Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
360 Ethan Soloviev - AI, good food at Davos, food as medicine and regen taking off
A check- in conversation with Ethan Soloviev, Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, about how regenerative agriculture is truly taking off, its position within large food and agriculture companies, and whether we risk watering it down or falling into greenwashing (Spoiler: Surprisingly, we're doing a lot about it!). We also get an update on HowGood—they're doing well and focusing more on nutrient density-, plus, we talk about Regen House, which is revolutionizing the way good food fosters meaningful conversations at major events like COPs, climate summits, and Davos, bringing farmers, indigenous community members, and global executives together around regenerative food experiences. By centering conversations on actual good food rather than panels and PowerPoints, these gatherings forge authentic connections that move regeneration forward.
And, of course, no conversation with Ethan would be complete without diving into AI—what currently does and what it could do for regeneration—not just through efficiency gains, but through innovative applications like predicting deforestation before it happens. The real breakthrough will come when we develop "large ecological models" trained on nature's patterns rather than just human texts, enabling truly regenerative landscape design.
As Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, Ethan offers a glimpse into how sustainability data is transforming food systems. Their database tracks environmental and social impacts for 33,000 ingredients and nearly 4 million products globally, enabling everything from carbon footprinting to supplier engagement. What's particularly encouraging is how this data influences consumer behavior—when sustainability information is presented clearly at the point of purchase, sales of sustainable products consistently increase across diverse markets.
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/ethan-soloviev-4.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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We're not slowing down. Regenerative agriculture is the thing. It is the food and ag, you know nature-based solution that everybody is talking about. If we want to regenerate nature and we're going to ask AI questions about that it can't be trained on what some white dude wrote on the internet. It needs to be trained on what's happening in ecosystems Very simple things like climate, friendly water, smart, fair labor. If you can simply communicate that this is a good thing for self and the world, then behavior changes.
Speaker 2:Checking in with Ethan Sologia, bringing really good region food to Davao and the New York Climate Week. We talk about how region is really taking off, the position of region in large food and and ag companies, and are we in danger of watering it down? And greenwashing? Of course, but what are we doing about it? Little spoiler, surprisingly much, and an update on how good. In short, they're doing really good and we'll be working more on nutrient density and Regen House, which is doing something revolutionary, bringing good food and does good conversations to the large event, the big cops, diversity, climate, etc. And, of course, as always with Ethan, we have to cover AI and what it currently does and what it can do for regeneration. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode. Today we have Ethan Soloviev back on the show. Friend of the show. We've done so many conversations together that I made a list, but it's actually quite long because we did a newsroom together which I think ran five or six or maybe more times. You were on the show in 2017 at episode 22, came back a few times after that. We did a few times. We covered the different maps of the region space you've made and kept up to date. We, of course, co-created the list of funds agriculture, land funds that we still have to do an update of, by the way. I'm thinking of this beginning of 2025. We need to do an update of 2024, but we've done one until 2023. And so we've had so many touch points, but it's been a while since we checked in properly. So I wanted to take the time in a time where a lot of things are moving and AI is on your mind and many other things are as well, so I want you to take an hour and check in with you. Welcome back, ethan.
Speaker 1:So glad to be here, pleasure to be back.
Speaker 2:And let's start with a high level overview maybe or no. Let's start with a personal question. How are you? This is the beginning of 2025. There are interesting times, in food, in ag, in politics, in companies, like the news seems all absorbing. How have you been weathering that, let's say, storm, or weathering the intensity of the news, the human weather, the human and political weather.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's so much moving in a positive direction in the world that a little thunder, lightning, rainstorm here and there doesn't faze me at all. It's not changing my work or angle or direction. If anything, I've accelerated, and how good is accelerating, as is Regen House, which we'll talk about a little later. I also am just getting back from the World Economic Forum in Davos where myself and our CEO went and hosted a series of Regen House events and participated in many events for the whole week and at the beginning of the week it was Monday, january 6th was like the start of the World Economic Forum there and there was some like you were just saying. There was some tension, there was some fear, there was an inauguration, like there was a lot happening, but by the end of the week, in session after session, meeting after meeting, somebody would stand up and, as opposed to being like that's, it's through, it's all over, there was no.
Speaker 1:We've got things in motion. Sustainability is important. It's not just a CSR thing anymore. Resilience, risk avoidance we need to move on climate change we need to move on climate change. We need to move on biodiversity crisis. We need to move on cost of living and human livelihoods, like all of that's gonna keep going. We're not slowing down. No political weather is gonna stop the larger motion that's happening in the business sphere. So I took heart from that.
Speaker 2:I left the mountains of switzerland feeling like from that I left the mountains of switzerland feeling like, yeah, let's go do most, if not all, of the larger events around business, around un, around the cops, biodiversity cop, the climate cops, all of those for the last good, a better part of a decade, probably. So you probably are in in an unique position, especially from the region angle, to feel the water. What's the? Where's the weather? Where's the wind blowing?
Speaker 1:Not necessarily weather. Where's?
Speaker 2:the wind blowing. Where could we easily sail to what has changed over the last X decade? Or X years, I'd say in terms of feeling at these large events.
Speaker 1:I mean so I'm most. I've been really out in the world the last three years, from Glasgow to Sharm el-Sheikh, to Dubai, going to the climate cops and then this year at the biodiversity cop in Cali. I was also at the biodiversity cop in Montreal, where we got the global biodiversity framework, and what I would say is, thinking back to 2017, jesus, that's eight years ago the change. And we were still the only ones talking about regen ag. Like it was a little. And we were still the only ones talking about RegenAg, like it was a little, like General Mills had said a little thing about it. There was a few you can look on the map that we've made of like the growth A few people were talking about.
