Welcome to the second edition of the Future Food News Review! This week's top headlines included: plant-based meat maker Impossible Foods' rumored $10bn IPO, a Japanese company's launch of a gene-edited tomato, an in-depth look at vegan cheese, the potential for solar panels to improve the productivity of farmland, a major restaurant tech acquisition, celebrities investing in bottled water and the romanticization of America's agriculture history.
The journalists joining us this week were:
Joe Fassler - The Counter (https://thecounter.org/agrivoltaics-farmland-solar-panels-clean-energy-crops/)
Sarah Mock - freelance (https://sarah-k-mock.medium.com/no-your-great-grandfather-did-not-know-how-to-fix-our-food-system-83775d4f1852)
Larissa Zimberoff - Bloomberg and freelance (https://technicallyfood.substack.com/p/gene-editing-our-precious-tomato)
Sonalie Figueras - Green Queen Media (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-impossible-foods-m-a-exclusive-idUSKBN2BV2SF)
Alicia Kennedy - Eater and freelance (https://www.eater.com/22315684/vegan-cheese-history-ingredients-process-grocery-brands)
Kristen Hawley - Expedite (https://www.expedite.news/p/tock-to-squarespace-for-400-million)
Elaine Watson - Food NavigatorUSA (https://tinyurl.com/35sa4rv3)
Ximena Bustillo - POLITICO
Megan Poinski - Food Dive
Errol Schweizer - Forbes and TheCheckout Podcast
Danielle Gould:
It's always really important to us to bring together a diversity of people, ideas, voices. We are always reaching out to different journalists. If you have people who you think should be a part of this conversation, if you want to be a part of this conversation, please feel free to reach out to either Louisa or I. We would love to include you. We have a phenomenal group today. I just want to tell you a little bit about the format and then I'll introduce everyone.
Danielle Gould:
What we're going to be doing is each journalist is going to be presenting their stories, and then we're going to have a discussion among everyone on stage of the stories. Where again, this is meant to be a diverse, nuanced conversation. We're meant to dig in, be provocative. Now it's my pleasure to introduce all of our wonderful speakers, journalists. So we have Alicia, welcome Alicia, who just popped in the bottom, who is going to be talking about a story that she did for Eater but she's also the desk of Alicia Kennedy. She's also working on a book about eating ethically for Beacon Press.
Danielle Gould:
We have Elaine Watson who is a contributor to Food Navigator, Joe Fassler, who is a contributor to the Counter. Larissa Zimberoff who is a contributor to Bloomberg. She's also publishing a book called Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Eat, which is out on June 1st. We have Sonalie Figueras, who is the Founder and Editor of Green Queen Media, Ximena Bustillo from Politico, Sarah Mock, who is the author of Farm and Other F Words and she's also a freelance writer and researcher covering rural issues and agriculture.
Danielle Gould:
Kristen Hawley, who is the author of the Expedite Newsletter, a weekly newsletter providing news and intelligent insight into the future of the restaurant industry. She's also a freelance contributor to Eater, Food and Wine, Business Insider and more. Megan Poinski who is a contributor to Food Dive, and Errol Schweiser, who is the Founder of the Checkout Podcast and Forbes.
Danielle Gould:
So we're about to jump into the discussion. But before we do, all of these journalists are fantastic. Please follow them on Twitter. Subscribe to their newsletters, support them, buy their books. With that, let's jump into the conversation. So our first story we're going to hear from Joe. Joe Fassler is going to be talking to us about Agrivoltaics and putting solar panels on farmland. Joe, you want to tell us about the story?
Joe Fassler:
So yeah, so we did the story, I think last week about the emerging science of Agrivoltaics, which is a fancy term for a simple idea. It basically just means putting solar panels over farmland. The reason for doing that is because really interesting things it turns out start to happen just with this synergy between the two. It starts with the panels themselves.
Joe Fassler:
Research shows that, well, solar panels, you put them out directly in sun. They can really overheat, even though their whole purpose is to absorb sunlight and turn it into energy. So it turns out they actually perform better, they can be like 3% more efficient if you put plants under them. Because plants, they essentially exhale, for lack of a better word, their oxygen, and that cools down the panels. But the really interesting thing is that crops start to grow differently too sometimes when they have panels over them. Sometimes much more efficiently.
Joe Fassler:
So the main character in this story is a guy named Greg Barron Gafford, he's a University of Arizona biogeographer who works at Biosphere 2, that famed research facility where they study habitats and how food production and things might work on other planets. But his work is focused on how we might live more efficiently on this one. He has an experimental garden there that's covered in solar panels sort of over it, they throw shade down onto the crops.
Joe Fassler:
In his 2019 study, he found that just by virtue of having the panel's overhead, tomato production doubled with 65% more water efficiency. That's because the water doesn't dry out as quickly in the hot Arizona sun. Pepper production tripled. Though jalapeno, yeah, once variety of pepper, and then jalapeno pepper production was static but the water efficiency was 150% greater. So a win for a region embroiled in historic drought, in really kind of eye popping numbers. The thing though is that those results are not consistent everywhere and not with every crop. Some plants like partial shade, some don't. Some regions are hotter than others, right, and don't have the kind of overwhelming sun that 300 days a year that Arizona has.
Joe Fassler:
So there's this race now among scientists and producers and all kinds of stakeholders to find out, you know, what grows better where with solar panels overhead. But it doesn't need to work everywhere for this to be a transformative solution. One sort of stat from the story that's comes out of research that I found astonishing was that if 1% of global cropland adopted solar panels, it would more than offset the entire world's energy demand, which I just found to be really crazy. Of course, we can't just do that, right? I mean, that is a good thing. Because as we start to use more and more renewable energy, we're going to need to put these panels somewhere.
Joe Fassler:
So it's great that farmland is such an obvious choice. But it's not necessarily going to be easy. First of all, it's not going to work as well in every place. So we still need to do more research to find out where does this approach actually make sense and with what kinds of agriculture. The financing is really high, the startup costs are really high. That's a challenge for farmers. There's also a lack of infrastructure, right? You can't just have solar panels on your farm and have that deliver energy. You need to be sort of connected to the grid, and a lot of that just doesn't really exist and may not necessarily be a priority.
Joe Fassler:
These are just some of the issues. Just to end on a sort of positive note, one of the interesting things that's starting to happen, is it's less that food producers are getting into solar at the moment as much as solar farmers are starting to produce food. That makes sense for a number of reasons. First of all, they already have their farms, right? They're in the energy business, they understand that. But there's increasing interest in having food production or even just growing perennial grasses and things that are good for pollinators there.
Joe Fassler:
So it is turning into a solution that is creating some more sort of farm income for producers. So one thing that's happening is people are ... They'll bring their sheep. You got to kind of mow the grass if you're growing perennial grasses under solar panels. So these solar farmers can pay wool producers or meat producers to bring their animals in and graze. Certainly, it's going to require sort of more agricultural knowledge to be part of the energy industry. So that's good too, I would argue. So really interesting stuff. That's my overview of the story. With that, I guess we could go to discussion. Have people heard of this? Is this a new concept to folks or ...
