Business for Good Podcast Paul Shapiro

Imagine thinking it would be a good idea to try to help people eat more fruits and vegetables, so you start making whole foods smoothies for your friends and family. Soon you’re selling them to more people than you personally know. Next thing you know, you’re running an all-vegan frozen meal company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, a billion dollar-plus valuation, and hundreds of thousands of customers all enjoying your whole foods plant-based meals. 
That’s the true story of Rachel Drori, founder of Daily Harvest, whose success with the company landed her on Forbes’ list of America’s Wealthiest Self-Made Women.
But it wasn’t all success along the way. Two years ago, after the company had achieved its unicorn status, tragedy struck. Dozens of people were sickened by one of their products, and it wasn’t clear why. Some people were even hospitalized. In addition to the serious suffering of some of its customers, the crisis captivated national headlines, threatening to put an end to the Daily Harvest story after so much growth and success. Eventually, the root cause of the problem was found: A little-known ingredient called tara flour (not to be confused with taro flour) caused a seemingly allergic reaction in a small number of people—and policies were put in place to prevent a recurrence. 
Yet, the story didn’t end there. 
In the two years since the tragedy, Daily Harvest has since branched out away from just direct-to-consumer sales and is now in thousands of supermarkets too, making it easier than ever for consumers to choose healthy plant-based meals. And as you’ll hear in this conversation with Rachel, they’ve even achieved that lucrative land known as profitability. 
So, how did this all happen, and what’s next for Daily Harvest? Listen to the episode to find out.
Discussed in this episode
Rachel recommends Brené Brown’s Power of Vulnerability TED Talk—apparently 65 million viewers agree.
Daily Harvest is now sold at Kroger, Target, and more.
Some Daily Harvest meals are about $5 per serving.
Rachel landed on Forbes’ list of America’s Wealthiest Self-Made Women
Our past episode with Doug Evans of Juicero. 
More about Rachel Drori, Founder of Daily Harvest 
Rachel Drori is taking care of food, so food can take care of you. As the Founder of Daily Harvest, Rachel and the company are on a mission to improve human and planetary health by making it convenient to eat more sustainably grown, organic fruits and vegetables every day.  
Since launching the business out of the trunk of her car in 2015, more than 20 million pounds of sustainably grown fruits and vegetables have been delivered to consumers' doorsteps while supporting farmers’ transition to regenerative and organic practices.
Drori founded Daily Harvest with just 12 smoothies. The company, now valued at over $1 billion, offers meals and snacks for any time of day. In 2023, the company built on its successful direct-to-consumer business with its launch into national retail. Daily Harvest is now found in the freezer section of grocery stores across the country.
Prior to Daily Harvest, Drori spent years honing her skills as a customer-centric marketing executive, leading teams at Gilt Groupe, American Express and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. She has been named one of Inc.’s "Female Founders 100". Drori graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and earned an MBA from Columbia Business School.  She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

If America’s roughly 180 million meat-loving dogs and cats formed their own nation, they’d reportedly be the fifth biggest meat-consuming country in the world. As pet-keeping has exploded in the developed world, so too has demand for all the chickens, fish, pigs, and cows to feed those pets. There’s even been a trend toward human-grade meat in pet food, meaning pet food isn’t simply the meat that would have gone into lower end uses. 
This is of course a major environmental and animal welfare problem, and it can even be a problem for the pets who are consuming all that meat. 
As a result, startups are being formed to provide an animal-friendlier way to feed our animal friends. One such company is Omni Pet Food. Based in Europe, the company was started only a few years ago but has now already sold millions of meals to European dog lovers, and is on track to bring in about £4 million in annual revenue, or about $5 million USD. 
By using novel, animal-free proteins from plants, yeast, and algae, Omni claims that its pet food has real health benefits for dogs, and is actually preferred by many dogs to the conventional dog food they were previously given. The company has raised a couple million pounds in investor dollars, including even a crowdfunding campaign that generated £400,000 (half a million USD) in 15 minutes.
With so much success in its first nascent years, Omni is aspiring to bring to the world the first-ever cultivated meat cat food by partnering with cultivated meat startup Meatly, which it claims it intends to do within 2024. Already, the company has secured a retail partner for its cat food made with chicken cells grown chicken-free.
In this conversation with Omni CEO Dr. Guy Sandelowsky, we talk about everything from who the audience is for animal-free pet food, why non-vegetarians would choose to feed their pets vegetarian, what the future may hold, and more. 
Discussed in this episode
Omni went through the ProVeg Incubator.
Omni’s (future) cultivated meat cat food!
Our past episodes with UPSIDE Foods (cultivated meat) and Wild Earth (plant-based dog food).
Guy recommends reading The Lean Startup.
Paul’s blog on the rising meat demand from pet-keeping.
More about Dr. Guy Sandelowsky
Dr. Guy Sandelowsky, co-founder and CEO of Omni Pet Food, is a veterinary surgeon with over 10 years clinical experience and an MBA from Imperial Business School. 

