Business for Good Podcast
141 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★★ - 168 ratingsJoin host Paul Shapiro as he talks with some of the leading start-up entrepreneurs and titans of industry alike using their businesses to help solve the world’s most pressing problems.
Whether it’s climate change, unsustainable agricultural practices, cyber threats, coral reef die-offs, nuclear waste storage, plastic pollution, or more, many of the world’s greatest challenges are also exciting business opportunities. On this show, we feature business leaders who are marrying profit and purpose by inventing solutions to both build a better world and offer investors a bang for their bucks.
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Episodes
Flying Cars or Electric Cars? Isha Datar’s Thoughts on Where Cultivated Meat Tech Stands Today
April 05, 2024 13:00 - 42 minutes - 37.4 MBWhen the New York Times recently ran an opinion column declaring the infant fatality of the cultivated meat industry, Isha Datar, CEO of New Harvest, was quoted as saying of the sector, “this is a bubble that is going to pop.” Given that New Harvest is intended to promote and advance the field, what did Isha mean by this? She expounded on that thought in a 2,000-word commentary asserting that while she disagrees with the columnist’s conclusion that cultivated meat can never become a viable...
Mark Post, A Decade After the First Cultivated Burger
March 29, 2024 13:00 - 39 minutes - 33.5 MBIn 2013, Dr. Mark Post shocked the world when he debuted the world’s first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth? When his burger was debuted, a grand total of zero companies existed to commercialize what would come to be called cultivated meat, no serious inv...
Are Smaller Cultivators the Answer for Cultivated Meat’s Success? Niya Gupta Thinks So
March 22, 2024 13:00 - 34 minutes - 30.7 MBSome of the companies in the cultivated meat space are betting that massive stainless steel cultivators—think 100,000L to 250,000L—are the path to commercialization. Niya Gupta, CEO of Fork and Good, is thinking smaller. She argues that there may be a more realistic path using a larger number of smaller tanks, void of the impellers that agitate the more conventionally used reactors in the sector. Founded in 2018, the company was spun out of Modern Meadow, the first-ever cultivated ani...
Josh Tetrick on the Future of the Cultivated Meat Movement
March 15, 2024 13:00 - 33 minutes - 29.5 MBIf you listened to the last episode, you already know that there’s an updated paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out April 9, 2024. I announced in that episode that, aligning with that release, this show will be devoted for a couple months exclusively to interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat space, many of whom are profiled in the book. And there’s perhaps no person in the cultivated meat sector who’s generated more headlines than Josh Tetrick, CEO of both Eat ...
Brief thoughts on the alt-meat movement and my role in it
March 01, 2024 14:00 - 12 minutes - 9.34 MBI’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold. Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on the issue that’s animated my life for the past 30 years: how to wean humanity off our animal-...
Incubating Tomorrow’s Alt-Protein Unicorns: The Kitchen
February 15, 2024 14:00 - 51 minutes - 45.5 MBIf you’ve spent any time in the startup ecosystem, you start realizing pretty quickly that the US isn’t alone in producing a lot of startups, but that there are some very small countries, like Israel and Singapore, that consistently punch above their weight when it comes to new company creation. In fact, Israel is often known as the startup nation, and there’s even a popular book on the topic with that very title. And if you’re in the startup food technology space, whether in Israel or el...
When Nonprofits Start Businesses: Garden for Wildlife and the National Wildlife Federation
February 01, 2024 14:00 - 1 hour - 46.7 MBMost startups are founded by entrepreneurs hopeful that their idea will be the next big thing and pad their bank accounts in the process. Yet sometimes companies are started not by enterprising capitalists, but rather by a far less likely progenitor: nonprofit charities. That’s exactly what happened when the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation decided to spin out a for-profit corporation devoted to advancing the charity’s mission to protect wildlife. The company, Garden for Wildlife,...