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much, Joe. No, I haven't heard of this. Yeah, I'm wondering what is the next step? How scalable can this be? How many panels that farmers need to put down to make this worthwhile in terms of scaling across multiple farms?
Joe Fassler:
Right. Again, in the scale of global farmland, it's a miniscule percentage. But I think for any individual farmer, it would be a huge investment and a big undertaking if it's not something you do already. Certainly, to an extent you're starting to see, cranberry farmers in Massachusetts are really interested in doing this in part because cranberries are basically worthless because they're so over produced. So they're thinking, "Okay, maybe we can keep making cranberries if we are getting money from solar."
Joe Fassler:
But it's not necessarily the best region for it for a lot of reasons. I mean, Massachusetts can be gray. It's not necessarily a good fit just from an agricultural perspective. So when you combine that with the fact that people don't really know what's going to happen with the price of solar and if you're looking at it as taking out a mortgage on a house or something, it's really hard to project what the return on that huge upfront cost is going to be in 10 or 20 years. I would say that the barriers are high for people getting into this and it would take concerted policy solutions to try to really make this a viable thing. That said, we're in a time where some big bold ideas are certainly being discussed. But it's not going to happen organically.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Hey, it's Larissa. Joe, thanks for sharing. I really read this with interest because I just wrote about greenhouses using Quantum.Film to improve the sun's efficiency. So I feel like it's adjacent to that story. I found that farmers are still reluctant to adopt it even though it has a lot more proof than the Agrivoltaic example.
Joe Fassler:
That's so interesting.
Larissa Zimberoff:
It does speak to needing subsidies or regulation to get to things like that, I think.
Joe Fassler:
Yep. I totally agree.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Does anyone else want to jump in on Joe's story? Yeah, it definitely sounds like a pretty risky bet for farmers to bringing policy and so on. I think sounds like that's how it could be scaled out more. Okay. If there's no other comments, should we move on to the next one? So next up, we have Sarah Mock, who Danielle introduced earlier, is a Freelancer covering Rural Affairs. You had an article that you posted on your medium channel this week, unpacking a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times, titled My Great Grandfather Knew How to Fix our Food System. Your story was titled, "No, Your Grandfather Did Not Know How to Fix the Food System." Can you tell us more, Sarah?
Sarah Mock:
Yeah, happy to. Thanks for having me. What a prestigious lineup to get to speak on. So excited to get to know some folks here better. But yeah, I wrote in response to Gracie Olmsted's recent New York Times article a little bit earlier last week, I think. The story, I guess to sum it up, is very what people maybe would expect from a story about that really glorifies the 1940s Depression era, small family farmer that is very focused on community engagement and on supporting local businesses ostensibly and on environmental stewardship ostensibly.
Sarah Mock:
But I think the argument, the crux of the argument that Gracie makes in her article is that if we could just go back to the glorious 1940s-1950s farm system that we had, then we would see magnificent transformation in our food and farming system, and would be on the right track to making some of the drastic system wide changes that we've been looking for. I mean, I think the article is a good unpacking of how every bit of that is just false nostalgia, which is quite funny. She has a literal sentence in the story where she says, "This is not just false nostalgia," which it 100% is. I mean, I think agriculture is not unique actually in the fact that like there is a big swath of people who believe that like the 1940s and 1950s was an idyllic time to be an American or the American dream and like the accessibility of wealth and social mobility for people. Despite the fact that that was truly only available for white men at the time.
Sarah Mock:
Women were being very actively excluded from the labor force, anyone who wasn't white was being heartily discriminated against at the end of the World Wars and during the Great Depression. There is undoubtedly a lot of nostalgia there, inside agricultural and outside agriculture. But in this historical moment that we are in right now, in 2020 and 2021, I think we've started to have a thoughtful conversation about the fact that the 40s and 50s were not this idyllic time for everyone in America and was our great grandparents and grandparents did not have like a glorious life that had no impact and if we could just get back there, everything would be fine.
Sarah Mock:
I don't see that conversation happening as actively in agriculture, about the fact that I think Michael Pollan probably made famous the idea that don't eat anything that your grandmother or great grandmother wouldn't recognize, or that wouldn't be grown on your great grandparents' farm or something in that vein. I think that I agriculture is certainly ready, food is certainly ready to have a conversation about the fact that lots of people's grandparents did not have a garden. They lived in urban places, they lived in tenements. They lived in low income housing. They were not making healthy food for themselves and their families because they could not afford to, lots of poverty in America and there always has been. Not everyone was an upper middle class white person in the 40s and 50s. Not everyone's grandparents were either.
Sarah Mock:
So that was the crux of my undressing of this argument. Also just think the frustrating thing, and what I would be interested to hear folks' thoughts and understanding of is, there is this ... There was a lot of language used in the article that was very community-focused and eating local. These buzzwords that are really important I think to the food movement still today and honoring, Gracie worked really hard in the article to honor her grandfather as he was the original ... This is very common argument in agriculture, the original environmentalist, he cared about his land, he cared about doing things right and was inherently virtuous in the way he shopped, and the way he cared for his family and the way he cared for his land and the way he did his job.
Sarah Mock:
In reality, the evidence that she offered in the article didn't really actually make any of those points. But I think that is a separate discussion. I think that's not true. I don't know. A big point that I wanted to make and writing this story was basically just white farmers in the 40s and 50s were not the pinnacle of modern liberal food system values. I don't think we should be celebrating people for buying local in the 40s because it's not like there was an alternative. They weren't doing it because it was the right thing to do. They were doing it because it was the only possible way to do things. I struggled with the idea that like we are in the food movement, in the farm movement today.
Sarah Mock:
When we look back at that time and honor it, and glorify it, and talk about it as the pinnacle of our agricultural history in the United States, we are whitewashing our history and eliminating the stories of all the other people who have made major contributions and who have been the voices that have actually gotten to where we are today, the more thoughtful conversations we're having now. It was certainly not white land owning farmers in Idaho who got us there. I think it's really problematic when I see stories like this that seek to put them in that position as leaders of a progressive food movement because I think that's whitewashing and deeply problematic. Yeah, I don't know. It was frustrating to see that in the New York Times going unchallenged as an idea.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Right. This is what you're so great at, Sarah, is your calling BS in the industry. Very thankful for that. I'm not an expert on American agricultural history. But I do know that around the time that her grandfather was around, it was also the Dust Bowl, a lot of farming practices too. I know you picked up on some of that. But what I thought was really interesting in your article as well was you're talking about how she glosses over certain issues.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
So she glosses over the idea of diversity, the importance of diversity. She glosses over the idea that our food system is brittle and doesn't really dig in. I think this is something that does happen quite a bit in reporting. I'd love to hear what other people think on this. It's a very complicated topic and often in a certain word count can be very hard to to get into right exactly, "Why is the food system brittle?" For instance. When you're trying to make maybe another point. It doesn't mean that I don't think she should have, but I'm just intrigued what people think about how you approach some of these topics within certain word counts getting deep enough to make sure that you're not glossing over in a negative way.