Speaker 2:RegenAg. Maybe Enies did something like Enies. Exactly yeah soy is important. I still cannot find it. There's a picture somewhere. If somebody has it, please send it. Like of any somewhere in a store, any like the mac and cheese brand and they had like soils import like somewhere, but I don't think they've used it since. Like it was like somewhere on a banner in the store 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:And now it is literally every session that has to do with food and agriculture at every major event talks about regenerative agriculture. It is there are regenerative agriculture teams in most of the major food and ag companies in the world. It is the solution that the business world and, to some extent, the government world and now growing the financial world the sort of investment and the banking side of things the international development banks are starting to get towards it. Regenerative agriculture is the thing. It is the food and ag you know, nature-based solution that everybody is talking about. Yes, there's reforestation, tree planting, yes, there's a host of other nature-based solutions, but when you're in the realm of food production and with these major global, multinational, multi-billion dollar companies, regen ag is their path. It's their way to hit their net zero goals. It's the way to hit their carbon reduction science-based targets.
Speaker 1:It's not the only thing. There's reformulation and there's packaging work they're doing and there's renewable energy, but like a big chunk of it is, how do we invest in and scale regenerative agriculture? That is the topic of conversation and it's advanced. I mean, like the work that has happened in these multi-stakeholder coalitions over the last five years is significant and I've been fortunate enough to be a part of them through my work with and advising on the metrics and helping to, yeah, get to some global cohesion and unity on what are the metrics by which we should track our progress towards regeneration, towards regenerative agriculture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because that's the risk, that it's a lot of lofty goals, a lot of speak, a lot of reports and targets, et cetera, and then not enough happens. I think there was just a massive organic meeting in Taiwan, which happens every couple of years, not every couple of years there or in Korea.
Speaker 2:I'm mixing up, which is bad, but anyway, there was a strong statement from the organic and agroecology side on regenerative and saying we recognize it as a very important movement. But let's make sure it's real, because it's also could very easily end up being, yeah, just a shortcut for large industrial ag and foods to not get to the soil, community, people, animal welfare goals we all want, or most of us want, let's say so. Do you see there's, let's say, fire among the smoke or what's the? And why is that? Is that? Is there food security? Is there? Is it finally hurting and not no longer CSR? But actually, unless we do stuff about soil health, we're not going to have our cacao beans anymore.
Speaker 1:What's the real? I don't, well, I'm not sure that fire among the smoke is quite the right metaphor here. More like, is there meat on the bone or beans in the pod when the tide goes?
Speaker 2:down what is warren buffett always says when the tide goes down, you can see who's swimming naked yeah, and I'd say who's wearing their swimsuits um, okay.
Speaker 1:So the main thing that I think we have been somewhat successful in is there is an awareness that regenerative agriculture should be based on outcomes and that we should have outcome metrics to measure our progress on and towards regenerative, and we have, by and large, succeeded with that. It's not perfect, it's not 100%, but if you look going back I think to 2018, we had the One Planet Business for Biodiversity put out a set of eight regenerative ag metrics, which we helped and advised on a bit, and then, after that, the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which we helped and advised on a bit, and then, after that, the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which we're part of, put out a number of reports, which we can, of course, link in the show notes that are quite good. And in the second one of those, we were able to drill down and get a handful of companies worth hundreds of billions in annual revenue to agree to five core outcomes-based metrics, and they're good ones. They are soil, organic carbon. They are greenhouse gas emissions and emissions factor, essentially Kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of material produced. They are water blue water usage scarcity, adjusted liters per kilogram. They're real, they're outcomes measurements by and large.
Speaker 1:And then the side platform came out and had some after that, which has hundreds of members using it. And then, most recently, over the last year and a half, howgood worked with WBCSD, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, along with 50 other organizations and companies, representing ultimately about a thousand companies and organizations around the world, and worked through a year and a half process on climate, soil, biodiversity, water and social and economic livelihoods and got to a core set of 10 metrics. This is all published. I can get you the links to the documents. Put everything into show notes.
Speaker 1:It's called the Business Guidance for Deeper Regeneration and we got to 10 metrics on agriculture that'll track your progress towards regenerative. Now, they're not all. I wouldn't if I was really being a stickler. They're not all outcomes metrics. There's some process-based metrics, but a lot of them are, and so with that set and with everybody starting to use those, it's going to be harder to blow smoke. It's going to be harder to be watching and say we're doing this thing because we have a practice, yes or no, because there are outcomes metrics that are being tracked. And then we have the tech ecosystem coming in to help track that and lower the cost of MRV and lower the cost of accounting for those outcomes. So I think we've made huge progress in solidifying RegenAg as something that actually requires outcomes to occur, and we went that route consciously instead of attempting to do a structured. You can do this. You can not do this definition, which you know I've been against from the beginning.
Speaker 2:I still remember seeing finding your first blog post on the spectrum of Regen with all the different practices, and it's a bit outdated. We talked about it in the video course we did, and in that episode we launched around that way, referred to the four paradigms, et cetera, but it's still very powerful. Just speaking about a spectrum and all these companies, like we see a lot of, we see, let's say, some very vocal pushback now on sustainability and it seems, especially in the financial world, a lot of American organizations, at least for their American parts, are stepping out of net zero and a few coalitions seem, to a certain extent, a lot of marketing just to please, let's say, some people In the food and ag space. Do you see that this is a serious commitment in the sense that it's not dependent on political wins and not dependent on things like that. It is dependent on good business?
