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
375 Matt Orlando - From Noma to building the world’s most circular restaurant and disrupting the chocolate industry
A conversation with Matt Orlando, chef, entrepreneur, and former head chef at Noma. He is also the founder of Amass, one of the most circular and fully organic restaurants in the world, which closed at the end of 2022. He then focused on a project in Singapore and is now back in Denmark, currently very busy with, among other things, a new restaurant in Copenhagen.
What happens when someone who worked as a head chef in one of the best restaurants in the world, Noma, starts going deep—deep—down the rabbit hole of sustainability and responsibility?
Welcome to a fascinating journey of one of the most interesting chefs in the world, who not only redefined what a circular, sustainable restaurant mean (and no, it isn’t more expensive to run, and it doesn’t require a lot of tech, etc.), but it does require a completely new mindset and way of thinking.
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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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What happens when someone who worked as a head chef in one of the best restaurants in the world Noma starts going deep, deep down the rabbit hole of sustainability and responsibility. Welcome to a fascinating journey of one of the most interesting chefs in the world, who not only redefined what a circular, sustainable restaurant means no, it's not more expensive to run and it doesn't require a lot of tech but it does require a completely new mindset and way of thinking. He shares some fascinating examples of data, but it does require a completely new mindset and way of thinking. He shares some fascinating examples of data monetary savings, for example, 17,000 euros a year in water costs, which is only possible because of a mindset shift. We talk about the role of fine dining and the hospitality world in transforming the agri-food system and the role of technology and, of course, fermentation and the VC-funded BS in food tech and fermentation. We discussed their new restaurant concept, which is still very much under wraps but very exciting, but also how they're disrupting the very, very dirty cacao and chocolate industry with an upcycled, fully organic, price-neutral, spent brewer's grain, which you can already find in quote-unquote chocolate cookies in the Nordics without tasting the difference. This is a long one, but worth it, listen to it when you prepare a meal, are gardening or anything else, but, most importantly, enjoy.
Speaker 1:This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and 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. Welcome to another episode today with chef, entrepreneur and the former head chef of Noma and the founder behind Amas, one of, if not, the most circular restaurant in the world and fully organic. It closed at the end of 2022 to focus on a project in Singapore and now he's back in Denmark. He's very busy and, among many other things which we're going to talk about, a new restaurant here in Copenhagen. Welcome, matt, thank you so happy to be here, and we always start with a personal question and you already alluded to in the pre-conversation. That might be dangerous with a chef. How come you spend most of your waking hours and I'm guessing also your sleeping hours thinking about ruminating, fermentating food and, in your case, actually also soil and ag? What led you into this magical world of chefs, food farms and food system change even?
Speaker 2:Well, my wife can attest to even sleeping hours because she'll often wake up and I'll be on my phone and she's like what are you looking at? I'm like, how do trees speak to each other? She's like you just go to sleep, you crackhead. So I would say from a I'll come from a chef's perspective and for a chef, obviously food is and products are the most important thing the quality of products, where they come from. And as soon as you start to deep dive into that, you see very quickly that the quality of product is directly connected to the quality of the soil that it's produced in.
Speaker 1:And you remember because it seems so obvious from the outside.
Speaker 2:I remember the exact moment.
Speaker 1:I can tell you Because it's so obvious from the outside, and I'm definitely not in the chef's world and I had the great pleasure to be at Matt's symposium a few weeks ago and because of Dan. Thank you, dan. But that's really an interesting subculture in terms of chefs and how cool it became and how the movement of hospitality really, yeah, not just because of Chef's Table, of course that's how most people look at it, but it became a thing just because of chef's table. Of course that's how most people look at it, but it became a thing. And still there you saw the disconnect with the products and where the products come from.
Speaker 1:But from the outside, we come from a farming perspective. It's like obviously it's the seed, the farmer, the soil that leads to a great tasting tomato. And then, yeah, of course how you cook it it's not so important, which of course the chef's like no, that's the starting point. Then you work backwards, like there's this interesting disconnect between when the product gets through the door of the kitchen, like suddenly it changes or something, the dimension changes. You say, do you remember? Like do you remember when provenance or terroir or whatever we want to call it became a thing? Or was it always just very logical, which it seems like?