Ximena Bustillo:
I'll jump in here on this one, largely because I'm all here for the Idaho content. I'm from Idaho, myself. So I kind of take whatever opportunity I can to talk more about it. A lot of people think it's in the Midwest and it's so not. I'm totally here to talk about those rural areas, especially now recently having moved out to DC.
Ximena Bustillo:
But I agree with a lot of what Sarah's saying in her piece. There is definitely a lot of this, almost like romanticization of the 1900s in general as this great golden era. Especially in Idaho, it most definitely was not. We definitely had Japanese internment camps, horrible, awful migrant laborer treatment that continues to this day. A lot of exploitation, which Sarah has written a lot about. It's just the exploitation of farming in general is very prevalent within the state in and of itself. That's often not even talked about within Idaho. So it's really easy for folks growing up there to gloss over that history that is not so far away.
Ximena Bustillo:
The idea of like, community focus is definitely a buzzword that you hear a lot in Idaho, buying local, buying 208, by Boise, or by Idaho. That is largely focused and emphasized. But I don't necessarily know that it for all of the great positive reasons that Gracie also advocates that it can be. There's plenty of rural towns out there, like in Montana, in Washington, in Idaho, in Oregon, Wyoming, where if McDonald's comes in, the local community, these itty bitty towns, they get frustrated and they get mad.
Ximena Bustillo:
But it's not necessarily because they want to just buy local, it's because that's now taking away business from these communities that otherwise, these businesses that otherwise wouldn't be surviving because they're already under a structure that is putting immense pressure on them. So I think that's another thing to keep in mind is these things aren't necessarily doing great. They're not necessarily thriving right now. Then they're faced with this additional kind of corporate pressure that sometimes comes in or sometimes comes out. I don't know if that really makes sense. But I have a lot of thoughts on this as well. That's just kind of like my blurb. But there is that mentality of sticking to the local. I guess it's not necessarily always as rejuvenating as I think people make it out to sound.
Joe Fassler:
Yeah, I really agree with with all that. This is Joe. It's such an important topic to be discussing because I think so much of the conversation, the contemporary conversation around food is just suffused with nostalgia in this really selective and I think damaging way. I think the modern contemporary food movement discussion starting in the mid 2000s has done so much to try to sell the public on the little red farmhouse of the 1920s or whatever, as being this platonic ideal of food production or something that we should want to return to, as Sarah really nicely pointed out.
Joe Fassler:
One thing I'm trying to do in my reporting and we're trying to do at the counter is just elevate the voices of people who do not have those associations, right? Who were excluded from that vision when it was happening, who know a lot not only often about the land, but about the dynamics that got us into the situation that we're in, and making sure they're a crucial part of the conversation because they have to be, because otherwise we end up with stories like this, which really only tell one side and are very invested in some ways in the problematic status quo that we already inhabit. So it's just a great topic to be drawing attention to. I'm really glad it's part of our conversation today.
Danielle Gould:
Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Sarah, for sharing that story and, Ximena, for your thoughts. Definitely a conversation that we should do a dedicated session on to dive deeper into. So for everyone who is joining us, this is Future Food News where we're talking with leading journalists about the top news stories from the week. Next, we're going to go to Larissa for a story about the first CRISPR tomato seeds. Remember to introduce yourself so that everyone knows who's speaking. Larissa, take it away.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Thanks, Danielle. Hey, everyone. This is Larissa Zimberoff. I have a book coming out June 1st. It's called Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Rat. You can find it on my website which is my name. I also have a newsletter that goes out weekly. In the newsletter, I talked about CRISPR edited tomatoes. Now CRISPR is a gene editing tool used in the lab that is close to GMO, close to genetically modified but is not considered genetically modified.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Now, I found it really interesting, this article that talked about a Japanese startup that had edited a tomato, a specific tomato a Sicilian rouge to be higher in GABA. GABA is an amino acid that you can find in supplements on Amazon, you can find lots of supplements on Amazon that include GABA. GABA's supposed to be relaxing or help you calm down. All the studies that are around GABA had it mostly unfounded or talk about it as like a placebo effect. Tomatoes also already have a lot of GABA in them. So I found it very amusing that this Japanese company had decided to make a tomato that had more GABA. They talk about it in a funny way. They say that they're choosing GABA because consumers are already readily familiar with it and are already buying it. Also tomatoes, they chose tomatoes because it was a nutritious way, a way to add more nutritious food to our diet.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Now that tomato is the most eaten fruit or vegetable, whatever you want to call it already in the world, it's the most produced and the most consumed. There were all these little tidbits to the story that I found really interesting. But I also appreciated that the story laid bare exactly what this company was doing. So the company's goal is to make consumers familiar with CRISPR. That's the goal.
Larissa Zimberoff:
The goal isn't to make us a more nutritious tomato because the more GABA when a tomato already has GABA, and GABA is an unfounded amino acid. Sure, a tomato is good for us. Great. But to make these seeds, and then to give them to home gardeners, which they're doing for free, they're purely doing it to get us familiarized and comfortable with CRISPR. That is the goal of this tomato. The Japanese company is pretty clear about it. They're not hiding it, which I also appreciated. They said they had 5000 applicants already for the tomato seeds, each person gets five seeds apiece. They said they weren't commercializing it.
Larissa Zimberoff:
I found this really wonderful example of the way food companies are, of today, the food tech companies of today are tackling getting their foods into the world. Everyone talks about how prices need to come down in foods. The reason they want to bring prices down is to get consumers to buy them, to get them used to them, these marketing tactics that are very much a part of bringing new foods to market. So I thought this CRISPR tomato was a wonderful example. CRISPR, just to be clear, in case you're not 100%, CRISPR basically takes a certain splice of genes from one thing and puts them into another.
Larissa Zimberoff:
They're replacing the exact same set of DNA. It's because it's the exact same set that the governments and regulators say it's okay. So while GMO has to go through tons of hurdles and show data and get approvals, CRISPR does not. So it's just something to be aware of. I'm not saying pro or con against CRISPR or GMO, but I want to just elaborate. Anyways, I think it's a really great story. I was tempted to write away for the tomato seeds. The next plans for this Japanese company, they said is to make other tomatoes with other nutritional elements up. So I'll be watching it for sure.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Super interesting story. Errol, do I see you take your mic off? Do you have something to share?
Errol Schweiser:
Yeah. Just a couple quick points of clarification and full disclosure, I'm on the board of non GMO project. I'm actually a biologist by training. CRISPR is regulated as a GMO by the European Union. The non GMO project which at this point certifies over $26 billion in product to determine there's less than 1% GMO content does consider CRISPR a GMO technology. The difference just to elaborate is that traditional GMOs which cover over 300 million acres, US corn, soy cotton, canola are transgenic in that they take the GMO, the genetic material from one organism and transplant it into another.