Speaker 2:Do you see the seriousness? Could a lot of these companies be the thousand you mentioned, like 800 are just there because it made sense from a CSR perspective and marketing? What do you feel? Because in the finance world it seemed like more okay, everybody's joining this club, let's do that as well. The wind is changing and a big number of those people left the room again, but in food and ag it seems a lot more more serious in terms of business longevity and but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:If you see this, yeah, it's more directly linked to the core business, which is producing food, manufacturing it and getting it to people. If the climate's a total wreck and their supply system disruptions, then you can't get your product on retail shelves and you don't make money. Investing in soil resilience, investing in a workable climate that's not totally chaotic, is good business sense. And I've also heard really strong financial arguments, even from the big banks, the big pension funds, saying look, there's nothing. Even from the big banks, the big pension funds, saying, look, there's nothing.
Speaker 1:Don't take this on, don't take on sustainability, don't take on working on carbon or nature or human rights. Don't take that on because it's a CSR thing. I don't care if you're doing it, don't even do it. For that reason, look at it from a fiduciary point of view, from your responsibility to know and disclose material risks to your business and to address them with force. This is from one of the largest pension funds in the world saying very clearly and directly you need to be paying attention to this, you need to be disclosing to the TCFD, to TNFD.
Speaker 1:Now we have the nature-related financial disclosures that are starting to come into effect. We have the science-based targets for nature. This is not a marketing exercise. This is what it takes to have a future-proofed business in the food industry, and there are I'm not going to say everybody at every company that we work with believes that, but in every company we work with there are committed people who see the business reality of that and are working full-time incredibly hard to move that forward in their company, at their boardroom, with their investors and, importantly, in their supply system and putting your how good head on what's been happening at how good, how you said, we're not affected at all because affected by political changes, etc.
Speaker 2:It's only been going faster and faster. What's the, let's say, the snapshot beginning of 2025? What? How is how good doing? There's a difficult sentence to say how is how good doing? Is how good doing doing? Well, now anyway, what's happening? What are you working on? What is exciting? What can you can?
Speaker 1:you share. Yeah, haugen's rocking. I mean we have some of the most incredible partners and customers in the world. Six of the 10 largest food companies in the world work with us. We're growing in Europe significantly. We now have some of the largest retailers in various nations in Europe are now using our platform. We have this.
Speaker 2:Just to walk us through. What do they use it for? People didn't listen to the previous ones. We did.
Speaker 1:Shame on you.
Speaker 2:But still, let's get them connected to this conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank you. How good is the world's largest sustainability database for food products and ingredients? Over the last 18 years we've mapped out the impacts on the earth the carbon footprint of the water, biodiversity, labor risk, animal welfare, soil health, processing, land occupation for every single food crop and ingredient in the world. So 33,000 ingredients every country. We have an incredibly granular database that can track impacts all the way down to individual farm level. So if there's primary data from a farm, we can take that into the system and represent the actual emissions factors or impact factors of a single individual farm. And that is all held in this database. It now has just under 4 million products, so anything with a barcode, a UPC or a GTIN around the world we have tracked and in the database. And so our partners and customers are food companies, small and large, and that's everything from major retailers You'll see us in the Whole Foods annual impact report that comes out. We have a partnership with Ajo Delhaize in the USA. So major retailers. Also in food service.
Speaker 1:We work with Cisco, largest food service distributor in the world, and they're using our data to understand their impact, to do product carbon footprints, to understand the exact footprint of everything they sell globally. A million products globally, uh, and then going back up through the supply system, we have brands, um, uh. Danone is a great partner of ours, long-term partner, an excellent example of this work. We have many other customers in the space, but danone, craft times, nestle we've all work with. They similarly use our data to understand their impact and then they do two things with it. So one, they will report with it. So they will go out for their CDP report or their public impact report or soon they're reporting to the CSRD in Europe or the CSDD, these regulations that are requiring companies to report very significantly on sustainability. So they'll use our data to help them have granular reporting. But then they'll also use it in innovation.
Speaker 1:So when formulating a new product and if you're a retailer, maybe that's an own brand or private label product you're putting on a shelf. If it's a manufacturer, it's a new soda or a new chip or a new yogurt or a new meal that you're putting out into the marketplace. Hellofresh is a great partner of ours globally doing incredible fresh foods. All of these companies can use it for innovation to figure out how do I if they have a goal to reduce their carbon footprint by 50%, one of the key ways to do that is to create new versions of their existing products, to renovate them or to innovate new products that are lower footprint. So there's that innovation side of it. And then one of the things that's grown really significantly for how good is the sort of upstream supplier engagement. So from a retailer or from a brand looking back upstream to say, okay, who am I buying from what?
Speaker 2:where am I getting ingredients from that data is available up to the farm level. I think many cases that data might not be available, depending on this, but it's like generally, or okay, if per liter of milk or proton, it's this, but then going down all the way down to the dairy farm, obviously, maybe danone has some of that, but if you go in cacao, it's very difficult, and so there lies a huge potential to start understanding, okay, where do I actually, where do I actually buy from? And then what can happen on the farm level, because that's where the biggest changes apart from food waste, apart, of course, um, reformulating, fixing your factories, all of that but what happens on the farm level, which starts with knowing, yeah, which farms actually are supplying to you, which is?
