Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast conversations with the people trying to save us from ourselves. This week I spoke with Megan Poinski at home in Washington DC. A veteran journalist of 20 years. She spent the last seven focus on the food industry and has seen some of the biggest changes in how and what we buy, eat and think about food literally in centuries. We talked about these changes in technology, attitudes and markets and what excites her about the industry now. I'm Ryan Grant Little Thanks for joining. Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Megan Poinski: 1:15

Thank you so much for having me, Ryan.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:18

So you've been a reporter for 20 years and spent the last seven years of that in the food industry specifically, why is it important for journalists to cover the food industry?

Megan Poinski: 1:28

Well, it's an extremely important part of everyone's life. I mean, you look at some of the interesting beats that are out there, interesting places where stories are coming from. There's a lot of stories that are coming from pharma, from healthcare, from technology, electric vehicles, that sort of thing, and that's great and that's totally interesting, but it doesn't impact everybody. Everybody in the world is not going to benefit from a new heart drug that's coming out. Everybody in the world is not going to buy a Tesla. Everybody in the world is not going to use some new tech platform that's being developed.

Megan Poinski: 2:10

But everybody in the world is going to eat and drink. Everybody in the world has eaten and drank in the immediate past and it is vital to keeping society going. So, since it's such a lifeline to all of us, it's really important to delve into how food and drink is made, the business practices of the companies that are doing it, what our food and drink does for the environment in terms of sustainability, and it's also huge on the economy. Everybody has to somehow obtain food and drink, so how does it impact everybody's everyday lives? And they're buying power for everything else.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:00

Given the importance of it in everybody's lives, do you think we pay enough attention to it?

Megan Poinski: 3:05

I really don't. Actually, it's funny because some of those other sectors that I was talking about electric vehicles, new AI bots that can do all sorts of different work things, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, consumer health sexy and exciting. What you're eating for lunch probably not, but it has a much bigger impact on our lives as a whole when you look at it.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:34

Interesting. You see, especially in the investments industry, that although the food system is responsible for about a third of our CO2 emissions, it attracts about an eighth of the investor interests financially. And indeed it's not like a shiny Tesla or electric airplanes and things like that that tend to get a lot more interest. But at the same time, the industry. There is a lot of technology that's involved in the industry, and especially probably in the seven years that you've been covering it. More so, if we look at the food industry, the last couple of hundred years not a whole lot has changed until kind of and you'll know better than I but five, 10, 20 years. What kind of changes have you seen in the industry?

Megan Poinski: 4:19

Well, I've been covering the food industry for about seven years and when I started the plant-based category was kind of there but it wasn't really a thing. You had Tofurkey, you had Gardain, you had Morningstar Farms, veggie Burgers and Boca Burgers and you had corn and that was really about it. All of a sudden the alternatives category just exploded. I was there for not necessarily the beginning of Beyond Meat, but definitely its rise, as well as the rise of Impossible Foods and a lot of the other companies that are out there that are bringing new technology into more future food that aren't really market forces yet. I would say that's one of the big changes. Another big change that I've seen is also just in the way that food companies do business.

Megan Poinski: 5:22

When I first started covering food, food companies were trying to grow modestly A lot of the earnings reports. They showed small growth, if they were showing growth at all. The margins were staying more or less consistent and food was really kind of seen as a much tighter and more lean business. That changed completely If we go back a few years to the beginning of the pandemic. All of a sudden all of these CPG food companies saw their sales go through the roof. Some record sales record earnings for a lot of these companies.

Megan Poinski: 6:10

Well, as we all remember, everybody couldn't go anywhere and do anything. What they did was they went to the grocery store and they stocked up. Since that's happened, great, a lot of these companies have really tried to keep their sales and keep their margins at same types of levels. It's interesting because now food is kind of the first and biggest indicator that a lot of people are seeing to how the economy is doing. Inflation, supply chain difficulties, just kind of a lot of economic issues have creeped into food recently. They have increased prices. They have made things sometimes hard to come by Any consumer. They might know that there's stuff going on with inflation, but they notice when their grocery bill is a lot higher, when the same loaf of bread that they bought a year ago is now 50 cents more, or it's a dollar more for that gallon of milk.

