Business for Good Podcast

You know how you put all your recycling—cans, bottles, cardboard, etc.—into the same bin? Well, have you ever wondered how all that stuff gets sorted out at the recycling factory? It's done mostly by humans.  If you watch a video about how it's done, rest assured you're not likely to apply for this job. These folks are standing at a conveyor belt with recyclable trash whizzing by them at every mom...

For decades, the alt-meat movement has focused on ground meats like sausages, burgers, nuggets, sticks, and more. That's because it's just a lot less difficult to create these ground products than a more structured product like a steak or chicken breast. Still difficult, but less difficult. Several companies now though are trying to reach that holy grail of whole cut products, and one of them is C...

If you follow the meat or the alt-meat industry closely, chances are high that you've read Lisa Keefe's work. As the editor-in-chief of both Meatingplace magazine and now Alt-Meat magazine too, Lisa has been both reporting on and editorializing on all things meat for the past 15 years. She's also the creator of the Meatingplace podcast and is a frequent commentator on everything from trends to con...

Our guest in this episode, Dr. Esgar Guarin , is on a crusade to promote vasectomies, and even gave up his previous medical career to focus on simply being a full-time vasectomist as part of his commitment to making the world a better place. That's right: his entire business is one thing and one thing only: helping men take greater responsibility in their reproductive lives and averting unwanted p...

Many already believe that fostering an alt-protein industry in the US is important for helping the environment, but is it also going to protect American national security? We're already importing much of our clean energy tech from Asia, but will we soon be importing our clean protein from other parts of the world, too?  Congressman Ro Khanna , a Democrat from California representing Silicon Valley...

While it's a charity, Family Empowerment Media tries to run like a business in that it relies heavily on measurable, evidence-based strategies that produce a significant return on their investment. Though the return they're seeking isn't a financial one, but rather is in the form of the social change they're working to create, mainly by empowering the use of family planning by families that are se...

If you've been listening to the show for some time, you know that replacing animals in the food system is a topic very close to my heart. While the meat and egg industries in the grand picture have still been largely unaffected by plant-based competitors, that's not the case in the milk industry, where the explosion of plant-based milks has very tangibly cut into demand for cow's milk. Gone are th...

I try to read any new book that comes out on the topic, and that includes Richard Munson's new book Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reminaging Food . I really enjoyed reading this book by someone who's far more well-known for his deep-dive biographies of visionaries like Nikola Tesla and Jacque Cousteau, but now has written a new book featuring dozens of entrepreneurs seeking to create a more sustain...

For those of you who've been enjoying Business for Good for some time, today's guest may sound familiar. That's because Kim Le is not only our guest on Episode 85, but she was also our guest on our 49th episode back in 2020. If you've not heard it, I do recommend you go back and check it out, which will be helpful in seeing just how much has changed for this young startup which was cofounded by un...

One of the most common questions I get from listeners is: how can I invest in companies you feature on the show? Well, most of them are startups backed by VC dollars, and that means the average retail investor isn't typically going to be able to invest in these early stage private companies.  But what if there were a way to invest money in an index fund that only included companies actively workin...

Humanity's relentless demand for seafood is emptying the oceans with little end in sight. Does the path to freeing fish from us run through fungi fermentation? That's exactly what Anne Palermo is betting.  As you'll hear in this interview, Anne is a former asset manager at Morgan Stanley who decided mid-career that she wanted to start her own chocolate company. After growing her first startup to m...

You know when you get a food product like those Beyond Meat sausages and see that instead of plastic, it's in one of those biodegradable trays or bowls? Have you ever wondered how they do that? I mean, that bowl needs to repel oil and water from its surface without getting soggy, but still be actually biodegradable. Seems impossible. Well, it turns out that this feat isn't only a great technologic...

This is a story about how one man entered startup life, rose to great prominence, got battered in the press and endured a very public downfall, and then got back up again and kept pushing his life's mission to improve public health forward.

When it comes to food, we often hear that switching to organic, local, non-GMO production methods are what's best for the planet. But, what if the preponderance of scientific evidence doesn't support such claims, and that actually both the planet and public health are better off with the synthetic fertilizer banned by organic standards; that buying local may not be better for the planet; and that...

For real: What were you doing during your sophomore year of college? Probably not what Jessica Schwabach was doing, which was starting her own plant-based meat company. Two years later, Jessica has gone through two prestigious accelerator programs, created products that have been sold in dozens of stores, and just raised a $4 million seed round , including investment from food giant Nestle. Just w...

A year and a half ago, a guy few people had ever heard of came on to this show's 44th episode to talk both about the business of police reform as well as his new book advocating plant-based eating. A former police officer, at the time of our interview he was the Borough President of Brooklyn and certainly had nearly no national profile. I mentioned in the episode that he was reportedly considering...

Welcome to our first-ever episode taped before a live audience! That's right, episode 77 was taped on-stage at the Cultured Meat Symposium in San Francisco before a live audience, and now you get to be a part of it. This is a story of two people who despite not having experience in the cultivated meat space felt so strongly about building a community around it that they started their own podcast,...

There's already plant-based pet food , but what about growing actual animal meat for all of our carnivorous best friends? The company featured in this episode, Because Animals , is trying to do just that. And they're starting with cultivated mouse meat for your cat. That's right: cats have been eating mice for millenia, but just maybe they're about to start eating cultivated mice. Because Animals...

In 2019, two friends were both working in the alt-protein sector, one at the Good Food Institute and the other at Eat Just. Even though Aylon Steinhart and Thomas Bowman were both doing great things to advance the animal-free protein movement, they wondered if they should try their own hands at co-founding a food tech start-up that would put cows out to pasture and mimic dairy with plants. After s...

It's not every day that hard-nosed financial journalists write about our ethical obligations to animals, let alone do they devote an entire book to the topic. Yet that's exactly what Financial Times journalist Henry Mance has done. In his new book, How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World , Henry takes his readers on a wild ride through our relationship with animals, including getting a job wor...

Whether we like it or not, one fact of modern living is that every day we're creating greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution. But should our final act on the earthly stage also necessitate one last pollutive hurrah?  Katrina Spade is on a mission to offer a better way to deal with human corpses, and it involves a process called natural organic reduction. It's essentially a fancy way of sayin...

Sure, diamonds— including lab-grown —may be forever. But does plastic also have to be? Not so, according to Kristin Taylor, CEO of Radical Plastics . After a multi-decade career in the plastic industry, including working at a small company you may have heard of called ExxonMobil, Kristin decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge and form her own startup, Radical Plastics, to help plastic manufact...

Doni Curkendall was born and raised in Mexico, came to the US as a seven-year-old, and when she entered the workforce started as a receptionist at Goodwill. As the years went on, Doni was continually promoted, got her MBA, and eventually was a Vice President at Goodwill overseeing more than 200 employees. But two and a half years ago, as fate would have it, Doni and I began exploring whether Doni...

You've probably heard of Beyond Meat's big IPO and their success as a publicly traded company. Sure, they were the first plant-based meat company to go public, but are you aware that The Very Good Food Co. is the second?  As you'll hear in this episode, what started just a few years ago as a dude selling his own plant-based concoctions at a farmers market on a Canadian island has turned into a pub...

So often you hear about start-ups that raise millions or even tens of millions of dollars from venture capitalists before beginning to generate revenue and start making a dent in the marketplace. That is very far from the story of our guest in this episode. Meet Deborah Torres, founder and CEO of Atlas Monroe , a start-up making plant-based fried chicken. As you'll hear, a chance encounter with a...