Speaker 1:which there's been like very significant advances in progress, even since we last talked, in that More companies know where more of their materials come from, and part of it is that we're helping companies do that supplier engagement. Looking upstream, say okay, who do I purchase from, who do they purchase from, and sort of trace backwards. Even though EUDR the deforestation regulation got pushed off a year, companies are still. They know it's coming, they're getting ready for it, they're enhancing their traceability, they're partnering with different software technologies and platforms in order to get that traceability. They're building their own internal tools. It's coming.
Speaker 1:The ability to see back to where things are being grown, being produced, is happening, and then translating the actual impacts of that is something we're very excited. Happening and then translating the actual impacts of that is something we're very excited about and we're the only platform that can really do in an automated, quick way because of partnerships. That's one of the things I'll mention about how good once we get through this kind of basic overview, we have a partnership with the cool farm tool and the cool farm alliance, which allows us to calculate really quickly. It takes me a couple minutes in the platform to calculate the carbon footprint or the water usage or the biodiversity impacts of an individual farm or an individual field, somewhere, based not on expensive consultants, but just based on basic business info for a farmer how many times did you till? What fertilizer did you put down? What were your yields Like? Just some basic bits of information. What soil did you put down? What were your yields? Just some basic bits of information. What soil type do you have? And you can calculate it with surprising accuracy and granularity.
Speaker 1:So all of that enables even our ingredient supplier partners, like Ingredion, like Kerry, who are doing incredible regenerative agriculture work. It helps them to be able to communicate to their customers, which is the brands that we've talked about, and then the brands. It helps them communicate to their customers, who are the retailers, and then it helps the retailers to communicate out to consumers, and we're even growing in that regard in places like the Middle East. At COP28 in Dubai, we had a very public partnership with Carrefour Majid Al-Fotain, carrefour in the Middle East, who operates in over about 12 countries in the Middle East. These retail establishments they're Carrefour, but in the Middle East and we did a pilot with them at COP28, where we did sustainability labeling and carbon footprinting in a little store right inside the blue zone where the negotiations were happening. So when the negotiators came out to grab a sandwich or whatever, they would see our carbon footprints and then they would actually get a little receipt. Uh, that had here was the carbon footprint of the meal you just chose to eat.
Speaker 2:Um, and so that level, was there a little add-on that you could compensate somewhere inside it, somewhere? We didn't get that far you want to compensate?
Speaker 1:we shouldn't do that. Zero food print does that? They're the best at that. We didn't get that far. Do you want to compensate? We shouldn't do that. Zero Foodprint does that? They're the best at that. We didn't get that far on those labels. But that's exactly the kind of thing that could come. It's a start Right and that sort of visibility all the way to the end consumer with really detailed, granular data. No one else can do that at that we use, and just our amazing team here, and so, yeah, we're growing very quickly because everybody wants access to this sort of information.
Speaker 2:Okay, there are like three streets I want to take from this junction. We're in now. But you mentioned consumers at the end and we've talked about it a few times in the past as well, and I think it's always an open question or question people throw at me or people in the space in general Do consumers want it? Do consumers want and understand enough of Regen to actually buy, compared to sort of the ceiling we seem to have hit with organic and with labels? And are people confused or not? Are people interested enough in this relatively complex story? But it seems to hit a nerve, at least in companies but also with people in the media, that none of the other let's say, agroecology, umbrella things has ever hit. But what do you see from the consumer people that are in the supermarket aisle or are ordering a HelloFresh box? Do they start picking or start selecting more versus, let's say, the soil-focused supply chain or supply system versus others? Or are we not there yet? Are we working mostly on the not the backend end, but let's say, beyond the supermarket shelf?
Speaker 1:okay, a couple points here. If you ask consumers if they care, they say yes yes, I care about the earth yes, I care about the.
Speaker 2:Yes, I care about my health and community.
Speaker 1:If you then ask them how many steps they're willing to take in order to help make that happen, it's an average of zero. They're not extra steps that will be taken.
Speaker 1:Despite that, what we've found is that if the communication is, easy if the communication is clear and simple and understandable, behavior will change significantly, and that's purchasing behavior will change if the communication is clear and simple and positive. Telling somebody that beef has got a high footprint or that their favorite cookie is shitty for them doesn't work and unfortunately some systems like NutriScore in the EU mandate in the EU have never actually quite achieved their goal of having people buy healthier and healthier food. So how good is to develop some simple principles and a system to figure out?
Speaker 2:what is simple, easy, concise, understandable, doesn't take it's nice that you even slow down when you talk, when you say it it doesn't take. Deliver the message.
Speaker 1:It doesn't take a carbon footprint in kilograms and it doesn't take a long story about a farmer or what soil health is or microbes are. Some consumers do care about that, but they're a smaller portion. But if you can simply communicate that this is a good thing for self and the world, then behavior changes, and we do that with a series of sustainability ratings and also a series of attributes that say very simple things like climate friendly, water, smart, fair labor, simple things that don't need. You don't need a dictionary, you don't need to look it up. You're like, okay, great, and we have the hardcore methodology with quantitative data to back it all up.
Speaker 1:But if you put those labels on the supermarket shelf, not on packaging, it doesn't work because it's not unified across the whole story. There's 600 different labels you can put on given packaging, so it has to be on the shelf edge. We have some incredible partners that help us do this digitally with little digital shelf tags. Talked about this the other day. If you put those labels on, the sales of more sustainable products go up Everywhere. We've tried it in the US, in the UK, now in the Middle East. Everywhere we've tried it, sales go up significantly, and so if there's the right bit of information at the right moment of decision-making. On a shell or in an e-commerce situation, consumers will choose in a towards regeneration direction, even if it's not regenerative per se.
