Podcasts

May 25, 2021

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

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.

May 24, 2021

Food Tech Live: Food Robots & Bitcoin Pizza

The gang got together on Friday to talk about some of the week’s most interesting stories. Our guest this week was former Chopped champ and food tech investor Silvia Baldini!

The stories we talked about for this live recording of the Food Tech Show include:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or just click play below.

May 10, 2021

Food Tech Show: Building The Plant-Based Creamery with Miyoko Schinner

Miyoko Schinner has had an amazing journey as a plant-based food entrepreneur.

But that doesn’t mean it was easy. Whether it was the early days in Japan where she ran into the Japanese mafia or her initial struggles trying to scale production for her plant-based cheese recipes in the early days of Miyoko’s Creamery, Schinner’s overcome a number of challenges to get to where she is today as one of the most impactful leaders in today’s plant-based food market.

In this episode of The Food Tech Show, I talk to Miyoko about:

Her decision to become vegan and how that shaped her career
About becoming a plant-based cookbook author
The challenges of raising capital for her first company in the 90s
Launching Miyoko’s Kitchen and how it was much easier to find interest for her second startup
How she overcame the challenges of scaling production towards large production batches for her plant-based dairy products
Her work to help farmers transition towards a post-animal agriculture economy
Her legal battle with the state of California over the language to describe plant-based cheese and dairy products

You can hear the story by listen to the podcast in the player below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

May 6, 2021

Red to Green Ep 3: Breaking Through Resistance to Cultured Meat

We humans are resistant to unfamiliar things.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t change, and one of the ways in which consumers will change their mind is consistent and repeated exposure to a new idea or concept. The more a consumer hears an idea, the newness and unfamiliarity wears off and it becomes normalized.

It happens all the time in technology. Fifteen years ago, most of us would have been uncomfortable jumping in a complete stranger’s car to catch a ride somewhere. Nowadays – pandemic concerns aside – most everyone would not think it’s weird to hail a stranger’s car using a ride sharing service like Uber or Lyft.

Chris Bryant, an independent food system researcher who also acts as the Director of Social Science for the Cellular Agriculture Society, says that this comfort through familiarity will also work with cultured meat.

“We see this kind of familiarity effect going on, both in quantitative and qualitative research,” said Bryant in the latest episode of the Red to Green podcast series focused on alt protein and consumer acceptance. “So on the quantitative front, as I mentioned, we can see just quite a strong correlation between familiarity and acceptance. People who have a more familiarity or more likely to say that they’d eat it.”

Those that adopt something early often have a strong personal reason or belief that drives behavior change. With cultivated meat, that reason is likely a concern for animal welfare.

“In terms of their impact on people’s purchase intentions and actual food, decision-making,” said Bryant “it seems like there are other benefits which could be more important to highlight. Say for example it seems like those earliest adopters are most enthusiastic about the kind of ethical benefits animals and the environment.”

But for many, they aren’t motivated enough by animal welfare to change behavior, especially when it comes to something as new and different from cellular agriculture. For these more resistant types, Bryant believes cultivated meat companies need to sell them on how this new type of meat will benefit them.

“For the more skeptical consumers, they need to see that there’s actually a benefit to themselves. So what can cultured meat offer them that meat from animals can’t?”

Bryant thinks there are a couple benefits companies can focus on to convert those looking for personal benefits from cultured meat. First, they should emphasize how much cleaner meat is from cellular agriculture is compared to traditional animal agriculture products.

“That serves to highlight that meat produced in this way, unlike meat from animals, doesn’t have these pathogens in there, doesn’t have traces of antibiotics and other nasty stuff that you get when you chop up an animal,” said Bryant.

They could also focus on a better nutritional profile.

“This is something that a lot of cultured meat producers are considering,” said Bryant. “Can we produce cultured meat that doesn’t have saturated fat? Unlike meat from animals. Can we improve it by offering other micronutrients and vitamins in a way that we can add things to cultured meat in a way that we can’t add things to meat from animals?”

You can listen to the full conversation with Chris Bryant in Marina Schmidt’s Red to Green podcast by clicking play below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe!

You can also read the transcript below.

Marina Schmidt

Chris, you’re also working with companies. How are you working with them? What are you doing? With whom are you working?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, that’s right. So I just recently finished my PhD at the University of Bath and I’m now consulting through my company, Bryant Research Ltd, with a number of nonprofits and also alternative protein companies in the animal food replacement space. I’ve done work with the charity Viva!, uh, The Good Food Institute and also Faunalytics.

And I’ve been working with companies as well. I’ve worked with The Better Meat co, also Aleph Farms, the cultured meat company in Israel and the cultured dairy company Formo. Previously known as Legendairy, a cultured dairy company in Germany.

So my work with these nonprofits and companies is generally to do with identifying the best kind of markets and messaging for the strategies for speeding up dietary change for alternative protein companies. It’s who’s going to be buying their products and cutting down on meat. And for charities that can be, you know, who to reach out to with advocacy and what kind of messages to put in front of people that they will wake up and change their behaviors.

Marina Schmidt

So Chris, give us a little overview of how the current state of consumer acceptance is. What is the research saying? How many people are actually up to eating cultured meat?

Chris Bryant

Yeah. So, the research is showing that in most markets we have about one in five people very enthusiastic about cultured meat that they would buy it with you know, few conditions and little other information. Whereas others can be quite skeptical. They might be later adopters.

They’re also known as laggards. And importantly, currently most people actually don’t know about cultured meat. So most people aren’t aware that this is something that exists. We also see that increased awareness is something that’s related to increased acceptance. So for people who are more familiar with cultured meats, they’re more likely to say that they would eat it.

That’s something encouraging in terms of the rate of acceptance kind of changing over time as people got more familiar with the product

Marina Schmidt

Hmm. I’ve been talking with, all of my friends about cultivated meat, obviously, and they’ve been hearing enough of it. And one of my good friends, I would call him very open-minded, but he was actually against it, the first time that he heard of it. And he said, after hearing about it, the second, third, fourth, or fifth time, he warmed up to the idea.

He wouldn’t have been fond of it at first, but it was important for him to be repeatedly exposed to the messaging and the benefits of it to then actually become familiar with it and loosen up this, this skepticism around it, is that also reflected in your research?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, absolutely. We see this kind of familiarity effect going on, both in quantitative and qualitative research. So on the quantitative front, as I mentioned, we can see just quite a strong correlation between familiarity and acceptance. People who have a more familiarity or more likely to say that they’d eat it.

And then also in focus groups, many times focus groups observe exactly what you’re describing. You know, it’s very similar to what we see in other areas as well. There are parts of psychology demonstrating this kind of mere exposure effect, right.

Where you will develop a more positive attitude to something just merely by encountering it more frequently. I think another important part of that picture, as well is the social transmission or the social construction we could say, of what is edible and also what is ethical.

So these are socially constructed ideas. There are things which humans could eat, but which we don’t consider edible. In terms of just being normal to eat, right? And so one thing that that’s something that’s going to change. And then the other part is the ethical part, where, as I mentioned, many people are kind of, post-hoc justifying the killing of animals for meat because they want the meat.

But once you have a system where you can have the meat and you don’t have to kill the animals, that motivation behind the motivated reasoning kind of melts away. And so this could, I think, pave the way for people to have a more honest, ethical conversation about killing animals for food. If we can say, if we don’t, you know, if the conversation is not to say killing animals for food, getting animals for meat is bad, and therefore you’ve got to stop eating meat. But rather to say killing animals, meat is bad and therefore we need to move towards producing meat in a different way. I think that’s much more acceptable to a lot of people.

Marina Schmidt

So the mere exposure effect seems to allude to the importance of companies communicating about it early and a lot. But the question is, well, how do they communicate about it? As you just said, we can go the route of talking about the ethics. We can talk about the sustainability aspects, probably various other routes.

And in the end, most food is talked about actually in terms of texture and features, benefits directly experienced by the consumer when they eat it. So based on the research that you’ve also reviewed, what is the best route to take, to communicate the benefits of cultivated meat?

Chris Bryant

So there were some conditions, as you mentioned, which will be just necessary preconditions for people wanting to eat cultured meat. They’ll need to find it to be a good taste, acceptable in terms of price, and also be confident that it’s safe by regulations or, or whatever else. In terms of communicating about the benefits there, yeah, there’s an interesting thing going on here where most people find benefits to animals and to a slightly lesser extent to the environment, to be the most obvious benefits of cultured meat, right? These are the things that everyone kind of gets it. We’re making meat without animals and therefore that’s good for the animals.

In terms of their impact on people’s purchase intentions and actual food, decision-making, it seems like there are other benefits which could be more important to highlight. Say for example it seems like those earliest adopters are most enthusiastic about the kind of ethical benefits animals and the environment, as I mentioned.

But for the more skeptical consumers, they need to see that there’s actually a benefit to themselves. So what can cultured meat offer them that meat from animals can’t? And there are a couple of ways that companies can go with that. The first, as I mentioned is to talk about the purity and cleanliness of cultured meat.

This was part of the thinking behind the term clean meat which has kind of come and gone in the industry. But that serves to highlight that meat produced in this way, unlike meat from animals, doesn’t have these pathogens in there, doesn’t have traces of antibiotics and other nasty stuff that you get when you chop up an animal.

