Full Stack Food

This summer, Reuters Events launched Transform Food 2023, a event accelerating innovation and collaboration within the global food and agriculture industry. As a precursor to the main event in Fall, 2023, Reuters Events teamed up with Full Stack Food's Aditi Roy, who moderated a panel discussion addressing the issue, "How Must We Rethink Emotional Resonance in New Food Categories." Irina Gerry, Chief Marketing Officer at Change Foods, and Paige Graham, SVP of Social Impact and Sustainability at Edelman joined Aditi in discussing why storytelling and building emotional connection with mass audiences is a critical part of scaling in new food categories. In this special episode, we bring you the unedited panel discussion. In addition, Aditi, Brett, and Stephanie discuss some of the topics highlighted during the panel, and ponder why and how storytelling matters in food innovation.

Adam Maxwell and Kelsey Tenney are almost polar opposites. What makes them such a formidable pair of co-founders is the one thing they do have in common. They are both downright obsessed with the science behind food. That mind meld led the pair to launch Voyage Foods, which makes your favorite staples with alternative ingredients to produce food more sustainably. The Oakland-based company recently launched peanut butter without the peanuts, and they’re also working on chocolate without cocoa and coffee without beans. Kelsey and Adam’s partnership began across the country on the East Coast - he had worked in fine dining, and she had a sweet tooth. Together, they believe they can replace ingredients that are becoming increasingly scarce in the world…with her capacity to solve hard problems and his big vision…and counterculture attitude that arose from his Boston childhood.

Tyler Huggins is not a man of many surprises. Rather, he is a study of consistency. The things that matter to him most today are the same things he cared about as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult. For one, he loves nature. And second, he wants to devote his life to preserving it. Tyler feels a kinship with land, trees, air, and water that feels core to who he is and it drives what he does. As a student, he studied ecology, biology, and engineering - marrying his love for the outdoors and living things with his passion for solving problems. Tyler also studied grizzly bears when he took up a side-hustle as a forest ranger....and also worked on water issues. After college, he started a land restoration company .. and later, as a PhD student, he landed on mycelium as a sustainable way to make structures from battery components to leathers and even building materials. After a brief flirtation with air filtration, Tyler realized that ultimately, he could have the biggest impact on the world by making food sustainably. And that's how Meati was born. Today, Meati - which makes plant-based meat from mushrooms - appears to be a raging success...it's backed by celebrity chefs, it just entered a partnership with Sprouts and it's building a mega-ranch to meet insatiable demand for its products. But for Tyler - the man of few surprises - none of these endeavors are far flung from his childhood growing up next to a national forest…

Markets and data transparency may sound like dry subjects, until you hear Kellee James talk about her life’s work. Kellee is the CEO and founder of Mercaris, a market data service, and trading platform for organic agricultural products. Over the course of her life, Kellee saw the power of exchanges in addressing social or climate issues. One example is, how cap and trade programs solved the problem of acid rain. And now, Mercaris is bringing more transparency to organic markets by providing farmers, processors, and consumers packaged goods companies with pricing data for organic foods. Mercaris is also a trading platform for organic commodities. In providing that transparency, Mercaris helps remove the hidden costs of those foods, and could help incentivize more farmers to switch over to organic crops. While it’s hard to imagine Kellee working on anything but market economics…that subject was pretty far flung from her childhood dream of riding horses for a living….

Riana Lynn’s company, Journey Foods, applies data to the world’s biggest food supply chains to help bring plant-based foods to market faster and more cost efficiently. That may sound like a big undertaking, but it’s just one of Riana’s many superpowers. From her days as an elite athlete and pre-med student to her early entrepreneurial experiences as the founder of a massively successful juice bar and a stint working for the White House - one of Riana’s early challenges was figuring out where could have the most impact while doing what she loved. Today, Riana sits at an unique intersection of food, data, nutrition, and culture that reflects her own journey…

We’ve interviewed many founders for Full Stack Food, but Jennifer Stojkovic is truly one–of-a kind. She created The Vegan Women Summit, which brings together more than a thousand women to help make our food systems more sustainable, accessible, and equitable. She's also an investor, founder, and author of "The Future of Food is Female." Stojkovic is devoted to increasing representation for women in the food system; she's started programs to increase the number of women launching, investing in, and working for food innovation companies. Above all, Stojkovic says she doesn’t expect everyone to become vegan; rather, her goals are more about systemic change - about targeting the food system to create more opportunities to bring delicious and affordable vegan choices to mass consumers.