Speaker 2:So if you're, like I'm, staring at a, let's say, a chocolate shelf and a few of the digital price label labeling tags that are on there say water, smarts, fair labor, et cetera, those will attract on average wherever you are a significant uptick in, of course it cetera, those will attract on average wherever you are a significant uptake in. Of course it shouldn't cost 10 times the price. No, there should be, and often it doesn't.
Speaker 1:Often it helps to reveal who's doing what and it's an exciting way to find. Often own brand in retail, like their own private label, can be better and is a lower price point. And those like we have a couple of photos where, like those shelves are empty, Like those just sell out right, Because that's the lower price and it's more sustainable, People go for it. Another way to just to step outside of me. And how good for another point of view on that If you shop on Amazon. They now do this. They have sustainability attributes live across millions of products that are sold on amazon. It's called the climate pledge friendly. They launched a big thing with regenerative organic alliance at regen house at climate week in new york city last year and they are doing very similar simple attributes connected to good certifications. And I mean, does Amazon do anything that isn't financially attractive?
Speaker 2:No, so like. So it works people. That's the simple, it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And how does? I don't know how big, let's say the ultra processed food or people. I think the book just came out in Hardcover paperback in the US. It's been a huge let's say the ultra processed food or people I think the book just came out in hardcover paperback in in the us. It's been a huge, let's say hit and a revelation in europe, at least in the uk, and ultra processed food combined with a sort of double whammy of ozempic and all the the, let's say, suppression, weight loss drugs that our medicines have been out.
Speaker 2:How do you see that in in our work, in your work, specifically in a lot of the formulation, because a lot of this food in general in any supermarket, not to pick on anybody, is ultra processed and not really good for you like, how? Like you mentioned reformulation before, how is that train, let's say, arriving at the, the big food world? That there's also a huge health angle to be tackled, apart from all the ingredient stuff. Of course we have to make sure that it doesn't end up in an extremely addictive cookie that we just cannot put away because we formulated in a way that we cannot put the cookie.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know. I have more faith in human beings' personal agency and choice than blaming the cookie for things. But I will give a couple angles on this. One is from the HowGood side. Nutrient density is one of the areas that I'm excited to be working on, and with this year, my role at HowGood is chief innovation officer, which means a number of things, including I get to look a little ways out into the future, two, three, five years out. What's coming in and how do we grow the business, partnerships and sort of ecosystem of collaborators out there in the world, so that what I can see in the future comes into the present. And so my main areas for the last year, which will probably continue, are nutrient density, biodiversity and AI.
Speaker 1:Artificial intelligence is huge, but just to focus on nutrient density, I think we're getting towards some very simple, clear nutrient density scores that we'll be able to combine with our broader sustainability scores that are a roll-up of ecological and social like that side of sustainability with nutrition, I think we will soon be able to offer combined ratings that are sort of like ESG plus N, esg plus nutrition, that give a quantitative, unbiased guidance on the nutrient density of foods. Now, that's not the only thing that makes something healthy, but it's a pretty good proxy. And it also provides a direct link back to regenerative agriculture Because, as we've seen, as the studies have continued to come out, when you farm regeneratively, the nutrient density of what you produce increases. We're still a little ways from when we can pay farmers for nutrient rather than weight, but it's coming. I think we're on the way to it in a really exciting way, and that's the other reason that I want to have more nutrient density metrics and scoring in our system and then putting out more broadly to the world.
Speaker 1:And then I'll give one other side, which is an anecdote, and I won't name the company, it's not even one that we know or work with that well, but I met somebody at a conference it was actually at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas which was fascinating. There's a lot of new pool cleaning robots, you'll be happy to hear, and new massage chairs.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of new pool cleaning robots you'll be happy to hear, and new massage chairs. That was exactly why I had you on. There's a lot of new massage chairs that do very interesting massages. With AI, I think right.
Speaker 1:Everything has AI in it these days. But I met somebody there who is an innovation person from a major global company and he was, like I've been tasked with, starting to change the food products that we sell to go into real, more like meals and healthier food, and so that's small, that's a leading edge indicator, but that's an awareness. That's an awareness that, um, yeah, you know, we're not particularly healthy by and large on the planet, at least in the global north these days, and there could be some changes in the food products that are produced and sold to help with that. Now, if you look at some of the broader metrics out there from ATNI and the other folks sort of tracking what's healthy, we've got a long way to go, but I'm hopeful that or a lot of opportunity yeah, both are true I'm hopeful that some more focus on nutrient density could be part of the path. That also feeds two birds with one seed and get some of the region ag in motion that we want to as well.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned region house already. Yeah, natural bridge to that. What have you been doing with region house? What is it? Where is it gonna pop up next time? Yeah, just to get people in the know. Yeah, what's about the secret society?
Speaker 1:well, let me tell you about the, the front of house, the first door you walk into, because region house is a house. So basically, this came from being at davos a couple years ago and at other, at these global climate conferences, and people were talking about regenerative agriculture, but the food was terrible, like there was no good food anywhere We've got little like sugary vegan canapes and they might hand you a glass of champagne or something, but there's no food, there's certainly no farmers, certainly no indigenous peoples anywhere, and so it's like this isn't quite.