Another thing that’s discussed in terms of offering consumers like personal, tangible benefits is nutritional enhancements. And this is something that a lot of cultured meat producers are considering. Can we produce cultured meat that doesn’t have saturated fat? Unlike meat from animals. Can we improve it by offering other micronutrients and vitamins in a way that we can add things to cultured meat in a way that we can’t add things to meat from animals?

So providing these kind of tangible personal benefits, I think is going to be important in communicating about cultured meats.

Marina Schmidt

Hmm. You know, I always find it quite interesting to take examples from related fields. And I have a background in technology history. I found that, regarding bicycles, for example, most people think that this is just something that was invented. And then people just said, oh, amazing, a bicycle, and started using bicycles, but the invention of a bicycle was actually a 19 year long tedious process in which the branding and the reaction of consumers had just as much of an influence on how it developed as the technical part of it.

So there was one interesting development during this 19 year long process where the bicycle industry with tires wanted to promote these bicycles to women specifically. Because they were saying, well, it’s more safe and therefore you should be using that. they wanted to get this market, but what ended up happening is that back in the day, men were saying, I don’t want a bicycle that is for a woman. I want an adventurous bicycle. And what was supposed to increase the market share was actually decreasing the market share of the safer bicycle with tires.

And I find it interesting to see these backlash effects, well intended. Do you see that something like this could happen by over focusing on selling to vegans in that way or selling to people based on morals?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, excellent, excellent question. I think there has been a kind of strange obsession with the reaction of vegetarians and vegans to cultured meat. I think a part of that is just that people like to cross-examine a vegetarian, right, see if they’re going to be consistent with the given reasons. You know, now we can have meat, but it didn’t come from an animal, and what do you think of that? And it’s quite intuitive, I think for reporters to think, this is an issue which presumably vegetarians care about. But actually the consumer data tends to tell a bit of a different story.

Vegetarians and vegans often understand the benefits of cultured meat and might even be excited about them, but actually most meat avoiders are not really interested in eating cultured meat. For most people who have given up meat already, they’re not seeing cultured meat necessarily as a way to start eating meat again. But rather we see that the most enthusiastic cultured meat future consumers are the heavy meat-eaters of today. So unlike other animal product replacements for example, plant-based meats, we tend to see that plant based products, they can be more appealing to females, and also are more appealing to vegetarians, vegans people who are at least flexitarian you know, meat, reducing. Whereas cultured meat on the other hand seems to be most appealing to males and also to heaviest meat eaters.

And I think that that is a good thing, firstly, because we don’t really have anything to gain by selling cultured meat to vegetarians. What we really are interested in doing is displacing demand for meat from animals, right? And so going after meat eaters is what you want to be doing. But more importantly than that, perhaps as you mentioned, we don’t want cultured meat to come to be seen as a product for vegetarians in a way that some of these plant-based products in the past may have suffered, the vegetarian option. Well, if I’m a meat eater, that’s just not for me. And so I think that cultured meat being meat and being marketed as such and in that way is going to be the best in terms of appealing to those heavy meat-eating consumers.

Marina Schmidt

I’m gonna say something that’s actually gonna be published later during the podcast So in a future episode, Jack Bobo will talk about it’s not just a topic of influencing consumer acceptance, but also influencing the whole mood, the whole environment in the industry.

So specifically how corporates perceive it and how willing corporates are to adopt the technology. And my personal opinion is that from innovation history and technology history, we can learn that big corporations and established players have an incredible power to stall innovation. And so it’s super important to go for collaboration and Jacob Bobo is arguing against clean meat and against talking about any benefits against conventional meat. So it’s cleaner because conventional meat is dirty because it creates an atmosphere of friction and it reduces the potential of collaboration.

What would you respond to that?

Chris Bryant

I think that there definitely is something to be said for that there’s a lot of cultured meat companies who have investments from, or kind of partnerships with conventional meat producers. And of course those companies are incredibly important in terms of accessing the meat markets. It’s definitely better to have those companies kind of with you rather than against you.

But at the same time, I think that whether there are benefits to a cultured meat over conventional meat we need to be strident in highlighting them and showing that there are reasons to want to move away from conventional meat production.

It might not be a particularly strategic thing for a company trying to make partnerships but I think that it is for us to be vocal in our criticisms of the animal production methods today.

Marina Schmidt

Are there differences in the populations that are interested in cultivated meat? So you were alluding to men. Did you see other cultural differences that influence it?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, there were a few sort of demographic factors which predict higher acceptance of cultured meat. As you mentioned, we tend to see slightly higher acceptance amongst men compared to women. And we tend to see higher acceptance amongst heavier meat eaters, compared to vegetarians and vegans. And there’s a few other things that we can see as well.

Generally, younger consumers are more open to eating cultivated meat compared to consumers who are, perhaps, a bit more set in their ways with respect to meat consumption in older groups. We can also see that people living in cities and people who have higher levels of education, people who tend to be left leaning politically, these are all groups which tend to be more open to eating cultured meat.

So that was kind of painting a picture of the kinds of early, early adopters of this technology, which we might expect to see.

Marina Schmidt

What are the most common concerns and criticisms or barriers to acceptance?

Chris Bryant

As you mentioned, many people have concerns about naturalness and kind of safety of cultured meat. Many people have this suspicion really, of science being involved in their food. This is something that we’ve seen with respect to other food technologies as well.

I think that regulators definitely need to have robust processes in place in order to give consumers the confidence that cultured meat they can buy is going to be safe and nutritious for them. And companies need to be transparent in their communications and also clear and highlighting the benefits of cultured meat over conventional meat.

I think that it’s likely that the kind of level of concern on these topics will wane over time. Of course this is going to be something where the concern is strongest, where the familiarity is lowest. And then once people have the opportunity to try cultured meat for themselves, or perhaps they know people who have tried it, it’s been on the market for a few years. It’s going to simply seem a bit less strange, which I think is at the core of a lot of those kinds of intuitive concerns.

Marina Schmidt

So I think one thing that we need to address is that consumer attitudes are not linear, so they can also turn around and change. Just as we see with, for example, vaccines becoming a more polarized issue and people previously not having strong opinions, actually we’re having positive opinions, maybe changing their mind about them.

How much do you see the topic of potential fake news, of conspiracy theories, of scandals being an issue for the industry? How much do you think is crisis communication something that cultured meat companies should invest in early?

Chris Bryant

So there’s there’s a few studies which have looked at kind of technology adoption of similar technologies or technologies which seem to have a lot of promise for mankind, but have had some problems with our adoption. The Sentience Institute has done a wonderful series of case studies looking at GM foods, biofuels and also nuclear power. So, these are three examples of things where there’s really a lot of potential for good to be done on some of the major issues that we’re facing today. And yet they have kind of had problems with respect to adoption and public perception and so on.

One of the lessons from those studies is that if there are safety issues, they’re perceived as much worse if they relate to things that people already had safety concerns about. I do think that it’s worth companies investing in having solid plans for communicating about cultured meat technology. And in particular we do need to be aware that some consumers will be pushing back against… well, first of all, we won’t be able to sell to everybody straight away. There will be some people who need to take time to come around to the idea. And also we can see that initially the quantity is going to be lower and the price is going to be higher than for conventional meats. And so we kind of have the space to focus the sales, just on those people who are enthusiastic about buying it.

And hoping that we don’t have, kind of major pushback from consumers who are not so enthusiastic about the technology. You mentioned vaccines and people sort of becoming skeptical about vaccines in particular through conspiracy theories and so on. Interestingly there is actually some research that shows rejection of cultured meat is associated with conspiratorial thinking.

So it does seem that the kind of person who might be an anti-vaxxer might also find themselves being an anti-cultured-meater. But yeah, I suppose we shall see.

Marina Schmidt

We even have the word for it now. An “anti-cultured-meater.”

Chris Bryant

Yeah. If, if I just coined the phrase, I feel I could have done better.

Marina Schmidt

So how does the consumer acceptance vary in different countries and how’s it influenced by religion?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, really interesting, really interesting question about religion. First of all, I’d say that we do see pretty solid markets for cultured meat products in many countries around the world. We’ve done studies in European countries, in America and in Asian countries as well. And we see that in all of those countries, there’s a decent number of people who already say that they’d be willing to eat cultured meat.

There are a few religions around the world that have, kind of, specific prescriptions about their adherence, meat consumption; Buddhism and Hinduism. Often people who follow these religions actually don’t eat meat. And for these people, these could be some of the vegetarians who we discussed before, who may now have a source of ethically produced meat, but it didn’t require an animal to die. So in those religions, as I understand it, there actually aren’t explicit rules about meat consumption, but many of the adherence interpreted it as requiring vegetarianism. And so they, they do that. Presumably for those people, there’s some room for maneuver if they wanted to change their diet.

And more specifically than that, and more kind of in the weeds of the religious texts, I suppose, are Islam and Judaism. So these are two other religions with specific rules about meat consumption and explicitly in this case, we have upwards of a billion Muslims around the world who are required to eat Halal meat only, which has been slaughtered in a ritual slaughter by having a throat slit. And it’s something like a similar process of ritual slaughter for producing kosher meat in the Jewish faith. And in both of these cases, it’s kind of interesting because the religious rules around slaughtering animals for meat appear to have come from a concern for animal welfare, right? At the time when these rules were developed, if you want to kill an animal, slitting its throat was probably the quickest way, and least suffering way of doing that.

