Animal Free Dairy: Making Cheese Without Cows with Irina Gerry

Hi. This is Paul D'Alizzuri. Welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could subscribe and do a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much.

Today, I am thrilled, I mean, like, really thrilled to introduce you to Irene Harry. And our topic is animal free dairy, making cheese without cows. Irina is the CMO at Change Foods, a precision fermentation food tech company that creates animal free dairy products. Prior to joining Change Foods, Irina worked at 2 of the largest plant based food and beverage brands, Silk and So Delicious. Irina holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and we connected on LinkedIn. And I reached out to Irina and Irina. Thank you so much for saying yes and being on the show today.

Oh, thank you for having me.

You've got quite a resume there. So I really encourage people to go check out what Irina has been doing for a really long time. And we're gonna get into this whole space of innovation in the food world and what that has to do with climate change. But before we do that, Irene, if somebody's listening and said, well, who is this person? And give me a little bit of sense of their backstory. Like, what would a listener who doesn't know you want to know about you and your journey, both as a human and as an impact business leader?

How much time do we have? Oh, I know. 33

hours. I

don't know. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, so on on the professional side, as you mentioned, I'm a chief marketing officer at Change Foods, which is a precision fermentation. It's a food tech company. It's kind of a new world of food where we're combining traditional food making and the latest advances in tech. And before that, I was in more of a traditional food space. So I worked on Silk So Delicious.

Those are brands you can find in a grocery store and, you know, worked on a lot of innovation within that space, within plan based, and loved it. By way of background, I also have, you know, worked on at P&G on a brand like Gillette, worked at Deloitte Consulting. So I kinda have a, what you would say, a classic training. But then I decided that I I really was excited by the idea of entrepreneurship because it does give you so much more freedom, so much more ability to go and do things quickly, to try something, to kinda pave your own path. And so, you know, I took a jump into entrepreneurship and really loved it. It's, you know, been been kind of a entrepreneur for over 3 years now, and I'm having so much fun.

From from a corporate journey to serial entrepreneurship, we might call it, in the specifics of fermentation, this new tech that's coming. One of the things that you were saying before we hit record, I mean, is like, it's not just food, you know, innovation for its own sake, or like veganism for veganism sake, but there's a real depth to what you're doing. And and one of those motivations is around climate and around what's going on in the world and how some of the innovations that are being built in the food space are trying to make the world a better place at a time like we're getting some concerning news. Talk to us about that part of the why of how you're doing what you're doing.

It is all about the why for me. It's not about the what. I'm a mother. I have 2 children. And I remember for a very long time, I was kind of on this health, wellness. You know, when you're raising kids, you start thinking about food and what they're eating because it's so important. Right? And I already kind of was on this, you know, per predominantly whole food plant based train. Like, if you read any sort of nutrition science, you realize that plants are amazing and and great for you.

Right? So I was already there for a long time, but then I think it was 4 or 5 years ago. I don't know if you remember. We had these massive wildfires. I lived in Colorado at the time, and it was just, you know, a whole place.

I live in New Mexico, so we were breathing that smoke Oh,

place. Yes. Smoke and red skies for, you know, weeks on end. Right? And I remember distinctly this moment where, you know, my my 2 little kiddos were playing outside in the backyard and and I look out the window and it's like, I can't see the sun. And, reading getting news alerts on my phone saying, like, the air is unsafe, you know, move children indoors. And it was such a crystallizing moment because, you know, I've, I've had an amazing career. I'm, you know, privileged in many ways. And I lived in this, you know, beautiful home in Boulder, Colorado, you know, top of the world, arguably, in terms of kind of where I've gotten.

And yet I wasn't able to like protect my kids. And it was like this super visceral feeling of, you know, I've done everything I could to build, you know, a safe, healthy life and a future and in comes this thing that I have no control over. And that was a moment where I've just realized that, you know, I had to do everything I could as as a mother, but also as a as a human living in this time of history to like punch a hole in this thing. Right? Maybe I can't solve everything, but for me it was, how can I dedicate my professional talent, my time, my expertise in in some area of the world where I can make an impact? And, of course, I was already working in food. I was already in plant based. And then this kind of climate angle came in and and just, you know, crystallized into a mission for me to go and and solve the food problem. And that's what kinda set off this this journey and to expand on the food problem. I don't know how many people really understand the massive influence that food has on climate.

It is a third of emissions, so big deal. But it's also the largest use of our planet. We currently raise animals on about 1 third of our available arable land. Right? We've taken up a third of our planet and converted it into grazing land. It is the largest user of freshwater resources. We use 70% of all freshwater for agriculture. Majority of that goes towards livestock farming. And livestock farming is the largest polluter of our freshwater resources.

