Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods)

Maggie Seng Sadowsky, food scientist and founder of 8 Track Foods, joins host Nick Carter to discuss plant-based foods, sustainability, giving back to help the planet, and more on this episode of More Than A Mile.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (00:04):

Welcome to More Than A Mile, a local food podcast from Market Wagon focused on connecting you to local food through farmer stories from across America. I'm Nick Carter, your host, a farmer and CEO, and co-founder of Market Wagon. We are your online farmer's market with a mission to enable producers to thrive in their local and regional markets. Food is so much more than just nutrients and calories. It's actually the fabric that holds us together. And I look forward to crafting a generational quilt of farmer stories and experiences, the victories and challenges of individuals, families, and teams doing their part to help democratize food in America. Thanks for joining me for this episode of More Than A Mile, and thank you for buying local food. That's one critical step in making an investment in food for future generations.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (00:53):

Welcome to More Than A Mile. My guest today is Maggie Seng Sadowski and I am really excited to talk about food because I am here with a leading expert in food. So I'm gonna brag a little bit. Maggie, say hi.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (01:09):

Hi, how are you doing today, Nick?

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (01:11):

I'm doing great. For those of you who don't know, Maggie's a vendor on Market Wagon, 8 Track Foods, and it's a line of canned beans, which we'll talk about how a leading food scientist got into a canned bean company. But you have probably eaten something created by Maggie in the past because over a hundred different products on the market today, from other food companies, involve inventions or innovations that Maggie's worked on. And then a couple of years ago, she spun off her own plant-based food company. And we're here to talk about that. So Maggie, let's just start with the beginning. How did you get involved in food science? When did you realize, I want to invent things that people eat?

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (01:53):

Well, it's kind of a tricky path, but it starts with, I was always really curious as a child putting things together and making potions in the backyard. And it led me to a love of chemistry. And I ended up going to Ohio State for food, I mean, for chemistry, and then along the path found food science, and it really kind of solidified the why of how things work in food. So why does your toast brown? Why does, you know, cheese melt? All of those things just became incredibly fascinating to me. And so it married kind of this love of food and this love of actually, hands-on creating things and applied chemistry. So that's really where it started.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (02:37):

So it started in a kitchen. [Do] you love to cook?

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (02:40):

I do love to cook, but I'll just, I like to say, I like to watch other people cook too. So I -- tinkering in the kitchen. I'm probably just a little bit more precision-based in that regard.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (02:51):

That's like the difference between baking and cooking, right? Baking is chemistry and cooking is art.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (02:56):

Exactly.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (02:57):

That's what I've always thought.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (02:58):

Yeah. It's so true.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (03:00):

So you started off in chemistry at The Ohio State University, ended up in food science. So tell me a little, so 8 Track Foods is the name of your business. And I don't think it, the title was modeled after an antiquated music delivery technology. Tell me about what 8 means.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (03:20):

No. So 8 Track Foods was really this idea that I wanted to kind of turn back the clock to a time where people, you know, gathered around the table and we were more community based and we cooked and we didn't focus so heavily on this like single-serve convenience. Everything has to be high-impact flavor. And so I felt like the food system was off track. And so I started to think about the name and decided that 8 Track Foods really worked because this 8 represented the image and the idea that I wanted to create, which was this infinite loop of sustainability. So it's one thing to focus only on the food that we create. And as a food scientist and product formulator, everyone's always like, I want it non-GMO. I want it organic. I want it plant-based. I want clean ingredients, but we, I put so much care into the food that we just eat that at the end, the day that product would be wrapped in, you know, heavily packaged, extremely plastic clamshells, you know, vacuum sealed and it kind of offset the impact that we're trying to, you know, accomplish by, you know, making an impact around climate change.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (04:40):

So the 8 Track Foods -- it's really the 8 is that infinite symbol of everything we do kind of feeds back into itself from the product, the packaging to how we source it, to how we produce it. And even the beans give nitrogen back into the soil, and our steel cans are infinitely recyclable because they're magnetic and they get picked up and most waste streams and can be reproduced over and over again, thus creating less waste.

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (05:09):

Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's amazing that you've zeroed in on that -- that steel is the easiest product to recycle, right. Because of the magnetism of it as opposed to using plastics or other materials. So was that hard for you to find a way to use that packaging? Was that a difficult challenge when you were starting your company, if you realized steel's where you wanted to go, was that difficult?

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (05:32):

I would say it wasn't necessarily a difficult challenge in getting the steel. I think communicating the benefits of steel is sometimes hard and helping consumers understand that there's a true value in using canned goods...

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (05:50):

[Do] you think some customers have an impression of what canned goods mean? Maybe it seems like -- from a post-war era and maybe we've moved beyond that, but you want to let people know that it's the future, not the past.

Maggie Seng Sadowsky (8 Track Foods) (06:04):

Yeah. I mean, there's so much value in [it] and there's so much food science in a can of beans, you know, the a