Business for Good Podcast

Not 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 different way from what I do during my day job. They're not fermenting fungi in stainless steel fermenters. Rather, they're practicing what's called solid-state fermentation to create high-protein foods that will be center-of-the-plate for sure, but they're not seeking to mimic meat per se. They've raised $3 million in venture capital so far and are making products that at least from the photos I see online, look fungally fantastic. In this episode I sit down with Bosque Foods CEO Isabella Iglesias-Musachio and chat about her lifelong passion that started her on this path. We discuss all types of cool things, including what to call the products she's making, how she intends to upcycle agricultural byproducts as a feedstock for her fungi, her pathway to commercialization, and more. So if you're interested in yet one more way fungi may save us, enjoy this episode. I think you'll be inspired by Isabella's story. Discussed in this episode Our past episodes with Funga (fungal forest transplants), Perfect Day (animal-free real dairy), and Aqua Cultured Foods Isabella recommends the How I Built This Podcast Article in the journal Nature on biochar from human feces More about Isabella Iglesias-Musachio Isabella is a passionate citizen scientist with an academic background in sustainability and agriculture, and a proven track record in helping tech startups scale internationally. She's now forging her own path in the food & biotech industry, with a focus on alternative protein and fermentation. At TechShop, as General Manager and then Director of Operations, Isabella played an essential role in building and managing multiple makerspaces in the United States and in France. Alongside the CEO, she oversaw the first international TechShop expansion to France, and gained experience in adapting an innovative startup to a new market and culture. More recently, Isabella decided to combine her skills in business development and expansion with my academic interest in food systems and agriculture. She joined Infarm, a leading ag-tech startup in Berlin, to build and head their first new market expansion team, and to establish their operations in the United States, Canada, and Japan. Beyond managing an all-star team to meet our growth goals, she was a key stakeholder in partnership building with major international retailers in North America and Asia (Kroger, Sobeys, Kinokuniya). Isabella's a life-long learner of food science, biotechnology, sustainability, and fermentation, as well as a passionate foodie, brewer, and fungi enthusiast. Today, she's merging her passions with her skills in business management, and forging her own path as an entrepreneur. Isabella's ultimate goal is to help accelerate the world's transition to environmentally sustainable, equitable, and animal-free protein.

Sure, 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 volcanic rock called olivine, the rock naturally removes C02 from the air. This process takes eons normally, but if you grind the olivine rock into a fine sand and spread it out over beaches, you can greatly accelerate the carbon-capturing capacity of the rock, while also protecting coastal communities. Sounds like a noble idea, and when you combine it with the capacity to sell carbon credits, it sounds like a profitable idea, too. That's why Kelly Erhart founded Vesta in 2019. Her company's raised $6 million in equity so far (along with an additional $6 million in philanthropic dollars) and is now poised to raise a much larger Series A round so they can get into the olivine sand spreading business. They're already conducting pilot programs in the Caribbean and say they'll soon be ready for much bigger footprint—or sandprint—projects that will make a tangible dent in the climate crisis. Discussed in this episode Our past episodes with Phoenix Tailings (valorizing mining waste). Funga (soil carbon capture), Global Thermostat (direct air carbon capture), and Coral Vita (regrowing coral reefs). TED talk by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: "How to find joy in climate action" CarbonPlan: Data and science for climate action More about Kelly Erhart Kelly Erhart is Co-founder and President of Vesta. A believer in humanity's ability to become a "net-positive" to nature, Kelly has spent her career commercializing sustainable technologies and climate solutions through creative non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid organizations. Vesta is developing an ocean-based climate solution called Coastal Carbon Capture. Coastal Carbon Capture has the potential to be a billion-ton-per year NET solution with co-benefits such as lowering ocean acidity and helping to protect vulnerable coastal communities from sea level rise and erosion.