Right? And and anything from fertilizer that's grown, you know, used to grow the corn feed to manure runoff that pollutes everything from rivers and streams all the way into, you know, the Gulf of Mexico. And so when you look at it and, you know, biodiversity loss and and how many species have now been absolutely decimated and destroyed by the food industry and specifically the livestock industry. When you start kind of piling all all of these things, specifically livestock stands out as the biggest cow in the room to go solve for. So for me, it was this health first was my learning curve, then climate. And then once I got into it and kinda started really peeling apart the layers of the onion, the treatment of animals, the treatment of workers, the the the plight of farmers in that system, you know, there are kinda more and more and more reasons to go and and really do something different, not just to try to marginally improve it. You know? And that's that's what my why was is really, you know, it's such a big issue, and yet we are not making any progress really as humanity on that. So I felt like, gosh, we're not gonna talk people out of being human and wanting to eat and what they wanna eat. It's really challenging.

But but this technology really offers something, and and I felt like that was a a great way for me to contribute.

So what I'm hearing is it wasn't just a shiny object. Wow. This is really cool. Right. But it was more like this journey of going from your individual wellness. You know, I'm a ultra marathoner in my fifties. Like, if you don't eat good, you don't do what I do. You have to.

You literally have to. So there is that personal wellness. I'm also a passionate gardener and obsessed permaculturist. Right? But it was like a personal journey to also, like, wait, even though we're eating really well and maybe organic and whole foods and Yes. My kids can't breathe the air. Like we live you lived in Boulder. I live in New Mexico. We're running out of water in the west, and a lot of that you started to connect some dots that went from, like, a personal layer and your family layer to, like, how we're using water.

These fire cycles mean that we can't breathe safely. Like, what do you do when we can't breathe? Right?

Right. And you know, part of it is just, you know, the, the person kind of the me to we evolution a little bit, right. Where, you know, I am privileged in in many ways and, you know, there's only so much me that is satisfying. At some point it switches over to say, you know, how can I contribute? What what can I do to make the world better? Like, what is the legacy, the impact that I could have because I'm in this position where, you know, I can.

Yeah. And suddenly, you're, like, working for one of the biggest soy milk brands on the planet.

That's right. Right?

And and you start walking down, like, further and further into understanding some of the inner relatedness from water, to the air we breathe, to what's happening to the soils, to, like, you know, growing food inefficiently in the way you're describing a lot of animal products. I mean, not only are we, like, polluting the water, but there's not enough land to grow enough meat to eat that. So then we're cutting down trees, which, like, you know

It's a cycle. Right?

It's a cycle.

It's a cycle. The the the food is impacting climate, and then climate is now impacting food.

Yeah.

Right? Where a lot of these droughts are getting worse. The deforestation is making climate worse, and yet we're keep chopping down more of the Amazon for our meat habit. You know, we keep polluting more rivers for our chicken and bacon habit. And it it's a vicious cycle, and we cannot continue to do that. And so that's what for me became kind of this rally cry, you know, of, you know, let's, let's figure this out.

You could have lived a very cushy life, you know, Harvard MBA work with Procter and Gamble and Deloitte and just like ride off into the sunset. And, and, but your sense of like caring for your family, like yourself, your family, but as you widen that circle, you're like, I can't. I gotta go in this space and try to do is is that fair to say I gotta try to be helpful

It is.

To the extent I can with my intelligence and your connections and your training. You decided to bring that into more of the impact space. Fair to say?

I did. That is. Yeah.

Cool. So now you find yourself at a place called Change Foods and, like, doing some really cool stuff. Right? Again, not just shiny object tech, but there's some pretty cool tech. Tell us a little bit about change food and what the heck is precision fermentation. If somebody doesn't know what that is.

Yeah, let's geek out for a minute.

Yeah, totally.

Precision fermentation is the, the not so new, but revolutionary technology. So let me explain. Precision fermentation in its kind of fundamental way is using microorganisms as machinery to produce a thing, a compound of interest. Right? We can use yeast, you know, traditional fermentation. You could you could think about that.

I made a look of sourdough this morning.

You make sourdough, beer, kombucha, like you, you have microbes that you throw into a favorable environment and they do things. Right? But we all know this. We've done this for millennia. Pursuit and fermentation is kind of an interesting biotech twist on that. So still take the microbes, you know, you select them well for what they can do, but then you use biotechnology. You actually take genetic code, which, you know, we've now sequenced DNA of everything almost on this planet. And you can actually go into a database and say, I wonder what DNA sequence codes for milk protein. And you literally copy and paste that into a microorganism.