Errol Schweiser:
In this case CRISPR is cisgenic where they're they're editing and snipping and moving genes around usually, though a lot of questions about the safety and efficacy of the technology. Obviously, a lot have food advocates have a lot of concerns. So if you were to release a GMO tomato in the US, non GMO project would still consider it a GMO and would have to add it to our list of ingredients that we're testing and certifying against. Likewise, like I said, the European Union, which has over 450 million consumers already considers it a GMO.
Errol Schweiser:
So as the speaker was saying, it's really as the first toe dipped in the water of a tidal wave of these technologies that are going to be hitting the food system due to the lack of regulation, the lack of oversight. FDA really being out to lunch or really bought in by lobbyists from biotech. Then if you like what Silicon Valley did with food delivery and if you like what Silicon Valley has done with fulfillment and logistics, you're going to love what they're going to do to the food system. So stay tuned.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Errol, I really appreciate you pointing that out. Yes, the Japanese company, it's okay. In Japan, they can do this. They have their their sights on, which is much more tightly regulated, and I often appreciate that it is much more tightly regulated in the US. I have concerns about the US. But thank you for making those points.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Yeah. I'll just add that actually, it looks like the EU is going to be addressing its regulation around this coming up soon. Sorry, Megan. Were you going to jump in?
Megan Poinski:
Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting story because I've looked a lot into just where companies are going with CRISPR in the United States. Agriculture companies that both are doing crops as well as doing animals, which is a completely different thing. But in terms of crops, a lot of companies have talked about how, yeah, we do have GMO crops, bioengineered crops all over the United States. But they've all had modifications done for farming-ist. They haven't had changes done to make the products better for people to eat in terms of nutrition or just presentation. There is a company, Pairwise, that's working on things like berries without seeds, and cherries without picks because these things get in the way of people's enjoyment of the fruits. So it's interesting that there are companies coming up, like this Japanese company that is amping up the nutrition, whether it's actually really making nutritional changes is to be seen. But I feel like it is the start of a lot the future what can be done with this technology to make things more what the consumers want.
Elaine Watson:
This is Elaine at Food Navigator USA. Yeah, I mean, we've been writing about some interesting applications of CRISPR as well that I think are actually quite positive and exciting. There's an Israeli company called Exit, which we've written about one of several, looking at this challenge around all of these male chicks that are basically killed as soon as they are born because there is no market for them as chicken and they don't lay eggs. So they're basically born and then they're killed which is an ethical disaster and also incredibly inefficient for the industry.
Elaine Watson:
There are companies now looking to use CRISPR gene editing techniques to add a genetic marker to male eggs that glows when it goes through a scanner. So you can enable the sex detection of these eggs immediately after they're laid in before they're incubated, which means that you don't have to wait for these chicks to hatch and then murder them effectively. So I think every case should be looked at on a case by case basis. But there are some potentially quite exciting applications of this technology from animal welfare perspective, if nothing else.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. I would also add that some of those applications you mentioned, Megan, around removing seeds and so on, that's all been done through breeding in the past, but over a much longer timeframe. So these genetic technologies can now speed up what would have been a traditional breeding process too. Sorry, Larissa.
Larissa Zimberoff:
That's okay. No, I've been reading up on that company as well, Elaine, and reaching out trying to find out like where they are because they've been at it for a very long time. They didn't have any updates to share with me. A new company recently got funding on the same topic, but handling it from a different way. So I think in the next few years, we'll see something like this. I do think from an animal welfare standpoint, it's worth worthwhile. I also appreciated your point of it being very much case by case. I think though that that's not how the food system works. One example does it and then everything falls. Right? So we have run it and now we're going to have everything else. Anyways, all real great conversation points here.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Great. Thank you so much. I think we could have a whole session on this topic. So maybe we should some time. Thanks for that, Larissa. Okay, moving on to Sonalie Figueras from Green Queen Media. You have got a few different stories to talk about today, Sonalie. Right?
Sonalie Figueras:
Hi, Louisa. Hi, Danielle. Hi, everyone. Always such an honor to be here. I hope I don't sound too sleepy. There are a few stories. But I think they all go together. The three stories I want to talk about are all very much related. I'll start with the reports. We had some big reports come out in the in the plant-based and old protein world this week. GFI, the Good Food Institute and Plant-Based Foods Association released a big report put together based on SPIN's data, which showed massive growth in plant based food sales in the United States. So the figure that they came up with is 7 billion in food sales. That's up from around 5.3 billion in 2019 and 4.9 billion in 2018.
Sonalie Figueras:
So quite a big jump between 2019 and 2020, with the pandemic obviously being part of it. But so many other interesting things came out of that data. I mean, there's too much to get into in this overview, but it's clearly a huge sign of things to come, something like one in five US households now buys plant-based meat. The 7 billion represented 27% I think of total food sales, if I'm getting this right. The other thing that was interesting was that my favorite quote was I believe somebody from SPIN said that today you really don't know as a supermarket who your plant-based customer is, because it could be anyone. What that shows me is that it's transcending age and demographic, and it's transcending income level.
Sonalie Figueras:
I mean, obviously there are stronger appetites in certain demographics, millennials, Gen Z, affluent areas, but it's still becoming a much broader play. That pretty much goes along with what we're seeing on a global level. Another big report that came out was Digital Food Lab, which is a food tech consultancy and media based out of Paris, which covers the European food tech scene. They don't just cover alternative protein, but they do this report that they release every year on the state of European food tech. They just released their 2020 numbers, and it's all about funding. They just released it this week.
Sonalie Figueras:
Interestingly enough, for the first time, investments into alternative protein in Europe went up by 168% or maybe 186. But essentially, it did really well. This was the first time there was such a jump into alternative proteins because a lot of the food tech investing in Europe tends to be towards a grocery delivery or food delivery or other kinds or indoor agriculture, vertical farming. So this again trends with everything we're seeing globally. What we're seeing in Asia, there was obviously more big news this week in terms of plant based factories in Asia. We had Nestle just opened a big plant-based food factory in Malaysia. We had Beyond Meat open their plant based meat factory in China. We also last week had Oatly saying that they were going to open a plant in Singapore, with a partner with EOS.
Sonalie Figueras:
So it's just everywhere, we're seeing a downstream, upstream, consumer wise, supply chain wise, plant-based is just obviously growing and it's getting wider in terms of who it's attracting. Of course the biggest news and I didn't know that I was going to be talking about this story until about two hours ago when I messaged Danielle, the biggest news today in the all protein space is that Reuters broke a story that Impossible Foods, I like to call them the enfant terrible of alternative protein, but they're also a serious pioneer in the space. They are looking at an IPO over the next 12 months.
Sonalie Figueras:
The company hasn't officially commented. But sources close to the company have said that this is what's happening. Really interesting. There's quite a few facts about why that's interesting. They are looking at doing a SPEC which is suddenly an I am not a FinTech expert in any way, but suddenly seems to be the hottest vehicle to go public. My understanding is that it's great because it allows the company to have a higher and more fixed valuation.
