Business for Good Podcast

Tuna are like the tigers of the ocean: apex predators essential for oceanic health. And just like with tigers, humanity has been waging an unprovoked war on tuna, causing their numbers to plummet in recent decades.  They may not be furry, but these finned beasts still need help, and help them is exactly what Impact Food is seeking to do. Founded in 2021 by a few recent UC-Berkely grads interested...

Nearly none of the plastic we use—even what gets thrown in the recycling bin—actually gets recycled. One reason for that is that plastic manufacturers often include additives in their plastics which enhance the performance of the material, but reduce the recyclability of those plastics.  But what if there were a natural additive that could mimic the performance improvements of conventional plastic...

What started with a small grant from the National Science Foundation to two twin science-y sisters barely out of college is now a startup employing dozens of people that's so far raised  more than $13 million to revolutionize how we make clothing. Here's how it works: You already know that plants take in CO2 and convert it into biomass, which we humans often like to turn into clothing. But what if...

If you listen to this show, you probably already think that we need to slash human emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. In many ways, our species has been engaged in a massive, uncontrolled geoengineering project that's heating up the planet to the point where wildlife extinction, massive floods and fires, and other tragedies are now simply routine. So far, humanity's geoengineering h...

Every piece of plastic you've ever used still exists somewhere on the planet, from the ziplock bag of leftovers to the bag of chips to the packaging holding in all the grapes you picked up at the store. We used to ship all of our plastic waste to China, but in 2017 they stopped taking it, so the vast majority of our plastic, including what we put in the recycling bin, at the very best just ends up...

Did you know about  the correlation between declining smoking rates and increasing hummus consumption? It's true—a decade ago, as American smoking rates were falling, hummus consumption began ascending, leading numerous tobacco growers to convert their fields to chickpea production instead.  Hummus is also a favorite of those seeking to eat plant-based while still getting a satiating snack or meal...

There are several dozen startups, including  one that I cofounded , laboring to scale mycelium fermentation to a point where it can start making a dent in demand for animal meat. One company though, has been doing this for decades: Quorn Foods .  While most alt-meat is made from pea, soy, or wheat, Quorn dominates the portion of the market made from mycelium, controlling more than 99% of the mycop...

Twenty years ago, Jason Matheny was a public health student who in his spare time was crusading to create a meat industry that would be less reliant on animals.  In 2004, after he founded New Harvest to popularize cultured meat, his fame grew. The New York Times profiled him in its annual "Ideas of the Year" feature in 2005. That same year Discover magazine named cultured meat one of the most nota...

You probably already know that using animals to make materials like leather has a lot of downsides. But using petro-chemicals and intensive crops like cotton, while better than animal products, is still pretty suboptimal for the planet. Keel Labs thinks it has a better idea. Rather than relying on animals or terrestrial plant agriculture, it's seeking to use kelp—yep, seaweed—to make the next gene...

In 2021, a lengthy  analysis was published by a now-defunct online news outlet concluding that cultivating animal cells at commercial meat industry scale was simply a pipedream. Josh March didn't really disagree. But he thought if you could bioengineer the animal cells to get more comfortable at production scale, and add those finished cells into otherwise plant-based meats, you could both commerc...

The Business of Being an Author and Influencer with Toni Okamoto of Plant-Based on a Budget This is a special episode of this podcast, because the guest is not only an entrepreneur making money by making the world a better place, but she also just happens to be my wife. Toni Okamoto is the founder and CEO of Plant-Based on a Budget , and she has her fourth cookbook coming out right around the time...

President Biden recently signed into law the FDA Modernization Act 2.0,  new legislation that ends the FDA's mandate that all drugs be tested on animals prior to human clinical trials. The new law doesn't prohibit animal testing, but it does give companies the choice of whether to conduct animal experiments or not, and could lead to many fewer animals being used as test subjects.  If we don't use...