And of course at the times when these rules were developed those who developed them didn’t necessarily anticipate the creation of meat which could be separated entirely from animals. So you kind of come to an interesting impasse where cultured meat has not come from a slaughtered animal.

And yet it may now not be compliant with some aspects of those religious requirements, which were kind of to do with animal welfare in the first place. So it is likely the cultured meat will be acceptable in a Halal and Kosher forms. It is feasible to make cultured meat, which kind of ticks those boxes. According to religious scholars in the area, we will be able to have Kosher cultured meat and Halal cultured meats. Although the other question which comes up with respect to those two dietary requirements is about pork. Pork is, not allowed in Judaism and Islam. And the question becomes, could it be, could you have kind of kosher bacon if it was made by a cultured meat as opposed to taken from a pig? I think that the jury is still out on that one.

Marina Schmidt

So in your research, you are also mentioning reasons why people don’t care about reducing their meat consumption. Could you give a brief overview of the reasons why?

Chris Bryant

As I experienced the problem, myself, meat is just quite nice to eat, right? And so the idea of giving up meat, in many people, produces an automatic kickback reaction. The ones who reflectively give reasons justifying eating meats, they don’t want to come to the conclusion that they’ll stop eating meat. And so all of their reasoning and thinking about the issue kind of works backwards from there. So this is called in psychology, motivated reasoning, and yeah, it’s a very well demonstrated phenomenon. And in particular, with respect to meat consumption it has been shown in a couple of experiments.

One really neat experiment, which demonstrates this well, is this set up where they ask people about the moral value of cows; whether they think that cows deserve moral consideration. And there are two conditions in the experiment. In the first condition, people are given some nuts to snack on before they answer the question. And in the other condition, people are given beef jerky. And perhaps you can guess the punchline here. The people who were given beef jerky were less likely to say that cows deserved moral consideration and can feel pain and so on. So actually the food that they had been randomly assigned to eat changed their beliefs about cows.

So it’s this quite remarkable process and we can see similar things as well. People are more likely to order a vegetarian option if menus say cow or pig instead of beef or pork. Right? The idea that this is actually coming from a dead animal, it’s kind of gross to most people. And you know, we have a phrase in English that nobody likes to see how the sausage is made.

Definitely the case with respect to actual sausages.

Marina Schmidt

Totally. And I think you also mentioned the scale in sensitivity.

Chris Bryant

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the idea that basically humans are not very good at processing very large numbers of things.

We kind of become insensitive to changes in scale beyond a certain quite low point. And actually it can end up kind of working against us. So there’s an experiment which demonstrates this phenomenon where people are asked how much money they would be willing to donate to save some birds from an oil spill.

And there were a few different conditions where people are asked how much they’d be willing to donate to save. In one condition, 200 birds in one condition, 2000, and in one condition, 20,000. Right? So each condition it’s like an order of magnitude more birds that you could save. And what they found is that people didn’t differ between those conditions in terms of how much they were willing to donate.

So the 20,000 birds was no more compelling than the 200 birds in terms of how much people were willing to give to alleviate the suffering. Right? If we’re being rational about it, it ought to be a hundred times more compelling, but it wasn’t. And we can see this as well in some kind of charity appeals where charities you know, are aware of this effect, and will often use marketing materials and so on which refer to a single identifiable victim.

It’s much more effective to talk about one young girl whose life has been affected by malaria say than it is to talk about however many millions of people die of malaria each year. It becomes a statistic rather than something people can relate to.

And as a result of that, we can’t really grasp the scale of what goes on in animal agriculture. And so as a result of that, we can’t really connect with the appropriate level of urgency, just isn’t available to us emotionally.

Marina Schmidt

So when we look at consumer attitudes could you, before we get into the details and the results give an overview of the scientific field, how far are we in researching consumer attitudes on cultivated meat?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, well, this is actually an area that’s come a long way in the past few years. I started my PhD on this topic in 2016 and just finished last year in 2020. And in that time there’s been dozens of studies on this topic in different countries and different experiments about naming and explanations and so on.

So the fields come quite a long way in the past five years or so. And actually we’re starting to understand quite well the kinds of markets that are out there and the kinds of messages that we ought to be using to get consumers excited about cultured meat.

Marina Schmidt

So we were talking about other related fields where technologies have been vilified by the public and where the negative aspects tend to be very prevalent versus the positive possibilities possibly downplayed in the media. And maybe you can share some of the insights from related fields like GMOs or biofuels or nuclear energy.

Chris Bryant

So yes, The Sentience Institute has a great series of case studies where they look at GMO’s biofuels and nuclear power which are all technologies which could have huge benefits, but they have faced significant problems with their adoption. And so we can really learn some lessons from those kinds of industries.

And some of the biggest from this work for the alternative protein space were to be transparent in the developments and the communications, not to develop the perception that they’re being secretive or hiding things from the public. To aim, to be somewhat flexible in their technological approach.

And in particular, you know, we see now many cultured meat companies, which are focusing on a specific part of the process. Some companies are specializing in producing cultured fats, for example, only. Others are leaning into developing the bioreactors. And it’s suggested that this kind of ecosystem, where there are different companies providing kind of different components of products and networks, provides a more robust ecosystem overall; compared to just a series of vertically integrated companies that are all trying to do everything in house.

Obviously then that gives you a kind of situation where if one of those companies fails, they are only one part of the network and there may be others which can provide the same inputs. Also, I think that a big thing is to focus on communicating the benefits and not to spend lots of time on very technical refutations of perceived issues and drawbacks. They found that with respect to the GM foods, when companies were putting out these very detailed, scientific explanations of why the technology was safe that was not able to be understood by most people and primarily just really drew attention to the safety issue, right? So it’s kind of thought that in terms of communications, it’s better to spend more time communicating the potential benefits than giving very detailed refutations to, and, lots of air time to perceived issues.

Marina Schmidt

Yes, we have this very thin line that we need to walk between not being secretive and not oversharing and giving TMI (too much information) on the wrong point. You know, there is a belief in the industry that if you just give people all the information and you are completely transparent, that people will be like “Oh, well, it’s, good, ot’s safe”. But at the same time in your research it was shown that the focus on high tech or a technology focused way of communicating, it’s actually turning people off.

And as far as I remember, it’s actually one of the worst ways to communicate about cultured meat. So how do we strike the line between, we should be transparent about the technology, but talking about technology is the most unsexy thing to do.

Chris Bryant

Right… Yeah. I think that has to do with the extent to which people feel like they understand the technology. And if it’s kind of explained in terms that are not understandable then that contributes to this sense of like, this is something that I don’t properly understand or can’t like assess whether I should be eating it.

And people are gonna feel that way. If it’s communicated in a way that they can understand there’s actually a great example of how this can happen in I guess science communication in general. Have you heard the thing about dihydrogen monoxide? It is a bit of a meme on the internet of like, this is a substance, which is found in all cancers and like an abundance of this will cause you to die. And of course it’s water, right? Dihydrogen monoxide is, is H2O water. And the idea of course, is that if you explain anything in these kinds of technical terms, you can make it seem scarier than it really is.

So, yeah, I think that’s definitely something to bear in mind when talking about food technology in general. I think that we need to communicate it in a way that people feel they can understand the basic idea and understand enough to know what they’re eating, but obviously we don’t expect most people to understand how to make cultured meat.

Right?

Marina Schmidt

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

Chris Bryant

You mean another $50 million? I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Marina Schmidt

A third $50 million. Can you, can you give me one of them?

Chris Bryant

I think that food technology is a very exciting area right now. I think that we’re kind of coming up on a number of tipping points with respect to food production because this is something which is very social. I think that there is a point when enough people get on board, everyone will get on board and it will kind of go in this S shape where we suddenly see very fast adoption.

And there will be some people at the end of the laggards who need substantial kind of social pressure to, to change their habits. But I do think that there’s going to be that kind of social tipping point and coupled with really, actually, more serious attention being given to the environmental harms from animal agriculture.

I think it’s only a matter of time before governments have to start doing something about this. And those two factors combined, I think, make alternative proteins, cultured meat and also plant-based meats and fermentation based and all of the other technologies which are looking to replace animal products. I think that they are looking like a pretty good investment now.

Marina Schmidt

Regarding food, sustainability or agriculture, what is an unusual opinion that you hold that many people would disagree with?

Chris Bryant

A really interesting thing in alternative proteins is insects. This is something that’s kind of spoken about sometimes alongside cultured meat and plant-based meat as like, you know, another thing that we could eat instead of environmentally damaging meat is insects.

Now there is some evidence to suggest that it is less intensive in terms of environmental outcomes to produce insects compared to other animals. Although there’s also some evidence to suggest that for the most part, Western consumers don’t really want to eat just like whole unprocessed insects, like it might be common in parts of Asia, for example. But some more kind of feasible products seem to be things like cricket flour, like these processed kind of products.

The issue is that the processing involved can be very energy intensive. To the point where be the case that insects producers end up wiping out the efficiency gains in terms of the extra processing that they need to do to make it acceptable for consumers. So that’s definitely something to bear in mind and I think be skeptical about insects.

The other part of that is an interesting ethical part. Basically killing animals for food, you can get about 200 meals from one cow. Whereas one chicken will give you just two meals, right? So in order to get the same amount of meat, you need to kill a hundred times as many chickens.