Ryan Grant Little: 7:17

Their taco shells are half as big as they were before, which happened to me last week while I was in Canada, and I thought I was doing something nice by making tacos for my family. It was like putting them on little tortilla chips or something like that.

Ryan Grant Little: 7:31

It was really really visible. The price hasn't changed, but the sizes have changed. The margins have gone up substantially. These companies are talking about COVID, or supply chain, and that story is getting a little bit old and the inflation is still driving the prices up. That's a bit on some of the large corporate behavior. What about in terms of technology and seeing the technology change in that period?

Megan Poinski: 7:58

There has been so much change in technology. It's been incredible and it's really really cool to watch. I remember back in 2017, I wrote a story about Hampton Creek, which was known as a plant-based condiment company, announcing that they were going into cultivated meat. This was a huge leap. Cultivated meat that's strange. I got to cover them as they developed their technology and as they got to be the first company that was able to serve cultivated meat to consumers under their new name, eat Just in Singapore back in 2020. Then I got to cover when they got full regulatory approval in the United States. It's really cool, because something like cultivated meat went from being something that could be proven in small quantities to something that can actually be served Things like that. I talked about the plant-based space. It was small, it had always existed, but now it's really a huge force that exists in the marketplace.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:11

Just on that point about cultivated meat. You're based in the US and the Washington area. It's only a few weeks ago that the USDA approved cultivated meat for sale at the retail level Basically everywhere in the US. I'm wondering is that getting some coverage right now? Are there restaurants where people are lining up to get their first cultivated steak or something like that?

Megan Poinski: 10:34

Yeah, there's a lot of coverage out there in the media. It's funny because I've done a lot of food tech coverage. I've been writing for people that are already in the industry. I know all these companies, I know all these storylines, I know all of the interesting things that they're doing, but it's not something that the rest of the world knows very much about. It's been interesting to see the same types of stories that I've been reporting on for years appearing in mainstream media. Not that all of them were particularly good.

Megan Poinski: 11:07

A lot of the stories still called cultivated meat, lab grown meat, which is definitely a misnomer because it's not grown in the lab anymore. If you grow it in a lab, you can't make enough to serve to people. All of the meat that's being served is grown in pretty big bioreactors. I've seen some of them in action. It looks like a microbrewery when you're there. Cultivated is just a better term for what they are actually doing.

Megan Poinski: 11:38

That being said, a lot of the articles have been oh, it's here, but it's not yet at the point where anybody can get it if they want it. They are serving a just cultivated chicken at a restaurant in the DC area that is owned by Jose Andres. He's actually a member of Eat Just's board and he's been an advisor to them for a couple of years, but from my understanding it's only going to be on the menu one time a week and that rotation hasn't yet started. The thing with cultivated meat it is approved for sale but it is not yet at a scale where it's something that can be mass produced so everybody can get it. It's still at a pretty small scale.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:28

This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Anyway, it's hard to invest in these massive bioreactors when the product's not available for sale. It'll take some time to catch up. There's also a lot of demand. That's a bit of the bottleneck is with the equipment and the large-scale bioreactors globally in order to serve this industry. Have you had a look at that? And, behind the scenes, the picks and shovels that are needed to make this a commercial reality?

Megan Poinski: 12:54

Yeah, I mean there's really a lot to do in order to scale up any of these food tech companies, whether they're doing cultivated meat, whether they are doing precision fermentation or biomass fermentation, which basically is using fermentation to make something a protein or mycelium that you can turn into a meat or dairy analog.