Can Tech Improve Farm Animals’ Lives? Robert Yaman Is Betting On It
January 15, 2024 14:00 - 59 minutes - 53.3 MBMany times when we talk about technology that can improve animal welfare, we’re talking about innovations that either have displaced or could displace the use of animals. Think for example about cars replacing horse-power, kerosene replacing whale oil, and animal-free meats displacing factory farming of animals. But can technology also be used to make better the lives of animals who are still being used? Long-time tech enthusiast and animal advocate Robert Yaman is betting on that idea, an...
Making Alt-Meat Research More Intelligent: GreenProtein AI & Noa Weiss
January 01, 2024 14:00 - 48 minutes - 41.1 MBPredictions abound for industries that allegedly will be upended by artificial intelligence, or AI. Will Uber drivers and truck drivers be replaced by AI-powered self-driving vehicles? Will writers and journalists be displaced by ChatGPT and its competitors? While many of our physical tasks have now been replaced by machines, it’s possible that in the future many of our cognitive tasks will also be replaced by machines that can do a better and faster job than we can, and for a lot less mon...
Building a Better Chew: Chef GW Chew is Working to Create Better Plant-Based Meat
December 15, 2023 14:00 - 48 minutes - 47.7 MBAs a young man, GW Chew saw his family dying early of lifestyle-related diseases, and he thought maybe he could do something about it. With a last name like that—yes, “Chew” is his real last name—maybe GW was destined to become a chef—that’s exactly what he did. Because of his interest in Seventh Day Adventism, GW gradually became Chef Chew by experimenting with Seventh Day Adventist recipes, ultimately leading him down the path of opening up his own restaurant and now to being a plant-ba...
Making All Births Intended and Wanted: Cadence OTC and Samantha Miller
December 01, 2023 14:00 - 39 minutes - 34.9 MBDid you know that nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended? And that percentage skyrockets when we’re talking about teen pregnancies, more than three-quarters of which are unintended. While teen pregnancies and teen births are thankfully at an all-time low in the US, we’re still behind countries like the UK and Canada in this regard. A big reason teen pregnancies have fallen so dramatically in recent decades is simply that it’s much easier to have access to contraceptives....
Power Walking for Cleaner Energy: The Pavegen Story
November 15, 2023 14:00 - 45 minutes - 43.6 MBEvery time you take a step, you’re creating energy. Sadly, that energy isn’t captured and used to power your daily life. But what if it could be? That’s exactly what Pavegen is doing. What started as a guy tinkering in his room to make tiles that generate electricity when depressed is now a multimillion dollar startup with flooring installations in more than 30 countries. As you’ll hear in this interview with Pavegen CEO Laurence Kemball-Cook, after much trial and error, he invented a l...
Robots as a Service to Turn the Tides for Our Oceans: The Reefgen Story
November 01, 2023 13:00 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBYou probably already know why coral reefs are so important—after all, they’re home to a quarter of all marine life. But do you know about seagrass? Seagrass not only provides habitat for aquatic wildlife, but it accounts for 10% of oceanic carbon storage, despite only taking up less than one percent of the seafloor. It also produces oxygen, cleans the ocean, protects against coastal erosion and more. Sadly, humanity is destroying both coral reefs and seagrass forests, with oceanic warmi...
From Food Bank to Making Bank on Food Influencing: Maxime Sigouin and Fit Vegan Coaching
October 15, 2023 13:00 - 46 minutes - 43.7 MBMaxime Sigouin was on the verge of homelessness, surviving on free meals from his local food bank. After getting laid off from work and having only about $30 in his bank account, Maxime struggled to figure out how he could afford to survive, let alone try to help his partner as she endured her own mentally and financially taxing fight with cancer. The answer, it turned out, was helping others. A vegan athlete, Maxime knew the secrets of how to lose fat and gain muscle, and he figured he co...