Because chickens are smaller and less similar to humans, I guess, and so harder to empathize with, they tend to be treated much worse in agriculture. And in much higher numbers. So, it’s actually quite a bit more ethical to eat beef than it is to eat chicken as a result of that. In terms of the amount of suffering associated with each.

Now my view is that it’s likely that insects are going to be to chickens as chickens are to cows in this kind of equation. And that by moving to eating even smaller animals, we’re going to multiply that kind of ethical problem again. And if we move towards farming and eating insects that could actually represent a step backwards ethically in terms of the numbers of animals that we’re, rearing for food.

And I get that it’s a little esoteric to think about insect suffering. But you know, I think that it’s something anyone can bring themselves to relate to. If you think, you wouldn’t want to find your kid picking the legs off a spider or something, you would think that’s kind of mean. And like that, you know, like, we’re speaking about the scale insensitivity before; you would need potentially trillions of insects in order to produce like a decent quantity of food globally.

So yeah, I think that the ethical implications of that could be pretty dire.

Marina Schmidt

Mm. Yeah. And then probably it’s also important to add to that the consideration of how environmentally unfriendly the meat is because with the environmental damage there’s another layer of harm added to it. So as beef is environmentally even less sustainable it does get a few minus points again and chickens are probably more sustainable in terms of conversion from input calories to output calories.

So it’s a, it’s a whole complicated mess. Let’s just, let’s just stop this. Let’s just move on. Let’s go plant-based and cultured and then we don’t need to worry about this.

Chris Bryant

That’s right. Yeah, we can we needn’t be counting the billions of animals. If we just move away from eating them altogether. Uh, I think that’s going to be best.

Marina Schmidt

Well, Chris, how can listeners connect with you?

Chris Bryant

I am on LinkedIn is probably the kind of professional space that I’m most active. You can find me on LinkedIn, if you search for Chris Bryant. I guess I have a LinkedIn URL that I could.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, well, we will put Chris’s LinkedIn profile and contact details on our website, redtogreen.solutions. And you will find everything if you click on this episode.

Chris Bryant

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, that’s much better than me trying to read out all of the numbers in my URL here.

Marina Schmidt

Thanks Chris, for being on Red to Green.

Chris Bryant

Thanks so much, Marina. It was a pleasure.

May 3, 2021

Food Tech Show Live: Beyond Launches 3.0

It’s another weekly news round up with the Spoon team and this week’s special guest, Ron Shigeta.

The stories/topics we discuss this week include:

As always, you can find to the Food Tech Show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also just click play below or download the episode direct to your device.

April 30, 2021

The Food Tech Show: The Future of Space Food

Feeding humans hurtling through space isn’t easy.

While today’s astronauts get to eat high quality cuisine made on earth by some of the world’s best cooks, space travel in the future will require entirely new approaches that can grow enough food in space to produce sufficient calories and nutrients for astronaut crews on multiyear interplanetary missions.

Which is why there’s growing interest from the space agencies from the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries to find new and novel food system concepts that can keep astronauts and eventually even permanent space inhabitants fed.

To discuss the current and future state of space food, I recently got together with Anjan Contractor, the CEO of BeeHex, a company who created a 3D pizza printer for NASA. Also joining us was Dane Gobel, the operations administrator for the Deep Space Food Challenge, a new initiative by NASA and the Canadian space agency to spur innovation in developing new food systems for long-term space travel.

Some of the things we discuss on the podcast:

The challenges of creating food systems for space
How astronauts need a variety of food types and nutrients (including fresh food) to maintain long term physiological and psychological health
How new technologies like cultivated meat and proteins will play a pivotal role in space food in the future
The requirements and goals of the Deep Space Food Challenge

And much more!

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen by clicking the player below.

April 29, 2021

Cell-Cultured Meat: Building Community, Safety and Brands With New Harvest’s Isha Datar

As cofounder of Clara Foods and Perfect Day, and now the Executive Director of New Harvest, Isha Datar has been working at the forefront of the cellular agriculture industry for a good part of the past decade.

Because of this, she’s the perfect first subject-matter expert to interview in Red to Green’s new podcast season on consumer acceptance of alt proteins.

In this interview, Red to Green’s Marina Schmidt goes deep with Datar into so many of the important issues facing the industry as new products built around cellular agriculture make their way from the labs to the consumer’s plate.

Some highlights from this in-depth conversation:

Consumer education about these products: How these new products are positioned to consumers is one of the biggest questions facing this industry today. In the interview, Datar recognizes how early the market is and that consumers will take time to form opinions about these new and sophisticated products. She also emphasizes how important storytelling, transparency and accountability will be for the industry to get it right.

Datar: “…How do we actually tell that story when it is so complex? It’s complex because there’s a lot of data that needs to back it up. It’s complex in that people are going to want to know how the product is made and have little detailed questions about it.

Like, was that initial cell sourced ethically, what was the life of the animal? You know, all of these little things that go so deep that you could never tell that whole story on a package and it will never be satisfying on a package. So we’re already tasked with, how do we tell this complex story of like the whole reason why we want to grow food from cells and that why you should participate in it by consuming these products.

I think there’s a lot of room for creativity and I don’t want to, set us on a path that is unnecessary, kind of like the one where we should be doing all market research all the time. Because I think the bigger problem is about transparency. Another kind of factor is, how much measurement do we want to do? There’s a storytelling element, but then there’s also a self-governance element where, we want to hold ourselves accountable.”

The tension between IP protection and branding: Datar discusses how a conversation about branding will be integrally tied to the intellectual property developed by many of these new startups, but recognizes there’s a danger of over-westernization of the product framing, since so many startups are initially building products for advanced western economies.

Datar: “It’s worrying because everything we’ve talked about so far are nuggets and burgers, which are like hyper Western foods. It would be really sad to see a lot of culinary traditions turn into burgers and nuggets. And so IP protection really factors into what do we want, like the global adoption of cell ag to be, how do we really integrate cell ag into the world and solving global problems rather than how do we get the most people to eat a food?”

What the industry should be investing in today to scale: Datar believes the cell ag industry has underinvested in infrastructure for companies to scale up and sees an opportunity for service providers to fill this need.

Datar: “…my big thesis is that this industry, lacks infrastructure and infrastructure is public infrastructure that everybody can benefit from. And so if I had $50 million, I would build a pilot plant facility where several culture meat companies could use it to do their scale-up research to test how to get from a hundred-liter bioreactor to a thousand liter bioreactors before they start building their own facilities because it’s really expensive to do that type of research.”

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch the full interview below as well as read the transcript of the entire conversation below.

This podcast is produced by Red to Green, who The Spoon is partnering with this season as they look at how the industry will promote and create consumer acceptance of cell cultured meat and other alt proteins.

Cell-cultured meat: building transparency, community and brand with Isha Datar from New Harvest

Watch this video on YouTube

Marina Schmidt

Isha. It’s fantastic to be talking to you again about consumer acceptance.

Isha Datar

You too, Marina, what a treat!

Marina Schmidt

How come that we were talking about this?

Isha Datar

Yes, it’s a good question. So yeah, we don’t really participate in these consumer acceptance conversations, but we do witness them. And so I could not pass up the opportunity to offer some unsolicited commentary about what I think we should be doing with consumer acceptance as someone who doesn’t really have a hand in it.

Marina Schmidt

So before we get deep into this, let’s do some groundwork, like, what is the current industry consensus on this whole naming topic? Like the nomenclature, should we be calling it cultivated, cell-cultured, cultured? What is now the right thing to do right now?

Isha Datar

I don’t think there is a consensus. I think there’s a lot of people saying that their words are the consensus, but I don’t think there, I don’t think there is a consensus, and I, I don’t think we should be surprised about that in the field, as this field matures, there’s going to be times when we come together and times when we differentiate.

And I think it’s still a little bit unknown where the coming together and the differentiation happens when it comes to terminology. and that’s because I think there’s lots of different types of terminology. There’s the terminology on the front of the package, the branded terminology, there is the product category, there’s the name that’s going to be on the back of the product, and the ingredients label.

And I, haven’t seen a really, really good kind of separation of what all those terms should be and how those should be addressed and which ones require coming together and which ones don’t. so I think there’s a couple of layers of detail around the naming thing that haven’t been sorted out. It’s been kind of summarized into.

We need to come up with a name that everyone loves, but I’m not sure that thinking is the right thinking to solve the problems that we want to solve.

Marina Schmidt

So let’s take a step back and look at what has happened in the cultivated meat field. Since our last talked in, let’s say June 2020. So you’re really plugged in into what’s happening. What were the highlights of what has been going on in the field?

Isha Datar

Yeah. And I’m like, what, what happened? At least we were in a pandemic. So it was maybe limited, but actually, lots of things happened. I mean, what comes to mind because I was so immersed in it was our safety initiative. That really took off between June and about now which was coming together of 50 cultured meat companies to work on describing the cultured meat manufacturing process and describing the safety considerations against that manufacturing process. So that was a big thing, but another huge thing which was tied into that was, well not tied into it, but simultaneous, was the Singapore regulatory approval of Eat Just’s chicken nugget product.

And then in addition to that, I think we’ve seen a lot of news coming from all over the place of more investment going into the field and people beginning to build pilot plants. And so I consider that to be a really big milestone for the field because we’re now really considering the scale and are truly on the cusp of figuring out the scale issues, in our space.

Oh, and also more related to the topic of this podcast. I’ve seen so many more studies about naming in the last maybe month or two than I have ever in history. So that is becoming a very, very live conversation, probably very much related to the regulatory approval.

