Business for Good Podcast

Let's face it: even though we all know there's a huge problem with single-use plastic bottles, right or wrong, most Americans just don't trust tap water. Tens of thousands of plastic water bottles are thrown out every minute, with nearly none of them actually being recycled. In fact, thousands of years from now, our plastic waste may be some of the most obvious relics remaining of our civilization...

If you're a regular listener of the show, you may recognize the name of this episode's guest since she's been mentioned on at least two past episodes. Isha Datar is a cofounder of both Perfect Day and Clara Foods , companies respectively growing real dairy and egg proteins from microbes and which were the subjects of Episodes 21 and 34 .  Yet Isha is perhaps best known not for her work cofounding...

In many countries, walking down city streets vividly brings to life two serious problems: plastic pollution and poverty. While there are charities trying to address both of these concerns, serial entrepreneur David Katz in 2013 thought there was an opportunity to marry the two issues and build a profitable business out of it. The result: Plastic Bank . Today, there are tens of thousands of low-inc...

Some states are beginning to open their economies after weeks of shutting down to try to flatten the COVID curve. But there are some things that we really want to keep sheltered in place...and never come out.  here are hundreds of thousands of pounds of nuclear waste largely stored by nuclear power plants around the world. And all of that extremely dangerous material—which will remain extremely da...

What do you get when you combine executives from Unilever and Nestle with alt-protein investors and $200 million? In 2020, it turns out you get a new company devoted to doing for plant-based chicken what Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have done for plant-based burgers.  Already The LiveKindly Co. has announced the completion of a $200 million funding round, installed a former Unilever CEO as its...

Today, everyone knows what plant-based meat is and chances are they've at least tried it. In many ways, those people have Seth Tibbott to thank. Seth, who in 1980 founded Turtle Island Foods (maker of the iconic Tofurky brand) and served as its CEO for more than three decades, is now releasing his autobiography: In Search of the Wild Tofurky: How a Business Misfit Pioneered Plant-Based Foods Befor...

When two college students were concerned about the plastic packaging choking our waterways, they wondered if they could invent a better way to contain companies' liquids.  Rodrigo Garcia Gonzales and Pierre Paslier began ordering ingredients off Amazon and Alibaba and tinkered away in their kitchen. With a rough prototype in hand, they decided they'd launch a Kickstarter to see if there was intere...

You already know about plant-based meat. You're also familiar with meat grown from animal cells, often called cultivated meat or clean meat . But have you ever heard of making protein—and therefore the building blocks of meat—straight out of thin air? Dr. Lisa Dyson was reading 1960s-era NASA research about how to feed astronauts on long-distance cosmic trips, when something truly out of this worl...

The challenge of climate change can seem daunting, but trying to solve daunting challenges is exactly what Google X does. One former employee of Google's moonshot factory, Kathy Hannun, is on a mission to help wean your home off of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Her strategy: make it so easy for you to convert your home to geothermal energy that you just have to hire her startup, Dandelion...

In many ways, Ryan Bethencourt is an OG of the biotech alt-protein scene. As a cofounder of biotech accelerator Indiebio, he was part of the team that wrote the first-ever investor checks to now well-known names in the field, including Memphis Meats, Clara Foods, and Geltor. In addition to Ryan's pioneering work to incubate and fund companies seeking to create more sustainable protein sources, he'...

By the time he was 22, Arturo Elizondo had already interned in the White House and for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But as the recent college grad learned, making the world a better place via public policy is a long and arduous road, and he wanted to make a difference faster. With a zeal to create an alternative to the factory farming of animals, Arturo bought a one-way ticket to San Fra...

How do people with ideas for businesses to save the world find cofounders? If you're fashion designer Michalyn Andrews, you read journal articles by scientists doing awesome things in biotech, cold-email them to ask them to meet up, and make the proposal at a Starbucks.  Her dream: to make real leather from cows to lighten the burden we're placing on animals and the planet. She and her new cofound...