Cementing a Better Future: Leah Ellis and Sublime Systems
October 01, 2023 13:00 - 46 minutes - 35.7 MBDid you know that nearly 10 percent of all CO2 emissions come from the creation of cement alone? That’s more than from all aviation! We rarely think about cement despite the fact that our society would literally collapse without it. Roads, bridges, buildings, and more all depend on this material that’s so ubiquitous we barely even notice it. In fact, concrete is by far the heaviest part of humanity’s footprint on the planet, and today all the materials we’ve built with it are heavier than...
The Most Successful Plant-Based Meat Entrepreneur Ever? Yves Potvin’s Konscious Foods
September 15, 2023 13:00 - 57 minutes - 44.9 MBNearly all startups fail. Often even founders with a successful exit under their belts have stories of entrepreneurial strikeouts prior to or after their home run. But every once in while there’s a founder who seems to have the Midas touch who just keeps winning. No, I’m not talking here about Elon Musk. Rather, I’m talking about Yves Potvin. The classically trained chef pioneered the plant-based meat movement, founding Yves Veggie Cuisine in the 1980s, which was acquired for $35 million b...
Microbes to the Rescue: Lisa Nunez Safarian and Pivot Bio
September 01, 2023 13:00 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MBA big part of what keeps you alive—among other things—is nitrogen. The plants you eat need it to grow, so for centuries farmers have been applying it to soil to make their acreage more productive. Prior to the 20th century, nitrogen fertilizer used to come from animal feces, blood, and bones—which is still common in organic agriculture today—but most row crops these days are fertilized with human-made nitrogen, produced by a high-energy reaction known as the Haber–Bosch process. (Or if yo...
Swapping Leaves for Leather: Biophilica’s Mira Nameth
August 15, 2023 13:00 - 40 minutes - 34.5 MBOne day, while walking through the park and looking at all the leaves on the ground, Mira Nameth had a thought: what could she make with all these leaves? Little did she know that her momentary thought experiment would lead her down an entirely new path in life. The lifelong vegetarian had a keen interest in design and materials, and she wanted to do something good for the world. Already aware of how much environmental and animal welfare harm the leather industry creates, Mira began work...
Turning the Tide for Tuna: Impact Food’s Kelly Pan
August 01, 2023 13:00 - 37 minutes - 31.8 MBTuna are like the tigers of the ocean: apex predators essential for oceanic health. And just like with tigers, humanity has been waging an unprovoked war on tuna, causing their numbers to plummet in recent decades. They may not be furry, but these finned beasts still need help, and help them is exactly what Impact Food is seeking to do. Founded in 2021 by a few recent UC-Berkely grads interested in doing something good for the world, the company has embarked on a journey to recreate whole...
Is the Future of Plastic Fungi? MadeRight Is Working on It
July 15, 2023 13:00 - 33 minutes - 33 MBNearly none of the plastic we use—even what gets thrown in the recycling bin—actually gets recycled. One reason for that is that plastic manufacturers often include additives in their plastics which enhance the performance of the material, but reduce the recyclability of those plastics. But what if there were a natural additive that could mimic the performance improvements of conventional plastic additives while improving recyclability? That’s what MadeRight is betting on. The Israeli s...
From Villain to Hero: Rubi Labs’s Quest to Make CO2 Work for the Climate
July 01, 2023 13:00 - 33 minutes - 29.4 MBWhat started with a small grant from the National Science Foundation to two twin science-y sisters barely out of college is now a startup employing dozens of people that’s so far raised more than $13 million to revolutionize how we make clothing. Here’s how it works: You already know that plants take in CO2 and convert it into biomass, which we humans often like to turn into clothing. But what if we could bypass the plants, and just capture C02 being emitted from a factory and convert it w...
The Most Controversial Plan to Cool the Planet: Make Sunsets
June 15, 2023 13:00 - 43 minutes - 42.2 MBIf you listen to this show, you probably already think that we need to slash human emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. In many ways, our species has been engaged in a massive, uncontrolled geoengineering project that’s heating up the planet to the point where wildlife extinction, massive floods and fires, and other tragedies are now simply routine. So far, humanity’s geoengineering has largely been limited to heating the earth up. But what about purposeful geoengineering to a...
