S7. E15: David Benzaquen: Mission Plant
“One percent of the U.S. is vegan, about five percent is vegetarian… And so if I'm thinking about where can I make the most money, it's not going after the vegans. And if I'm thinking about where can I make the greatest impact, getting a plant based person to switch from one plant based burger to another does zip. And so our focus is how can we help people move the needle with those who aren't on board yet?”
- David Benzaquen
David Benzaquen is one of the world’s leading experts in the plant-based food industry and he’s the founder of Mission: Plant, a holding company advancing the plant-based sector with strategic investments and consulting services.
He has been a part of the plant-based food scene since it really started to take off, and a few months ago he launched an entirely vegan online grocery store called Plant Belly – it’s stocked with all of his (and my) favorite plant-based foods. It’s absolutely awesome.
David is one of the stars of the plant-based movement and I’m extremely grateful to him for making it grow.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn More About Mission Plant
Learn More About Moonshot Collaborative
Learn More About Plant Belly
Transcript:
David: [00:00:15] 1% of the US are vegan. About 5% are vegetarian. So if I'm thinking about where I can make the most money, it's not going after the vegans. If I'm thinking about where I can make the greatest impact? Getting a plant based person, an entirely plant based person to switch from one plant based burger to another does zipp. So our focus is how can we help people move the needle with those who aren't on board yet?
Elizabeth: [00:00:49] Hi. I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is a Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with David Benzaquen. David is one of the world's leading experts in the plant based food industry. He's the founder of Mission Plant, a holding company advancing the plant based sector with strategic investments and consulting services. He has been part of the plant based food scene since it really started to take off. A few months ago, he launched an entirely vegan online grocery store called Plant Belly with all of his favorite plant based foods. Hi, David. Thank you so much for being here in person. It's awesome. I want to work our way up to Mission Plant because I know you started advocacy really young, and I want to hear how you transitioned from advocacy to food.
David: [00:02:09] When I went to college, my first day at the school, which was kind of orientation week, I went to the student clubs fair and there were all these different organizations tabling and I went to all of the advocacy groups to find out what they would do. So if I join the feminist group, what would we do in there if I joined the Vegan Club? I went to every one of them and I found that a lot of them didn't really have actionable things that I could see having great results. So there was an anti-death penalty club, which I certainly supported the mission of. But when I went it was 2002, George W Bush was in office and they were like, oh, we'll call on George Bush not to execute people. I was like, that's that's quite a feat for the governor and president who's executed more than anybody else in history or the Anti War Club. Same thing. Oh, we'll try to stop the war by protesting. I'll do that. But that's not that empowering when I don't think it's going to have much impact. Then I found the animal rights club and I met these two young women who are still active in the movement today, Larry Sanders and Tara Nicotra. They said to me, Are you vegan? I said, No, I'm vegetarian. They said, okay, we're going to help you go vegan. Are you going to save this many more lives per year? Every single person that you help us move on that journey is going to save exponentially more. I was mind blown, here I was 18 years old, desperate to make an impact, somebody just told me that with just my fork and my dollar, I could change the world. For a young person who's desperate to feel influential and like they can change the world that they feel is facing so much strife. It was really moving to me and so I decided to join the club. I got really active and I started thinking about my career. So in college I interned at Mercy for Animals Compassion over killing the Humane Society of the United States and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Then when I graduated, I went straight to work at PETA, and from there I went to work at the Animal Welfare Trust. Then I went to spend four and a half years at Farm Sanctuary, the reason that I went into that work when I graduated college was because in 2006, if somebody wanted to influence our food system to promote vegan eating or protect farm animals or animals in general, since the numbers were so much greater in the food industry than any other. It seemed like the only option to do that was to work in advocacy in the nonprofit world. Social entrepreneurship hasn't reached our industry or our movement yet? Nobody thought, Oh, let me go start a vegan business or let me go start. There were people who had vegan businesses, not particularly large ones, but it wasn't a commonly held belief that that was a way to help farm animals.
Elizabeth: [00:04:53] Well, and it seems like back then, even though back then it's not that long ago. Right. But it feels like vegan businesses were really only to sustain the vegans. So it was like little vegan businesses who were for that little group of vegans.