And I'm simplifying it. There's a lot of science involved into how you copy and paste it. But, essentially, that's what you're doing. You're saying, this sequence of of of DNA, I wanna hold that into a a yeast or a fungi. And when you do that and if you do that successfully and you can ferment, then this microorganism very similar in a way you ferment beer. You you throw them in a giant tank with some nutrients and favorable temperatures, spin it around. And when these microbes ferment, instead of producing alcohol, like in the case of beer, these bugs are now making milk protein. Like, crank crank out milk protein.

And now

you have parmesan cheese.

And then you're, like, brewing dairy. Right? It it's the strangest thing, but you're brewing dairy. Yeah. And then you can filter out your your chosen protein. So in this case is is filtering out milk protein. Not dissimilar process how you make whey protein from from liquid milk, and then you end up with a fine powder of your chosen protein. So whey protein, casein protein, whatever, and it becomes an ingredient that you could use to create cheese, milk, ice cream, whatever you call. And the the awesome thing about this tech, and that's what's different about it than plant based.

In plant based, you're taking plants, soy, almonds, whatever, and you make them into those foods. Here, you're actually taking, you know, an identical protein and putting it into food. So it gives you the same nutrition, very same taste, kinda similar, very same texture that you would get if you used cow based protein. So if you've been around plant based space, you could say, hey. Maybe the the protein content doesn't match. Maybe the cheese doesn't melt and stretch the same way. It doesn't give me the same gooey mouthfeel. Well, guess what? Those proteins really help unlock and close the gap to that amazing experience that you want without needing to farm cows.

So that's the precision fermentation magic. Now that sounds pretty new and revolutionary. The cool thing is we've used precision fermentation for the last 30 years. Not only is it used, that's how we make insulin, that's how we make a lot of medicines, but it's also already in food. In fact, it's in your cheese today. Renate is a enzyme that we use to extract from stomachs of calves. We stopped doing that very long time ago. Now we make that through precision fermentation.

So even though it sounds new and weird, sometimes people get creeped out. I'm like, all your vitamins are made through precision fermentation. You know? Your citric acid, your vanilla flavor, your a bunch of stuff that's in the food already today you've been eating safely because it's the same exact molecule is just made through a different method. We've all been eating it without even realizing it. But now because it is so cool and so revolutionary where you can actually take the cow out of cheese, but then still have cheese that tastes and functions like cow based cheese. We actually wanna talk about it. And so now it's becoming this big thing of, you know, we we we talk about a lot like it's this brand new thing.

Lots of hype, shall we say?

Right. Lots of hype, which is which is fun, and it's well deserved because it is revolutionary. But I also wanna, you know, point out that it's not that new and it is already this technology is already in food today.

Beautiful. So just widening back a little bit. So full disclosure listeners, I'm a vegetarian. If I I just don't do that well when I do the very intense exercise that I do going a 100% vegan. Ethically, I wish I could, but I don't do well, and I'm a practical human. So anyway Yep. Just full disclosure. And so I'm barely informed when I say I have a lot of vegan friends and vegan adjacent.

So when somebody starts to move in the plant based, if they move towards that continuum at all, one of the things you'll hear people often say, what about cheese? Like, like All

the time.

A 100% plant based options for cheese. Not that there isn't awesome plant based food. I mean, I had a friend here last night, and we sat down to an incredible lentil stew. And he was just like, oh my god. There is incredibly tasty in textures, and so this is not bashing, you know, plant based foods. But when you get to cheese, the alternatives are just leave a lot of people kinda like, no. Thank you. It's the the taste and especially the texture.

The texture is the thing you hear a lot of people just saying, like, nope. This is not gonna work for me. And either I'm just gonna drop it all together and not do cheese at all, or I want cheese.

I know.

So that's the space that you're kinda leaning into. And some of it's from climate, but some of it's also, like, many people won't get over that hurdle of the taste and the texture, and therefore will continue to eat traditionally produce dairy. And let me also say it again, somebody who knows the space pretty well, that producing dairy is not that different impact wise in terms of the environment and the climate impacts as eating the cow itself. You have a lot of the same negative consequences, everything you outlined so well, whether it's what's going on with the water and leaching nitrates into the soil and just using a lot of water and methane gases. So so cheese, some people are like, well, cheese has a lot less environmental impact.

Oh, it's massive.

So much. It's pretty simple.