Megan Poinski: 13:19

It takes a lot to get the equipment to make that happen. With cultivated meat, too, you've got the added step of getting some sort of culture medium that can grow the cells, which is also an expensive proposition. A lot of companies that do cultivated meat and a lot of biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, animal feed companies, ingredients companies they're all working on this problem. They are all looking to develop something that is cost-effective and relatively inexpensive, but they aren't to the point where there is something that can be used on mass to do this at a more affordable rate. So there is just a lot that needs to be done in order to create something that is available to everyone, and a lot of the companies that are in the cultivated meat space, as well as companies that are doing some of this fermentation, that need a lot of equipment in order to make a product, to make any product. They're probably some of them that have raised the most money from investors through their lifetime, just because they really need it.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:35

Are you optimistic that the market supply will catch up with the demand, kind of before people I don't know lose interest, or before it becomes out of the headlines?

Megan Poinski: 14:47

The thing is food almost never gets in the headlines and stays in the headlines. That's just kind of a reality of it when you're talking about kind of the general headlines. As long as these companies are able to scale up, as long as they can do what they're trying to do and they could get yields that they want to make, the product can come to them in theory, and I don't necessarily think that you need to have it in the headlines to have somebody be interested in it. What you need is a product that people want.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:27

I should probably remember that my algorithm is not everybody's algorithm.

Megan Poinski: 15:32

A lot of my headlines are about food tech.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:36

It's definitely my LinkedIn post, so that's a very fair point. You mentioned also that we hear the term lab-grown meat and that it really is a misnomer, and I feel like at a certain point it was an accidental misnomer and now it's much more of an intentional misnomer used to kind of create this Frankenstein view of this type of food by certain industry actors. Is that? Am I getting warm on that?

Megan Poinski: 16:03

I feel like it probably is sometimes, and sometimes it might just be people that are thinking oh well, we've called this lab-grown meat 10 years ago, so obviously we should continue to call it lab-grown meat.

Megan Poinski: 16:17

It's without a product, without a lot of information. It's kind of hard to see the evolution there. However, there are certainly some actors in the food system and also just kind of in policy that don't want people to see this as real food or actual meat at all. In 2019, the American Farm Bureau Federation they passed a policy that said they were going to plan to try to limit terminology that was about meat only to products that come from slaughtered animals, so they wanted anything else that presented itself as meat to be called something else and, honestly, if you look at some of the comments that were made in the Federal Register when they put out something a couple of years ago asking different players in the space what should we call this product in the United States, there are a lot of them that wanted to call it things like meat imitation or full meat or meat-like product.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:33

We see the same thing happening a bit now in the dairy industry and in multiple countries. So it's happening in the Netherlands, in the UK, in the US as well, where very strong dairy lobbies are pushing to have nothing that doesn't come from a cow or be called milk. And then my thought is always if we're worried about confusing consumers, then how come they're not chasing after peanut butter?

Megan Poinski: 17:58

That's true. I never thought about that.

Ryan Grant Little: 18:01

Like an obvious one, but it's not just kind of on the policy side. I was listening to the Economist podcast last week, and a story came out about new research from MIT Media Lab, where the researcher, alex Burke, found that non-vegans and non-vegetarians are pretty seriously put off by foods labeled vegan, and so the finding was that twice as many people would eat hummus as would eat vegan hummus, even though it's the same product. And I wonder, from a consumer perspective or consumer perception perspective, does that surprise you or is that kind of consistent with some of your experience?

Megan Poinski: 18:42

It does not surprise me at all. There has been a lot of research to this point and it has really all kind of come out with the same thing. I mean, even in 2018, five years ago, mattson did a very similar survey where they asked people what do you think about a product that is plant-based versus vegan? And plant-based does not always equal vegan, but it very well could, and it's very similar. But 73% said that something that is plant-based would taste better than something that is vegan and 68% said something that is plant-based is healthier than something that is vegan.

Megan Poinski: 19:29

The reasons for this go back to just kind of the terminology. I mean plant-based it sounds good, right. It sounds like you are doing something healthy. Eating plants is great for you and great for the environment, or so we have kind of been made to understand by society. So if you're choosing plant-based, you are choosing something great. If you're choosing something vegan, all of a sudden you're slumped into the category of a vegan diet and vegan diets. If you are just kind of looking at the general perception, people think that vegans are denying themselves a lot of good stuff. That's out there.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:17

The sanctimonious vegan.