Maisie Ganzler has never worked at an animal welfare charity nor an alt-protein company. Yet she’s in the upper echelon of effectiveness when it comes to reducing the suffering of farmed animals. That’s because she’s served as an executive of a national food management company supplying 1,000 schools and corporate dining facilities, Bon Appetit Management Company, for decades. In her career, Maisie pioneered some of the first-ever corporate policies to require suppliers to stop using battery cages for laying hens and gestation crates for breeding pigs, meat reduction policies, and a whole host of other important animal welfare and sustainability initiatives. 
When Bon Appetit would implement a policy like those mentioned, it was often seen as leading edge at the time, yet eventually would become the norm among food service companies. For example, Bon Appetit’s 2005 cage-free egg policy would come to be adopted by McDonald’s a decade later. Maisie even ran for McDonald’s board of directors, backed by billionaire Carl Icahn, a campaign she writes that the fast food company spent $16 million to defeat. While she didn’t make it onto McDonald’s board, Maisie does sit on the board of directors of an alt-protein company called Air Protein, whose CEO Lisa Dyson has been a guest on this show before!
So it was with great pleasure that I learned that Maisie has come out with her first book, which is part autobiography and part guide for others on how to create meaningful change in our food and agricultural system. The book, which just recently came out, is called You Can't Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company. I read it and found it both informational, inspirational, and entertaining. What more could you want? 
Well, maybe you’d want to hear Maisie’s story straight from her rather than from me, so enjoy this conversation with a true pioneer for animals, farm workers, and everyone who wants to build a better food system.
Discussed in this episode
Josh Balk worked with Maisie on many animal welfare policies, and now runs The Accountability Board.
David Benzaquen was a student who in 2005 helped catalyze Bon Appetit’s cage-free policy, and who now is an executive in the plant-based food industry. 
Maisie discusses the difficulties implementing the Better Chicken Commitment, leading Compassion in World Farming to extend its deadline for compliance. You can read more in CIWF’s 2023 Chicken Track paper.
Maisie recommends reading Civil Eats and the NRA Smart Brief.
Our past episode with Resetting the Table author Robert Paarlberg.
Walker Hayes’ song Fancy Like has 146 million YouTube views, so it’s not just Maisie and Paul who like it. 

More about Maisie Ganzler
Maisie Ganzler is the go-to expert on how companies can make positive change in supply chains and other entrenched systems. She’s been interviewed by leading media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fast Company, and Bloomberg, spoken at conferences around the world, written thought leadership pieces for Forbes, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle and is frequently called upon for strategic counsel by start-ups and big business alike.
As Chief Strategy & Brand Officer for Bon Appetit Management Company, a $1.7 billion onsite restaurant company with 1,000-plus cafés at corporations, universities, and cultural institutions in 33 states serving more than 250 million meals per year, Maisie tackled local purchasing, antibiotics in meat production, sustainable seafood, humane care of farm animals, climate change, farmworkers’ rights, and food waste, positioning the company as the foodservice industry’s undisputed leader in sustainable purchasing and holistic wellness.
She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