David: [00:05:06] Absolutely. So I considered myself so privileged and so lucky to have received one of maybe, when I got to Farm Sanctuary and was leading the campaign, I was maybe one of five people in the country at the forefront of farm animal advocacy work. So I was really, really privileged to be in that. But it also made me realize two things. One was if I didn't do that job, the work would still happen because there were hundreds of people who wanted the job I had and who were excited about protecting farm animals. The movement had really started to blossom on the advocacy side, and so it made me wonder if I was having a unique impact that others couldn't, and I wasn't sure. The second thing that I came to realize was that I'll tell you, I was speaking to somebody about why they should go vegan, and they asked me why I liked sweatshops, and I looked at them like they were crazy. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Of course I don't like sweatshops. They're like, Well, your shirt is probably made in a sweatshop, right? I was like, Oh, you know what? You're probably right. They're like, Do you hate children? I was like, No, of course not. They're like, Why are you wearing that? I was like, I thought about it and I said, I guess it's not that easy to find fair trade clothes that are convenient and that are attractive that I could afford. I don't know where to look for them. They said exactly. He said, You helped me get more vegan food. That's delicious, affordable and close and convenient. I'll go vegan. Mind blown. It Just changed my entire perspective. I realize that the entire movement and I think education and advocacy are extremely important, don't get me wrong. But the entire movement was focused on identifying problems, as you noted earlier, and on trying to get people to change their lifestyle based on those problems, without giving them the tools and the solutions to make that convenient. There are some of us who were motivated by that and who have the privilege and the time and the affordability to have the resources to be able to learn and educate ourselves and engage this way without having it made easy for us. But none of us do that in every single issue we care about. Right here was a perfect example where I don't like child labor and I was not doing all I could because of a lack of time or affordability or convenience or whatever else. So it really made me question whether the work I was doing was the most impactful.
Elizabeth: [00:07:27] I love this because people, even now in 2022, say to me all the time, look, it's really hard when you're so deeply in and especially then when it's such an us versus them mentality and the us versus them is it just makes it so limiting. But I think it takes a lot of people who go vegan and then have this big mission, It takes some humbling. You need to get humbled a little bit because it's not easy and you're trying to write conditioning and all these things that are so ingrained in people. On top of all that, yes, of course, solutions are going to change the world, yeah, we do need advocacy and we do need to know what's happening. I mean, that was my story even with Species Unite. In the beginning, I was just like I wanted everyone to know every issue and everything that's happening. My audience was really small and it was really bigger. I want to talk about solutions. Everything started to open up and get a lot bigger and a lot broader and more inclusive. That's what we want. We want to shift the world. We don't want to create a small army of vegans.
David: [00:08:48] If ten of us eat 10% fewer animals, it makes more than one person go vegan, right?
Elizabeth: [00:08:55] Yeah. I really do think it's I like that you tell the story because I do think we all kind of need that moment of clarity of like, oh, shit, this isn't really working. Even though I did not put down that whole.
David: [00:09:08] So we need all the pieces, we need the policy change, we need the hearts and minds to change. I mean, the work that Farm Sanctuary was doing when I was there is amazing. They're taking people and introducing them to the animals themselves so that they can realize that those animals have personalities, have families, have, you know, have feelings, have everything else. That's a very humbling, emotional and deep experience that really touches people. So I do believe in all of the work, but certainly there was a missing component that hadn't been addressed.
Elizabeth: [00:09:38] When this guy said that to you about the sweatshops, where you're like, okay, I have to do something else?
David: [00:09:43] It started me on the path. So I started reading about consumer psychology and reading about behavior change and thinking about what caused behavior change. I had never even thought about marketing before or sales before any of these things, but I started thinking about how people are influenced by that lens. I was somebody who probably thought of all advertising and marketing as Mad Men, like white men in a room smoking cigarettes and planning out how they could con people into buying things they didn't need. It really made me rethink that. But I also started thinking that I wanted to work in the food industry. I knew that food was the issue where we could have the most impact on animals and the environment and health. I didn't know what that was going to look like. So for a year I was doing informational interviews. So every day I did 115 informational interviews in one year. So every single day, either at breakfast or at lunch, sometimes both or after work, I was having coffee or drinks with somebody I could find who worked in the food industry to understand what they did. I met with baristas and I met with waiters and I met with CEOs of massive food companies, just whoever I could speak to. At home, I had a whiteboard where I mapped out the entire food industry, from farm to fork, from food scientists and farmers and distributors and salespeople and everything I could do. I started to think about where I could, where I could fit into the industry and where I could have influence, where my skills would translate well, and where I could make an impact that was not being made thus far. I came to determine that the areas that I found were most related to what I was used to doing. I was used to doing fundraising and advocacy, and I realized that sales and marketing and the strategy of sales and marketing was very similar because the benefit was that now I was giving somebody a tangible good in exchange rather than just a good feeling in their heart. If I could work on a strategy to help companies be successful at scaling, at launching, whatever it may be, then I could make a difference. So in 2010, I started a firm called Plant Based Solutions.
Elizabeth: [00:11:59] Right.
David: [00:12:00] It still exists. I don't, I don't own it anymore. I sold the business, but the business was based around supporting plant based or vegan food companies with their strategies for branding, marketing, sales, all these kinds of things. I started by doing whatever people would hire me for door to door sales, where I walked up and down the subway stairs and went to dozens of small health food stores a day with melted, half melted pints of ice cream in a cooler bag on the subway to try to convince them to buy five pints at a time or three cashew cheeses or whatever it may be, where I only made money as a commission of what I sold and was not making much money. Or somebody needs a logo. I'm not a designer, but I'm sure I can figure this out. I will take care of that for you. Then go find a designer and get a logo done. It was being scrappy and figuring it out. I made the decision no matter what. No matter what it cost, I would ensure that the clients I worked with got the best work, even if I lost money on it because the animals depended on it and I would do whatever it took to do it, as well as if somebody who had the experience before did it. So that was my goal. I started by doing that smaller work.
