic, well, based on their own assessments, that means they’re going to produce 8% less food.

So if Europe produces 8% less food, who’s going to feed them? Well, the number one exporter to Europe is Brazil. Europe already imports 70% of its animal feed needs. So, you know, it takes a land mass the size of the agricultural land of Germany to produce soybeans for Europe. So Europe has exported its environmental footprint to arguably the most bio-diverse country on the planet.

If Europe were feeding itself, there would be no deforestation in Brazil. So, that’s a choice, you know. But Europe has more forest today than it did a hundred years ago. You know, one, because they’re wildly more productive, but two because they’re exporting their footprint. Our local sustainability comes at the cost of global sustainability. Global sustainability comes at the cost of local. And what I mean is an organic system may be better for the local environment, but if I need 20% more food someplace else, that’s a problem somewhere else. 

And intensive agriculture may have run off and eutrophication of water and all of those negative consequences, but it is protecting forest someplace else. Anytime you scale an idea, it will come with some costs.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, well, we could keep talking for another six hours easily. I wouldn’t run out of things to talk to you about. And how can listeners connect with you?

Jack A Bobo

So there are a few ways. My website is futurityfood.com. That’s futurityfood.com. There’s also LinkedIn where you can find me and you can always send me an email. You can put it in the comments, but it’s just jack@futurityfood.com. I’m also on Twitter and Instagram.

Marina Schmidt

Wonderful Jack. It was really a pleasure to have you on.

Jack A Bobo

Yeah. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.