A Packaging Revolution: TIPA is All in on Compostables
June 01, 2023 13:00 - 30 minutes - 23.3 MBEvery piece of plastic you’ve ever used still exists somewhere on the planet, from the ziplock bag of leftovers to the bag of chips to the packaging holding in all the grapes you picked up at the store. We used to ship all of our plastic waste to China, but in 2017 they stopped taking it, so the vast majority of our plastic, including what we put in the recycling bin, at the very best just ends up in a landfill, and at the worst ends up in the ocean. Enter TIPA, an Israeli startup promisi...
Hummus as a Force for Good: Joey Bergstein and the Sabra Story
May 15, 2023 13:00 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBDid you know about the correlation between declining smoking rates and increasing hummus consumption? It’s true—a decade ago, as American smoking rates were falling, hummus consumption began ascending, leading numerous tobacco growers to convert their fields to chickpea production instead. Hummus is also a favorite of those seeking to eat plant-based while still getting a satiating snack or meal. In fact, in the Middle East, the birthplace of hummus, it’s not eaten as a dip like it is her...
The OG of Mycelium Fermentation: The Quorn Story
May 01, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes - 36.8 MBThere are several dozen startups, including one that I cofounded, laboring to scale mycelium fermentation to a point where it can start making a dent in demand for animal meat. One company though, has been doing this for decades: Quorn Foods. While most alt-meat is made from pea, soy, or wheat, Quorn dominates the portion of the market made from mycelium, controlling more than 99% of the mycoprotein-based alt-meat sector. Partnered with companies like KFC, Quorn is the number one alt-mea...
From Cultivated Meat to National Security: The Journey of Jason Matheny
April 15, 2023 13:00 - 52 minutes - 49.4 MBTwenty years ago, Jason Matheny was a public health student who in his spare time was crusading to create a meat industry that would be less reliant on animals. In 2004, after he founded New Harvest to popularize cultured meat, his fame grew. The New York Times profiled him in its annual “Ideas of the Year” feature in 2005. That same year Discover magazine named cultured meat one of the most notable tech stories. For the next several years, Jason was the face of the movement to grow real ...
Some Help from Kelp: How Keel Labs is Reimagining Sustainable Materials
April 01, 2023 18:36 - 34 minutes - 29.4 MBYou probably already know that using animals to make materials like leather has a lot of downsides. But using petro-chemicals and intensive crops like cotton, while better than animal products, is still pretty suboptimal for the planet. Keel Labs thinks it has a better idea. Rather than relying on animals or terrestrial plant agriculture, it’s seeking to use kelp—yep, seaweed—to make the next generation of materials. Kelp grows much more quickly than land-based plants, sucks C02 out of the...
(Bio)engineering Better Beef: Josh March and SciFi Foods’ Quest to Cultivate Meat
March 15, 2023 13:00 - 58 minutes - 51.8 MBIn 2021, a lengthy analysis was published by a now-defunct online news outlet concluding that cultivating animal cells at commercial meat industry scale was simply a pipedream. Josh March didn’t really disagree. But he thought if you could bioengineer the animal cells to get more comfortable at production scale, and add those finished cells into otherwise plant-based meats, you could both commercialize meat cultivation and make animal-free burgers taste even better. Not only did March pers...
The Business of Being an Author and Influencer with Toni Okamoto of Plant-Based on a Budget
March 01, 2023 14:00 - 42 minutes - 34.9 MBThe Business of Being an Author and Influencer with Toni Okamoto of Plant-Based on a Budget This is a special episode of this podcast, because the guest is not only an entrepreneur making money by making the world a better place, but she also just happens to be my wife. Toni Okamoto is the founder and CEO of Plant-Based on a Budget, and she has her fourth cookbook coming out right around the time that this episode drops! Long-time listeners will recall that Toni was actually the co-host ...