Speaker 2:It's not logical, because you are right in saying that chefs are widely disconnected from where their food comes from. And you can say, oh, I know the farmer, and the farmer comes to the back door and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah that stuff, and that's all romantic. But unless you're standing out there and feeling it, you really don't understand what it is. And the exact moment for me, I was with a friend named Mikko. He had a company called Spiesman Grease that sold meat, only organic. The person we were at in this particular day, his name was Ole, we called him the Cow Whisperer. He had a very small herd of cattle and we were out in the field with Ole and Mikko and I brought my whole team out there to kind of see what was going on and they were walking quite far ahead of Mikko and I brought my whole team out there to kind of see what was going on and they were walking quite far ahead of Mikko and myself and the sun was kind of low in the sky and Mikko's like check this out, and we were like in a field with like grass up to our waist and the cows are moving around and it's clover and alfalfa. It's not a, it's just a wild field. It's not a green desert, no, exactly.
Speaker 2:And Mikko's like come here and we're away from everyone and he's like check this out. And he's like bent down, we got, we bent down and we were at like eyeline with the top of the grass and there was just hundreds of thousands of bugs flying around. And he's like this is organic. And I was like my head just exploded and he reached down and he like grabbed a handful of, like pulled a bunch of the grasses out and was like look at this dirt. It's like sticking together and dark. He's like this is it like?
Speaker 2:We talk about organic and no pesticides? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's like organic is creating a functional ecosystem that thrives on each other. And he's like this is it? This is I've tried to explain it to you in words. He's like, but this, for me, is the best way to explain it to you and my brain just like exploded and that's what really took me down the rabbit hole of really trying to understand what is food, what is soil, how do they interact with each other, and through that it's obviously it can take you down multiple rabbit holes and how it affects our microbiome and brain activity.
Speaker 1:Including at night how trees talk to each other. Let's see how long the battery lasts, but we can make it work. And did that land at that point because you said I brought the full team here as well, with the team as well like how is that notion of like you had that moment in the field, looking at basically a field full of life? I still think this Logan I mean shout out to Wild Farmed is one of the best one. Like this is food full of life, like a farm full of life, a pasture full of life and anyway, our gut system full of life, etc.
Speaker 1:I'm a very small investor, I'm biased, obviously. How do you convey that? Or how do you make sure, or how do you enable it's probably a better word other people to have the same in your kitchen, in your teams, in the office of a restaurant, in like the whore Because if it's just quote, unquote the crazy chef, it's great, but it's maybe going to stop there Like, how do you enable it, like people have that same experience or a similar experience, to have that same moment of okay, wow, this is about functional ecosystems, abundance, full of life, and that creates the food that we end up serving in a very nice restaurant with the right tablecloth and all the fanciness around it, but it starts there in a messy like objectively, preferably, messy, preferably. If it's not messy, it's not good Field. Is that difficult to? This is a very long question. I realize it. To have other people in your team or in your teams and around you see that as well.
Speaker 2:Well, in that immediate moment, in your teams and around you see that as well. Well, in that immediate moment, which lasted about a minute, of Mikko and I just having this non-conversational moment together looking at these hundreds of thousands of bugs, it was a lightning moment. Yeah, I, without saying anything, I set out on a full sprint across the field to catch my team.
Speaker 1:Scaring the cows probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all those cows were unscareable, they were just so docile and moving around, yeah, and to say everyone, you got to see this and I grabbed everyone and sat everyone down in the grass and was like check this out, so you can have those moments. Obviously, you can't have your guests experience that.
Speaker 1:But did it click then for the team? Did you see different reactions to?
Speaker 2:I would say my wife always says like you always want people to understand things how you understand it, my wife's always like you're a little bit psychotic as well, so you maybe people won't fully grasp it as passionately as you will, but I there was definitely a few of them were like, wow, like because it's interesting because they walked through the field and until they got underneath they didn't see.
Speaker 1:See that, you don't see it or you hear it.
Speaker 2:Exactly, but I think that's like a metaphor for all of this that's happening. So many things are happening that we don't see every day, and because we are a species that don't really acknowledge anything unless we can physically see it or touch it, then it doesn't exist and it doesn't matter how many times people talk to you about it.