Whenever you deal with cows, it's, you know, it the math varies a little bit, but actually when it comes to cheese, the emissions profile is is a little bit less than meat, but the water footprint is ginormous. It is about 16 bathtubs of water footprint for a 1 pound of cheese.

Like a pound of cheese. Right.

It's insane.

Right? And you're talking to somebody who lives in New Mexico, the state in America that has the least surface water of any of the 50 states.

And you know I lived

in You can't do that.

You can't do it. And and I lived in California, which is the number one dairy state in the country ahead of Wisconsin. And it was during the drought. And I remember getting these mailers, you know, from PSAs, right? The cut, cut your showers 5 minutes or fix leaky toilets. And I'm like, how do we do that where we drive right past all the cows and all the cheese, which is by far the largest water footprint in the state.

If you if I gave up 1 pound of cheese, I could take a bath or totally to the top. Right? Every single day and be fine. Right?

That's right. And and that's why, you know, for me, that messaging was so important because that's building of the why. Like I have my personal why. Right? But I feel like as society, we don't understand why we need to change our behavior around food. And, you know, me maybe people got the memo about the beef, but I feel like very few understand the dairy component and very, very few understand it beyond emissions and really look at things like water, really look at things like pollution and, you know, and methane and all of those details that get kind of swept under the too long didn't read, you know, stuff in in science literature. So I felt like it was really important to talk about it. Yeah. Whether people choose or not choose to do is their call, but I wanted them to have an informed choice.

This is a really data based approach that you personally take. Like, this isn't

I do.

More this isn't moral, you're a better person or not that you're unaware of the suffering of modern food production as it relates to farming at scale of animals. You care about that. But the primary piece is like, hey, look, we just don't, we can't live this way. We literally can't feed this many humans, this diet in the way we have and expect it to go well into the future. And you saw this new tech, which is kind of shiny and kind of cool. And a lot of the tech bros are like, you know, they're they're, it's got attention of certain demographic. But that's, it's not the shiny object or the moral high ground. It's just a really practical, hey, this can make a difference in terms of us being able to eat something that humans like.

And it's produced in a way that really mitigates a lot of these big problems that our current way of producing dairy leads to. Is that is that a fair assessment?

For me, for me, right?

For you, personally. Yeah.

For me. And, you know, I'm a cerebral person, I guess. Like, I I geek out on science and data and studies. And there are different ways in to appeal to different people. Like to some, the moral argument and and animal treatment of animals is the most appealing argument. To some, it's the health. To some, it's, you know, the the climate. For me personally, I found kind of that, you know, practical, rational reason to be important.

And I also felt like, honestly, people just don't know. And I felt like if more people know, then those who find that appealing can take action. But today, we're not even there. Today, we can't even say, oh, they know and they don't care. It's they actually don't even know.

Yeah. So talk to us a little bit, Harina, about we talked about the problem. Right? How much dairy the the negative consequences and downstream effects of dairy. When you produce dairy products like cheese with this precision fermentation, like instead of 16 bathtubs of water, how much water does this process use? Like, what does it mean?

90% ish less. Right? Like, it depend the number vary a little bit, but it's it's vastly better, right, from emissions because you don't have any methane from all these cows. Right? You don't have to grow, you know, we use almost half of our country to grow feed for animals. Right? Soy and corn is, you know, anywhere between the coast is just peppered. Right? So all of that has implications for land use, for biodiversity loss, for emissions, for pesticides, for, you know, fertilizer. All of that is the footprint of the meat and dairy consumption. That to me is such a massive savings number that is overlooked. You don't see it.

Right? You're like, oh, glass of milk. How bad could it be? But if you look down the chain of what it actually takes in terms of water and inputs and and land, it is so big. And I felt like, gosh, so many people in, you know, in in the US believe climate change is real, feel that it's urgent, want to do something about it, and yet they don't feel, you know, maybe empowered or enabled to act. Right? I mean, it might be too expensive for you to to live in a house that, you know, too expensive to put solar on your roof. Maybe it's it's too challenging to change out your water heaters, you know, heat pumps and every. But we all eat hopefully 3 times a day or what however, whatever diet you have. And each one of those meals is an opportunity to make a big impact. Again, think of just the 1 pound of cheese is 16 tubs of water.

It's the same amount of emissions as burning £10 of coal. So or the same amount of land impact as a growing a £100 of potatoes. So when you think about the resources that come kind of loaded behind those foods, if you make some change, you don't have to go all in. You don't have to become vegan, but if you can just make changes and incorporate them in your life in whichever way they work for you, you can make a big difference. And I personally found that to be more of an empowering message rather than a negative blaming message. Because you can talk to me, oh, it's so bad and blah blah blah, and you're, you know, complicit. And it's very disheartening, and I'd rather flip it on its head and say, look. We'll give you all the information.