You've likely heard the story about the Jew who was said to have taken a small amount of fish and multiplied it to feed thousands. Well, in 2020, there's another innovative Jew, Lou Cooperhouse, who is literally multiplying the fish—or at least their cells—in the hopes of again feeding the masses, and saving our planet at the same time.  Lou's company, BlueNalu , has raised millions of dollars to...

Plastic is amazing at doing so many things—except going away. As the planet increasingly swims in humanity's plastic garbage (nearly none of which gets recycled and virtually all of which will last for centuries), Lori Goff is betting that biotech will be part of the solution to creating functional plastic alternatives that are so biodegradable you can eat them.  As you'll hear, Lori is using the...

In the 29 previous episodes of this show you've heard about pork without pigs, milk without cows, diamonds without mining, and even wood without trees. Well, on this 30th episode, we're exploring the brave new world of coffee without the bean. Turns out that there's a lot of deforestation for coffee growing, and climate change is making the situation worse. In fact, experts predict that the amount...

What do  you get when you combine a Google leader, a dairy industry executive, and an engineer? Apparently, if you're in Singapore, you get a new startup producing real cow's milk-- without the cow: TurtleTree Labs. Rather than trying to turn plants into milky beverages like many alt-dairy companies are, and rather than using yeast to make certain components of cow's milk, like Perfect Day is doin...

You've heard the folklore time and again: a group of young idealists starts a company in their garage with dreams of one day changing the world. In the case of Fenix International, they too started in a garage, but this garage happened to be in Uganda, and those idealists happened to be a group of ex-Apple engineers. The problem they were trying to solve: Lots of rural Africans just don't have acc...

You know the story: there's a bright college student who drops out of an Ivy League school to embark upon an entrepreneurial journey, founding his own company and building it into a major success along the way. No, we're not talking about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates here.  Instead, we're talking about Tom Szaky, an immigrant whose family fled Hungary after the Chernobyl disaster, eventually send...

Many of the people running plant-based and clean meat companies are vegetarians themselves who often have come out of the animal protection or environmental communities.  Not Rody Hawkins.  The man who brought you Oscar Mayer's Lunchables and other notable products such as Slim Jim is now hoping you'll buy his soy-based meats. After spending 30 years in the meat industry, Rody co-founded and is th...

For a lot of people, when they walk by someone who's homeless, their inclination may be to look the other way. One day for Jasmine Crowe, however, she not only didn't look the other way; she saw a profitable business opportunity in helping connect the hungry with perfectly good food the rest of us are throwing away. Sound like a pipedream? Well, today many major food users, including the NFL, the...

Should employers really make their employees wait two weeks to get paid? You may not think it's that important, but imagine if you had less than $400 in your bank account right now. You might start wondering why, in today's digital age, you have to wait 14 days to get paid for work you did two weeks ago. Well, our guest—a rocket scientist-turned fin-tech-entrepreneur—says there's no reason employe...

When Josh Tetrick in 2011 cofounded Hampton Creek, later renamed JUST , the idea of applying tech to food to solve public health and sustainability problems was just very far from many investors' and would-be entrepreneurs' minds.  For Tetrick, however, there was an opportunity to create a profitable business that could address so many of the problems he was concerned about: food sustainability, c...

There are few people who know more about climate change than Columbia University's Graciela Chichilnisky . Not only did she propose and design the carbon credits trading system under the Kyoto Protocol, she also was a lead author of the 2007 report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby. Prof. Chichilnisky, however, isn't relying solely on th...

Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi were both in their early 20s when they were e-introduced to each other by another person they'd never meet in person either, Isha Datar. A series of online chats led to the idea of jointly creating a company that would put cows out to pasture by making real dairy proteins without the involvement of a single cow.  Five years later and $60 million in venture capital ra...

Have you ever wondered what makes the most successful inventors tick and whether you could develop more of those traits? That exactly what NYU business school professor Melissa Schilling thinks about all the time. And it's the subject of her riveting book, Quirky.