Speaker 1:Biodiversity went down.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. As soon as you see it and experience are in it, then it becomes real and then you can start having thought processes about it. But until then it's really hard to convey that experience or even the existence of that happening around us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. Actually, how do we, of course, in the investment world, in the finance world, the entrepreneur world, the food company world, how do you have people have that experience without bringing them to the farm? Maybe it's not possible. We're going to talk about the food role in that, the hospitality world, because the best thing is to come to and luckily we have in Western Europe and actually all over Europe and many other places. You have places you can go to, you can see and you can see the difference, like the field next door looks and sounds and feels very different compared to the farm you visit. So, if you can, I almost always end these conversations with go and visit the farm, spend time and listen not only to the farmer very important but also to the insects. But if that doesn't happen, like if the farm doesn't, if the investor or the person doesn't come to the farm, can we bring the farm to the investor? And I've been thinking about, okay, what do we do with these I don't know vr goggles like, how do you bring, like just to understand and hear and sound and listen to the difference between a field full of life and a field without any life, which might still be organic, but you can sense the difference or a forest that is maintained very differently compared to a monoculture forest. And I remember we had something on chestnuts a long time ago no, not so long actually on chestnuts, investments around Propagate. I will put it in the links below.
Speaker 1:And he just made a small video, I think he put it on LinkedIn. Just, they planted chestnuts and they filmed simply the insect activity on that field, so they planted a cover crop and chestnuts and the sound is just amazing compared to your next door field, which is as hay silence. Obviously. He said just that like bring the investors to that place, either through a video very small iPhone one, like nothing, but bring the investors to that place, either through a video, very small iPhone one, like nothing. But the sound difference is already amazingly different compared to.
Speaker 1:But now we get to the role of food. Like how do you is that the guests? Obviously cannot, we cannot bring all the guests to the farm. You can do amazing dinners on a farm. Let's say you're in a big city, like here, 1.3 million people. So then how did you, from that moment on, try to bring that experience, or part of the experience, without bringing all the insects to the restaurant. Like how did you, how did your thinking change? I think is the question in terms of how to convey that message through the food, through the experience, through the table and everything that happens on top of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, A restaurant is, people think because you have a restaurant, you have a platform to talk about whatever you want to that you're passionate about. But a restaurant is a challenging arena.
Speaker 1:That was my whole emphasis of this conversation. You're saying that we're not going there. Okay. We're saying that if you talk about soil the whole time in a restaurant, people might not like it.
Speaker 2:Well, a restaurant is a difficult arena to talk about things because you think you have people's amazing care and you can talk. A restaurant is, first and foremost, a restaurant Like. People go there to eat and drink wine and enjoy themselves, and we want to think about a restaurant as some of this ethereal kind of place where we can preach and stand on a platform and talk about what we do, but you and that's true to some people that go there, but not all so therein lies the challenge of how do you communicate about this within a restaurant, because then, all of a sudden, you're trying to read your guests at a level that normally you don't have to read. Does this person really care about the microbiome and how it connects to the soil? Probably 2% of your guests do.
Speaker 1:Which, if you have a small restaurant, there are not so many people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that is we always talk about it at Amas, especially like where are the challenges in communicating about what we do? And that was one of them. Of course there are people. We actually got a complaint letter one time because we didn't communicate enough about what we did.
Speaker 2:So you're like let me just shoot myself in the head right now because those are there and like okay, come back please and we'll do three hours. I will take you to the farm and we will talk about exactly what we're doing. So communicating in a restaurant setting is challenging. What I found, personally, a bit more efficient is that a restaurant is a restaurant and, of course, we operate in a very specific way, based on the things that are and the values that we hold. But you can talk about it aggressively around the dining experience, visually, on the walls.
Speaker 1:You can do it in a way where people who are interested will engage based on what they're looking at around them, and then, okay, there's a way in so you invite people can literally or figuratively raise their hand or what, instead of just preaching to everyone exactly, it's forced to sit there because they're in your first of all there's a fine line between preaching and informing.
Speaker 2:You never want to preach. I want to preach, I want to stand up there, give a sermon on soil every day.