You may have never heard the names Jon King and Rob Forsythe, but there’s a good chance the work they are doing will someday impact something in your fridge. The pair launched Milk Moovement, which is a digital platform which tracks everything along the dairy supply chain, from production to delivery. The work they are doing is wildly disruptive - before they started their company, Jon and Rob say much of the business along the dairy supply chain was conducted through phones, fax machines, and even snail mail. Milk Moovement started in Canada, where Jon and Rob are from, but the two say they’ll have a quarter of the U.S. market this year. How did they do it? They both started off in Newfoundland - meeting in college and originally working in the oil industry before pivoting to dairy. Through it all, their childhood experiences in Canada still guide the work they do today.

It’s not often that a company comes along and develops a product so game-changing, that it not only disrupts an entire industry, but sets the bar for any other company innovating in that area. Blue River Technology is that company. The startup was launched by Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden when they were Stanford grad students. Their mission was to help farmers take on some of their biggest challenges by making agricultural equipment smarter through robotics, AI, and machine learning. Blue River focused on precision agriculture - its first product was a piece of computer vision hardware you hitched to a tractor that targeted weeds and sprayed them with surgical precision - saving farmers time, money, and product. From the earliest stages of developing their product, Jorge and Lee talked to farmers and had them test it out again and again. In 2017, ag giant John Deere acquired Blue River in what turned out to be a seminal deal in agricultural innovation. Five years later, Heraud is still with Deere - doubling down on his mission to ensure the world’s rivers are clean.

Cannabis has arrived, and it’s spreading fast, far, and deep. Marijuana is legal for recreational use in nearly two dozen states. Gwyneth Paltrow, Jay-Z, Joe Montana, and Martha Stewart are just some of the A-listers backing cannabis companies. As a result, many entrepreneurs are switching from other industries into cannabis. One of them is Kyla Sirni. She started out in software, and launched a software platform managing reservations at nightclubs. That startup - called Tablelist - was hit hard by the pandemic hit and business wiped out overnight. That’s when Kyla pivoted to cannabis. She started Dispense, which helps cannabis companies run their e-commerce sites. Since it launched, Dispense has been growing...yep, you guessed it, like a weed. While Kyla’s success isn’t surprising, cannabis is pretty far flung from her roots growing up in a traditional family in upstate New York.

Benson Tsai is the CEO and co-founder of Stellar Pizza, a pizza-making truck operation that Tsai calls a “spaceship on wheels.” Why? Because inside the truck, the chef making the pies is actually…a robot. The spaceship analogy is particularly apt because Tsai is a rocket scientist who left his job as a battery engineer at SpaceEx to launch Stellar. His co-founders and nearly one dozen employees are also former SpaceEx employees who jumped ship to join the so-called spaceship. They aren’t alone in betting on pizza-making robots…recently, Jay-Z invested in Stellar. For his part,Tsai seemed destined for this journey…having been an engineer turned entrepreneur after grad school and then working at Lucid Motors and of course, SpaceEx, where he said he learned a lot about innovation from his face-to-face meetings with Elon Musk. But Tsai’s drive to build new things also comes from his childhood…where he learned to do hard things.

Ryan Shadrick Wilson wears a lot of hats as a leader in food innovation - advisor, investor, advocate, and strategist are just a few…but even those don’t do justice to conveying the influence Shadrick-Wilson, the founder and CEO of Boardwalk Collective, has had on the industry. Simply put, Shadrick Wilson has probably influenced many of the food brands you know and love. She started out her career as a lawyer focused on civil rights…but after getting assigned to working on cases in the food industry instead, Shadrick Wilson realized food can be a vehicle for social change. Her path led to a stint with First Lady Michelle Obama's office, and she ultimately found herself building a community - a tribe - if you will, of founders, financiers, big food execs, and celebrities….and galvanized them around the power of food and innovation.