Elizabeth: [00:13:19] So talk about for a minute before we keep going because the landscape in 2010, what it looked like like I mean, I know you're going down up and down the subway stairs with your ice creams, but like there wasn't anything like there was very little outside of like soymilk, maybe some almond milk compared to what we have right now. Like, if you go to my grocery store, my grocery store, it looks like vegan paradise. But so talk about what were the reactions and what was actually happening in the marketplace in 2010?
David: [00:13:52] It was a very different world. I mean, Daiya was just coming onto the scene. Gardein had not yet entered the United States. They both became large clients of mine. Treeline Cheese was just launching, Miyoko's didn't exist, just wasn't in the market yet with Hampton Creek. Beyond was just starting out and was botching their chicken launch, which they then pulled and then relaunched much more successfully now pre burger's, Impossible didn't exist. It was a very early time, I remembered, I had been vegan since 2002. So in my mind, the experience of having Daiya for the first time, having a cheese that actually really kind of melted for the first time was game changing. But I knew a lot of people. Yet, not as many as now. But a lot of people were starting to open their minds up to these things as they tried products. I remember when I was working on Gardein and helped to run their East Coast office out of my company, my sister called me one day and she invited me over for dinner and she said and by the way, we started using this really great product. I think you'll really like it. It's kosher and it's vegan. I like it because it allows us to add more vegetables into our diet, which was one of our key messaging pieces that you could add plants into your diet and it's called Gardein and is a really good thing, i was thinking I was the one who convinced her to do that through my marketing work, and she didn't even know that was really moving for me and realizing that the world was changing.
Elizabeth: [00:15:26] That's crazy.
David: [00:15:27] It was a lot of fun. The space has changed a lot since then.
Elizabeth: [00:15:31] You've really been in it like since like the vegan thing has just exploded since 2010. There were very few vegan products out there and now there's 10 million and they keep coming. Explain that a little bit more because for me, like I said, I'm in Brooklyn in the bubble in a lot of ways. It seems like if you come up with a new product, I'll see it in the store next week. I mean, that's how it kind of feels, right.
David: [00:15:57] Is not that easy.
Elizabeth: [00:15:59] I mean, I know that. But are there too many coming in or do we need more? Like, what's the demand?
David: [00:16:05] I think we definitely need more. I think there are certain categories that are easier to launch or innovate in than others. Yeah, I'm not as excited about somebody who comes to me and says they want to launch a new non-dairy milk or burger, as I am about somebody who says they want to launch anything else. Those are very competitive, challenging categories to launch in, but there are a ton of places with so much opportunity. Let's take the deli meats example for a second, sliced deli meats. So in the US, Americans eat six times as many cold cuts sandwiches a year as burgers. So when we look at the space right now, everybody has launched burgers. The largest players in the market are doing burgers. Everybody's gone after that and why? Well, it is much easier to make products that involve ground meat mixed together so crumbles and ground burgers, meatballs and sausages are a lot easier to make than whole cut steaks or larger pieces. But it's a challenge because that means that we've got so much competition for a smaller segment. Burgers are still very popular, but there are other opportunities that are even bigger and aren't being tapped. So in the deli meat category, total sales of plant based deli meats are sub $50 Million in the US. It might sound like a lot of money. It is not a lot of money.
Elizabeth: [00:17:28] What are the sales on burgers or whatnot?
David: [00:17:33] I don't know. But it must be easily ten times that. Probably 20 times. Right. Because you think about each of those companies that we the big guys are each doing 100 million plus in burgers. So there's serious, serious movement there in plant based deli meats. You've got Tofurkey, right? With three quarters or 4/5 of the market and deli meats followed way behind by Light Life, Worthington's, Morningstar, I don't know who else they're a handful that are doing four or 5 million each. Then there's tofurky that's doing 25 million. But at the end of the day, none of those products, I think, are anywhere near product parity on taste with the animal equivalents. Burgers are getting much closer than they used to, and we haven't seen that on the deli meat side. So it's clear to me there's a big opportunity there. If somebody comes out with the right product, the opportunity is endless and I've never been satisfied.
Elizabeth: [00:18:33] Is it just how the way it is at the moment, like Tofurky even, it's almost more like that's for vegans versus I mean, not on purpose, like I said, but the vegans are buying that more so than meat eaters, whereas impossible. It's the mediator's, right?