Marina Schmidt

Do you feel that the topic of nomenclature is already talked about enough like it’s chewed through?

Isha Datar

Oh yes, that’s a great question. I think the topic has been chewed through with one lens, but it has not been chewed through enough lenses. I mean, that, it seems like everyone is addressing this topic of nomenclatures with the same tools of let’s do market research and let’s do market research on you know, population demographics, representative of the whole population. And so there’s a lot of assumptions built into that already. And I think one of the assumptions is, this is a product for every person who eats food. And the second one is that market research is the way forward for a product like this. And this podcast is where I’d like to like, maybe poke some holes in that thesis and suggest that maybe this product is so transformative, that market research is not the way to go. And that market research is actually pulling in way too much inspiration from how the existing food industry does business.

And instead, we should release ourselves from the expectations that’s how new foods enter the world and try something completely creativity-driven. So I think, on one hand, we’re being informed by what consumers say, but consumers always just recycle past experiences.

And, there is always an appetite for new experiences and I’m sure someone would argue with me quite deeply on that, but I, I think there is a lot of creativity to be had here that does not come from consumer data. And then the second point is, I’m not so sure that companies should be not targeting their audience from the beginning.

And so, what my strategy would be, and it’s easy for me to talk about this because I don’t have a company. But my strategy would be to figure out who are the early adopters who are going to be really excited to eat my product that I’m making and amplify that to the world and put out into the world “I ate Isha’s burgers and absolutely love them,” and tweet about it and like really evangelize the product from the voice of the consumer. And I haven’t seen that kind of segmentation happen so far.

Marina Schmidt

How has the view on consumer acceptance developed in the field of cultured meat or overall cellular agriculture?

Isha Datar
I think the field of consumer acceptance, it developed in a weird way. And what I mean by that is, to me, the question of consumer acceptance is absolutely a question for industry to own because they are the ones on the line selling the product, you know, driving market share. All their interests are aligned for that to happen.

And so for me, as a nonprofit that focuses a lot on the academic side of things, when we’re thinking about naming, we’re thinking about what are the search terms and keywords that could bring up publications? So that’s why we kind of stayed away from what would be on packages because the audience that we are serving is a scientific population, because we want to see more scientists and researchers enter the field So I think the fields naming thing started a little bit differently because that initial debate did not originate from the industry. And it has now turned into industry kind of doing more and more data to test now these old terms that no one is using anymore, but in this like due diligence way.

So it, so in some way, the stage was set that we need to be doing these, these like large scale surveys as a way to create data that informs what the naming is. But of course, a survey is, is only kind of reflecting what consumers think they want. So I don’t really know how, how useful it is.

And I think we really need to mix it up. So an example of mixing it up is Wild Type did a really interesting kind of naming survey recently. And instead of just surveying people, they actually looked at what were the appearances of these names and various social media platforms like Tumblr and Twitter and so on, which I thought was just interesting because it is really reflecting on a real-world, “What are people talking about right now?” I think this is the kind of creative thinking we need to be working with How are you going to get your products to people, maybe your product is not going to be available in the store and maybe it’s actually purchased online. In which case you want to see a certain type of virality online, and you should be thinking about terms that work better there.

So, there’s a lot of room for growth and, and bifurcation, in how we arrive at these names.

Marina Schmidt

Well, with other novel food products, we’ve seen quite a tricky path to adoption, like soy, for example, and even organic soy still has quite a hard time with certain consumer groups or have associated ones with problems in the environment, et cetera. And it’s, it’s tricky because once opinions are formed they’re hard to move, especially public opinions.

I think in the industry, there are some people who would say we don’t really need to worry about consumer acceptance because once people actually get to taste it, they’ll be like, oh, this is awesome.

And they will just go with it. On the other hand, there are other people who say, well, actually this isn’t guaranteed. There may be demonstrations against it. There may be a rise of conspiracy theories and fake news and all of these self-proclaimed health gurus who are gonna tell you all about it.

So where on the scale are you, and how much do you feel is the active education of consumers and good branding essential for the success of the whole industry?

Isha Datar

I mean, they are paramount to the success of the whole industry. And to go back to your point about soy and people changing their mind. I think people actually do change their mind quite a lot, especially across generations and time. We had a speaker, the food historian Nadia Berenstein at our conference in 2018, I think.

And she gave a talk on margarine, which is one of the first kind of animal product replacements. You know, a replacement for butter that is made without animals. She talked about how the history of margarine’s adoption is up, down, up, down, up, down. Sometimes, actually, very few times was that up down related to anything intentional by sellers of margarine.

And instead, it was things like a famous person eating it and having a quote. I think it was like a first lady being like, “Oh, I love margarine.” And that changed the adoption of it. We do kind of get thrown into the world of uncontrollable factors, deciding the up and down sales and marketing of, of the product. So I wouldn’t make, I think we shouldn’t put too much pressure on ourselves that, if we don’t launch the marketing, right, it could all fail.

I think, worse than that are things like if safety is not correct, it could all fail. If people feel lied to, it could all fail. And then there’s a second part of your question, which was about education.

So, so here I’ll, I’ll walk it back to our safety initiative a little bit. So as we did the safety initiative, we realized that. existing policy and existing governance and so on.

And safety demonstration does not actually capture the benefits of cell ag. The mission that I believe is uniting, you know, all 80 something over a hundred companies in this space right now, which is that we move away from using animals in food products that we could create food products that are more sustainable and more controllable, and, have fewer externalizations to society that are negative, such as epidemic viruses, et cetera, et cetera.

And those benefits are not going to be captured by any existing policy. Like those benefits are entirely our story to tell. And, how do we actually tell that story when it is so complex? It’s complex because there’s a lot of data that needs to back it up. It’s complex in that people are going to want to know how the product is made and have little detailed questions about it.

I think there’s a lot of room for creativity and I don’t want to, set us on a path that is unnecessary, kind of like the one where we should be doing all market research all the time. Cause I, I think the bigger problem is about transparency. Another kind of factor is, how much measurement do we want to do? There’s a storytelling element, but then there’s also a self-governance element where, we want to hold ourselves accountable.

How do we do that? Who is the governing body that holds this field accountable? And I think these are all questions that need to be asked essentially within the next two years or so because once a product is on the market, it’s going to be really hard to reel those products back into a self-governing structure.

And it’ll just be like a free for all. And we’ll try and govern retroactively and it’ll be really crazy and messy. There’s a lot of things that need to be solved. And I think New Harvest could have a role in solving those things, especially in terms of equipping policymakers with the data and understanding to think about these things, but at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to, you know, we are a mission-driven industry today. We may not be a mission-driven industry forever, but since we are one today, how can we rally together, create accountability structures for ourselves and like make sure that we are actually moving towards a future where we don’t need to consume animals for food.

And so that, that’s my big thesis that I want to put out in this podcast is like the real sets of timeliness around this thing. Like it is a hundred percent related to consumer acceptance because consumer acceptance is not just about marketing. It is about transparency and self-governance and accountability.

Marina Schmidt

So Isha do you think branding is going to become even more important in the future or what’s your take on that?

And did you see anything develop in terms of IP being opened up?

Isha Datar

So I’ve been thinking, a lot about branding recently because I spend a lot of time thinking about IP in, in this space. And just to be kind of clear and out there, I would like to see a world in which cellular agriculture does not rely on a lot of IP protection because I think that for us to achieve our greater goals of change we want to see in the world that IP protection could actually stand in the way of that.

And an example is, you know, what if the most amazing product is marketed in the worst way, like that is a huge missed opportunity because it’s excluded other, kind of marketing, of a product and technology that could be incredibly transformative. So when I think about branding and marketing, I am reminded of the smiling curve, which is kind of like a business management thing.

And really it’s a curve of value-adding where on the top of one side of the curve is value through R & D and IP protection. On the other top of the curve is value-added through brand and marketing. And at the bottom of the curve is like, just manufacturing. And I would love to see a norm develop in the field where we see more and more companies excited to differentiate by brand and marketing and add value through brand and marketing rather than through IP protection.

Because I think at the end of the day there’s going to be a lot of brands. There’s going to be a lot of markets, like different target markets to serve. And there’s a lot of ways that we can really get products to people in with, with creativity and like a lot of product differentiation. Like the person who’s interested in holistic foods and healthy foods compared to the person who’s interested in like high tech, precision, like fitness, you know, Different, but similar.

And I think that IP protection is actually a potential threat to the change you want to see in the world. So, I don’t know how companies feel about this, but in my vision of the future, I would love to see a world where companies all over the world could use the technology to create products that are relevant to the people surrounding them.

So, you know, how do you create products that are culturally relevant in African countries? How do you create products that are culturally relevant in India? In other Southeast Asia, they’re all going to be different. And with too much IP protection, we might find ourselves in this like deep westernization of food globally.

And I mean, it’s worrying because everything we’ve talked about so far are nuggets and burgers, which are like hyper Western foods. It would be really sad to see a lot of culinary traditions turn into burgers and nuggets. And so IP protection really factors into what do we want, like the global adoption of cell ag to be, how do we really integrate cell ag into the world and solving global problems rather than how do we get the most people to eat a food? So yeah, branding is top of mind because I think it’s kind of this counterpart to IP.