Megan Poinski: 20:18

Exactly exactly. You're not indulging, you're just eating vegetables, and that's what you're doing. You're also making a serious commitment to this lifestyle. As a vegan, you know you're not just choosing one thing of one category one time, so it's kind of a choice between a perception that you're doing something great or that you are following a diet. You're buying a product that is really depriving you of something that is good, and it doesn't matter how good the product actually is and whether it tastes and feels like there's deprivation involved. There's certainly a lot of vegan products that do taste as indulgent as their traditional counterparts, but it's just the perception of the terminology.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:16

Do you have a sense? So plant-based is obviously one of them, but some of the terminology that lands a little bit better in your experience as a journalist and talking to people, seeing kind of what messaging works.

Megan Poinski: 21:28

That's really not an area that I get into and as a journalist I try to use the terminology that is most accurate and is being used by the different industries. You know I've heard that precision fermentation. Some of the companies maybe want to get away from calling their products animal-free, but again, I just kind of follow those conventions.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:54

So, and is it changing a lot? Has it changed a lot in those seven years? Do you have to kind of recalibrate those conventions?

Megan Poinski: 22:01

I mean I definitely recalibrated the conventions about, you know, cultivated meat. Back in the beginning I wrote about it as laparone meat, like everybody else, until I wrote one story and literally my inbox was full of people asking me not to call it laparone meat anymore. I gave people enough reasons. So you know I kind of eschewed that language from my future stories. But you know that product has gone from lab-grown. It was called clean meat at one point in time, which that's also a term that's gone by the wayside because you know.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:41

It implies that other meat is dirty.

Megan Poinski: 22:43

Exactly, exactly, and then there's also cell-based that it's called. Sometimes, though, people there are some that are not keen on cell-based, because really all meat is cell-based, right?

Ryan Grant Little: 22:58

And vegetables for that matter.

Megan Poinski: 22:59

Exactly, Exactly. So yeah, that's really the only place that I feel like I've been changing my terminology through the years.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:09

And so, other than being first in line to try that, the chicken breast in DC, the cultivated chicken breast, I mean, you've probably had cultivated meat a couple of times anyway.

Megan Poinski: 23:19

I've only had cultivated meat once and it wasn't truly meat, it was cultivated fat. I had it at Mission Barnes and they are working with a company in California. They're a sausage company and they have a partnership that as soon as Mission Barnes cultivated fat is approved by the FDA and USDA, they are going to start working with the sausage company to make a hybrid sausage product. The sausage is going to be plant-based and it's going to have cultivated fat in it.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:56

Oh, very cool. Yeah, this is kind of my number one prediction for the future of food tech is that we're going to see mostly hybrid products, and cultivated fat is probably a really really good use of that technology.

Megan Poinski: 24:08

Yeah, for sure, and there's tons of partnerships that exist in this space between companies that are making cultivated meat and cultivated fat, as well as companies that are making plant-based meats and other products or products through fermentation using mycelium or other fungi.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:28

And so, of all the things that are happening right now, what excites you the most about food tech?

Megan Poinski: 24:33

I'm really excited about the next step, and that's kind of what I've always been the most excited about. You know, it's really great that cultivated meat is on the market, but what happens next? Is it going to be seeing other kinds of meat? Is it going to be at a scale and at an availability level where anybody can have it, not just people that are lucky enough to get a reservation at an exclusive restaurant on the day that they are doing cultivated meat? All sorts of brand new technologies that I'm seeing all the time, new ways to make plant-based meat that really could be a game changer and could get away from some of the criticisms that are leveled at plant-based meat all the time that it's not tasty and it's not really meat-like enough. There is a ton of interesting stuff that is happening through fermentation. Different sorts of products that are coming out. There's even companies like Air Protein that they're hoping to make a meat analog product from carbon dioxide For the casual observer. That's making something to eat out of nothing, which is pretty cool.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:48

We have a company like that here as well, in Vienna, called Arkeon. They've basically found this ancient microbe that lives in the very hospitable zone of the bottom of volcanoes, I guess and somehow turned this into. This microbe can convert CO2 into the 21 amino acids that are useful for protein, and negative food could be on the menus sometime soon as well.