David: [00:18:53] Yeah. I think certainly, some of these are what we call legacy brands, right? Morningstar, Lite Life Bulk, Tofurky. They're appealing to consumers who've been at it a long time and consumers who are younger, fresher, looking for new things are not as likely to go to those products. I will say, to be fair, that all of those companies have come out with more recent innovations that are probably way ahead of where they were a year ago. But it's hard to change formulations. Not only technically it's hard, but it's also hard in terms of maintaining consumers. I'll give you an example. At a localized level, Candle 79 and Candle Cafe, which were some of my favorite restaurants and one of the first vegan restaurants I ever went to. When Candle Cafe tried to change its menu a few years ago, they had revolts from the long standing customers who've been there forever, but they had a challenge because they innovated. They were the first to have a Satan piccata dish. They were the first to do this and that, whatever. Then every other seated vegan restaurant in the country copied their menu. So now they had 20 restaurants in New York City with the exact same menu and they weren't able to differentiate themselves because when they said, okay, well we can innovate and create new dishes, their die hard customers said, Well, that's what we come for. We don't want you to change it. So it's hard to change what people have gotten accustomed to, even if you could make it better. So I do want to say that there are some new products from Tofurky and these other companies are fantastic. I think their chicken strips are one of the best in the market. I don't think their deli meats are as good as they could be or anybody else's, frankly.
Elizabeth: [00:20:30] Do you know Adam Weiss? He's Honeybee Burger in L.A. It's a vegan chain. So he was on the podcast not that long ago and he was explaining the world to me as vegan 1.0 and vegan 2.0. It is hard for vegan 1.0 ers who are like the OGs and you just want to root for them and you want them to succeed massively and wildly in this whole new world. But the vegan 1.0 consumers are holding on to them really tightly. Right. These new guys who come in all fancy and shiny.
David: [00:21:05] Yeah, Tofurkey as an example, they have made an incredible success. They've done an incredible job with a legacy brand that has really built a following that is consistent and loyal. They've done great things and they've innovated and gotten some new customers that way. But it's harder to reinvent oneself. Right. So the space has changed a lot. You were asking about where the opportunity is, where the market's going. I think there are so many places where one can innovate and bring out new products that are meeting needs that haven't been met yet. It is crowded in certain categories. Even when it's not, it's not as easy as it seems to launch a product, and actually it's harder to scale a business. What a lot of people don't realize is that actually getting into a store is not hard. Selling a couple of units is not hard. Making a consumer packaged goods business profitable is super hard. Just to put in perspective, the average grocery store might sell five or six units a week of a product. So if you've got a product in a store and you sell it to the store for a dollar 50 and they sell it for three, let's just say as an example, and you sell six, you're not making very much money, so you're making nine bucks a week. The time it took to get it to that store and the money it took to make it and everything else, nine bucks a week gross revenue for you.
David: [00:22:31] Maybe you're spending $0.75 or a dollar on making the product. So you're making $0.50 per unit for one whole store. You're only making $3 for the week.
Elizabeth: [00:22:41] Oh, my God.
David: [00:22:42] So that's just an example, right? But it's not an unrealistic one per product. You might only be doing 3, 5, 10, 15, $20 per week per store. So it's really difficult to scale a business like this, but there are certainly opportunities that are more open than others.
Elizabeth: [00:22:59] Right. Where do you see the biggest holes, like places that need more change and more innovation?
David: [00:23:05] Deli meats, bacon, seafood. Food. Poultry is getting a massive influx of new products right now as we speak with Impossible and Beyond. There are so many new products coming out from new challengers also. I also think there are still opportunities in some products for functional use and baking, like I think butter from the perspective of margarine for putting on bread is fine, but I think we still have a long way to go in terms of butter that can be used in a baking application. Yogurts; 30% of American households bought yogurts that were non-dairy last year, but only 3% of yogurt sold were non-dairy. I own a company called Moonshot Collaborative with a gentleman named Che Greene, who's a long, longtime researcher in the animal protection movement. We've done research on this category. What we've found is that people have tried yogurt, but they're just not satisfied with it. So if the plant based yogurts were more satisfying, they would switch.
Elizabeth: [00:24:11] So they want it?
David: [00:24:12] They want it. Right. That's true about all these categories. That's why I'm so excited about the potential for our space, because people are like, oh, sales slowed down by 1% beyond this month. Okay, that's ridiculous. That's one company. They've done a million amazing things. They get dinged for any one tiny thing that doesn't succeed when if you look elsewhere, they're crushing it. But it's also not representative of the whole world or the whole category or the whole movement. This is a long haul game. There are a lot of different products, a lot of companies that are out there. It's just difficult when there's a couple companies on the public markets that are being scrutinized unfairly and to such an extent. Then that's being extrapolated across an entire universe.
Elizabeth: [00:24:54] Yeah.
David: [00:24:54] But there are so many areas and opportunities and I think everybody should get into this space. I think that we need more competition. Look, 99% of Americans don't know that plant based eggs or seafood exist literally, So we are not there. I mean, you look at a company like just on eggs, they're only doing a few tens of millions of dollars on sales of plant based eggs a year. Right. Eggs as an animal product are a multi trillion dollar industry. So when we're seeing our world as having had so much success, it's really our bubble. We are having success.