So it’s very complicated. But we kind of need to unpack it because, at the end of the day, a lot of the investors see IP as the only way to protect their investment. So, maybe the thought leadership needs to happen amongst investor groups rather than the companies.

So I don’t know, I haven’t really thought it through entirely because I think it’s a pretty complex thing. I don’t know what the solution looks like. I think it’s a solution that would have to be co-created with people who really understand all of this stuff and a lot of different players.

Marina Schmidt

And when you were talking to a lot of the companies in the field recently over the past month, what was your impression? How important do they see consumer acceptance? Are they actively working on this? Is this on their plate more at the top priorities?

Isha Datar

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’ve begun a, I want to say ritual, but I shouldn’t call it a ritual. I’ve begun a thing of just undergoing what I guess I’d call a listening campaign, where we have these one-on-one conversations with leaders in the field and ask them, ”what are your concerns?” Like what could a group like new harvest do?

How can we be most useful? And in talking to so many different players, it’s amazing what the themes are. Like they come back with themes that are really related to this podcast. So, you know, naming is a big issue and there seems to be a lot of different opinions about it.

Like, what is the study? What is the study design in finding that name, know who are the target markets and why don’t we pursue something totally radical, and creative to get our name out there and like an example of something radical and creative, which probably goes against what your marketing data would show is, you know, Soylent calling their product Soylent. You know, the way Soylent entered the world was kind of like, a Reddit forum type of community, like a very online community that was playing with their Soylent food.

And they were like putting different proportions of different this much protein this much, you know, they were really involved with the food production on their end and like toying with it. And they’re, I don’t want to say it’s a culinary aspect, but it is kind of a culinary aspect.

And that vibrant community was like the starter culture for Soylent becoming popular.

Marina Schmidt

In between just because maybe some listeners don’t know about it, Soylent is a meal replacement drink. And as far as I am informed, I think the most successful worldwide, the most sold one, and actually the guy, the CEO, I think he is full-on into completely replacing all of one’s meals with Soylent, like just eradicate food, unless it’s really just for enjoyment.

So it’s quite, it’s quite advanced in its opinion. So,

Isha Datar

Yeah, but what I, what I loved about Soylent is that there are lots of meal replacements out there Boost and Ensure and all those things. But, Soylent is not a meal replacement for if you’re trying to go on a diet. Or if you’re in the hospital and need to gain weight.

Soylent is just simply for I’m too tired to care about what I’m eating and I want to, get perfect nutrition as quickly as possible. And there is a huge market for it. It probably is a market that kind of resembles, the first adopters of cell-cultured meat products. And how do you really rally a community around your product rather than, be out there in the world, selling meat on the meat product shelves in the same way.

So, and I mean, Soylent, there’s no way that Soylent would ever come back on a consumer survey as the number one, the number one pick. So that’s an example of like really targeted marketing and this idea of entering your product marketing with like an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset, which is something we talk about at New Harvest all the time, you know, a scarcity mindset is how do we get the most people to eat this product. An abundance mindset is how do we make sure the people who love it eat this product and the people who won’t love it, won’t eat the product. That’s what we need to be driving forward with over the next few years because if you can please that group, everyone will come afterward in a different way.

But I feel like I went off track and you asked me a different question. Is that possible?

Marina Schmidt

No, I absolutely love it. I’m digging it.

Actually, I really liked the point that you had regarding the community topic. So it’s quite interesting. A lot of companies say they have a community like a deco store around my corner has a poster with “join our community and type in your email.” Right? that’s not a community.

That’s not a community because the sign of a community is when the individuals who are part of it are not just connected to the company but are interconnected amongst each other. So I really like this idea of cultivated meat companies getting involved in the community building and getting ambassadors onboard, getting influential people who have a following to also feel like they’re part of it.

And we see that a lot with plant-based companies now getting investments from people like Oprah and that just moves the public opinion towards it. How important do you see this influencer topic?

Isha Datar

So to me, influencer is not my personal style. Like that’s, that’s not what would convince me that something is cool because to me that’s like old, that’s old fashioned marketing. That’s like, this is a paid spokesperson type of thing. But I think the idea of a real online community, like the Soylent community, is so compelling because there are so many layers of credibility.

The more people you have interacting with your product and manipulating your product and like talking about it. And so an example of, what I would love to see in this world is something that looks kind of like the New York Times cooking app, which you could argue maybe is not a community of people using the cooking app.

But when I look at a recipe, I can see the star rating and I open up the recipe and look at all the comments before I cook the product because, or so I cook the recipe because the commentary is way more valuable than the actual recipe itself. The commentary is, is this recipe good? And how do I make it good?

And what are the little minor adjustments that I need to make to do it? And you see people talking about like, Oh yeah, this needs salt. Yeah. I agreed with the person above and I added salt. That to me is an awesome way for these products to actually go from version 1.0, to 2.0 to 3.0 is to have a really rich community of people interacting with the product, cooking it.

Because that is what real buy-in is, is like you’re so bought into the product that you’re consuming it and you’re cooking it.

And you want to share that with the world. I love that you brought up that definition of community because we had been actually thinking a lot about that definition of community, especially last year wondering, is our donor base a community? Like they all interact with us, but do they interact with one another?

So yeah, I love that you wanted to go down that path. I actually hadn’t thought about it all that much, but I do think it’s a really, a really, really cool way to think about this. To quickly come back to the influencer topic, I, I find it interesting that you say that well it wouldn’t really convince you that’s right, because it would be for more for like the general audience.

Marina Schmidt

I think the ones that follow the celebrities on Instagram So I find that influencer marketing. In the old school way of buying the promotion. Yeah, that’s, that’s maybe not, not as interesting as actually getting authentic interest and authentic commitment.

And because with cultivated meat, we have a very unusual case This is not like your next app or the next kitchen gadget. It’s something that can have such an impressive effect on the future generations and sustainability, ethics, pandemic risks, like so many positive reasons that I think it could be possible to get really big names to promote it without even having this financial drive.

But just by the mere fact that by promoting it, they can actually do something positive

Isha Datar

Yes. I mean, actually, as you’re talking, I’m remembering and realizing that our safety initiative was made possible because Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition was one of our kind of funders getting it off the ground. And the characters that he plays are such an amazing example of a really aligned type of persona for this technology, where it doesn’t feel like someone, you know, it doesn’t feel like a misfit. So, yeah, maybe I should take back what I said a little bit because I have like a picture of that, but there is a lot of creativity in who you, who your influencer is, and who these people are. And I think through Footprint Coalition, RDJ is trying to put forward the idea, like I have this huge audience, how do I get them excited about technology that can change the world?

So yes, you’re absolutely correct. Marina, thank you for bringing it back to that.

Marina Schmidt

Well, we can also look at the plant-based side of things. Have you spotted differences in the communication or something that the cultivated meat companies could learn from plant-based companies? I feel like we always see the same celebrities when it’s related to veganism or vegetarians. It’s come to me to a point where like if that person appears, I, I already automatically think it’s like for a very sub-divided section of the population. And so I would actually say that the cultivated cell culture, whatever you wanna call it, meat industry should not look in that direction and not take an inspiration from the plant-based world because, we don’t want to bring in the baggage of activism and veganism and everyone’s opinions about it because I, you know, I think it’s still at the end of the day, a question if cell-cultured meat is vegan, you know, that’s still open-ended. So if it’s open-ended, let’s not put ourselves into that box from the beginning, and let’s try and think about things completely from scratch. Some people would argue that talking about a product that isn’t yet on the market is a wasted effort. What’s your take on that?

Isha Datar

I probably would be that person. I have been that person that talking about the product is a wasted effort, but I think there are types of conversations about products that are not a wasted effort. And an example of that is this breaking of the paradigm. So, you know, I, for example, was able to eat a steak chip that was made by Modern Meadow who no longer participates in cultured meat anymore.

But, eating the steak ship was incredible because I had never eaten a potato chip that was not made of potatoes. And it really brought to light the fact that we can really break down the boundaries of what meat is and create these culinary experiences we have never, ever seen before. And I think these are the things that we should be exploring as we consider consumers of products. What is the first product that will get the most people to try it for the first time?

And I think snack food is an example of something that will really break down the barriers of, yeah, sure. I mean, I can always buy a pack of chips, eat one or two and throw it away. And I don’t, I don’t feel invested in it. Whereas for me, if I was going to the store to buy, uh, you know, a pack of pork chops, like that’s dinner for tonight and like dinner is on the line for tonight.

And if we don’t like it, it is going to be a huge disaster and maybe I’m overthinking it. But I actually do think that way, like, I really don’t want dinner to be a disaster. Um, but a snack is like, come and go bonus and like a really great entry point for example. And so like, these are the things, the kind of conversations that I think are really valuable and important.

I think the questions and conversations that are less valuable are the, would you eat it? And then it’s like, well, what is it? And then you’re describing something that may or may not ever exist. Like it is exactly the same as meat. You know, I would, I would suggest that it is not exactly the same as meat and maybe we should de-risk the idea that we’re putting something exactly the same as meat, because there are some people who have a very, you know, careful palettes and will say, no, this is not meat. Like it’s 99% close, but it’s not meat. Um, how do we capture that population? I think we capture that population by putting out something that cannot be compared to anything.

Such as a chip or snack food, because then it’s like, do you like this? Or do you not like this? Not, is it the same? Is it not the same? There’s like a tiny, tiny thing that makes a difference, which is all the difference. But if you’re just like, do you, do you enjoy this product for what it is? Lets us differentiate it from the beginning. Then you’re asking a different question that has less of a negative answer.