Many listeners of this show will be familiar with precision fermentation, or turning microbes into factories to produce proteins like those proteins that have historically been produced inside of chickens and cows. Think of companies whose founders we’ve had on, like Perfect Day and The Every Company.
But, what if instead of using microbes as protein factories—and all the associated costs of bioreactors and other capex—you could simply turn plants into protein factories, and make actual animal proteins inside of the plants, which can then be extracted and sold?
That’s exactly what Israeli startup PoLoPo is doing inside of potatoes. Their first protein: Ovalbumin, or the protein that makes up most of the egg white’s protein content. If you pay attention to ingredient decks on food packaging, you’ve probably noticed that albumin is an ingredient in many foods, often serving to help color and texturize foods, as well as serving as a high-quality source of protein. In fact, the global egg albumin market is valued at billions of dollars, with some estimates around $5 billion USD and others as much as $30 billion USD.
Founded in 2022, PoLoPo has already raised a couple million US dollars to scramble that market with real egg proteins grown inside of potatoes. Since the process is totally animal-free, it should go over easy as a  vegan ingredient, but since it’s an actual egg protein, those with egg allergies will still want to avoid cracking open a food with PoLoPo’s Ovalbumin.
In this episode, PoLoPo CEO Maya Sapir-Mir and I chat about her work as a plant biologist, how she teamed up with a vegan scientist to co-found this company, her passion for using bioengineering to help save the planet, and of course, how she plans to use the humble potato to displace some of the need for chickens in our food industry. 
Discussed in this episode
2022 Food Navigator story on PoLoPo’s technology.
Our past episodes with The Kitchen and Aleph Farms. 
As well, Paul recommends reading Resetting the Table, whose author we did an episode with too.
Fellow molecular farming startup Moolec received approval from the USDA for its soybeans that contain pig proteins. 
More about Maya Sapir-Mir
Maya Sapir-Mir is CEO and co-founder of PoLoPo, a molecular farming pioneer producing proteins directly in common crops, beginning with egg protein (ovalbumin) grown in potatoes. She has nearly ten years of experience in the biotech industry and agricultural R&D, including senior management at a small cannabis industry startup. In addition to leading R&D on plants with commercial and medical applications, she managed collaborations with partners and customers.
She holds a PhD in plant sciences and an MSc in plant genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a BSc in biochemistry from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She performed post-doctoral work at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s leading agricultural R&D facility, creating a new area of research for the organization in Protein Identification, Extraction, and Characterization in plants and microorganisms.

Upon reading his obituary, Mark Twain reportedly wrote that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Whether Twain actually wrote this or not, the reality remains that today the reports of the death of cultivated meat are indeed quite real. Yet Bruce Friedrich, the president of the Good Food Institute, is here to tell you that he believes such reports are not based on science and are indeed greatly exaggerated. 
Few people have done more to inspire others to pursue alternative protein—including cultivated meat—as a strategy to ameliorate world problems than Bruce. I’ve known Bruce since 1996, and one thing that’s remained constant during the past three decades is that Bruce’s commitment to reducing suffering on the planet is simply enormous. Whether in his role as part of the nonprofit animal advocacy world or the crusade he’s been on since co-founding GFI in 2016 to render alternative proteins no longer alternative, Bruce’s lodestar has always been: how can he do as much good as possible during his limited time on the planet?
In this conversation, Bruce and I focus on the state of the plant-based and cultivated meat industries today, why he believes the critics are misguided, whether China will lead this race, how to respond to the new cultivated meat bans like those newly passed in Florida and Alabama, and critically: what it will take for alt-protein to no longer be alt.
Discussed in this episode
This episode is the 10th in our ten-part podcast series on cultivated meat. The previous nine episodes include Orbillion Bio, UPSIDE Foods, Avant Meats, BlueNalu, Eat Just, Fork & Good, Mosa Meat, New Harvest, and Aleph Farms.
Dr. Elliot Swartz’s presentation: The Cost Drivers of Cultivated Meat Production.
GFI’s Plant-Based Meat Production Volume Modeling 2030 analysis.
GFI’s numerous additional resources, including The Science of Cultivated Meat, Advancing Solutions for Alternative Protein, The Costs and Environmental Impacts of Cultivated Meat, and The GFI Startup Manual. 
You can sign up to receive GFI’s many newsletters and to be alerted to their many webinars and other events and resources at gfi.org/newsletters. 
Bruce cites numerous laws, including Amara’s Law (we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run), Wright’s Law (for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs will fall by a constant percentage), and even Newton’s Third Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction).
Good Meat is now selling cultivated chicken at a butchery in Singapore.
China’s five-year plan for the future of meat.
The cultivated meat documentary Meat the Future.
Bruce recommends Hannah Ritchie’s book, Not The End of the World. You can see Paul’s review of it here.
Ezra Klein’s 2021 NY Times column, Let’s Launch a Moonshot for Meatless Meat.
Bruce’s 2019 TED Talk.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ report: The Future Appetite for Alternative Proteins.
Our past episodes with Ryan Bethencourt and Jason Matheny.
An upcoming episode with Israel’s albumin producer PoLoPo!
More about Bruce Friedrich
Bruce Friedrich is founder & president of the Good Food Institute, a global network of nonprofit science-focused think tanks, with more than 220 full-time team members across affiliates in the U.S., India, Israel, Brazil, Singapore, and Europe (UK, Germany, & EC). GFI works on alternative protein policy, science, and corporate engagement - to accelerate the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity. Friedrich is a TED Fellow, Y Combinator alum, 2021 "American Food Hero" (EatingWell Magazine), and popular speaker on food innovation. He has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Fo