Elizabeth: [00:25:29] Every time I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's huge.
David: [00:25:33] We are having success, right?
Elizabeth: [00:25:34] It's super successful, but it's very small in the big picture.
David: [00:25:38] Yeah. Over the last few years, dairy milk and dairy yogurts have declined in overall sales relative to population growth. Dairy yogurts are declining quite significantly, 1 or 2% sales per year, which is massive when you think about a market that size and non-dairy yogurts are growing 30% year over year. So in proportional growth, we're crushing it.
Elizabeth: [00:25:59] Right.
David: [00:25:59] But we need to be aware that we have a long way to go. The more products that are out there, the more different taste preferences and ingredient preferences we meet, the more likely it is that it will win as a category. So I was just asked recently by a reporter for the Food Institute what I thought it meant for Burger King, that McDonald's is expanding mcplant and what it meant for the impossible whopper. I said it was the greatest thing that could happen to them. It's just like the soda wars between Coca Cola and Pepsi. To me, when more people become more used to the fact that veggie burgers or plant based burgers can live on a menu and deserve to be there, yes, they will be more willing and more open to eating them at any other place. The brand is almost irrelevant. It's a normalization of the concept. In the grocery store there are 60,000 products in some large format supermarkets. The only way I'm going to recognize any category is if there's enough shelf space devoted to it that I can see it when I walk by. If there's only one or two products in the Plant-based seafood section, I'm not even going to know it's there because I'm too busy seeing 80,000 meat pieces. So having more brands, having more offerings is actually a gain for all of us.
Elizabeth: [00:27:15] Well, when you go into a grocery store and there's one or two plant based, it makes it look really niche and weird, right? Nobody wants that. It just looks rubbish versus a whole section. It's a thing. It's something people want. It's something you should try. I think it's insanely exciting. It's a lot of fun. Are there companies you're really excited about right now?
David: [00:27:36] Yeah, absolutely. I'm so lucky that I get to work with companies at so many different stages, so I have four parts to my business right now.
Elizabeth: [00:27:43] Will you go through them?
David: [00:27:44] Yeah, sure. So my first is my consulting practice and my consulting practice. I've fallen into this niche of working in two areas all around strategy. One is venture backed, innovative startups overseas who want to enter the US market, helping them with their go to market strategy and preparations. The other is very large corporate food companies who want to get into. Plant based either through investments and acquisitions or through in-house innovation. They're bringing me on to help them find companies to invest in or acquire or to come up with whitespace opportunities for them to develop. So they'll say, what products should we develop? So I'll look at their production capabilities, I'll look at what areas they're strongest in, and I will say, Oh, here's a kind of product here, a range of products that people aren't doing very well that aren't being done that I think you're perfectly suited for. So those are my consulting clients most of the time. Right now the second part of my business is investments. I'm an angel investor, not a very large, deep-pocketed investor, but I've been very lucky to make some investments over the last year and a half in some fantastic companies, usually very early stage companies. So to name a few, I'm an investor in Bramble, BramblePets.com. It's a direct to consumer fresh plant based pet food company, dog food company, Hurray Foods, which is making just extraordinary bacon, the only plant based bacon I've ever been really excited about.
Elizabeth: [00:29:15] So because everyone has been telling me about Hurray's bacon, but I haven't ever seen it in a store.
David: [00:29:20] So it is now in Whole Foods nationwide.
Elizabeth: [00:29:22] Really?
David: [00:29:23] So you can get it there. You can also get it on my website, my other website which is plant belly, which I'll talk about in a second.
Elizabeth: [00:29:30] Why is Hurray so good? What's what makes it different?
David: [00:29:33] I think what makes Hurray so good is that you can really control the texture from it being gristly and fatty and chewy, to it being crispy based on how you like your bacon.
Elizabeth: [00:29:47] So you can cook it the way people cook bacon?
David: [00:29:49] Yeah, it is. It has a great texture. It's very easy to cook and very similar to cooking animal bacon. It has a really good aroma and flavor that doesn't feel too forced. I've had a lot of products the way they just drop a vat of liquid smoke on it and it's just artificial tasting and it doesn't taste like it should. So this is really perfectly balanced that way. That's made of coconut and tapioca, I think.
Elizabeth: [00:30:19] Oh, my gosh.
David: [00:30:21] Maybe rice. Yeah, it's a really good product. Then I'm an investor in a company called Change Foods, which is using precision fermentation to make casein protein, which is the protein that makes cheese stretchy.
Elizabeth: [00:30:36] And addictive.
David: [00:30:36] And addictive. Usually it only comes from milk, but they're making it through fermentation. So they're going to be able to add it to vegan cheeses to make them more like dairy cheeses.