Speaker 2:But then your wife says no my wife is yeah, my wife is like I. We, like my wife and I, have worked together for 18 years. We ran a house together, we worked at Nova together, we worked at Perse in New York together, and so and she's front of the house, she's also the realist. I'm like we can do everything all the time. She's like we can do everything, but just not all the time we can do it.
Speaker 1:I understand the family. We've been running the podcast and everything else together. I understand the dynamics. It's great and it gives amazing opportunities and it's challenging at the same time, because it never stops and it goes on in the middle of the night and it goes on when you're yeah, but it makes a lot of things possible.
Speaker 1:If it works, it's really powerful. But front of the house, obviously, yeah, she was and is like like then, responsible for the guest experience and of course doesn't want somebody to stand on a food crate and talk about soil for two hours Exactly.
Speaker 2:She's like if you want to do that, you can do it outside of the restaurant, all you want, and so, but that's a great, that's a great observation. So myself, I aggressively engage outside of the restaurant because that ultimately sets the platform for what the restaurant's all about. Who? Comes in who thinks already yeah, not at first, but in the end people were really coming to a mass for the exact reason.
Speaker 1:Because that changed right. Because when you started a mass, was that already and I'm sorry I'm not in the chef's world so much when you started, was that not aggressive but such a focus, the circularity, the organic space? Because that was a transition, right, a transition. Look, I did my prep, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, amass, when we opened, I was actually, so I would say, anti-nordic Because I just didn't. Coming from Noma, that's interesting, yes, but I think when Coming from Nomad, that's interesting, yes, but I think when you do something so extreme, your immediate reaction is to do when you do your own thing, is do something the opposite of that, like children and parents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, I'm scared for my children.
Speaker 2:But ironically, fast forward 10 years. Amass was the most Nordic restaurant you could ever imagine, because we were 99% Danish ingredients aside from the 1% of Norwegian fish we would get, or stuff like that.
Speaker 1:How did that transition which is so fascinating you start with saying I'm going to be the exact opposite on the other side of the spectrum and really serve the most amazing?
Speaker 2:We had flogger on the menu when we opened. What the fuck?
Speaker 1:I didn't want to go there, but that, and I don't know the best, I'm just like angus from whatever uruguay, like doesn't matter, fly it in, yeah, we're fine. And then, when did that start to? When did you see a movie, did you see? Was it a gradual process?
Speaker 2:okay, let's switch on olive oil or something else immediate we were open for six months, we had our first closure. We were closed for three weeks in the winter and I was having a coffee with a friend and she asked me Evelyn, kim, thank you, evelyn, for planting the seed. And she says you're open, now You're going, your systems are in place, what's next? And I was like what's next? I'm next, I'm like I will be creative, make people happy, like it's a restaurant. But in that same sentence that the word responsibility popped into my head. I didn't even acknowledge it or say it, I just was like what? Okay, whatever, we just kept having our conversation.
Speaker 2:For the next two and a half weeks we were closed. That word just permeated my entire being and I wanted to understand what that responsibility meant in the context of a restaurant, because I had never worked at a restaurant where that word was part of the vocabulary at all. And so trying to understand how do I start, what do I do to embody this word that will not leave my brain. And I remember coming back. We were, the whole team was back, we were opening three days later and I sat down in front of the team and I was like okay.
Speaker 2:So we've been open six months, we have systems in place, we're going in the right direction. Now we're going to forget about everything we've done in the last six months and we're going to start over. And everyone just looked at me and they're like have you spent the last three weeks in Christiania? Like, what are you doing? Which is a free town here in Copenhagen? Just background? Yeah, what have?
Speaker 1:you been smoking.
Speaker 2:Losing.
Speaker 1:What kind of ayahuasca trip did you go on? And so I said, well, we're going to, which is funny from like sorry to interrupt, but it's interesting because the systems she was right and like the systems are in place. So it's probably I'm not saying the most the easier moment to do it. But if you do it from the start and you have to put all the systems in place and run a new location, that for sure there are 10,000 things that don't work and all the out. Yeah, now you were, quote unquote changing the menu, just changing the menu, which, with everything else working, at least all the stoves were working and everything else like was flowing.