If you follow the cultivated meat sector, you know that the last couple years have been tough. Some companies have gone under, others have gone into hibernation, and others have shed staff in cash-conserving layoffs. Major publications have published opinion column obituaries for this industry, yet the work goes on. Part of that work is that of Obillion Bio, a B2B cultivated meat company which successfully raised capital in 2024, surely a Herculean feat.
Having now brought in $15 million, while the Orbillion technology is complex, the business model is simple: grow high-quality wagyu beef cells and then sell those cells to others who will create finished goods with them.
In this conversation, Orbillion CEO Patricia Bubner and I chat about what makes them different from other cultivated meat startups, her work as a plant and fungal biologist prior to her career in mammalian cell culture, what she thinks are the best ways to scale, why she thinks she was successful in fundraising during a funding famine, and more. 
Discussed in this episode
Patricia is a fan of John Steinbeck’s books.
Patricia co-founded The Millet Project.
Orbillion went through the Y Combinator accelerator program
Patricia and Paul both recommend Hannah Ritchie book, Not The End of the World. You can see Paul’s review of it here.
AgFunder News on Orbillion Bio.
More about Patricia Bubner, PhD
Patricia Bubner is a PhD scientist and engineer focused on commercializing cultivated beef. She is the co-founder and CEO of Orbillion Bio, Inc. with the mission to make sustainable, nutritious, and flavorful cultivated meat at price parity. 
Patricia grew up in Graz, Austria, surrounded by an abundance of local and regional foods. With farmers as grandparents, she learned early where food comes from and the hard work that goes into producing it. Her deep interest in food — and the molecular basis of food — led her to study chemistry.
Patricia holds an MSc in Technical Chemistry and a PhD in Biotechnology from Graz University of Technology in Austria, and she conducted her postdoctoral research at the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. During that time, she also pursued her conviction of a more sustainable food system as a co-founder of the agriculture and food systems initiative, The Millet Project. 
Prior to Orbillion, Patricia advised several technology companies and led the Analytics and QC teams at biopharma startups. During her time with the Bioprocess Science team at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), she built and led a team dedicated to scaling bioprocess development for mammalian cells — the very systems required to commercialize cultivated meat. At BI, Patricia met and worked hand-in-hand with Orbillion co-founder, Samet Yildirim, on a novel bioprocessing technology now commercialized by Pfizer.
Combining her experience in the biopharma, food, and sustainable materials industries, Patricia co-founded Orbillion Bio, Inc. Orbillion is a B2B cultivated meat technology company that brings commercially viable meat to the ever-growing $211B global ground beef market. Orbillion has developed a game-changing algorithm for the scale-up of cultivated meat that makes commercializing low-cost cultivated beef possible.
Orbillion has raised $15M and is backed by The Venture Collective, Y Combinator, At One Ventures, Venture Souq, and Metaplanet among others.