Elizabeth: [00:30:48] When casein comes on the market. So it's plant based cheese with precision fermentation, casein, it's going to be the biggest game changer in vegan cheese that's ever happened, right?
David: [00:30:57] I certainly hope so. For the animals and for the returns in investment
Elizabeth: [00:31:00] Somebody would say, oh, veganuary, which is an awesome, awesome organization, had an email or an Instagram or something yesterday where because most people who sign up for Veganuary, which is vegan January are not vegan, and a lot of people are not even familiar with anything vegan. So they put this post out yesterday all about how to give up cheese and basically you need to wean yourself. It was really honest, right? It was really like, look, you're not going to like the vegan cheese. I was thinking, I love cheese, but that's because I haven't had cow's cheese in seven years. So to me, vegan cheese tastes amazing. But I think cheese is still a big blocker.
David: [00:31:42] It is a big blocker and there are so many products now and they meet different needs. I think we're getting to the point where we have some really fantastic artisanal cheeses and we have products that melt better than they ever did before. I still don't think they're at parity and I think that this could be a real game changer in making that possible.
Elizabeth: [00:32:02] It's going to be amazing. I'm just excited for all this stuff to be available.
David: [00:32:06] Yeah, the other two parts of my business, so one is called Moonshot Collaborative. I mentioned it earlier, it's a consumer research company. So what we do is we have thousands of shoppers in the US who buy plant based products. Plant based products are defined as alternatives, plant based alternatives to meat, dairy, eggs or seafood. These are people who buy those products at least once every 90 days. They're all in the US. We have recruited them in, deeply profiled them. So we know all kinds of things about their behaviors and their beliefs. What do they buy? when? Why do they buy? What motivates them to eat this stuff? What is demotivating and is a barrier to them doing it more often? We've capped the number of vegetarians and vegans in the panel to less than 10%, and that's so we can really focus on understanding what's going to motivate people that are open but not sold already, because that's where the real opportunity is, right? 1% of the US is vegan, about 5% is vegetarian, somewhere around 20% of vegetarians eat more than half their meals, and even more than that are saying they'd like to reduce their animal consumption and increase their plant consumption. So if I'm thinking about where I can make the most money, it's not going after the vegans. If I'm thinking about where I can make the greatest impact, getting a plant based person, an entirely plant based person to switch from one plant based burger to another does nothing, so our focus is how can we help people move the needle with those who aren't on board yet? We use Moonshot Collaborative to query these consumers on behalf of brands or others about Would you buy this? How much would you pay for this? Do you prefer this branding or this one? Where would you like to see it? In the store? All these kinds of questions so that brands can perfect their branding, their messaging, their products to appeal to consumers.
Elizabeth: [00:33:58] What are some of the bigger takeaways you're learning from these people?
David: [00:34:02] One really fascinating thing we've been looking at recently is health and how you define health. It talks about the fact that consumers say that health is one of the biggest motivators for their decision making. I should caveat that by saying that the largest motivators are always taste and price with convenience close behind, similar to my example with my sweatshop shirt. People are most motivated by having something that doesn't make them sacrifice the things they love or their ability to buy other things they need to survive. But beyond that, when it comes to social issues or preferences, beyond those obvious ones, we look at issues like health, sustainability, animal welfare, etc., and that's actually the order in which consumers are motivated to choose plant based products. So what nobody had ever really looked into, though, was what does health mean to those consumers? Because there comes to be a lot of disagreement or a lot of concerns that if health is how people are seeing this, then what if they start to think that X ingredient isn't healthy, this or that? So we've been digging into that and we ask, do you think that soy, for example, is healthy or not healthy? Are you more likely or less likely to buy something with it? Because we've heard there is a certain small segment of the market that has been led to believe that soy is unhealthy. I tend to think it's bunk. It was primarily actually promoted by the Western T Price Foundation and their efforts to make soy look bad. But other than the fact that soy has grown in an unsustainable way to feed to cows, it's actually a pretty incredible crop from its cancer fighting properties and everything. But putting that aside, consumers believe what they believe. So we did research on that and we found that only about 11% of consumers said they were less likely to buy something with soy than not. That makes you really challenge the notion of the fear of these kinds of ingredients. We also looked at what does health mean to people? So for some populations, health is about weight loss. For some populations, it's about vitality and mental clarity. You ask a person over 60 if they're trying to gain mental clarity or acuity with their food, they'll laugh at you. Because the idea to my parents' generation that food would have any influence on our mental health is a strange concept. You ask a person under 30, it is without a doubt a major thought that goes into what they eat. They are convinced that food has an influence on their mental clarity and their weight. But it's just weight loss. You ask a young person if they're trying to lose weight by eating plant-based food, they'll get offended and tell you your sizes. You ask an older person and they'll say, Well, of course I want to lose those extra pounds. So one of the things we're learning is that there's a lot more richness to mine among what really motivates consumers and to really understand.