Will Technology Spare Animals from Experimentation? Emulate and Jim Corbett are Working on it
February 15, 2023 14:00 - 33 minutes - 28.5 MBPresident Biden recently signed into law the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, new legislation that ends the FDA’s mandate that all drugs be tested on animals prior to human clinical trials. The new law doesn’t prohibit animal testing, but it does give companies the choice of whether to conduct animal experiments or not, and could lead to many fewer animals being used as test subjects. If we don’t use animals as test tubes prior to human clinical trials, what should we use? Emulate claims it ha...
Selling Shovels and Pickaxes to the Cultivated Meat Pioneers
February 01, 2023 14:00 - 47 minutes - 40.5 MBYou’ve heard of the companies seeking to build new brands of animal-free meat, but you hear a lot less about the B2B companies working behind the scenes to give those pioneers the tools they need to succeed. One such company, Matrix FT, recently debuted what it’s calling Ohio’s first cultivated chicken nugget, featuring chicken cells grown on the scaffolds and microcarriers it produces. Via a technology called electo-spinning (more like this than this), Matrix FT is creating edible, anim...
Fermenting Methane into Meat! The String Bio Story
January 15, 2023 14:00 - 34 minutes - 34.1 MBUsually when you hear about meat’s connection to methane, it’s about all the methane that cows are emitting into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. What if, however, you could capture methane before it goes into the atmosphere, and feed it to microbes which in turn convert it into protein-packed ingredients to make alt-meat? Sounds like magic, but it’s not magic, it’s science! And it’s a science that Dr. Ezhil Subbian and her team at String Bio are advancing right now. The Indi...
Is the Road to the Future Paved with Upcycled Plastic? Shelly Zhang and Molten Materials Thinks So
January 01, 2023 14:00 - 33 minutes - 32.9 MBNearly none of the plastic we use gets recycled. Even the plastic we throw into the recycling bin often ends up in landfills since it’s just not economical to recycle the plastic, especially now that China has banned imports of American plastic waste. So what are we going to do with the vast oceans of plastic we love to use? Shelly Zhang has an idea. As you’ll hear in this episode, the death of Shelly’s father led to the birth of her company, Molten Materials. Armed with her PhD in enginee...
Is Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future
December 15, 2022 14:00 - 45 minutes - 40.2 MBIs Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future We all know that eating too much sugar isn’t good for us, but millions of years of evolution led us to love sweet foods. After all, they provide us with a quick boost of energy needed in an ancestral environment where we were largely active throughout the day. Of course, today most people in the developed world are far from being active all day, yet we still crave sugar and eat it ...
The Deepest Hole Humanity’s Ever Dug: The Quaise Energy Story
December 01, 2022 14:00 - 31 minutes - 31.5 MBThe inside of the earth’s pretty hot. How hot? As hot as the surface of the sun. Seriously. That heat could generate unbelievable amounts of clean geothermal energy to power our civilization—if we could reach all the way down there. You see, to get to fossil fuels like oil and gas, we only need to drill down a couple kilometers. In places that have volcanoes, like Iceland, you can fairly easily reach down into hellish parts of the earth to harness geothermal energy, but most human populat...
Automated Reforestation: Grant Canary and the Drone Seed Story
November 15, 2022 14:00 - 45 minutes - 43.9 MBThis is a cool episode, because Grant Canary has found a way to make money by cooling the planet—with trees! In episode 98 with Maddie Hall, we learned about how her startup, Living Carbon, is bioengineering trees to grow faster so we can reforest the planet faster. And in this 101st episode, we’ll hear about a different approach to reforestation. Every year, millions of acres of forests in the US burn down, and the number of acres burning is increasing annually. We know that trees not on...