You've heard of the companies seeking to build new brands of animal-free meat, but you hear a lot less about the B2B companies working behind the scenes to give those pioneers the tools they need to succeed. One such company, Matrix FT , recently debuted what it's calling Ohio's first cultivated chicken nugget , featuring chicken cells grown on the scaffolds and microcarriers it produces. Via a te...

Usually when you hear about meat's connection to methane, it's about all the methane that cows are emitting into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. What if, however, you could capture methane before it goes into the atmosphere, and feed it to microbes which in turn convert it into protein-packed ingredients to make alt-meat? Sounds like magic, but it's not magic, it's science! And it's a...

Nearly none of the plastic we use gets recycled. Even the plastic we throw into the recycling bin often ends up in landfills since it's just not economical to recycle the plastic, especially now that China has banned imports of American plastic waste. So what are we going to do with the vast oceans of plastic we love to use? Shelly Zhang has an idea. As you'll hear in this episode, the death of Sh...

Is Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future We all know that eating too much sugar isn't good for us, but millions of years of evolution led us to love sweet foods. After all, they provide us with a quick boost of energy needed in an ancestral environment where we were largely active throughout the day. Of course, today most people...

The inside of the earth's pretty hot. How hot? As hot as the surface of the sun. Seriously.  That heat could generate unbelievable amounts of clean geothermal energy to power our civilization—if we could reach all the way down there. You see, to get to fossil fuels like oil and gas, we only need to drill down a couple kilometers. In places that have volcanoes, like Iceland, you can fairly easily r...

This is a cool episode, because Grant Canary has found a way to make money by cooling the planet—with trees! In episode 98 with Maddie Hall , we learned about how her startup, Living Carbon, is bioengineering trees to grow faster so we can reforest the planet faster. And in this 101st episode, we'll hear about a different approach to reforestation. Every year, millions of acres of forests in the U...

If you're familiar with the Silicon Valley world or venture capital space, Steve Jurvetson is a name that needs no introduction. For the rest of you, Steve's a legendary venture capitalist perhaps best known for his early backing of companies like Hotmail, Skype, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, and more. He sat on Tesla's board of directors for years, and currently sits on SpaceX's board, too. These big be...

As we continue to empty the oceans, our species' demand for fish only seems to increase. But what if we could eat all the bluefin tuna and salmon we wanted without having to harm fish and other aquatic animals? That's the vision that companies like Wildtype are working toward. Founded in 2016, this cultivated fish startup has raised $120 million so far and now has 60 employees who are growing real...

What's the most old-school way to capture carbon from the atmosphere? Trees! But is there a new school way to help trees stand up to the task of quickly removing the carbon humanity's been spewing into the atmosphere in recent centuries?  Living Carbon is pioneering an exciting new field in which it's enhancing trees' natural ability to photosynthesize, causing them to grow dramatically faster and...

Not plants, and not animals, fungi are an entirely separate kingdom of life, and they can do some really amazing things. For example, two episodes ago you heard from a startup called Funga that's seeking to implement fungal transplants in forests to enhance the carbon-capturing capacity of the soil. And you may know that my own company, The Better Meat Co. , uses fungi fermentation to recreate the...

Sure, we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases. But even if we stopped all emissions today, there are so many that we've already put into the atmosphere that we need to remove them. Some folks are trying to build massive machines to suck C02 from the air, but Kelly Erhart has a different idea: just accelerate the earth's natural geochemical processes to remove that same C02 and safely deposit it...

You've heard of flora (plants). You've heard of fauna (animals). But have you heard of funga? That's the relatively new way to describe this third kingdom of life on earth: the vast number of species of fungi which aren't plants nor animals, but are a different branch on the tree of life. And it turns out that fungi are a lot more important than many in the past have realized. In fact,  they seem...

At age 18, Jeff Nobbs founded an ecommerce company, building it into a valuable enough startup that it was acquired in what Jeff calls a "life-changing" event. After then opening a restaurant that now has two locations in the Bay Area, Jeff decided that there'd be a third entrepreneurial act in his life, this time focused on fixing fat. What's wrong with fat today? Well, Jeff argues that the way w...