Elizabeth: [00:36:52] But just to take the health thing just for a second, because meat and dairy are pretty much not healthy like across the board, it's just not healthy, a healthy way to eat. Most vegan alternatives for alternative dairy and alternative meat aren't really healthy foods, right? I mean, they're good. I'm not complaining about them, but no one would ever go get a Beyond like a healthy dinner. Right. It's still a processed burger, right. That confuses me a little bit. Just because I mean, to be a healthy vegan, you pretty much need to be a 1975 vegan. That's vegan 1.0. It was a lot healthier. I do think there's a lot of people who think, I'm going to go vegan for a month or I'm going to go vegan four days a week because I want to lose weight or because I want to. You can gain a lot of weight being vegan, right? You can get really unhealthy being vegan, especially now. Is that going to change the products, going to get healthier?
David: [00:37:54] Yeah, it's a great question. So first, I think we have to put it in context of what the reference point is, right. Is it beyond burgers? It's not healthier than a kale salad. Is it healthier than a Big Mac? Probably is, yeah. Less saturated fat. Sodium. None of the cholesterol.
Elizabeth: [00:38:10] No death.
David: [00:38:11] No death. So in a country that has the kinds of diet related disease crisis that we have, getting people to feel comfortable with the notion that they can eat plants and get the same satisfaction is a great step towards moving them away from the toxic, unsustainable, truly worst foods they could be eating.
Elizabeth: [00:38:31] Oh, I absolutely agree. But what vegan food does need to get healthier? I mean, if we're going to be if we're going to be on a healthy diet.
David: [00:38:39] Absolutely. I look forward to the day when everybody in the world eats kale salads. I also know that I'm only doing that a third of the time.
Elizabeth: [00:38:46] I know for sure, I get a lot of pushback from meat eaters who are like, well, it's not all that healthy. I'm like, Well, that's because you only look at burgers and you can eat that a little bit of the time and eat healthier things more of the time.
David: [00:39:00] But if people are looking at, oh, going vegan equals eating these processed veggie burgers, they're really missing the point, right? We are innovating on creating foods that will give people the motivation and reduce the barriers to behavior change. I would love to convince people who are severely ill and who are contributing to horrendous climate change and animal suffering to drop the Big Mac and go for the kale salad.
Elizabeth: [00:39:27] No, I know. That's never going to happen.
David: [00:39:29] It's not going to happen. So this is.
Elizabeth: [00:39:30] A vegan is because of all these products.
David: [00:39:32] Yeah. This is a step in the right direction. There's nothing better than hearing somebody say, oh, I didn't realize I could feel so good or eat so well and not eat animals. Then how much easier is it to introduce more veg, more fruit, more nuts, more seeds, more whole grains into their diets?
Elizabeth: [00:39:52] A lot of times when we all go out to dinner, especially in New York, we have so many good vegan restaurants and I'm with carnivores and they'll say this happens pretty much every time. Well, if I could eat like this, I would feel good. I'm like, well, you can.
David: [00:40:06] Yeah. I think that the other thing is that as companies are innovating, the vast majority of consumers convince them, we do need to make things that are exciting to them. That's easiest when it's things they're used to. But over time, every company is motivated to make the products meet the desires of consumers and make them better on every factor from price and nutrition and sustainability and taste. So they're constantly getting better. I think we're expecting so much of the entrepreneurs and brands in our space that if they were trying to be everything to everybody's concern all at once, they'd be outrageously expensive and not be able to make it well.
Elizabeth: [00:40:48] I've said this many times, but we're in the beginning. This is like this is infancy in all of this.
David: [00:40:56] Absolutely. That said, I'm thrilled when I see products that are able to excite people with whole ingredients. That was one of the things that made me so happy to be part of Ocean Hugger, because we literally took whole tomatoes and made them taste like tuna with almost no other ingredients.
Elizabeth: [00:41:12] Totally.
David: [00:41:13] Insane, and when I see those kinds of opportunities, I get very excited.
Elizabeth: [00:41:17] Yeah, they're awesome. So talk about the fourth part.
David: [00:41:20] So the fourth business, super excited about this. It's a joint venture I launched with another company called PlantBelly.com. Plant Belly went live in November of 2021 and it is a direct to consumer site for curated plant based products shipping across the country which is unique from any other site in our space for two reasons. One is for consumers. I think we really distinguish ourselves by having, I think, the best UX user experience and user interface anywhere. That means that they're getting a much more fun, lighthearted, less stressful shopping experience and searching experience. The second reason is because we are very curated and what we offer, and so we're very stringent about what we choose to sell based on meeting very high standards of taste, acceptability among a lot of people. So our aim is to make it so that any non vegetarian that comes on the site tries something and is going to love it every time. That's why we're very intentional about curating very strictly. So we need to get the approval of a large number of our team members and we all try it and we're very hypocritical about it, knowing that we are choosing to limit how many products there are per category significantly. So we're not looking to have 15 different burgers on our site, we're looking to have a couple. So we're only choosing the best. We also try when possible to really highlight small batch makers, artisanal brands and the things that you can't find at your Whole Foods or other places. Another thing that we do is we work really hard to ensure that you're getting not just your protein alternatives, but also your pantry essentials because people don't shop based on just center plates proteins. So if we want to make a shopping experience that's really going to meet people's food needs, it needs to be more expensive so we have rice and we have coffee and we have this and that, all those kinds of things, everything plant based.