How you wanna live, how you wanna make an impact is now up to you, and you could make those choices.

Yeah. And the research is telling us that the world is burning is not particularly effective at getting people to change their face.

I mean, it's sad. Right? We're all like,

this

is horrible that it's happening. And but what can I do? Well, guess what? Food is one of the biggest You

can have your nachos and save the world too.

Right? Individual actions you can take. It's more impactful for you to switch up your diet than for you to put solar panels on your roof or drive an electric vehicle. It it's that meaningful. Right? So I hope that this this helps people to make a choice that if they wanna make it. Well,

let's do this in a moment. I wanna come back and hear a little more of the nuts and bolts of change foods and a little bit more geeking out on how you actually make the cheese. But before we do that, let's just take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you facing 1 or more important decisions in your impact business? And you'd like an experienced thought partner to develop a plan about how to proceed in the complex times we're living. But you don't feel the need for an extended coaching or consulting contract that's gonna cost you many 1,000 of dollars. You're looking for an affordable, targeted, and time efficient type of support. Through paulzellizer.com, I offer a strategy session package. These packages are ideal for entrepreneurs who are facing 1 to 3 immediate decisions, like how to increase your positive impact, fine tune your marketing strategies to get more results for less effort, launch a new product or service successfully, or refine your pricing structure so it's both inclusive and provides you with a great quality of life.

You can find out more by clicking below, and thank you so much for listening to this podcast. So welcome back, everybody. I am super grateful to be here with Irina Hedi, And we are talking about making cheese without the cows, precision fermentation and animal free dairy. And I really saw in the first part of the show, we kinda I think we got a pretty good overview of, like, why to be thinking about animal free dairy and precision fermentation. Now talk to us a little bit more specifically about change foods. Like when did you start? Give us a sense of the scale. And a little bit of, like, what does it look like to actually make cheese from this very exciting and kinda, you know, getting a lot of attention, precision fermentation process, to, like, how do what does it actually look like to go from inception to shelf in this process that most people would kinda be like, what does that even look like?

Yeah. It actually looks a lot like cheese making. So sorry to disappoint. It's not a crazy

There's no UFOs involved? There are

no UFOs involved. It's actually so the making of the protein, right, so we've talked about this. There's there's quite a bit of science. You need to get your microorganisms. You need to encode the the sequence so that they get the instructions to make the milk protein. You ferment them. You filter out the milk protein. So that's kind of the fermentation stage of it.

At the end of the fermentation stage, you end up with white powder. If if you're doing making whey protein, it looks exactly like whey protein. You can go buy it today from cows. If you're making casein protein, it looks exactly the same as just the other part of the milk protein. Right? So you end up with this powder and then you need to turn it into food. The maybe not so well known secret in the food industry is the food industry actually works very frequently with powdered milk ingredients rather than milk. So the way you can make cheese is you can go milk a cow, get liquid dairy, put rennet in it, and and make cheese kind of the traditional way. But you could also make the milk, powder spray dry it, you know, and then rehydrate you know, ship the powder, rehydrate it in a different location, and kinda start the process from powdered ingredients.

There's also a ton of foods that use a specific, not the whole milk powder, but a specific protein. Right? So if you go today and look at a grocery store, you'll find tons and tons and tons of foods that use whey powder, whether it's protein bars or cereals or anything else that's kind of fortified with whey. So they start with that. You can also find in the cheese aisle a lot of cheeses that are made starting from the casein powder. In fact, it's a it's a pretty sizable business. Industries do that for many reasons. Liquid milk is, you know, very heavy to ship. It spoils quickly.

It's hard you know, you you kinda working with this this big thing that you you know, to make cheese, you need 10 liters of milk to make 1 kilo of cheese. So it's a 10 to 10 to 1 that you need to extract the water. So instead of shipping water, people ship powdered casing. So it's actually a big industry. We use it all the time. Most consumers don't think about it, but there's a lot of processes and infrastructures and, you know, food manufacturing facilities where they start with powdered ingredients and and they make food. So you add you would add fats. You would add, you know, some kind of flavors.

You know, you might add actually additional culture to culture your cheese, to give it that distinctive flavor profile that you want. And so once you get past the fermentation stage, it's actually quite typical. And then you can make cheese and you can slice it and package it and ship it just like you would dairy cheese.

Cool. And so talk to us a little about Change Foods. Like, when did it get started? Where are you all at in your journey as a company?