The Legendary Venture Capitalist Fixated on the Future: Steve Jurvetson’s Quest to Improve Life On Earth and Beyond
November 01, 2022 13:00 - 1 hour - 55.6 MBIf you’re familiar with the Silicon Valley world or venture capital space, Steve Jurvetson is a name that needs no introduction. For the rest of you, Steve’s a legendary venture capitalist perhaps best known for his early backing of companies like Hotmail, Skype, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, and more. He sat on Tesla’s board of directors for years, and currently sits on SpaceX’s board, too. These big bets he’s taken on then-risky and out-there companies have led Steve to astronomical financial suc...
A Whale of a Tale: Wildtype and the Future of Cultivated Seafood
October 15, 2022 13:00 - 54 minutes - 51.6 MBAs we continue to empty the oceans, our species’ demand for fish only seems to increase. But what if we could eat all the bluefin tuna and salmon we wanted without having to harm fish and other aquatic animals? That’s the vision that companies like Wildtype are working toward. Founded in 2016, this cultivated fish startup has raised $120 million so far and now has 60 employees who are growing real fish meat without the fish. I’ve enjoyed their product now twice, both pre-pandemic and recen...
Tree-mendously Fast-Growing Trees to Fight Climate Change? Maddie Hall and the Living Carbon Story
October 01, 2022 13:00 - 39 minutes - 38.6 MBWhat’s the most old-school way to capture carbon from the atmosphere? Trees! But is there a new school way to help trees stand up to the task of quickly removing the carbon humanity’s been spewing into the atmosphere in recent centuries? Living Carbon is pioneering an exciting new field in which it’s enhancing trees’ natural ability to photosynthesize, causing them to grow dramatically faster and therefore capture carbon more quickly. You see, trees are essentially just big columns of c...
Mighty Mycelium: Isabella Iglesias-Musachio and Bosque Foods
September 15, 2022 13:00 - 44 minutes - 43.6 MBNot plants, and not animals, fungi are an entirely separate kingdom of life, and they can do some really amazing things. For example, two episodes ago you heard from a startup called Funga that’s seeking to implement fungal transplants in forests to enhance the carbon-capturing capacity of the soil. And you may know that my own company, The Better Meat Co., uses fungi fermentation to recreate the meat experience without animals. But Bosque Foods is putting fungi to work in a very differ...
Spreading the Good Word about Olivine Spreading: Kelly Erhart and Vesta
September 01, 2022 13:00 - 39 minutes - 38.8 MBSure, we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases. But even if we stopped all emissions today, there are so many that we’ve already put into the atmosphere that we need to remove them. Some folks are trying to build massive machines to suck C02 from the air, but Kelly Erhart has a different idea: just accelerate the earth’s natural geochemical processes to remove that same C02 and safely deposit it in solid form at the bottom of our oceans. How to do it: Turns that when water touches this vo...
Can Fungi Fix the Climate Crisis? Colin Averill and Funga Are Working on it
August 15, 2022 13:00 - 36 minutes - 34.6 MBYou’ve heard of flora (plants). You’ve heard of fauna (animals). But have you heard of funga? That’s the relatively new way to describe this third kingdom of life on earth: the vast number of species of fungi which aren’t plants nor animals, but are a different branch on the tree of life. And it turns out that fungi are a lot more important than many in the past have realized. In fact, they seem to play a major role in just how much carbon the soil is storing. Certain fungi, it seems, are...
Is the Future of Fat Fermented? Jeff Nobbs of Zero Acre Farms Is Betting on it
August 01, 2022 13:00 - 51 minutes - 48.1 MBAt age 18, Jeff Nobbs founded an ecommerce company, building it into a valuable enough startup that it was acquired in what Jeff calls a “life-changing” event. After then opening a restaurant that now has two locations in the Bay Area, Jeff decided that there’d be a third entrepreneurial act in his life, this time focused on fixing fat. What’s wrong with fat today? Well, Jeff argues that the way we grow plants to make oils like palm, soy, coconut, canola, and more is just pretty taxing on...