Marina Schmidt

I like the snack idea. I think snacks are also things that are shared more often, and there’s more potential talk about that and just can imagine somebody just handing over a bag of, uh, cultivated meat chips to a friend or passing it through and everybody being like, Oh, well, okay. I’ll try a little one. In Singapore, it’s, it’s really popular. They have these really popular, salted, egg-flavored fish skin chips. Um, and I had them the other day. I’m like, these are so cool. Like it’s literally chips. Like it’s, it’s like crunchy and everything, but it’s fish, fish skin. And I was like, this would be a very cool cell-cultured food product, which is like, probably easier to create than a filet of fish.

Isha Datar

Um, but it’s very shareable. Like I wanted to buy it for my friends online and just like send it to their houses. Yeah, Isha, is there anything regarding the consumer acceptance that we haven’t touched upon that you find important to talk about?

No, I’ve had a really fun time chatting with you. It’s very hard for me to think of something we didn’t talk about. Well to come to the ending questions, you’ve already answered this one. Maybe, maybe your answer is different. You don’t need to remember your last answer. If you would have 50 million in what businesses would you invest in?

Isha Datar

$50 million?

Marina Schmidt

Yeah.

Isha Datar

Do I have to invest in businesses?

Marina Schmidt

I’ll make an exception.

Isha Datar

This is why I suggest we don’t, I don’t invest that in businesses because there’s a lot of investment in business. And because of the role that I play and what I see in my everyday kind of conversations and so on, my big thesis is that this industry, lacks infrastructure and infrastructure is public infrastructure that everybody can benefit from.

And so if I had $50 million, I would build a pilot plant facility where several culture meat companies could use it to do their scale-up research to test how to get from a hundred-liter bioreactor to a thousand liter bioreactors before they start building their own facilities because it’s really expensive to do that type of research.

You don’t want to be in that mid-range facility forever. And so to want to build that yourself is like, ah, how do I do it? And I’ve heard that there are not great contract organizations for doing that kind of scale-up work specifically for cell ag. So that’s what I would build is this like facility that is very much tuned to the needs of, of cell ag, where companies can use them to grow out of their kind of early-stage and into their okay, we’re putting products really on the market stage and, and really support that in-between period.

Marina Schmidt

Very interesting. Regarding food, sustainability, or agriculture, what is an unusual opinion that you hold that many people would disagree with?

Isha Datar

Things that people are surprised by is that I still eat all foods. I don’t know if it’s an unusual opinion, but to say that the sustainability of the world rests on individual purchasing decisions is unfair to consumers.

It goes back to the same thing of like, Oh, we’re using so much energy. You better turn off all the lights in your house. And like, you better not take you better take a five-minute shower instead of, you know, whatever 10-minute shower. And that’s unfair because those are, those are problems that could be solved with policy and innovation and dah, dah, dah, and the right incentives towards the right players.

Like there are much easier ways to solve that than to blame individual human beings for the state of the world when we do not control the state of the world. We control the state of our own tiny little worlds and that’s totally inappropriate. And we’ve seen it time and time again, like, you know, recycling doesn’t solve the problems that we hope it solves.

You know, it makes us feel kind of better. No, it’s not acceptable. And so I kind of eat meat because I want to be the average person and I want to be interacting with these products as an average person. And like I’ve absolutely gone through being vegetarian and being a vegan and all those things. And that’s great and I’m glad that people do it.

And I think it’s awesome that people do it, but yeah, i, I feel like there are people in power that could make that easier for many people and could flip a switch easier than me making a decision at a supermarket. So I don’t know, even if that’s an unpopular opinion, but I think it might be unpopular in my little sphere.

Marina Schmidt

It’s great to hear you talk about that and the most common objection to that is. yeah, but people should still, look at their consumption patterns and their behavior patterns. And I would say, yeah, they should. But the main lever for change is not within the hands of individual consumers.

I think the influence of consumers is in pushing companies to change, but imagine like all of the efforts and trying to turn off the water quicker when brushing our teeth would go into being active and organizations that keep corporations accountable, it would have a way bigger influence on the bottom line.

So in the last season that we did on plastic alternatives and sustainable food packaging, that was also one of the biggest takeaways. Seeing how corporations are using recycling to actually make everybody feel better about this whole thing and avoid regulation on it, or how BP was inventing the personal carbon footprint to say, well, we are only having a tiny carbon footprint.

It’s actually the personal carbon footprint of all our consumers. That’s their issue that they’re using our products and it’s so upside down. And it’s crazy how it creeps in. As always, there will be information. There will be links to further resources in the show notes on our website, redtogreen.solutions. Isha, how can listeners connect with you?

Isha Datar

They can literally email me at isha@new-harvest.org. They can follow New Harvest on Twitter, we’re @NewHarvestOrg; they can follow me on Twitter @IshaDatar. Check out New Harvest www.new-harvest.org. And our newsletter is probably the best way to be part of our community.

Marina Schmidt

Isha it was a pleasure to have you on again.

Isha Datar

Thank you so much, Marina. This was really fun.

April 25, 2021

Food Tech Show Live: AB InBev Enters Alt-Protein Game

The usual Spoon gang got together this week to talk food tech with special guest Riana Lynn, longtime food tech entrepreneur and CEO of Journey Foods.

This stories we discuss on this week’s show include:

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also just click play below:

April 21, 2021

Exploring Consumer Acceptance of Alt-Meat with Red to Green

There are lots of factors that play into the success of a food product: Price, taste, cultural norms and acceptance.

Sometimes it helps when a chef embraces a type of food and popularizes it through media or a new restaurant concept. Other times, a new type of food takes decades to become an overnight success.

With plant-based proteins, I’d say it’s a mixture of both. More and more chefs are exploring new ways to move meat off the center of the plate, and many non-vegan consumers are trying plant-based alternatives for the first time.

Looking to the future, it’s hard to say how consumers will react to the next big tectonic shift in alt-proteins — cultivated meat. Since most companies in the space are focused on scaling their early prototypes for wider scale production, there’s been very little work done in these early days to educate the consumer about what this cultured meat is and why they should eat it.

That better change soon since, with cell-cultured meat, the battle for the minds is as big a hurdle as the science. Not that some aren’t trying. Companies like Eat Just are beginning to experiment with ways to raise awareness of this very early product, while others like Blue Nalu are working with young research chefs to have them think about the future of sustainable food like cultured seafood.

Still, there’s a lot more work to do to help educate the consumer about what this food is and why they should eat it. That’s why I’m excited for a new podcast season from the folks behind Red to Green, a Berlin-based media and consultancy firm that is headed up by Marina Schmidt. When Marine told me about how the latest season of her podcast would focus on how these companies will win consumer acceptance of their products, I was excited because it’s an area we think a lot about here at the Spoon and one that needs more discussion.

Then when she asked if we would like to cross-publish her podcast, I jumped at the chance. Each week for the next few months we’ll be publishing each episode of the Red to Green season three here on The Spoon complete with transcripts.

Below you can see the first episode of season 3, which includes yours truly. Marina and I decided it would be fun to first have us both on the show to go behind the scenes and talk about the topics she’ll be discussing this season. You can also see the transcript of the conversation below.

The next episode of Red to Green, which we’ll publish tomorrow, will feature Isha Datar, the executive director of New Harvest, talking about building community, safety and brands in cultured meat.

For now, you can check out the first episode below or subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Promoting Alternative Proteins - PODCAST│S3E1 Introduction & Red to Green behind the scenes

Watch this video on YouTube

Transcript:

Michael Wolf

We’re having this conversation because we are excited to have you as a content partner. You’re putting together this interesting season where you’re having conversations with leaders in the cellular agriculture and alternative protein space. And the third season, we’re going to actually be putting up on the spoon, kind of as a partnership with you guys. So you guys also have it on your own outlets as well, but yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re building. So tell people about, Marina Schmidt and Red to Green.

Marina Schmidt

Well, I think to start right now with the status quo Red to green is doing deep-dive research. So I started out with Red to Green because I found two types of content in the food tech and sustainability space. On the one hand, you have this diverse array, like one episode on vertical farming, one on food waste, and another one on the latest quinoa chocolate chip goji berries chocolate bar.

And then there’s the other type of content, which is really, really extremely in-depth. for example, I found a podcast with 245 episodes just on precision farming. So we started Red to Green to get the middle ground to choose one topic at a time, specifically in food tech and sustainability, and cover it really in-depth.

So that means we approach each podcast season like a book. We think about what would people need to know to get a very well-rounded diverse perspective on the topic? As an example, we started out last year in May with a season on cultivated meat, or actually more broader cellular agriculture.

And it starts with an introduction. What is it? What is the concept behind it? How is it produced? Then we covered all the different important topics. We covered beef, dairy, cheese, eggs, gelatin, seafood, fish, and then had also the NGO perspective and the investor’s perspective. And by choosing the interview guests very well with a diverse set of backgrounds and companies that they work for, we create this well-balanced overview of what’s going on.

Michael Wolf

So you ultimately decided to create Red to Green as kind of a new focus for your career. And part of that journey, interestingly enough, and not that’s something that I think a lot of people always consider when they make a new move is a spreadsheet was at the center of this, this kind of switch.