It started in 2019 with the founder founding team. They actually all came from Australia. David Bookow is the founder, and Junior Teo was at the time a a professor of molecular biology at the Queensland University of Technology. And David had this idea. He was actually a Boeing engineer, worked on airplane engines. And, you know, kinda much like myself, you know, as a parent, started learning about climate and food and the impact, and he made a big switch in in his career from aerospace engineering to food. But then, you know, he found Junior who had the the tech part of it. And together, they came came together, and they said, let's let's see if we can crack this cheese problem.

And then the 22 of them plus, Sasha, the VP that that works on our team, found me on LinkedIn, you know, serendipitously during COVID. I mean, it

was Damn LinkedIn. You know?

Damn LinkedIn. You know? It has it. It has it.

We wouldn't be here. You know?

We wouldn't. I know.

We That's how I found. Like, wait. They're doing awesome things. I need to reach out. LinkedIn is amazing listeners. If you're not on LinkedIn, you gotta get on LinkedIn.

It's it's it's my favorite platform because people are real. You know, they're they're real selves, at least, I think, for the most part. Anyway, so David found me on LinkedIn and we've hit it off. And then we found another core team member, Luis, who joined us, decided to relocate the company to California because that's where a lot of this kind of biotech innovation was happening and food tech ecosystem was developing. And so we all, after a year or so, ended up congregating into California. But for about the 1st year, we did a lot of our work on Zoom. And think of the craziest journey that is entrepreneurship and building a team and building a business when you're just kinda waist up only in 2 d. And it was, like, the the most surreal and fun time when we all finally met in real life having been working together for months.

So, you know, it's COVID's thrown a lot of things, you know, into a new universe, and and change foods was one of them.

It's about 5 years. We started in 2019, and here we are early 2024, maybe 4 and a half, 5 years ish. And, like, is it in the market? Can can people go into their local grocery store and buy chain food

product? Not yet.

Not yet. Not yet. Okay. So where are you?

We're still pre commercial. So we're still working on kind of optimizing and scaling the protein making stuff. Right? So the reason it's it's taking time is because, you know, this whole programming of microbes is complicated science, And doing that at larger and larger scale takes time. Right? So you go from kind of a small shake flask to a larger fermenter and a 100 liter fermenter and a 5,000 liter fermenter. And, you know, if we really wanna be a part of a food system, we have to operate at a gigantic scale. You know, we're talking, you know, 100000 liters and, you know, big, big, big industrial sized processes because that's how food is made. It's not, you know, these quaint artisanal shops. Like, we all love the idea of them, but the vast majority of the food we eat is made in really big facilities.

So that's kind of where we are. We're we're in that process of going through those stages of development.

Talk to us about the funding journey. I mean, food pack at scale is usually pretty pricey proposition. Right? And there's a lot of capital needed.

There's a lot.

Yeah. Anything you could say about the capital journey and what's helped Change Food get to this point in your

Oh, you know, we're still early. We're still a baby company. So we're we've raised, seed series funding couple years ago, and now in the process of of, working on series a. It's going to be a long journey because not only are we developing the technology, the kind of the the know how and the IP around protein production. But then we still need to find ways to manufacture it. We still need to find ways to distribute it, and there's many ways to do that. It's not like one company has to build it all. You can have partners and co manufacturers help you.

And and we are working with food companies, actually, because we believe that it's it's better to leverage, those relationships and bring them. So where we can focus on kind of the core technology and the the original prototyping and and building the the story and the messaging around it, but maybe not going all the way into kind of every single stage of what it takes to bring food to shelf. Yeah.

And so if there's any investors listening or people who know investors and somebody saying, well, I like what I'm hearing, I would like to talk to you all. You would not be you would not be upset if somebody reached

out to you. A conversation, of course. And I'm sure you know that, you know, funding is always a hot issue for startups. Right? You're always running as fast as you can run, trying to do as much as you can. And in this environment, economically, it's been tough. It's been tough for for everybody. Yeah. But in the food tech space, it's been particularly tough because we have these very expensive technologies that we're trying to commercialize, and it's just it costs a lot of money to do that.

Yeah. I'm a consultant with New Mexico Angels here, the largest network of early stage investors in the state. So, yeah, just I know both locally and globally, 2024 is different ecosystem of trying to raise in. You know? It's never easy to be an innovative startup, but especially now, you know, people are a little more nervous and being more cautious with their investing. So I was joking, but I'm not joking. Listen, folks, if you know investors or you are investors, please reach out and have a conversation.

We would love that.