You'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 particularly effective at sequestering carbon than others and in making trees grow a lot faster. Some even say that a one percent increase in soil-based carbon could be sufficient to stop an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Enter mycologist and entrepreneur Colin Averill and his new startup Funga. Having just raised a million dollars of seed venture capital, he's seeking to start reforesting depleted land and converting it into biodiverse carbon sinks much faster than would otherwise occur. Think of it kind of like a fecal transplant (yep), but instead, it's more like a fungal transplant. It may sound disgusting, but we know that you can take feces from a healthy person, inoculate (aka insert) a sick person with them, and the good microbes populate the colon of the sick person, turning them well. Similarly, you can take rich, biodiverse soil from a healthy, old growth forest and inoculate agriculturally depleted land with it, and biodiverse life returns, causing trees to grow up to three times faster than they normally would (wood?). So, how do you make a business out of reforesting ex-agricultural land? Let Colin give you the scoop (of soil) on how he and Funga are going to monetize this type of carbon capture. Discussed in this episode In a Vox story on deforestation, they note: "It's not toilet paper or hardwood floors or even palm oil. It's beef. Clearing trees for cattle is the leading driver of deforestation, by a long shot. It causes more than double the deforestation that's linked to soy, oil palm, and wood products combined, according to the World Wildlife Fund." Local FOX coverage of Funga's work. Our past episodes with Global Thermostat (direct carbon capture) and Coral Vita (rehabilitation of coral reefs). This CNN story about a startup called Living Carbon making faster-growing trees. Colin loves the book Entangled Life and the podcast My Climate Journey. More about Colin Averill Dr. Colin Averill is a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich's Crowther Lab, where he and his team study the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? He focuses on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth. In addition to his academic role, he is the Founder of Funga PBC, a new startup harnessing forest fungal networks to address the climate crisis. He is also co-founder of SPUN – the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks – a non-profit dedicated to documenting and protecting mycorrhizal fungal life across the planet.

At 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 the planet. It's often not that good for us, either. So instead of farming plants to extract the tiny amount of fat that's in them, why not just farm microbes that produce vast quantities of fat and save a lot of land in the process? It would be especially beneficial if these microbes were adroit at making monounsaturated fats, or the so-called "good fats" we associate with avocados, olives, and so on. It turns out that producing fat via microbial fermentation is pretty efficient. A life cycle analysis conducted by Jeff's new company, Zero Acre Farms, found that their fermentation process uses far fewer resources than farming soybeans, which are a pretty efficient plant. Founded in 2020, Zero Acre Farms now has three dozen employees and just closed a $37 million dollar financing round. Its first product, a cultured oil, is now available to purchase from their web site. I tried it in my own kitchen and can attest that indeed, the oil performed and tasted quite good. It's an impressive journey that Jeff's been on, and with tens of millions of dollars now at the mid-30s CEO's disposal, it's sure to be quite a ride as they scale up and see how many acres they can free up by switching the world to their lower-footprint fats. In this episode, Jeff recommends Dale Carnegie's books Peter Drucker's books Think and Grow Rich Scaling Up High Growth Handbook More about Jeff Nobbs Jeff Nobbs is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Acre Farms, a food company replacing destructive vegetable oils with healthier, more sustainable oils and fats made by fermentation. Jeff has co-founded several startups to offer better quality ingredients and nutrition-forward food to people and communities, including the fast casual restaurant chain Kitava. In 2020, after seeing a drastic decrease in accessibility to fresh food, Jeff co-founded HelpKitchen to connect food-insecure individuals with partner restaurants for a free meal via SMS. Jeff also served as the chief operating officer for Perfect Keto and General Manager of Rakuten, which acquired his first company Extrabux. Jeff writes about health, nutrition, and sustainability at jeffnobbs.com and @jeffnobbs.

You 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 items per minute! It's tough to watch the work for 30 seconds, so imagine how tough it must be to do that work for hours every day. Well, Matanya Horowitz had a different idea. He'd been obsessed with robots since he was a kid, and fresh out of his PhD program, he wondered whether he could teach robots to sort trash more effectively and efficiently than humans. The dude started in 2014 by dumpster diving with his girlfriend to get trash which he could start training his AI on. Then he got some government grants to hire himself and a couple others. Fast forward to today, and Horowitz's AMP Robotics has raised $75 million from investors, employs 250 humans, has deployed a similar number of robots at recycling factories on three continents that have now sorted billions of pieces of trash, and has even opened their own recycling factory in Ohio. Their robots pick at a rate of anywhere from 80 to 120 pieces per minute, don't need breaks, don't get covid, and importantly, they alter the economics of recycling to make it far more likely that what goes into the recycling bin actually ends up getting recycled. In this episode, we talk all about the economics of AMP's robots, the trajectory Matanya took from being an academic roboticist to becoming a CEO, the role venture capital has played in the company, what mistakes along the way were made, whether he thinks robots will ever become sentient, and more. It's an impressive and inspirational story from a scientist who's using his business to help solve a pressing sustainability problem for humanity. Discussed in this episode Matanya is influenced by the Jewish tale of Golem He's also a big fan of Isaac Asimov's work And he recommends reading The Innovator's Dilemma and Paul Graham's essays Matanya gave a cool TEDx speech about robotics Want to read a transcript of this episode? You're in luck! More about Matanya Horowitz Dr. Matanya Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of AMP Robotics™ an industrial artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company that is fundamentally changing the economics of recycling, by lowering processing costs and extracting maximum value from waste streams. Matanya developed and commercialized AMP's breakthrough AI platform, AMP Neuron™, and robotics system, AMP Cortex™, which automates high-speed identification, sorting, picking, and processing of material streams. AMP's machine learning technology continuously improves performance adapting to the complex, ever changing material characteristics of municipal solid waste, construction and demolition (C&D), e-waste, and metal scrap. Recognizing attributes down to the SKU and Brand level, AMP can provide unprecedented data transparency and insights on waste streams to inform decisions and unite the value chain of circularity. Matanya was just individually recognized as Waste360's '2019 Innovator of the Year' award, in addition to being named to their '40 under 40' list. AMP has received numerous awards and international recognition, including The Circulars 2018 Award for 'Circular Economy Top Tech Disruptor' at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the NWRA's (National Waste and Recycling Association) '2017 Innovator of the Year' award. Matanya earned multiple degrees including a BS in Electrical Engineering, BS in Computer Science, BS in Applied Mathematics, BA in Economics, and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. Matanya holds a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology with publications and research in control theory, path planning, and computer vision.