Speaker 2:I will push back on that. Changing the menu is the easy part. So the words I said to the team I was like okay, so every decision we make now we are going to put the phrase is this the most responsible version of this decision? Of course it's a restaurant, so sometimes you make decisions on the fly and of course you can't always make the most responsible decision in the moment. But if we make a decision that's not the most responsible one, we then meet afterwards and make a plan to get to the most responsible version of that decision.
Speaker 2:So it started based on this word, responsibility, and we started to put that in front of everything how we were cooking. Obviously, the immediate response to that is where the product's coming from, which before wasn't a big thing. So then we started to just retract from. We took farger off the menu, obviously, because that's not the most responsible thing to put on the menu, probably yeah. And we started to retract back into Denmark and Scandinavia and started to look at the farmers we were using, how they were actually growing their vegetables. So that was the initial like boom, that's low hanging fruit, that's there. Then we started to look at how we were cooking. Okay, how much were we actually throwing away of the products that were coming in? And there's also a thing in Scandinavia that in basically January till April, every restaurant cooks with the same five ingredients Beets, onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips.
Speaker 1:And if you want to do regional, let's say seasonal, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Because if you don't want to, bring anything from outside. That's pretty much the Nordic, you're tied to weight. So how do we differentiate ourselves from the other 20 restaurants using the same ingredients for these four months? Because, after Noma, or with Noma.
Speaker 1:Of course, there was this movement of these kind of restaurants doing those things. Going back one second, when you opened the Mas for the first six months. Did you get any pushback or any of your former colleagues and friends from the Nordic cuisine? It's like what are you doing? Why do you bring foie gras from everywhere and everywhere? Or was it a very logical sort of jump into? Okay, let's do something completely different Back then?
Speaker 2:no, now I would have, because there's a different way of thinking about cooking from this region.
Speaker 1:But so what do you do in winter? Like end winter, basically until spring.
Speaker 2:So we were looking at these vegetables and you can ferment and dry and pickle, blah, blah, blah. But then I started thinking the skins of these vegetables, which are generally moved every time you prepare them because they're quite rough, because they've been in the ground, contain the most interesting parts of the vegetable from a nutrient perspective. So if the nutrients are different than the internal part of it, the compounds are different. So if we apply different fermentation methods to it, whether it's lactic, koji-based or yeast-based, the flavors are going to be different that come out of it. So then we started drying, rehydrating, fermenting, drying and rehydrating, like all these of the stems, the skins, the seeds, of all these different, and we started to come up with new flavor profiles. So not to say that, I just want to make it clear that, from a chef's perspective, we were doing this to find flavor, and the byproduct of the search for flavor was the whole circular way of cooking.
Speaker 1:And the nutrient. I remember having this discussion or conversation with Dan Barber, the last one when we had him on. I will put it in the links below as well like on the word processing or on like what's the role of chefs to take in this case a carrot or whatever and almost not upcycle is not the right word here but like unlock more nutrients than you would have before if you just eat it raw or whatever. Simple cooked quote, unquote. Again, I'm not a chef, you just eat it raw or whatever. Simple cooked quote, unquote Again, I'm not a chef. But you unlock because of fermentation, you unlock because of the processing and in this case actually you get more nutrient. Plus, you use something that would have gone away in the best case, maybe some broth, but let's say it would have been thrown away, because how many carrots do you peel? What happens with that? Oh, we make compost, great but actually get into a very interesting cycle and not only more nutrient dense, but oftentimes more delicious.
Speaker 1:And that's sorry, I of course forgot the flavor piece and even more delicious, which is like three, four levels up from okay, where you don't like the term zero waste or minimum waste circular, etc. But it has to taste amazing. It cannot be like all this. We'll cook you some leftover. Good luck, there you go.
Speaker 2:So you can view sustainability, or whatever you want to call it, through many different lenses, and I, or we at the restaurant, choose to view sustainability through the lens of deliciousness, which is the most important.
Speaker 1:How many people are going to be moved by? We see that now with soil, health and carbon and biodiversity, even at the end we see a strong push. And how many people outside our little activist bubble are going to care about that? Unless it tastes amazing and it's good for you, it's not going to kill you or poison you.
Speaker 2:But you asked me earlier, how do you communicate this within the restaurant? And I can sit there and I can give my sermon on soil for the whole evening, or I could sit there.