Speaker 1:We're not actually going to get to regeneration if we're not eating regenerative food, if we're not face-to-face with the core people that are helping to make regenerative agriculture happen. And so we started to invite and bring farmers to Davos and to these other events, and we started to host things that were centered around food, and so this became Regen House, which is a new house, a new home for evolutionary conversations focused on regenerative food systems, not just regenerative agriculture.
Speaker 1:That's also an important shift is to regenerative food systems, as a whole not just the agriculture, because then it ends up we're putting too much on the farmers, too much on the ag side of things, whereas it's really the whole system that needs to be evolved and grown here. And so Regent House pops up at these major global events. Every event is centered around food. No panels are allowed. You're not allowed to do a bunch of white guys up on a stage talking about shit they've already talked about in the past. That doesn't fly at Regent House. You have to design something, craft something around food, around a real food experience, and then do something more disruptive. We're aiming for new thinking, not thotting. That's happened in the past. And we're designing for global decision makers. So it is executives at the largest global companies, and the cool small ones as well, who are in the room to shake it up. It is bankers, it is government representatives, ambassadors and ministers and secretary. We're inviting them into the space that is centered around food, where the farmers are there, where indigenous community members are there, and we can really, yeah, mix it up and it's like a new recipe. That hasn't happened before. And so we launched at Climate Week in a big way. I mean, we actually launched at Davos last year, but the real significant launch was at Climate Week in New York City. We rented out six floors of a building, including a rooftop, and we hosted a full week of events 42 events over the course of the week. That ended up being about 5% of all the in-person events at Climate Week and all of them were food-centric.
Speaker 1:And there were just amazing events that we had and things that we did. There was a Unilever sponsored this event called Stone Soup, where everybody who came was required to bring an ingredient from their company's supply system. And then we had a chef this amazing chef, pierre Thiam unbelievable. He's head of Yolele and does work with Fonio in West Africa, senegalese chef. He's amazing and he was there in the room. We had a bubbling cauldron of soup that he had been cooking and as people came, we got the ingredients, we put them into the soup and told the story of stone soup and the collaboration that's needed in the food system, and then we all tasted and ate the soup together at the end. Yeah, there was a breakfast. How did it?
Speaker 2:taste.
Speaker 1:It was so good you put a chef like Pierre on something, even something crazy where people are bringing cheese from Holland and tomatoes and one clove of garlic from a particular place.
Speaker 1:I brought lamb from my farm. It was amazing, it was so good and just a whole series of events that were hosted. Rockefeller did events, the OP2B, the Alan MacArthur Foundation, mars Calanova, kellogg's all of the food companies came and all of these food experiences and it was like 10,000 people tried to get access to the space. We couldn't let. I mean it was like we. We ended up with about 2,500 people coming through the week. 500 of those were C-suite executives in some way, shape or form from there's 178 organizations that came through. One breakfast I actually cooked breakfast myself from my farm. I brought down eggs from the farm, I got veg from one of the farmers at our place and myself and actually and Karen from Kiss the Ground, who was on our previous episode she was there.
Speaker 1:We both arrived 6am with a couple of other people from how Good. And we cooked breakfast and served it to 20 chief sustainability officers a couple hundred billion in revenue sitting around the table. We served them this delicious food directly from my farm.
Speaker 2:It's interesting how that food like that, that this is, I'm getting goosebumps because it's so cool and so interesting and so simple in a sense and so new. And it's almost scary that it's new, like we talk about food goals and agriculture et cetera and you're saying, yeah, actually none of these events has good food. And I think most people are like nodding, like actually most of the events we go to and talk about this stuff doesn't like how is that possible? How did we allow that to happen? That we are not eating good food, we're not sitting at a table, we're standing somewhere uncomfortable with a plasticky, biodegradable whatever. And how can we then decide on not decide? How do we even get involved or engage if we're not actually nourished at these events or in general? I think it's a. It's scary and confronting and very interesting. Obviously that's shifting now. At least it's out there. You can do good food. It's a lot of organization, a lot of work, but it's fundamental. Otherwise how on earth are we going to have these conversations?
Speaker 1:And what we decided after doing them, after it was a complete amazing success. And just it was the. It became the home for food systems conversations at all of Climate Week, and so we said let's keep going, let's do this again, and this year we have a whole series of events in different places around the world. So we were just at Davos and then the Sustainable Retail Summit in London.
Speaker 1:In a little bit we'll be at Natural Products Expo West big food important food show in the United States, and then we'll fly to South by Southwest and kind of do some new things in a more arts, cultural, tech scene. But we're bringing Regen House there to experience that for people who aren't usually into food, getting into food. And then we'll go to San Francisco Climate Week, be in Amsterdam for the Consumer Goods Forum annual summit. We'll be in London for London Climate Week, then we'll do New York Climate Week again and then Belem in Brazil for COP30, which will be a really big, significant coming together of people to look at and push regenerative agriculture and regenerative food systems forward. And it's just fun. Our team helped work the bar so you could have someone serving you a cocktail that could explain your scope.
Speaker 2:Three category one and 14 footprint it's a very good I'm not saying marketing, but very good meeting, communication, networking space. If you have the coolest place in town and you have the best food, you can have the most interesting people in a, in an atmosphere where you can talk about scope three and how you can help with that. Potentially and of course it's a, it's an investment, but a brilliant move as well. And it's potentially and of course it's a, it's an investment, but a brilliant- move as well and it's in partnership.