Yeah. So give us a sense, like if you look ahead at 2, 3 years of change foods, obviously nobody has a crystal ball, but you do have a pretty robust I mean, given your background, you know, a little bit about kind of trying to project given companies history and what they've been on, and also just all those great conversations y'all are having. Where do you think you'll be in a couple of year of change?

Yeah. I don't have a crystal ball. But what I'll tell you is Changehood is not alone in in this journey. There are a number, not not 100, but, you know, there's a a few dozen companies that are that are working on similar technologies whether it's in whey protein, casein protein, egg protein, all kinds of other things, meat proteins that are all pursuing this this goal, this journey of of becoming a part of the food system and integrating into existing supply chains and and helping to really make a dent in the climate impact. In fact, Change Foods and, you know, I, in particular, am very deeply involved and was a founding member of, of an industry organization called Precision Fermentation Alliance, where we've actually come together as a group of companies to work on some of these foundational market issues such as, you know, what do we call these things? How do we explain this technology to people? How do we engage with ecosystem players like retailers or food manufacturers or regulators? And and tackling some of those collective issues together has been really impactful and very helpful because no individual company is really able to shape the entire market, but, collectively, we can do that better. I'm saying all of this because this is kind of new tech, and it's gonna come out probably in various shapes and forms and iterations in the next 5 years. It's gonna be, I think, pretty exciting where you'll see and even already today, there are a number of products that are available. Some widely, some, you know, kind of as tasting events.

Company called Perfect Day is one of the the original kind of leaders in the space. And they've launched their number of kinda smaller brands and and iterations in market from Bored Cow Milk to Brave Robot Ice Cream. Recently, I heard that Nestle actually partnered with them and launched a better way powder. So they're making way powder. Nestle sells whey powder under the Orgain brand. And now you can actually order Better Whey from Orgain and that comes from precision fermentation. So you can it's happening. It's it's starting.

It's gonna take some time. Like, it's not super widely available everywhere, but it's coming out. I just saw the news today. Breyers ice cream came out with ice cream that's now made with whey protein from fermentation as well. So we're starting to see big brands and big companies adopt this. And the reason we're starting to see that is because all of these big companies have climate objectives. They're tracking their emissions, they're seeing the data around the impact of cows in their supply chain, and and they know they gotta do something about it. So this is the beginning, but I would say this journey is not gonna be overnight.

It's probably gonna be 5 to 10 years till we kinda see it widely available on shelves, but it's happening today.

Cool. So listeners, check the show notes. I'll put a link to the Precision Fermentation Alliance and some of the other brands that Irena just mentioned. And so you can check out what's going on in some of the stuff that's already in the marketplace. So I read a question for you, like in an alternate universe, you'd be like, you know, still at Deloitte or still at Procter and Gamble, right? Like like, that's another trajectory and in some ways, more safer in a traditional how you approach your career advice type of safer. Right? Not safer in terms of passing on a word world to our children that they actually wanna live in or even can live in.

Mhmm.

But but but just in terms of, like, when you are in executive level, and or some leadership level at Deloitte or Procter and

Gamble or I agree.

You you know what I'm talking about. That's a that's a certain that's a different career path than, you know, being in several startups and just anything you can say both about what it's been like for you to you said about 3 or 4 years and more of a startup world. And also anybody who's listening who has that kind of skill set where they could go to a more corporate brand. And they're struggling with the same kind of ethical, like, I'm looking at my kids, and I'm looking at the world. And I'm like, it's kind of attractive to get that big corporate, you know, secure at least on the surface, but I really wanna make a difference and maybe feeling a little torn between that. Anything

I was there.

I was there. I can imagine that was not

an easy. Right? Because I was doing well in, in my corporate career. And it was a leap. Definitely. Because anytime you go into an entrepreneurial journey, you don't know what's around the corner. You really don't. It it you're taking a leap where it's unpredictable where the industry will go, where the technology will go, what will happen with the company. There's so many variables.

It's it's nearly impossible to predict. And I found that I, through my life, learned to be comfortable with the unknown. So the little bit more story behind me is I actually grew up in Russia in a small town, and I had a serendipitous opportunity to go at the age of 16 to study in Wales. Never been to Wales. Didn't know much about it, but had a chance and I said, that sounds really cool. And my family didn't have enough money for my mom to even escort me. She dropped me off in Moscow airport and off I went with one suitcase. It was very uncomfortable.

I didn't know anything. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know the culture. I I did speak English, but it wasn't fluent. And I figured it out. And after that, I had another opportunity to go study in the US. Same thing, never been to the US. I looked up US News rankings and picked a bunch of colleges and applied.