Sonalie Figueras:
The big news is that Impossible is eyeing a $10 billion valuation, which is pretty big jump from the 4 billion valuation that they were apparently privately valued at in their last funding round in 2020. Interesting also that Oatly has also been rumored to be chasing a $10 billion valuation this year. Obviously, it seems 2021 or maybe early 2022, we could have some pretty significant all protein plant-based IPOs. Eat Just is also looking at possibly having an IPO. It's also interesting because Beyond Meat IPO in 2019, which is around 10 years after it was founded in 2009. Impossible Foods is just turning 10 this year. They started in 2011. Impossible Foods has a lot to justify a big valuation, it has a huge IP stack.
Sonalie Figueras:
It's not just the alternative meat, which is very controversial as well as hugely successful. I mean, it's funny, if you look at Google data and if you read all the press about Impossible and Pat Brown, their mercurial founder, it's really a company that has changed the conversation. That I would argue it's the company that made alternative proteins a food tech topic. It's the company that really decided to take technology and put it into food in terms of alternatives to meat. I mean, that's my view. I'm sure there is debate around that.
Sonalie Figueras:
But it's just been a huge piece of news. I think very awaited and especially for all the other players in the space. If Impossible can get the exit that it that it wants, it's going to mean so much more investment flowing into plant-based meat on plant-based foods. So it's going to have a huge knock on effect. I think that Impossible Foods has also shown that they can do things their own way. They are obviously controversial because they use GMO soy. They have the heme ingredient, which is made using a kind of fermentation technology, which obviously is what gives it that iron rich mouthfeel. Most people who've tried every single plant-based meat under the planet will tell you that impossible is the winner in terms of matching meat.
Sonalie Figueras:
I know that I've seen people get fooled right in front of me and thinking they were eating meat, which I can't say happened with Beyond. So I mean, they do have this place in the Pantheon that is very important. Obviously the IPO news is hugely exciting. There's a lot more to say. But I don't want to take up too much time.
Danielle Gould:
Yeah, I bet there are a lot of people on this call or on the session that have response to this. I would just like to say as that I hope that next year that we do, in addition to the reports around funding, we have some reports that are actually around the environmental impact of all these companies because I think it's exciting to see the amount of funding that's coming to the into this space, but I don't think enough scrutiny or nuance is given to what the actual impact is.
Danielle Gould:
So I'm curious, I know there are a bunch of people who are writing about the alternative protein space. Alicia, I know you've been covering this quite a bit. This is what you're writing your book on. I wonder if you have any response for Sonalie or any questions or any thoughts on the story?
Alicia Kennedy:
Sure. I mean, yeah, we know that these burgers are more impactful than being burgers. But at this point, it doesn't seem like that really matters to anyone. What matters is that it tastes like meat. I'm a food writer so I don't really think too much about about the money beyond like how it notes how significant these things are. Yeah. So it's interesting to hear all that, that Impossible is doing so well. My anecdotal evidence is that people like Beyond more. So I think it's going to be interesting to see what really comes out ahead in the end.
Sonalie Figueras:
Just to be clear, I actually prefer the taste of Beyond, but what I've seen and I've seen gather some data around this, is that Impossible convinces meat eaters more. Of course, they are hugely committed to being the alternative meat for meat eaters. I don't know if anyone saw their their new campaign this week just came out, meat for meat lovers. We are meat. I mean, they really lean in on that.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Can we talk about the commercials? Has everyone here seen them? Sorry to butt in. This is Larissa.
Sonalie Figueras:
Yes, yes.
Danielle Gould:
No apologies necessary. Butt in please.
Larissa Zimberoff:
They're so ridiculous. They're voiced over by what sounds like the Uber farmer from the Midwest, deep, gravelly, male voice. All you're doing is looking at a grill with the burgers sizzling on them. The voiceover is like meat, like sizzling meat. That's basically the commercial. Then it ends with a hand slapping a sticker that says made from plants onto the package of Impossible. At the very end, and the hand is always a black person, which is just obvious as a use. Anyways, the commercials are just really ... What did everyone think?
Sonalie Figueras:
I actually think of it more in terms of what they're trying to do with the meat lobby. Because I think that we're going to see a lot, I truly believe we're going to see a lot more blowback about them, from the meat, from big meat and big dairy now that alternative proteins and plant-based foods are really starting to take a cut out of their sales. I don't know, I saw that as a kind of war cry towards big meat. But maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
Danielle Gould:
That's a good point. I'm sure they're trying to poke a lot of people with that commercial. Did you guys follow the The New York Times full page ads that were going back and forth between Lightlife and Impossible? Yeah. Was Plantera the other one? Anyways, in some ways, I felt that it was sort of insidery. I'll be curious to see how they do or what changes from the commercials. It's like a commercial at the Superbowl. Right? Trying to make just a statement. It's the new Oatly.
Sonalie Figueras:
Well, just because of their funny commercial at the Superbowl. Sorry.
Danielle Gould:
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think Impossible has that that hipness that Oatly has, right? Because it started with the baristas and coffee shops. But Impossible and Beyond are certainly fighting to be the everyday answer to your meat needs. I don't want to take over the show.
Sonalie Figueras:
I did want to mention quickly that impossible also has other stuff up its sleeve, right? It has the milk that it's working on, the fish. I don't think that it's just going to be about meat with them. I know that the valuation talk maybe not exactly food related specifically. But I think it is going to affect the food system in terms of how it's going to push funding into the space, not just in the US but across the across the world.
Larissa Zimberoff:
One thing that I find it kind of interesting about this whole thing is how many people out there really want to put money into alternatives and can't. So I mean, when I was doing research for writing about the Reuters story, I was surprised that there was actually a company that did a fundraising for an Impossible IPO over the summer last year. They raised $27 million. Who knows what happened? The expectation that they said was that impossible was going to be filing an S1 within weeks. As far as I know, that has not yet happened. But for somebody that's interested in this space there are very few options to invest other than just buying it at the store or in a restaurant. So if Impossible does go public, I'm sure that it will very easily get what it's looking for simply because there is a public hungry for it.
Danielle Gould:
Elaine, you want to finish us up?
Elaine Watson:
Yeah, yeah. What's interesting to me, because I was following the Light Life Campaign and so on, which I think was a bit of a PR stunt because none of these products can really be made in grandma's kitchen unless you've got a industrial scale extruder on your countertop. But I think that it's going to be interesting as this market matures, and you're seeing more and more players pile in, all of the big meat companies, some of the legacy brands, big CPG. This too how they start kind of differentiating themselves. Some of them are trying to present themselves as slightly less processed. Again, I don't know how successful that has been. So I think nutrition is going to be the next thing. But it's interesting to me that Beyond Meat is reformulating its burger this spring.
Elaine Watson:
So it's going to have I think a couple of products replacing its flagship burger. One's regular and one's going to be lean. But I think Ethan Brown said in the recent earnings call that when people grab a plant-based burger, they assume it's going to be healthier. That's what the consumer research says or at least that's the perception. Whether it's true or not remains to be seen, but I think that's going to be interesting to see in where this market is going.