Speaker 1:Look at my slides, people.
Speaker 2:Or I could just sit there and feed you a delicious spoonful of something that will catch your attention way quicker than if. All the words that I'm saying to you, and a combination of those two, for the ones that are open to it have a really strong impact.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing that people, after that spoon of amazingly fermented, dehydrated, rehydrated, fermented again, et cetera, skin of or peel of carrots, more than the 1% is going to ask what is this?
Speaker 2:how did you do this what?
Speaker 1:is this flavor that I never tasted before but makes me feel good because my body recognizes like this is good stuff, it's full of life. Coming back to that's a much bigger percentage. Still not a hundred, that's fine, but even if it's 10 people asking, then you have, then you cannot be there the whole time obviously doing that. So how do you train, like, how do you, how does your staff, which stands to like a war term, like the people running the like, having that interaction with the people at the table? How do you bring them on that that they can give not the two-hour soil seminar but then actually engage when somebody says, how did you make? What is this? Why does it make me feel like my brain is popping out? How do you make sure that people that then can answer that question or actually can bring them on like we've been on the farm or we've fermented in this way, or how do you train your people then to be that interaction or that bridge between you and the kitchen and almost the farm?
Speaker 2:I use the acronym AIR.
Speaker 1:So awareness impact responsibility, which was also the name of your project in Singapore, exactly. Sometimes I do reprep, not always, but in this case, and I remember words, so AIR awareness impact responsibility. So you can't even start to operate in this way unless you have awareness Talking about the people in your team, In my team exactly.
Speaker 2:And so awareness means a couple things. Awareness means the awareness of the impact of the actions that you are doing. It means awareness of the potential in things.
Speaker 1:You're growing the world, you're responsible. Of course there's like yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And awareness also means being aware that you have to shift your mindset. So if you can get through all those three, then you have the potential to have impact. Once you have impact through awareness and changing your that's what I'm looking for changing your habits, changing your mindset Once you have impact, then you have a responsibility to share that impact with other people. And you only are able to share that impact with other people if you're able to talk about it and understand it.
Speaker 1:So you have to make it through the entire hack and above air before you can start to have really be able to communicate it and share it and, as you had a team in place after those first six months, did some people leave or like how did some some people not like, okay, I just want to serve Fargo. Like what did that clash click, engage or not? And did you find out? How did that land?
Speaker 2:I definitely had a few initial eye rolls. We just got it going. But I would say, no, no one left and everyone actually really embraced it Once we started to talk about it as a team. Because I am, I'm also very I like to involve the entire team in big decisions like this, because I, of course, I have my views and how I want it to sound like that.
Speaker 1:It sounded like from now on, we're going to do everything different. I don't know if there was like I vetoed this.
Speaker 2:I'm the dishwasher. Let me see. Yes, we're gonna do everything different and I'd like your input on how we do that.
Speaker 1:Because I also had no idea.
Speaker 2:No one had ever worked at a restaurant like this, so no one had any reference point. So we all had to start to feel it out and initially it's easy. Just that is part of the cooking, because that's the easy part. Everyone always thinks this is hard. The cooking part of it is not hard. It's using techniques that exist. It's just the whole idea of this. The most difficult part is the psychology of it. You really have to your mind. Your mindset has to shift in such a dramatic way. In the restaurant industry. You are taught repeat, repeat, repeat. So when you have a team full of chefs in their late 20s to mid 30s, these are people that have been cooking for a while now and they have their habits in place To shift. That is quite difficult. It was the most difficult part of the equation.
Speaker 1:You have an example on that. It's funny because if you change the word chef for farmer and restaurant for farm, I've heard many farmers say the technical parts of region farming not super easy, but definitely very possible. We now have a lot, of, a lot of places you can go for inspiration, et cetera, et cetera. But the mindset needed to apply them at the right moment, the right time. But the mindset needed to apply them at the right moment, the right time, in the right emergence, in the right facilitating life. Basically, because that's what you're doing. I think Gabe Brown even says it the most difficult real estate is between your ears. To change that, because you're going from killing and trying to make something grow that desperately wants to die to keeping things alive and managing a very different. Do you have an example, or for sure, more in that mindset shift in the kitchen that just took it from like 180, basically in terms of the peels of the carrot, obviously, and what do we do late or early spring?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I'll even go to a simpler ingredient water. I'm so curious where you're going with this. So at a mass, we would put water bottles on the table and still they're sparkling and people could pour their own water. We'd come around and pour the water.