And same thing, went, you know, one suitcase and a few $100 in my pocket and landed in in the US. And that taught me that, you know, one is to take these leaps and, and, and go on these journeys because you don't know what's around that corner. But it's so exciting because you know it's gonna be something cool. You don't know what it is, but it's going to be fun. Like I wasn't, you know, going into dangerous things. Right. The other thing it taught me is to trust that trust myself that I could figure it out. You know, I had other life experiences where, you know, I've taken risks in my career and ended up living in Alaska for 3 years for, for my husband's job.

You know, again, something I didn't plan, but it's just life takes you there. And I've just learned that life's kind of unpredictable and that's a beautiful thing. And if you see these these transitions as I'm just gonna open a door and see where that path goes and being a little bit brave, but also, like, knowing that, gosh, you can you can do this. Like, it's trusting in yourself and your skills. And the other thing I'll I'll throw in is at a certain point in your career, you know, you have the tools. Right? Like, you've been in this profession, that profession, and this expression, You have a lot of tools. So it's not like you're going at it blind, and you can always come back. It's not like it's a all or nothing.

This is, you know, you choose the red pill and you could never come back from it. You can. You can do an entrepreneurial journey and then go back and take a corporate job if you realize that this is not for you. So that was the other liberating thinking that I had to do that I have to switch is to say, don't think of it as what do I want to do with my life? But think of it as what do I want to go do next? And when you switch that thinking to next, for me, I found that to be liberating because I didn't have to decide forever. I had to decide for next. So if it helps folks, I think, to me, those were the the things that I've kinda laid out and said, you know what? This sounds exciting. This sounds like an incredible journey, an opportunity to learn. There's a high risk of failure.

Startups fail, you know, 90% of the time. But you know you're gonna come out of it with knowledge, experience, amazing friendships, and a hell of a story. Right?

One heck of a story.

One heck of a story. So, you know, why not? Like, to me, it just became like this, gosh, how could you not go and experience it? So it's it's tough. It's a hard journey. There's one day is never like the other. The the highs are higher and the lows are lower always. But now that I've done it, I'm like, why why wouldn't you do that if you had an opportunity?

Wonderful. Great. I love your answer there. And anybody who's listening who might be in somewhat of a similar boat, 2 resources that you might check out. Again, on LinkedIn, there is a hashtag called open door climate, hashtag open door climate. It's really skillful people all around the world with all different skill sets that are willing to meet with just about anybody for free to just help you if you're thinking about leaning into using your skills, whether it's accounting or marketing, whether you're an operations person, or you do janitorial products at scale, whatever you know, how might that be useful to this incredible community of folks who are thinking about climate? So check that out and do a pitch. He is my brother, but he's the, literally the best resource I know. My brother, Craig Zelizer, is the host of the social change career podcast and a career coach for folks who are either are in the impact space or wanna get into the impact space in some way.

So check out the podcast. It's free. He also does career coaching. So I'll put a big shout out for Craig there. I mean, I could hang out with you all day, but I know you're busy. Our listeners are busy. You've been so generous. It's been so great to have you on the show, but if there was something you were hoping we were gonna get to as we start to wind down that we haven't talked about yet, or is there something you wanna leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye? What would that be?

I think I'll maybe leave you with a bit of inspiration. Obviously, the climate issues is so big and so massive. Right? And I know many people care deeply and and wanna do something. And I think for me, it became like, what what do I what tools do I have on my tool belt? And what can I do? Right? The kind of thinking. And then, yeah, taking a bit of a risk, taking a bit of a leap. But also, I'll tell you from the other side, it is so fulfilling to work on something that matters beyond your own individual self or your family. It is so fun to work with people who have that kind of mentality, who care deeply about what their problem they're trying to solve. Were you working long hours? Yes.

But it doesn't feel like work when you find that right combination of of people and problems. It is just fun. Like, I wouldn't have traded this journey for the world. So, you know, I'll leave you with that. It's life's too short to be stuck somewhere.

Irena, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you for having me.

So check the show notes listeners. Let's do what we do. Go tell your friends. Somebody might wanna work for change food. Somebody might want to invest. Please go check it out. And if it resonates, share it with somebody because this is how we make the world a better place. Before we go, just a reminder, we love listeners' suggested topics and guests.

You all send, like, 30 to 40% of our guests come from you. It just happened again today. So if you've got a story you would love to unpack a little bit, go to the AwarePreneur's website, check our contact page, and we have 4 I'm sorry, 3 simple guidelines. And if you feel like they're fit, send in your ideas. And I want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for.