Elaine Watson:
I mean, there's a lot of conversations about saturated fat levels in these products and trying to tackle that from a nutritional perspective but also from a functional perspective as well. So it's going to be interesting to see as this market matures, how these players differentiate themselves and what messaging they use. So yeah, I'm watching that space closely.
Danielle Gould:
Definitely. Okay. We're going to move along right now. So thank you to everyone. Sonalie, thank you for sharing this story and everyone's comments. Just a quick note, I am unfortunately going to have to leave in a couple of moments because I have a big client presentation, but I wanted to introduce Alicia Kennedy, who did a really wonderful deep dive into the world of vegan cheese that she published for Eater and would love to hear more about this story, Alicia.
Alicia Kennedy:
Hi, Danielle, thank you so much. Yes. So I'm a food writer. I have a newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. Yeah, just published this big 5000 word piece on vegan cheese for Eater with Bear, which is super related to my book that I'm writing, which isn't specifically about veganism, but about eating ethically in an unethical, under myriad unethical systems. So this piece has actually been in the works for years. I think I pitched it to Eater at the end of 2018 when they added different features editor.
Alicia Kennedy:
So the landscape though of vegan cheese hasn't actually changed too much in that time, which is interesting. So basically, the piece is how did vegan cheese start? How has it evolved? Because as we've been discussing, people are so welcoming to Impossible and Beyond Meat. They're so welcoming to things like oat milk and almond milk in the past. But vegan cheese is the thing that is like a step too far for a lot of people. So this piece explores why that is, why is cheese the icky thing to people and how are different vegan cheese makers coming for that ick factor.
Alicia Kennedy:
So I kind of propose that there are three tiers of vegan cheese. At the bottom, we have the most ubiquitous ones like Daya and people really like Biolife and Chow, but these are kind of all of the same tier because they are flavored pressed oils, they are not real cheese. Then at the second tier, we have companies like kite Hill and Miyoko's who do at scale, do fermented nut and and other base cheeses. But they do them at scale.
Alicia Kennedy:
They're not grinded, they're still pretty soft most of the time. Then when you come to the top tier of vegan cheese, you have the artisanal level. People like blue heron creamery, rind cheese in New York, and Riverdale as well, are doing like wheels of rind-did cheeses that are really different in texture, they have camembert, they have breed, they have other more interesting things. So the pieces about how from the start of vegan cheese was from soy-based stuff that was influenced by fermented tofu and things that were made in China to how the raw food movement in the 80s started to culture cashews in order to have something cheesy and funky.
Alicia Kennedy:
Then to now where we're seeing like this cultured and fermented nut based cheese at scale as such with Miyoko's and Kite Hill and how the raw food movement pushed it along, which is interesting. Miyoko's is everywhere. There's new mozzarella in New York that's everywhere. So yeah, it's just kind of a history of vegan cheese that goes pretty deep, I would say. Some people said too deep. Yeah. So Miyoko Chinar, who has Miyoko's Creamery, which is I think got huge investment is available in over 12,000 stores in the US. She's the biggest name in vegan cheese for a reason. Her stuff is really palatable. She makes butter as well that is the best on the market.
Alicia Kennedy:
So yeah, it's just about how vegan cheese is really coming into its own in the last few years. Are people ready for it as enthusiastically as they've been ready for non dairy milk and meatless meat? But I think the answer is they are not. I think the cheese is really going to take a long time for people to come around on that. But I do think that a lot of the smaller makers are doing the right thing in positioning themselves not as like the alternative to eating dairy but as a supplement to eating dairy. Just a different sort of cheese that can be on your cheese board that you can have in your house that you could use and just occasionally switch it up. So I think that's really the way to do it, is to position it not as you have to go whole hog on on giving up dairy, but to say this is something you can eat that's a little different. That's a different kind of cheese. But you don't have to make the hole all the way to being vegan. Yeah.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Right. Yeah, I agree. Vegan cheese has not necessarily been the one for me either. There's a company in Stockholm called Stockeld Dreamery. They've done like an alternative feta, but the founder would probably kill me for saying that because they're not trying not to say this is an alternative fetter. They're trying to create a whole new experience that could be used in recipes where you might use fetter, but it's not trying to exactly replicate fetter. I think that's quite an interesting approach as well. Sorry, Errol, I think you look like you're about to say something.
Errol Schweiser:
I think Kristen was first actually.
Kristen Hawley:
Oh, yeah. Thanks. Hey, Alicia. I'm Kristen Hawley, I write about restaurants. I think that a lot of this success for some of the bigger alternative meat companies has been in restaurants, especially it's headline news if fast food starts working with Beyond or Impossible. I'm curious if you see a restaurant partnership future for vegan cheeses as well.
Alicia Kennedy:
Yeah, that's in the piece. New Moo Vegan in New York has had a lot of success. Holly G's was using them. Miyoko's was in the process of partnering with a lot of other places. They did a pop up with Melt Shop, I believe in 2019. That was pretty successful. But I haven't seen ... I mean, I'm also a little bit detached being in Puerto Rico, not being in the US. I haven't seen them on anywhere else. Pizza Hut is doing the Beyond Meat sausage. But when is Miyoko's going to be ready to be at that level in terms of getting mozzarella to to these places that are open to plant-based meat?
Alicia Kennedy:
But yeah, so they're definitely working on it. And I think that is going to be, as you said, where the change is. But right now, it's pretty siloed of hipper more urban places like Paulie G Slice Shop and Scars Pizza in New York. I know Luke Holly did an event with New Moo. New Moo has really been one of the bigger vegan mozzarellas. I think they've been right to focus on mozzarella, because while everyone else does a mozzarella, I think doing it really well and focusing on that is such a huge game changer because of the pizza possibilities, which yeah, it's definitely getting on the pizza and doing good pizza work is going to be the big thing. I've eaten these slices before. I don't get as much satisfaction out of them, frankly as I do if I eat like a dairy mozzarella on a pizza. There's a long way to go. But I think everyone's on the road to making these work for the those nostalgic foods that they're going to need to make it work for.
Errol Schweiser:
Hey. This is Errol, I launched Kite Hill and Daya and Miyoko's when I was at Whole Foods. I love this article, Alicia. It's one of the few pieces that I think have captured the almost category management perspective in understanding different quality and price tiers and how customers are actually buying it. I don't have this indicated data in front of me right now. But I think it pretty closely reflects customer behavior and what folks are buying and the fact that vegan plant-based cheese are still a fraction of the sales of plant-based meat or plant-based dairy alternate beverages. Just wanted to say thank you for putting it together. It's a great piece. I think a lot of the folks who are actually in buying and merchandising in the food industry would appreciate it too.
Sonalie Figueras:
I just wanted to add something quickly, which is that there was a piece of, sorry, I forgotten which publication that was showing how cheese a category. By that I mean dairy cheese was one of the few categories that had actually, the demand and the sales had grown compared to plant-based foods. So I think this is a great conversation because obviously cheese is just a holdout compared to the rest of the categories because people still looking for it.
Errol Schweiser:
That's accurate, but meat sales have gone up 19% last year too. So I don't think we could confound the two.