Speaker 1:Region House is a collaboration between HowGood and EIT Food, which is one of the largest food collaboration innovation organizations in the world, and so we kind of co-host and host in different places. And the part of the idea with Region House and we're really just getting started part of the idea is that the first time you come, you step in the door and you meet someone, you have a chat in the foyer, maybe you have a drink and you leave. Next time you come back and you go a little deeper. You go into the living room. You have some snacks and regenerative snacks from our partners at good sam or elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Shout out for good sam and also some of the most amazing products.
Speaker 2:We're both investors in them.
Speaker 1:So yeah, fully biased, fully biased about their excellent products Also.
Speaker 2:I never had them, I just invested without it. Oh my God, they're so good.
Speaker 1:And then my buddies at the Philosopher's Stone Ground. They have these gut nuts, these unbelievable fermented almonds and cashews I think I had them at RFSI. Oh, they're so good and so those were snacking around. So you come in, you get a little deeper. Next time you come back maybe you get a meal right. You come in and a chef from the Future Food Institute, who we partner with incredible alchemist chefs who are at Davos cooking these like 11 course meals from the local farmers there. It's just unbelievable. So each time you come in you get a little closer and eventually what we want for some people, anybody who wants to step in is that you get into the kitchen.
Speaker 1:The heart of Regent House is the kitchen and in the kitchen there's an indigenous community member, friend of mine, stirring the soup. There's a farmer walking in from the field who's bringing the most amazing new regenerative crop that they just harvested. There's a CEO who's actually cool enough to just sit and chill and listen and chat. There's this deeper level of work. But it's also where we offer and share the regenerative business technology and the sort of deeper paradigm of regeneration and help people learn to use that. So there's a certain point that's coming later this year where not only can you like come to Regent House as an event venue which it is but it's sort of an event. It's actually a global community disguised as an event venue and so there's a point coming this year where we will open up membership to individuals not to companies, but to individuals and those memberships will basically get you a spot at any of the region house events that are happening anywhere in the world, but then also get you access to, but also commit you to doing some of the deeper regenerative thinking change your own mind.
Speaker 1:Paradigmatic work, kitchenships. Regenerative thinking, change your own mind. Paradigmatic work, kitchen shifts. That has I don't know it's made me be somewhat useful in the world. So that's coming soon. It's not a secret society, because I'm telling you publicly about it, but it's you said it before, at the pre-call, you said it a semi-secret society.
Speaker 2:That's why I brought it up. Yeah, it's semi-secret Outing you here.
Speaker 1:But you can join if you have the will to regenerate yourself and the world.
Speaker 2:And you have to start with dishes, otherwise I'm chopping on you no come in and cook us something delicious. No, you don't have to start with dishes. I'll wash the dishes.
Speaker 1:You cook something beautiful from your farm.
Speaker 2:And let's see where we go. Amazing, no, it sounds fascinating. I want to dig deeper and talk about AI, as I know we have a hard stop in about 10 minutes, so I'm going to choose for the AI angle here. Sorry to cut this off. We'll get together again, we'll do a longer one, but I just wanted to make sure we had time to check in properly, and it's been some interesting years for AI, let's say, for the rest of the world. You were already on the bandwagon a long time ago. We talked about it many times, looking at what we could do with transcripts of the podcast, how we can unlock that. We'll get to that later. But what do you see? I mean, ai is everywhere, from your, let's say, robot vacuum cleaner in your swimming pool to from your toothbrush probably, but what, as we don't have time for two-hour discussion here? What excites you at the moment about ai? What is useful for us in the region? Space, what do you? Or maybe not? What do you see?
Speaker 1:ai is going to fundamentally transform society, and I'm not even I'm not necessarily saying that's a good thing, but it is already in motion to transform the entire world. It is a general purpose technology, especially generative AI, and a general purpose technology is one like the wheel or like electricity or like the personal computer that just fundamentally alter the structure of economies and societies. And generative AI is that there was a statistic from a paper that a Nobel prize-winning economist put out that 80% of the jobs that exist that people are working in today, did not exist 100 years ago, and so generative AI will usher in that sort of transformation around the world. The combination of that, with widely available internet and super, mega powerful computers in our hands that we call phones like it, will shift everything. It will shift everything.
Speaker 1:Part of my excitement about it is that we know that the most destructive extractive industries in the world are happily jumping in and using it to its fullest extent, from mining to the military right, they're happily using AI, and if those of us who want global eco-social regeneration don't also step in and start to engage and learn and work with and be creative with artificial intelligence, we're just going to be left behind. It's going to be needed for us to work quickly and effectively, and there's a number of levels on which we can work and transform how we work and how our companies and organizations work. So most of what's happening out there with AI right now is still at the kind of basic level that I would call efficiency, where it's basically just like doing what we've done before, but faster Analyzing soil microbes, but faster. Writing marketing emails for your great podcast, but faster.
Speaker 2:So like analyzing clips and see it's fascinating how it hallucinates. I had an example yesterday Transcribing with a French accent, automatically translated in French, but he was speaking English. We're like how did that? Whoa, yeah, across different platforms, like it's not just one. It was very interesting. I could fix it. It was very interesting and of course, we used for suggestions for titles, etc. Nine out of ten, probably 99 out of 100, are very vague and like they're not, but it's interesting to use as a yeah, an efficiency or some suggestions, some brainstorm around okay, what, which direction, etc. But you spotted into it. I, yeah, you spot the emails written like that as well.
Speaker 2:Definitely, but anyway it's child play.