Robots to the Recycling Rescue: Matanya Horowitz Is Ensuring Your Recyclables Are Actually Recycled
July 15, 2022 13:00 - 54 minutes - 50.9 MBYou know how you put all your recycling—cans, bottles, cardboard, etc.—into the same bin? Well, have you ever wondered how all that stuff gets sorted out at the recycling factory? It’s done mostly by humans. If you watch a video about how it’s done, rest assured you’re not likely to apply for this job. These folks are standing at a conveyor belt with recyclable trash whizzing by them at every moment and they need to pick pieces off the line to put into the proper bins at a rate of 40 item...
Is Plant-Based Meat about to Get Chunkier? Amos Golan of Chunk Foods Thinks So
July 01, 2022 13:00 - 53 minutes - 50.3 MBFor decades, the alt-meat movement has focused on ground meats like sausages, burgers, nuggets, sticks, and more. That’s because it’s just a lot less difficult to create these ground products than a more structured product like a steak or chicken breast. Still difficult, but less difficult. Several companies now though are trying to reach that holy grail of whole cut products, and one of them is Chunk Foods, hailing from the holy land of Israel. As you’ll hear in this episode, Amos Golan ...
“Meat” the Meat Industry’s Journalist: Lisa Keefe and Meatingplace
June 15, 2022 13:00 - 1 hour - 57 MBIf you follow the meat or the alt-meat industry closely, chances are high that you’ve read Lisa Keefe’s work. As the editor-in-chief of both Meatingplace magazine and now Alt-Meat magazine too, Lisa has been both reporting on and editorializing on all things meat for the past 15 years. She’s also the creator of the Meatingplace podcast and is a frequent commentator on everything from trends to controversies and more in the meat space. While she’s not a meat company executive, as a meat med...
This Dude Vasectomized Himself! Meet Dr. Esgar Guarin, the Evangelical Vasectomist
June 01, 2022 13:00 - 1 hour - 64.5 MBOur guest in this episode, Dr. Esgar Guarin, is on a crusade to promote vasectomies, and even gave up his previous medical career to focus on simply being a full-time vasectomist as part of his commitment to making the world a better place. That’s right: his entire business is one thing and one thing only: helping men take greater responsibility in their reproductive lives and averting unwanted pregnancies.
Is Alt-Protein a National Security Issue? Rep. Ro Khanna Thinks So
May 15, 2022 13:00 - 32 minutes - 33.1 MBMany already believe that fostering an alt-protein industry in the US is important for helping the environment, but is it also going to protect American national security? We’re already importing much of our clean energy tech from Asia, but will we soon be importing our clean protein from other parts of the world, too? Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California representing Silicon Valley, doesn’t want that to happen. He’s not only called on USDA to invest in alt-protein, he’s rec...
Reproductive Freedom in the Developing World: Anna Christina Thorsheim and Family Empowerment Media
May 01, 2022 13:00 - 35 minutes - 35.3 MBWhile it’s a charity, Family Empowerment Media tries to run like a business in that it relies heavily on measurable, evidence-based strategies that produce a significant return on their investment. Though the return they’re seeking isn’t a financial one, but rather is in the form of the social change they’re working to create, mainly by empowering the use of family planning by families that are seeking to have fewer children in developing African nations. Started in 2020, the sole mission...
Oat-to-Market Strategy: Mike Messersmith and the Oatly Story
April 15, 2022 13:00 - 54 minutes - 53.5 MBIf you’ve been listening to the show for some time, you know that replacing animals in the food system is a topic very close to my heart. While the meat and egg industries in the grand picture have still been largely unaffected by plant-based competitors, that’s not the case in the milk industry, where the explosion of plant-based milks has very tangibly cut into demand for cow’s milk. Gone are the days when almond milk and soy milk were for vegans—now they’re for everyone. But just a few...