Megan Poinski:
Yeah, I recently did a piece on plant-based cheese. That is what I was told by people on both sides of cheese, people who do dairy cheese and plant based cheese. That it's the only segment of dairy that is still growing in sales. Therefore, it isn't necessarily an imperative for a lot of dairy companies to try to get into it.
Elaine Watson:
Yeah. We just did a piece so I thought Megan's piece was great, looking at all of the brands. Then we just did a piece talking to Cargill and ADM that have been working on the technical side. They've got dedicated teams to plant based cheese because it's, you know, the most challenging area in plant-based dairy. But I think there are still kind of major challenges, I mean, if you want a kind of artisanal cheese that you have on a cheese board and some of these cultured nut products are fantastic, but if you want something that's going to melt and stretch on a pizza or to make a great grilled cheese sandwich, it's still these kind of starchy oil combos.
Elaine Watson:
Even Miyoko's which has got this fantastic heritage with the cultured nut products, they've been trying to sort of push more into that dire type space with their latest products with their cheddar products. Again, you've still got that kind of starch and oil combination, even though they're adding some interesting proteins as well.
Elaine Watson:
I mean, I'm most interested in some of these next generation companies like Changed Foods and New Culture that aren't on the market yet that are going to be using casein, i.e. real dairy proteins produced from microbes. Because from a functional perspective, casein is really the hardest thing to replicate. That's before you even get on to the flavor challenges. So it seems like it's still a significant technical challenge for some of these plant-based companies. But I was just looking at the data because the GFI data that we've been talking about, and it says, sales of plant-based cheese were up 43% to 234 million in measured channels. So it's probably a bit more once you add in the retailers that spends doesn't cover, but it's still a fairly small market.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Great. Thank you so much for that story, Alicia. So just checking in with people that may have joined. This is the Future Food News Review, we're chatting to leading journalists covering food tech, ag tech and food systems news on the top headlines of the week. So we have two more stories for everyone this week. So moving on to Kristen now who wrote a piece for your newsletter, Expedite about Squarespace acquiring Tock for $400 million.
Kristen Hawley:
Hi. I'm Kristen Hawley. I write about restaurant industry and ag type technology. So I think one of the bigger stories the last week is that Tock, the reservation service was acquired by a website company for $400 million, which is a large amount of money for a reservation service of Tock's size. So Tock started as a ticketing business. It was started by the co-owner of Alinea Group in Chicago, fine dining group. It evolved from prepaid ticketing to then just free bookable reservations and hybrids of the two events, wineries, CEO and founder Nick Kokonas is a vocal critic of Open Table and really like as a market brand, went up against Open Table.
Kristen Hawley:
Then in the pandemic, they added very quickly a to-go offering, which many of their restaurant clients would just not have offered were it not for pandemic time. So it started as pickup only direct ordering with the restaurants, took a 3% charge plus, and also charged the restaurant the cost of payment processing, significantly lower than a lot of the third parties that you hear about, but still a significant expense for a restaurant, especially without the marketing power of an Uber or a DoorDash. There's been a kind of a halo around Tock for the last year.
Kristen Hawley:
I think there was a Fast Company Profile about a month ago that called it the startup that saved restaurants, I don't think I would agree with that. But anyway, in within that piece, Nick basically said like, "Yeah, I'm going to sell this company. I have investors to please." That he did to Squarespace, which is a company you're probably familiar with as a website, a tool for businesses and people, I use it, to build their own websites.
Kristen Hawley:
What does a website company want with a reservations company? Obviously a lot of restaurants are on Squarespace to run their restaurant websites and to be able to integrate reservations and now takeout and delivery solution, I should add they do power delivery with some delivery partners like DoorDash is really valuable, clearly very valuable to Squarespace, as they paid 400 million in stock and cash. Squarespace has filed its F1 confidentially to go publicly here.
Kristen Hawley:
So Nick Kokonas, who is usually very excited to comment on anything about the restaurant industry or the reservations industry isn't really talking about what's going on. But my guess is obviously, there was never going to be a better time for the sale to happen. There was never going to be better news or talk. As the restaurant industry recovers, I think that obviously takeout and delivery are going to take a backseat to the in-person experience. But I think it says a lot to you about the future of the reservations industry. Right, and what is going to happen when people start going back to restaurants?
Kristen Hawley:
I'm very curious to see the direct channels like Tock versus Open Table with 50,000 restaurants around the world and a huge marketing machine called that change. So it's very interesting. I was very shocked at the amount of money, I will say. Very interested to watch what Squarespace does. Squarespace wouldn't tell me how many restaurants they have on their platform. I'm sure that that will come at some point. Actually, it might be part of the F1 filing when it becomes public, still to be seen.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Hey, Kristen, it's Larissa. I loved your latest newsletter. I was surprised to see Tock sell but not surprised to see Tock sell. I'm curious because you said Open Table is still the leader. It seems like people are finally okay with using multiple apps to get to the restaurant they want to. I used to be like, "Oh, it's just going to be one person." Now, it seems like everyone's fine with it. Especially with the last year being those towns and restaurants using apps other than for delivery and pickup, did you get anything from Open Table that really showed that they were still in the lead? Are you certain of it?
Kristen Hawley:
I mean, they're certainly the leader in terms of number of restaurants on the platform indisputably.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Right. But that's not usage, right. That's not reservations made. So I'd be curious to know who led 2020 in knowing that it was a very different marketplace.
Kristen Hawley:
Led 2020 in terms of reservations made?
Larissa Zimberoff:
Usage and, yeah, tickets bought, reservations made, pickups organized.
Kristen Hawley:
Tock had 7,000 restaurants, Open Table had 50,000. I think it would be really hard for anybody beat Open Table's number. No, I did not ask. I know for sure Tock doesn't give out to that number. I think they've talked about how much money they process.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Yeah.
Kristen Hawley:
I hope there's more info in with Squarespace F1 now that they'll be a part of Squarespace, but there might not be. But I would be hard pressed to believe that Open Table is not the leader on all fronts just because of its size. But no, I haven't checked it out. I haven't looked.
Larissa Zimberoff:
What about the idea that people are now much more comfortable using multiple apps to get to the places they want or the night that they need?
Kristen Hawley:
Yeah. I mean, like Google has obviously ... The way that people find restaurants has changed completely. I think there was this really interesting time when resin reserve were new on the scene where it was like, everyone's like, "Oh, if I open at Mesi, I get like the new hot spots." Tock is for fine dining only and Open Table is for everything else. I don't have recent data on this, like pandemic era data on this. But before that, the trend was everybody's looking at Google or Google Maps. That's where they were finding them. That's where discovery was happening. Then the actual action of making the reservation was the second thing. It was like, oh, I'll go anywhere that the restaurant tells me to go make it. Is that what you mean?
Larissa Zimberoff:
I know that a few years ago, it was like, which ones have more restaurants that I want to go to. Now I toggle back and forth between the web and my phone. I'm more than happy to use different apps. Honestly, I haven't used Open Table in a very long time. They don't have the features that I look for and/or that appreciate as a diner. I'm just curious what what the landscape is and what the mood is for people.