Speaker 1:And it's most of what's happening. Most AI use cases right now are efficiency. It's focused on efficiencies for what we already know how to do. Most generative AI is trained on the corpus of already existing human writing. For the most part, the large language models are based on human writing, so in a way, it's sort of rehashing and regurgitating a bit what was already written, and I have a couple of thoughts about how we kind of get beyond that. But efficiency is the baseline that most people are doing. I'm more interested in innovation. I'm more interested in when you can take the level of effect up from just being efficient to actually innovating and doing something new and different that you have not ever done before. We're seeing very few uses of this yet, but there's a couple starting to happen.
Speaker 1:I did a webinar. Actually we did. It was an official Green Zone event at the Biodiversity COP in Columbia. We did a live session, but then, in order to make it more available, we ran a webinar with the same crew in it. That was AI for biodiversity, and if you want to see some examples of innovation, you can go check that webinar out. It's really cool what some of these organizations like Wildmon, like Terra E Prevacia. Which is this amazing? It's in the Amazon. They're using AI to predict where deforestation is going to happen before it happens. So not afterwards to repair, but to be like, oh wait, here's where it's coming next.
Speaker 2:They're not faster observing satellite data to see, or satellite imagery where it's actually happening, actually predicting before even the logger knows where he's going.
Speaker 1:And so that can prevent deforestation. That's an innovation. That's new. That's not doing something more efficiently that was done before. That's a new use that became possible through machine learning and AI algorithms. So that's cool and we're going to see more and more like that. The third level that I keep looking for in the regenerative space and there's some startups starting to pull some cool stuff in this realm is really like transformation. So we went efficiency, innovation and then transformation, and transformation will radically shift business models, will radically shift the sort of social and cultural approach to whatever we're working on. We don't see a lot of that yet in the regenerative or regenerative agriculture space, but I'm saying that it could exist in order to invite all of you who are listening to us today to go out and bring those together, bring this work on AI, go learn it.
Speaker 1:I spend five minutes a day messing around with AI, making images, asking questions, trying to train new things. I bought one gadget at CES, which is this little pin that you can just pin on your shirt or wear as a little thing and all I have to do is click a button and it will transcribe, record and transcribe and it will auto translate from different languages. That was the other cool thing I saw, just in terms of gadgets, while we're on AI gadgets CES the glasses, like the new glasses, the wearables that are coming are pretty amazing. I saw one pair of glasses that transcribed live while we were talking, including translation, and I had a little earbud on Time Kettle, I think was the company an earbud that would simultaneously translate, so that I had a conversation from Japanese to Spanish back and forth, no problem, with pretty good accuracy. And then they also have a thing where you can speak in your language and it will auto translate to five other languages simultaneously. And that's not like a future tech, that's. I could have bought it right there for 600 bucks.
Speaker 2:So I do think that there will be some Done are the days where you had this little book, the pointed book, where, okay, I need a toilet, I need a bus station.
Speaker 1:I mean it's like we're pretty close to Star Trek Universal Translators. It's actually legitimately not far from that now. So I think there's some huge opportunities to innovate with AI, especially on regeneration, especially when we look at how do we design landscapes for eco-social and agricultural regeneration and there's one in that AI video that you'll see who's who's working on that. But, like one of the keys that we're going to need is that we have to, we're going to need to change the models that the AI is working off of and this is kind of put this thought out there. This is a little bit of a big thought. That is key to learning the learning data.
Speaker 1:So, instead of chain, we have large language models, training on language data. Now we're getting large multimodal models that have got videos and imagery in them. Then there's another level up, which is not multimodal, but there's what I would call large ecological models, where we're actually training on ecosystem oracles, on the patterns and the language of nature. If we want to regenerate nature, then we need and we're going to ask AI questions about that. It can't be trained on what some white dude wrote on the internet. It needs to be trained on what's happening in ecosystems. So that's a large ecological model.
Speaker 2:Probably quite destructive if it's based on the papers nature papers we have until now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And then there's a level above that. There's actually a couple levels above that. There's a level above that's called a large action model, where the models themselves are trained on cause and effect loops, where you take an action and you watch the result and see what happens and then you train off of that, as opposed to a more static written form. And then there's even a level above that we can get to at some point.
Speaker 2:That sounds like something we need on that watershed level or landscape level, which is one of the original questions, and we're wrapping up One of the original questions I wrote a long time ago and we discussed it as well like what is needed on a landscape level how are we going to figure out what to plant, where and why, and how can AI help with that? And, yeah, the data set is going to be absolutely fundamental. One quick shout out you're launching a podcast as well. I know we need to wrap up because you need to go one minute on your podcast and then we save the rest for another time.
Speaker 1:I'm launching a podcast with the Spoon Network Food Podcast Network. There are some great folks. The podcast is called the CSO Show and I will be interviewing in a kind of dynamic, sometimes intense, exciting way, the chief sustainability officers of the coolest and largest food and agriculture companies around the world. So really a deep dive into what they're seeing in the future, and I'll also be challenging them live to take on something. They're working with, some situation that they see potential in and trying to actually have a new thought live on the podcast, not reporting what they've done before, but looking forward into the future and designing together. So that's the CSO show should be launching. When is it coming? A little later this year, maybe Q2 2025.
Speaker 2:Exciting. Thank you so much, ethan. As always, another few hours we could do and we're going to do it another time. Thank you for what you do, what you bring to this place, and for coming on here to share and thank you for everything you do and I'll just end by saying the future for regeneration is bright.
Speaker 1:It still looks good from where I'm sitting and there's a lot of potential of what we can all do together.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website or via the Spotify app, and tell us what you you liked most and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.