Speaker 1:So please don't tell me it was like this Nestle water from Italy, Aquapan or something. No, definitely not. How did they do that? I drank bottled Italian water. Sorry, I'm going to do a rant now. Do it In the US. Is there a boat that crossed with bottles? Of course there was Maybe a plate, which sounds like the most like on top of an ocean. A boat full of bottles, anyway, okay, so, no, obviously not. So people could pour, we had filtered water.
Speaker 2:So we would have. Often there'd be, as this water bottle is sitting in front of us, there's some water left on the table. They haven't touched it, it's in the water bottle. We the table. They haven't touched it, it's in the water bottle. We would do. We'd have different, like ice baths to wash vegetables. We would then strain that out, so we would save all of our excess water about a hundred liters a day that we would divert from going down the drain. We would take that water, we would boil it and we would use it to wash our floors, and that that how did you come up with that?
Speaker 2:is like right in front of you all the time I don't even know, I can't even remember the origins of that one, it just we just started doing it one day. But the hurdle of if you're next to a sink and or even like with an ice bath or something, you're chilling down poached herbs just like you take the ears out and you just dump it.
Speaker 1:The logistics are interesting. Many of these bars have the constant water running to clean the glasses. And the sink just goes. That's a few thousand liters a day, exactly so, then do you get it?
Speaker 2:out of the sink. How do you do that? It never should go in the sink. So you then, are now having to like take three. First of all, you have to make it convenient. So we had a massive bin that said water on it, and we had one in the back and one in the front so you didn't have to take too many steps to get to it. So all the water would go in there at the end of the night. It would be taken to get boiled, and then we would use it. It came to a point. So, obviously, in the beginning, every time I heard water hit the sink, I'd be like what are you doing? They're like oh no, my gosh, I'm sorry. So it was this process In the end, because we had a lot of interns coming in that were obviously that's even more challenging. You have new people coming in all the time that you're trying to. If water hit the sink, the entire kitchen would stop and look at this person and be like what?
Speaker 1:did I do? Was it champagne? What did I do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at the end it was so integrated that it was like nails on a chalkboard when water hit the sink. But that was the first one where I was like when I just kept hearing it hit the sink. But that was the first one where I was like when I just kept hearing it hit the sink. In the beginning you're just like why don't you people understand what's going on here? But through so, and then at the end of the night when you pull 100 liters of water out of the back that you've been saving up and you show it to everyone because 500 mils here, a liter there, it doesn't. People don't understand it.
Speaker 1:Like the soil washing away, like erosion, but you don't see it. You don't see it.
Speaker 2:And so when you show a aggregated mass of something at the end of the night 100 liters and then you quantify that over a year and you give this enormous number, then people are like, oh, there is impact.
Speaker 1:I am having impact by doing this, you still have to boil it, though, so there's an impact analysis you could have done there to figure out OK, is it worth it boiling and then using it or wasting the 100 liters, and then, of course, the water you needed to have salt anyway.
Speaker 2:So in the beginning we boiled it, but then we found a compound that sterilized it in the end, that we could just add to it. Then we washed the floor.
Speaker 1:Because then you needed God knows how many liters of water anyway to wash the floor.
Speaker 2:So there's that double so I always like to try to add a financial aspect to this because this is important. And I realized this when I first started to go out and give talks to people. I was actually there's something called the conference in Malmo every year and I was speaking to like 900 people about what we were doing at a mass and all this stuff and giving statistics. And then I talked about this water and I said in Denmark, you pay all your utilities in the beginning of the year based on last year, and then at the end, if you use less than you get a refund. The first year we did this, we got a refund of 17,000 euro. And as soon as I said that at the conference there's all these people like half asleep, everyone's like what, and I saw it happen I was like, oh, now you're interested.
Speaker 1:So know your audience, yeah exactly, exactly. So, like in the restaurant business I don't think most people might realize it or if you have, you invested in it or run places. It's a thin margin business like any. 20 euros is important and 17 000 definitely is. That's yeah wow so.