Kristen Hawley:
Yeah, I think the one interesting thing about reservations is that it's hard for a restaurant to use more than one provider. That's very different from delivery, that you can sign up with all the delivery platforms, it's not zero sum. Reservations is a little bit more zero sum because reservation systems are not only for bookings, but they do table management as well as time and management and all kinds of things.
Kristen Hawley:
I think you would probably use Open Table more if more restaurants used it because they have to pick one. Right? It's a little different than a delivery app that everybody can work with DoorDash and Uber at the same time. You can't work with Open Table and Resin at the same time. So you can work with Open Table and Tock at the same time if you want to use Tock's takeout feature, which a lot of restaurants have done, which is very interesting. I'm super, super curious if that conversion will hang on after the pandemic, depending on whether or not restaurants are choosing to continue their takeout offerings that normally wouldn't have offered takeout. I'm also very curious if Open Tables is going to jump in with a competing product for Tock to go and I'd be shocked to see if they did.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Right. Thank you, Kristen, for such an in depth discussion on that. It's super interesting. Okay, so last but not least, Elaine, you pitched your story for this week. You said Bottled Water Sustainability, Snake Oil and the Kardashians all in one article. That's brilliant.
Elaine Watson:
Yeah, I thought I would end end with a rant because I had a rant last time. So this is my bottled water rant for the week. The story I wanted to highlight is about this bottle water brand called Zen Water, which makes its bottles from recycled ocean bound plastic, which is fantastic because it's diverting some of this plastic from the ocean. But then of course, Zen Water bottles themselves could very well end up in the ocean unless they're all recycled. So for me, this isn't really about Zen Water, per se, I'm just keen to get people's take on bottled water in general because it's one of those products that when you step back and think about it, the fact that this product even exists is so crazy on so many levels.
Elaine Watson:
I mean, pretty much every week I get a press release about a celebrity that's invested in bottled water brands, Shawn Mendes is saving the planet by buying flow water in a tetra pack or The Rock plugging Boss or Mark Wahlberg and his Aqua Hydrate. Now we've got Chloe Kardashian strategically positioning bottles of Zen Water in her Instagram posts. To me, if any of these celebrities really wanted to save the planet, they'd be better off just telling us to buy a reusable bottle and keep refilling it from the tap. That we ever sold drinking water, something that's already available on tap to most Americans in single use bottles, whatever they're made out of, and then ship it all around the world. I think may one day just be viewed with utter disbelief and alerts for disaster relief or areas where drinking water is unsafe.
Elaine Watson:
I guess like most packaged food and beverage brands that we all write about are selling things that we of course, could make ourselves if we had the time or the inclination or the technology. But water to me is unique. Coca Cola doesn't come out of the tap, but water is already available on tap in every home. So if you're going to sell it, you've got to deploy some pretty creative marketing in order to persuade people to trade up.
Elaine Watson:
So you've got spring water, then we had purified, water with electrolytes, with taste, and then alkaline water. None of the companies that I've interviewed in this space provide any compelling scientific evidence that higher pH water confers any meaningful health benefit, which is why none of these brands actually make any hard claims about it. They just state pH nine, whatever it is on pack, thereby implying that this is somehow significant. But when this matter has been litigated, their defense has been, "Well, it was just marketing puffery or we never actually stated it was better for you."
Elaine Watson:
So if there are any bottled water companies listening to my rant, obviously, there's science to show that adding electrolytes can improve hydration. If you're replacing those lost in sweat, and I guess if you're an elite athlete or you just run a marathon, anything that can give you a microscopic edge is worth it. But if you're sitting at your desk right now, sipping from a bottle of a censure, all you're probably doing is wasting your money and contributing to plastic pollution. That's my wiki rant. So I'm keen to get people's take on bottled water.
Errol Schweiser:
Amen.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Yeah, I completely agree. My in-laws drink bottled water, they don't like the taste of tap water, never have since they moved to the UK about 15 years ago. So they always have bottled water. I mean, I completely agree. Yeah, trying to make it sexy in some ways with these celebrity investors and so on I think it's pretty poor form.
Elaine Watson:
I just think it's really hard for consumers as well to compare the different products from a sustainability perspective because all of them are presenting themselves as the most sustainable option. But it depends on what metric that you're using. I mean, tetra pack is interesting, because as I understand it, it's lighter. Maybe if you look at its carbon footprint, it does better than some other materials. But then in the US, I mean, where I live in Santa Barbara, California, for example, there's no recycling facility for tetrapack where I live, so it just goes straight into the trash, it goes to landfill. Some of the cardboard may degrade, but then the other components won't. So it's not being recycled, even if it's lighter, and it has some other advantages.
Elaine Watson:
Similarly, with this ocean bound plastic that's being shipped from Thailand or wherever they're collecting this stuff from, again, unless those bottles are recycled, that it could just end up becoming plastic waste itself. So I think it's just quite hard for consumers to compare these different products. I feel fundamentally, we're just being sold something that really isn't any better than what comes out of the tap. Then it's a hell of a lot cheaper to just turn on your tap and maybe just put it in the refrigerator if you want it to taste better or buy a water filter.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Right. It sounds like it's a communications piece for these bottled water companies to you talk about the type of plastic or how they can be recycled. Maybe they even need to do like an espresso situation where you have a bag that you fill up with your claps that they can then recycle to ensure that it is as sustainable as possible. I don't think we see any of them doing that, do we?
Elaine Watson:
I think it's like with a lot of things. It's like was the baby food industry, got a a bugbear about that too because obviously, a lot of these products are sold in pouches, which are very convenient and safe. They'll say, "You can send these bags to terracycle, package them up and mail them." Who does that? I mean, I'm sure there are some people that do and that's great. But mostly they go in the trash. I think when you look at the the websites of some of these companies, you really think that they were saving the planet, when in fact they're doing something that's fundamentally unsustainable.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. As Errol said, amen to that. So does anyone have any further comments or anything they want to share before we wrap this up? We've been very good time-wise so thank you to everyone. Okay. All right.
Errol Schweiser:
It's rare that you get any retailers that do the right thing on single served plastic bottles, but I think I just want to give a shout out to New Leaf, New Seasons, Bristol Farm, Lazy Acre, I think it's eMart now, I think they're a Korean conglomerate, They've decided to eliminate single use plastic bottles in their stores. So that's a big financial decision. I think that would make a huge difference if more retailers especially at scale did that as I think these folks have, maybe a few dozen stores. So just wanted to point that out, that it's rare that a retailer actually does the right thing on single-use plastic models. So thanks a lot.
Louisa Burwood-Taylor:
Brilliant. Okay. Well, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. This is the Future Food News Review. We'll be back next week, same time, 7:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 AM Eastern, 3:00 PM UK time. Thank you so much to all our journalists.
Larissa Zimberoff:
Thanks, Louisa. It was wonderful. Nice talk, everybody.
Elaine Watson:
Thank you. Thank you.
Alicia Kennedy:
Thank you. I learned so much.