For 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 was a guy fascinated by chemistry. He tried a couple business ideas that didn't take off before starting to try to make steaks in his kitchen by putting soy through a fermentation process. After many failures, he finally created something he thought was worthy of showing to investors, one of whom was interested enough that they put in $50,000. Fast forward to today and Amos has been making quite a lot of innovations in his process, is making a steak that I tried and really enjoyed, is overseeing a team of a dozen people, has raised millions of dollars, and claims his steaks are going to be hitting the United States by the end of 2022. Time will tell if that prediction pans out, and I certainly hope it does, but Amos has an impressive story that offers a good reminder to never give up, and that the most meaningful work of your life may still be ahead of you. Books Amos recommends in this episode Venture Deals Never Split the Difference The Periodic Table (memoir) More about Amos Golan Amos Golan is the founder and CEO of Chunk Foods. He has a deep passion for innovation and solving hard problems, and a solid background in science, engineering and design. Amos graduated from the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program For Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University where he obtained an MS.c. in Organic Chemistry. He later moved to Boston and gained a second Master's degree focused on Human-Computer Interaction from the MIT Media Lab where he conducted research and worked on various futuristic projects with fortune 500 companies. After serving in various roles with startup companies in fields such as ag tech, chemistry and biotech, Amos joined Ferrero's Open Innovation team in NY as the youngest member of its leadership team. At Ferrero, he led some of the company's most cutting edge innovation projects in biotech, food tech, age tech and digital technologies, trying to address pressing challenges around supply chains, climate change and ingredient sourcing, better-for-you nutrition, and sustainability. Amos loves food and cooking, and attended the Cordon Bleu culinary school, where he was trained in classic French cuisine and worked in several restaurants in Tel Aviv.

If 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 media (meat-ia?) executive, Lisa's spent much of her career watching what's happening as far as plant-based and cultivated meat goes, as well as animal welfare changes occurring in the ag industry too. As you'll hear, she certainly views animal agriculture as a desirable industry worth keeping around, yet she's very open-mined about animal-free proteins, as evidenced by the existence of her newest creation, Alt-Meat magazine. In this interview, Lisa discusses her latest trip to Israel where she tried various cultivated meat products, her views on why plant-based meat hasn't taken as much market share as plant-based milk yet, why the pork industry hasn't advanced cage-free animal welfare changes like much of the egg industry has, and more. I always learn from reading Lisa's work, and I learned even more by chatting with her for this episode, and I'm confident you will too. So, if you've ever wondered what meat industry insiders think about the alt-protein and animal welfare worlds, now's your chance.

Our 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.

Many 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 recently introduced a bill in Congress calling on the Director of National Intelligence to submit an intelligence report on the effects of increased production and consumption of alternative proteins on American national security. The bill even calls for the DNI to explore whether, and to what extent, progress in the production and consumption of alternative proteins made by foreign countries like China constitutes a competitive threat to American economic interests.

While 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 of the group is to create radio content featuring Nigerian families talking about their positive experiences with family planning. Not only are donors backing these social entrepreneurs, so is the Nigerian government. Why? On average fertility rates in Nigeria stand currently at more than five children per woman. Generally speaking, the poorest countries tend to have the highest fertility rates while wealthier countries have lower fertility rates. So while in many African countries each woman often has on average more than five children, in wealthier parts of the world, like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, each woman has on average less than two children. The US is also at less than two children per woman, though immigration to the US prevents the country's population from shrinking.