Elizabeth: [00:43:20] They're really good companies.
David: [00:43:22] Really good quality, really good companies. We're very transparent with why we sourced the companies and products we do. We highlight all the wonderful things about them from their sustainability practices to when they're bipoc owned or whatever else. We're really proud of the companies we partner with from the company side, from the supplier vendor side, the brand side. We also feel we're quite distinguished from others in the space and this is not to say anything negative about others who are doing the wonderful work of promoting vegan products. But we do two things that nobody else in our space does. One is, or nobody else does both; we buy wholesale, not on consignment. That means that when we bring in a product, we're going to pay you for it. If it doesn't sell, that's our problem. So you're also going to have that cash in hand more quickly to be able to go and invest in your business and spend. There's a lot of other platforms that will buy on consignment. The second thing we do is we store, pack and ship ourselves. So we have our warehouses that we own and some of the websites are platforms where somebody would go on and they could see all these products that are listed, but when they order them, they actually come from the manufacturer directly. For the consumer that means having to track down a lot of different shipments. It's a pain in the neck and it's more insulation, more plastic, less sustainable for the brand. It also means that they're having to figure out the logistics and the labor and the cost of shipping all across the country in small volumes. It's a nightmare to spend so much time on shipping $10 of product. It just doesn't work for them. So we don't do that. We buy the product, we take it in our warehouse and we ship it out ourselves. So we really try to be offering a value add both for the consumers, the buyers and for the sellers.
Elizabeth: [00:45:07] How long does it take for people to get it if they make an order?
David: [00:45:10] So it takes 2 to 3 days usually. I mean, it depends what day of the week, but within three days you're getting your order guaranteed.
Elizabeth: [00:45:15] That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. Especially there's a lot of places still in this country where it's hard to get good variety and have kind of choice.
David: [00:45:25] Yeah. I mean, most days when I order, I get it. Next day our warehouse is in Pennsylvania and so very often I'm getting it the next day. We have an exceptional team on customer service and packing our boxes with care. We handle refrigerated frozen and shelf stable products. So yeah, I'm really excited because I think the team has done a beautiful job on the site and on the products we've put forward and I'm excited about what it means to give non plant based folks an easy, fun entree into this space so that they can treat, so that we can give them the experience of seeing plant based food as a journey of discovery and joy and not a trek into sacrifice and hoping you don't stumble upon that dud product that it's going to turn you off.
Elizabeth: [00:46:14] Right. Wow, that's very cool. How's it going so far?
David: [00:46:18] It's going really, really well. It's been exciting. We're adding new products every day and we're working on some really unique partnerships that allow us to put forward new things like we're thinking about how to incorporate produce onto our site and all kinds of things.
Elizabeth: [00:46:30] It's also a really good place for people who are going to try going vegan for the first time. Like it just makes it a lot less intimidating because we've done vegan challenges here and there and we're starting one next week. A lot of the questions I get like when you've never shopped vegan, even though everyone shops vegan all the time because you're buying vegetables and whatnot, but when you've never gone into the store to literally just like purchase food for, oh, I'm going to be vegan for the month or the week. So it's really intimidating and it's really kind of like there is stress, it is stressful and so it takes all that out.
David: [00:47:09] Yeah, we're building up even more content to give people the recipe support and those kinds of things. But in the meantime, while we're doing that, one thing we're already doing is creating bundles of products around themes or around meals or around pairings. So that's really our goal. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for checking out the site.
Elizabeth: [00:47:27] Love it. It's gorgeous and it's got such good stuff on there.
David: [00:47:31] Thank you. It's a lot of fun. We have really unique and fun products there. I mean, I've had the best pickles of my life and hot sauces and all kinds of things in addition to fantastic meat, dairy and egg alternatives.
Elizabeth: [00:47:42] Yes. Well, we'll link it on our website so people can order off of it. David, thank you. This has been really cool. It's been incredibly informative and really fun.
David: [00:47:53] Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Elizabeth: [00:47:55] It was great. Thank you. To learn more about David, to learn more about Mission Plant and to check out Plant Belly, go to our website. We will have links to everything, on Facebook and Instagram @Speciecunite. If you have a spare minute and you could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Speciesunite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
You can listen to our podcast via our website or you can subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Play. If you enjoy listening to the Species Unite podcast, we’d love to hear from you! You can rate and review via Apple Podcast here. If you support our mission to change the narrative toward a world of co-existence, we would love for you to make a donation or become an official Species Unite member!
As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.