Megan Poinski: 26:18

Wow, yeah, and the whole space of molecular farming is fascinating. It is just kind of an amazing concept.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:30

Can you talk a little bit about what that is for people?

Megan Poinski: 26:33

Yeah, so molecular farming is basically when a company uses CRISPR to change the genes in a plant so that this common plant produces something else inside of it. There's a company called Mulek Science which is publicly traded. They just went public through a SPAC deal at the beginning of this year and they are adding all sorts of stuff to make animal-like products in ordinary plants. They announced several weeks ago that they have produced soybeans that have some material that is like what you find in pork. So a company like this, you could take these soybeans and you could use them to make animal-free meat.

Megan Poinski: 27:36

The same concept is being done by companies to create things like. There's a company called LLIFE Sciences and they are working to create monk fruit, the sweetener in monk fruit in other things, in ordinary melons, because monk fruit is really really difficult to grow and cultivate. It doesn't grow a lot of places, it can't be cultivated in a lot of places. But if you can take that genetic information that gets something else to make that sweetener, all of a sudden you can have a ton of it and the monk fruit sweetener can be a lot more plentiful.

Ryan Grant Little: 28:20

It's interesting you mentioned CRISPR, which is a gene editing technology that was originally used and still is for medical purposes, medtech purposes, and it feels like there's a lot of medtech that ports over to food tech as well after a while, usually after the prices come down a little bit for the technology itself, but I think of the original applications for precision. Fermentation is basically how insulin is made, the insulin that diabetics use is made, and now we're seeing it in the food industry. So interesting that CRISPR is also being used in this application.

Megan Poinski: 28:55

Yeah, it is really interesting. You mentioned precision fermentation and several years ago I was interviewing one of the founders of Perfect Day, Ryan Pandia, and he actually was working on using precision fermentation for pharmaceutical purposes and just kind of a light bulb went off and I said like, hey, wait, I am doing this for medicine. Couldn't we do this for dairy?

Ryan Grant Little: 29:23

Very cool, yeah. Yeah, perfect Day is a precision fermented milk, if I remember correctly. Yeah, Right.

Megan Poinski: 29:30

Yes, they use precision fermentation to. Right now they are making casein proteins, which is in dairy, but they are kind of working with a lot of different companies in the space to broaden precision fermentation technology in general.

Ryan Grant Little: 29:48

Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to keep track of all of the technological changes that are happening right now, but I guess you get a kind of a front row seat to this as a journalist and get to talk to all of the players. What's the most interesting interview you've ever done?

Megan Poinski: 30:03

Most interesting interview, my goodness. I mean I've done a lot of really interesting ones, you know, and I love talking to. I love talking to especially founders or people who are really like have been in a company for a while, because they're just so passionate about what they do and there are times that, you know, the conversation is just fun. You know, I did a really good interview with one of the founding team members of Juicy Marbles, which makes plant based steaks, and it was just fun to talk to him.

Ryan Grant Little: 30:43

Juicy Marbles over here. So I'm in Austria and they're in the country next door, in Slovenia, and I've been a customer. I've got you know, my freezer is filled with them and I had a chance to also invest in it recently and, yeah, that's an example of a great product and also really really fun and interesting marketing as well.

Megan Poinski: 31:00

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure, that's for sure. I when I they sent me some and I just spent hours reading the box and laughing.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:11

Yeah, it's very cool. Megan, what's the best place for people to find you online?

Megan Poinski: 31:17

Well, right now, I'm kind of in between things, so currently, the best place to find me is LinkedIn, because there you can I post everything that I'm working on. I am working on some other projects, though, and I may be back on the scene covering food tech in a much bigger way sometime soon, so if you are paying attention to my LinkedIn, you will find out all about it.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:42

Okay, that's very exciting. Megan, thanks a lot for joining today.

Megan Poinski: 31:46

Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:48

Thanks for listening to another climate tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climate tech podcom. Find me, Ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.