Tell us a little bit about that story.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, my, my friends actually have a lot of insider jokes about the amount of spreadsheets that I have and the things that I manage in spreadsheets, which can be quite crazy. Well, pretty much originally I built a company in career consulting and job consulting. It’s a German company, we are partnering with job fairs all over the place. Twenty-five plus of the largest German job fairs. And through that, I would see hundreds, if not thousands of CVs and there would be this pattern of people going for the career and then the middle of their career, they would want to drastically change the industry, what they’re specifically doing, et cetera. And usually, it was because they would find that what they’re currently doing is not actually aligned with their values, and maybe they haven’t been looking at their values for quite a while. So I saw that as a sign and I was like, well, maybe I don’t have to go down that path. And I decided to sit down and really think about it.

And this process led me to gradually work on, on topics that got me closer to that calling of food tech and sustainability. I worked in company building and worked in digital health with some of the largest medical publishers. I was also working with the World Economic Forum representatives to increase health and climate innovation in Europe. And it was getting warmer and warmer, but I was still tiptoeing around the actual topics. So there was a yoga retreat that really helped. Seven days, lots of meditation, lots of yoga can very much recommend that for some clarity. There I realized, okay I have to be in sustainability, but sustainability is still super broad. Very very wide.

So that’s where a spreadsheet helped. Actually a friend of mine, he’s the founder of the regenerative agriculture company, Klim. He originally had started the spreadsheet where he has listed various, like so many different areas of impact and he created a spreadsheet detailing what is the field about what is the core problem? And what are some startups trying to address this problem and solve it. I looked at it and I filled it out. I ranked these areas on a scale of one to 10, 10 being “this is fricking amazing. I would put everything down and stop my life move to another country to work on this” and nine and down being exciting or less exciting.

As I filled it out, I was quite surprised that all of my nines were in food tech. My nines were vertical farming, plastic alternatives, which you can sort of say as part of food regenerative agriculture, food waste, and my only 10 was alternative proteins and specifically cellular agriculture.

You have this saying in German, but not sure if it’s also applicable in English, it was like, tomatoes fell off my eyes. I love the saying. It’s very visual. That’s how it felt. Tomatoes fell off my eyes right there as I was staring at the spreadsheet and I realized, Oh wow, I have to, I have to work in this field. Otherwise, I’m going to regret it. And especially with cellular agriculture, it feels like you have to work in it right now because it’s, it’s a special time to contribute to it.

So, I’ve been talking to a lot of people who want to get into the field or who are thinking about their purpose and their values. And I have decided to make the spreadsheet available for free to anybody who wants to just look at it, maybe broaden their scope of on the ways of how you can have an impact. Or just maybe re-check career choices. So we can link to it and people can fill it out. Please, if you find anything where there’s startups to add, where there is a broken link, please just comment on it because we will work on updating it and making it more and more useful to more and more people.

Michael Wolf

Well, great. Well, that’s a great use of a spreadsheet. Definitely different than most people use spreadsheets. That’s a great story.

Yeah. I mean, I, and I think that podcasting allows you the storytelling arc throughout a season, and I love that approach. And I find it’s when I go through and do podcasts, I find I’m learning every episode and I get better for the next episode. So I’m kind of curious how maybe your approach to the season changed.

Were they fairly close to what you had thought about when you set out to kind of plan this 12 episode arc or did, as you learned more and, and discovered more and talk to these experts on the way, did it change at all?

Marina Schmidt

So I think it’s very dependent on the topic. With the cultured meat topic, I had a relatively clear idea of what I’m going to cover, and that turned out to be pretty on point in the end. But with the plastics alternative season, which is the second season we had, it was like stepping in the dark.

Because the tricky thing is to create such a season we need to understand the whole field and that can be harder in some cases than in other cases. With the topic of plastic alternatives and sustainable food packaging, it was more an investigative season. We were looking for an answer. What does it mean to have sustainable food packaging?

What is bad packaging? And as these issues are very big and very cloudy and complex we were going step-by-step interview by interview, learning bits of the puzzle and finding our way. With the second season, I found that we had to have trusted people in the industry who would fact-check. The guests that we would have on and who would fact check the topics that we would be addressing and promoting. Because there’s so much greenwashing and it’s very hard to differentiate fact from fiction in this space. So it was a completely different experience in cultivated meat or cellular agriculture versus in plastics.

And here again, with the next season, we are doing on convincing consumers. We again, don’t have a clear playbook. It’s not like we are just making an overview of an existing field. We are researching for the industry. What would make consumers switch to alternative dairy, to insect protein, to cultured meat. And we’re actually looking for people who you wouldn’t think of as being interesting interview guests, like people from outside the industry who maybe don’t even know much about cultured meat in general, but who can offer a novel perspective on it. So this again is more an investigative season.

And how have you seen the messaging change? So if you look at the plant-based companies, but also the cell-based companies, how has their marketing and the way that they communicate about the products changed?

Michael Wolf

Well, what’s interesting is just this past week Impossible launched really their first big widespread consumer advertising campaign with the message that “we are meat”. And I think what they’re saying is, you know if you’re a meat-eater if you’re a carnivore this is meat. It may be meat made from plants, but it’s really no different.

So I think it’s in a sense also pushing back against the incumbents countering the message saying this isn’t meat. This is some weird ingredient. So I think I think there’s a messaging war going on and we’re, we’re in this middle of this, this big evolutionary consumer acceptance path where you’re going to see, and going to try to understand if mainstream meat-eaters are going to accept these alternative proteins.

I think with cellular agriculture and the cultured stuff, the time horizons a little bit longer. And I think that’s going to be a much, even more, tricky messaging campaign because it’s really advanced science and then we’re not even talking about things like precision fermentation, right?

Marina Schmidt

The more I look into the topic, the more multilayered complicated it becomes as actually with many of the themes that we have covered in Red to Green. So I’m really happy to now have a team of, we’re now 12 people, who are looking into this, who are doing industry research, who are looking for interview guests. Because that’s absolutely necessary to be able to cover these topics.

Michael Wolf

And what I love about podcasting is it’s a form, I’ve always viewed it as a form of open-source journalism. In a way that, you know, if you’re a good journalist, if you’re a, ultimately a good podcaster, you’re having these conversations. And you know, you go back 20 years before there’s podcasting, you wouldn’t hear these conversations, you would hear like what essentially you’d read, like a 300, 400-word article.

But what I always found was interesting is the conversations that take place to get there. And so I love that you’re doing these deep conversations that people get to hear these, these conversations and take this journey with you. what’s what I’ve always loved about the medium of audio and audio journalism.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, definitely. We do go now into video, also releasing the video to the podcast, and also making write-ups. So for the work that we’re doing from this season onwards, but also for any upcoming seasons, we will create summaries and reports. Because I would say that the audience that we have is clearly the food tech nerds.

Most of our listeners from 70 plus countries are actually food tech professionals or are about to get into the field. And you do have to be quite a bit nerdy to listen to eight hours of deep-dive cellular agriculture content or nine hours on plastic alternatives. And that’s why it’s more like an audiobook.

And I recently started looking at it as audiobooks that have this beginning, middle, and end attached to them.

Michael Wolf

And I love the idea of the story arc and I’m sure people will be able to, to enjoy it and listen to both the first and second season and, and listen on for the third season on your outlets as well as on the spoon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to working with you on this and looking forward to this conversation.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, lovely. thank you, Mike. And looking forward to also see how the content will be received by the spoon, readers, and listeners.

Michael Wolf

I can tell you already, they’re going to love it. So, all right. Thanks, Marina.

Marina Schmidt

Thank you, Mike.

April 19, 2021

Food Tech Show Live: Meal Worms – It’s What for Dinner

This week’s podcast is another live Clubhouse edition of the Food Tech News wrap-up.

In this week’s show, we discuss:

To listen in live on Clubhouse, join the Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse and listen in on Fridays at 1 Pacific.

And as always, you can listen to the podcast version by clicking play below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

April 9, 2021

Podcast: Talking the Future of Food With Seth Goldman

For most, founding one of the original better-for-you brands in Honest Tea and eventually selling it to Coca-Cola would be enough of a lifetime achievement.

For Seth Goldman, he was just getting started.

Nowadays Goldman is not only Chairman of the biggest publicly traded plant-based meat brands in Beyond Meat, he’s also cofounded a plant-based fast food chain in PLNT Burger and just shipped the first product, a mushroom based jerky, for his plant-based snack brand Eat the Change.

Clearly Goldman thinks a lot about the alternative protein and future food space so I thought it would be great to catch up with him to talk about the future of food.

Seth and I talk about how alt-protein and the future food space has evolved in recent years, the crazy valuations for startups, and where he thinks the market for these new alternatives to animal agriculture are going. It was a fun and thought provoking conversation, so make sure to listen in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

Like many of our podcasts nowadays, we did it live in our Clubhouse room (if you’re on Clubhouse, join the club here to listen in live to our conversations).

April 5, 2021

Food Tech Show Live: Dark Kitchens, Dark Grocery

The Spoon team got together on Clubhouse on Friday to talk about the biggest stories of the week. Our special guest was Veronica Fil, the CEO of Grounded Foods.

The stories we discussed include:

If you’d like to join us for the live recording, make sure to follow The Spoon’s Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse, where you’ll find us recording our weekly news review every Friday.

As always, you can listen the most recent episode and past episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. To listen to last week’s episode, just click play below.

Podcasts

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