Food has long been associated with health and healing. So it’s kind of remarkable that food isn’t typically a part of medical treatment for chronic diseases like diabetes. Josh Hix wants to change that. He’s the founder of Season. It’s a platform which allows health providers to give patients meal plans and recipes and even connects them to grocery delivery sites to help treat chronic diseases with wholesome foods. Interestingly enough, it was Hix’s previous company, Plated, a meal-kit startup that was acquired by Albertsons in 2017 - that made him consider launching a company centered around food as a vehicle for health benefits. But the story of how he ended up as a veteran founder starts much earlier - during a childhood marked by a lot of moving and a lot of math…

A twenty pound sweet potato may not sound like a life-changing piece of produce, but it was for Ben Chesler. He, along with Ben Simon, launched Imperfect Foods, which takes ugly, misshapen, or weird looking fruits and veggies that would go to waste - and delivers them to your home. Over the last several years, Imperfect Foods has built a sophisticated logistics network. Recently, rival Misfits Market announced it is acquiring Imperfect Foods. While the news came out after we taped our interview, we did learn that the seeds of the company were planted in Ben long before he set eyes on that sweet potato.

On the face of it, the problem James Rogers was trying to solve for as a grad student is pretty simple: how can you get produce to last longer? Once the materials science PhD student started digging, he found out that nature already solves the problem…fruits and vegetables already have a natural protective coating to shield them from the elements and the effects of aging. Rogers has taken that principle and used it to come out with a natural coating that extends the shelf life of produce, all in the name of reducing food waste in the global supply chain. He named his Santa Barbara-based company Apeel, which today is worth more than 2 billion dollars. Apeel's retail partners include Costco and Kroger and its investors include Katy Perry and the one-and-only Oprah Winfrey. In this episode, Rogers explains why it took him years to develop his product, how he convinced skeptical grocers to buy it, and what it was like to pitch Oprah.

These days, there are so many ways food entrepreneurs are making plant-based meat. There are using methods like fermentation, or culturing meat cells, or simply using a plant-based source like pea protein or mushrooms to make vegan meat. And in this space that’s bubbling over with innovation, the work Dan Riegler is doing is truly novel. Riegler is the cofounder of Karana, a startup which turns jackfruit into plant-based pork. His vision came about after living in Asia - where jackfruit is popular- and seeking to find a more sustainable and equitable alternative to industrial farming. Before he was a founder, Riegler was a traveler and a musician - not exactly the typical prototype of a food tech founder. But growing up in a nomadic and musical family which didn’t have traditional expectations for Riegler is exactly what he says allowed him to think outside the lines.

Did you know that black pepper can boost your metabolic health? That's just one nugget that Brightseed, a startup that studies the compounds in plants, has uncovered. But there's so much more to learn, according to Brightseed's co-founder, Sofia Elizondo. Brightseed targets what Elizondo calls the "dark matter of plants," or the healing compounds in plants that we haven't known about until now. Using data produced by microscopes powerful enough to detect those compounds on a molecular level, Brightseed's artificial intelligence technology combs through that data to reveal medicinal and healing properties of plants, thereby shedding light on the "dark matter." Sofia explains how Brightseed's discoveries may someday turn your pantry into a medicine cabinet.

Farmer's Business Network is one of the seminal disruptors in agriculture. Founded in 2014 by Charles Baron and Amol Deshpande, FBN's crowdsourced platform has challenged Big Ag companies - conglomerates which sell inputs like seed, fertilizer, and chemicals to farmers - by shedding light on price disparities and lack of transparency in the industry. Today, FBN is valued at more than $4 billion, and backed by Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and ADM, among others. Charles Baron tells us how the seeds of FBN were planted the first time he visited a farm, when he was in his 20's.

Amogha Srirangarajan is the founder of Carbon Origins, which develops robots to deliver food on college campuses, and hires human gamers to operate them.

You may never have heard the name PURIS Foods, but there's a good chance you've tasted their products. The "legacy disruptor" launched more than three and a half decades ago when its founder, Jerry Lorenzen, spearheaded what he called the coming "plant protein revolution," long before companies like Impossible Foods were household names. Today, PURIS counts Beyond Meat and some of your favorite plant-based milks as its clients. Jerry's two kids, Tyler Lorenzen and Nicole Atchison, have taken over CEO duties. The pair of siblings is steering the company into the next chapter of plant-based foods, picking up where their father, now considered a visionary for predicting a "plant protein revolution" left off.

When you hear about Lindsey Hoell’s life journey, there’s almost a Forrest Gump-like quality to it. Lindsey is the founder of Dispatch Goods, which aims to make the oceans cleaner by getting restaurants - and their customers - to switch to reusable packaging. Lindsey is sharp, opinionated, inquisitive, and action-oriented…and throughout her life, her varied interests have landed her in extraordinary circumstances – from helping to save lives as a cardiac nurse to riding the waves as an avid surfer. Her current passion - trying change the world by ridding the oceans of plastics and pollutants.