Host: Mike Gelb
Guests: Seth Goldman & Spike Mendelsohn | Co-Founders | Eat The Change & PLNT Burger
Category: 🍏 Sustainable Food | Plant-Based Food
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[13:54] SG: “PLNT Burger […] is not a health food restaurant. It's a delicious burger restaurant that is plant-based. To make a Beyond burger you use 99% less water, 93% less land, and 90% fewer greenhouse gases to make a product that's equivalent to a beef patty.”
[14:37] SG: “At Eat The Change, our consumer packaged products, we're undoing food. We're taking super simple recipes and delivering food in a new form. […] We've just launched these carrots snacks for kids. And you might want to contrast them with what are called fruit snacks. […] [We] found a way to take carrots and make them flavorful and chewy and shelf stable in a way that could fit in a kid's lunchbox. […] There's a process to make those but the process is: take carrots, soak them in apple juice, and then dehydrate them. So people shouldn't always be afraid of the word process. […] The process in its own is not a bad word.”
[15:49] SM: “We're never going to really get away from what we deem as processed foods. […] We have so many people to feed in this world. So being able to develop a better for you processed food and better for the planet […] is kind of what's happening in our world right now.”
[19:30] SM: “I've always looked at portobellos and cremini mushrooms as the giveaway back in the day in the restaurants. If someone was vegetarian and they came in, you cook them something with a portobello. […] We started producing this really amazing jerky. […] But if we're going to call ourselves Eat the Change, and we're gonna have these planet commitments, we're going to have to eliminate some of these ingredients that you use. So we eliminated the top six cash crops that contribute to most of our food.”
[20:31] SG: “57% of all agricultural production is soy, wheat, potatoes, corn, rice, and sugarcane. […] If we're serious about biodiversity, let's leave those out of all of our recipes.”
[21:55] SG: “We go back to Project Drawdown, which talks about 80 solutions to address global warming. […] With respect to food, their top two are reducing food waste and switching to plant-based. So of course, everything we sell is plant or fungi based. And then with respect to food waste, with the mushrooms, we use the whole mushroom. We use the stem of the mushroom, we don't worry if it's bruised or oversized or undersized, the kind that wouldn't make it to a retail shop, we're taking it all. […] We also look for crops that are super water efficient, so there's no water waste. And so it turns out that both mushrooms and carrots are some of the most water efficient crops on the planet. […] The other thing we looked at, as it was back to how we create the product is avoiding any waste as we make the product. […] And so for us selling more of these products means we're displacing other products that are not as planet friendly.”
[24:15] SM: “The ethos of our brand is education in the food space. […] This pouch of carrots […] equates to one whole serving of carrots in your lunchbox. […] Slightly cooked carrots are far more nutritionally available than raw carrots. […] So there's bits and pieces where we can always educate whether it's on the packaging, on social handles, […] that I think is really at the base of what we do.”
Rating: 🍏🍏🍏
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "Why they decided to found two companies together, and their approach to making the world a better place")
🕰️ 38 min | 🗓️ 05/26/2022
✅ Time saved: 36 min