Speaker 2:So that was also an eye opener about data, sharing data with your team, because then it becomes real, like another example were egg whites. So it's a common practice where you take an egg, you put it in a circulator at 61 degrees, you cook for an hour and a half, you crack the egg open.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's looking at me like this is super normal. I'm like I'm just nodding along. Yeah, it's a common practice. Yeah, sure it does at home.
Speaker 2:But you cook it at 61 degrees and then you crack it open and the whites are like raw weird that you rub away and you have this really chewy egg yolk and a lot of people use that on different variations. And then what happens to the white? Exactly. So we went on a deep dive in the whites and really broke down egg whites to their proteins and we found that an egg white has over 100 different proteins, but only 12% of those proteins cook at 61 degrees. The 88% are still raw, suspended in these cooked egg whites. So what we would do is we'd save all the egg whites at the end of the night and we would put them through a very fine strainer and raw egg whites would come out that we could use again for meringues or whatever. And then the solid cooked ones we would take and make garams out of it, because you need a protein in replace of soybeans when you make a garam and so.
Speaker 1:But when you have- it's like R&D, basically, yeah.
Speaker 2:So. But what you have during service, from a practical point of view, is this young chef in the middle of service, when it's really busy cracking these eggs, trying to clean the egg whites off of them, cursing my name at the same time. What am I doing here? And then? So then I said, okay, at the end of the night let's weigh these egg whites 500 grams of egg whites at the end of the night. And then we say, okay, let's quantify that over one year, how many services we do. And then you like, then you look at this kid and say this annoying action that you're doing every night has yielded a half a ton of product that would have been thrown away.
Speaker 1:That we've now turned into something that would have been, we would have bought it.
Speaker 2:Yes, so, and then they're like ding, and so you have to give context to the actions that people are taking to make them understand it. So I was a I never thought I'd use the word data as much as I do as a chef, and I love data all sorts. We had our. We had an lCA every year at the restaurant, because those touch points in the LCA allow you to make, like data-driven decisions on what to stop doing, what to not stop doing and moving forward.
Speaker 1:And so now you're working on a new place. Yes, what can you share about it? What do you want to share?
Speaker 2:about it. It's behind here, it's 30 meters from here. You share about it. What do you want? To share about it. It's behind here.
Speaker 1:It's 30 meters from here, I would say what I can share. It's not going to be foie gras, probably it's going to be pigeon from France, all the good stuff, golden spoons, from wherever Exactly Of?
Speaker 2:course, yeah, so I cannot share the name yet, and what I can say is that there's a small group of us in the world and I say small like a handful of restaurants that I know, and I'm sure there's more out there than I know that are pushing aggressively in this direction within the restaurant industry, and this restaurant I really want to.
Speaker 2:I would say using the word responsibility as a core of running your restaurant and for me, I really want to bring all of us together to have a stronger voice, and I just had a meeting with Lisa Abend, who is a. Do you know who Lisa Abend is?
Speaker 1:She was on stage at MAD interviewing Yvonne Shinar right.
Speaker 2:Amazing woman. She's been in Copenhagen for a very long time, and we were talking about the restaurant and moving forward, and I said this way of cooking is a new way of cooking. You could go as far as calling it maybe a new style of cuisine, and all five of us are cooking this way, but nobody's in Copenhagen. Nobody's in Copenhagen, just us. There's one in Aalhus, though domestic. How do we put our stake in the ground now and say we need to move in this direction, even if you don't want to move in this direction, that's fine, but this is something and she's like. You have to name it.
Speaker 1:Claiming the linguistics here and then, because then and you start loading that term with all the things we discussed and all the other things you're going to do, and then it becomes a thing. Until it's a thing. It's like oh, there's this super nice restaurant there and there's one there, yeah, and that's it, but it needs to be like Nordic cuisine became or other movements became. People need to understand. Okay, that's part of it because we like boxes.
Speaker 2:That's not. Yeah, and is that part of it or not? At least you can have a conversation about it. Does something fit in it? Yeah, because she's like, every time we talk about it it's so ethereal, it's like whoo up in the clouds. She's like you need to like ability, yeah, yeah, you need to like, you need to call it something, and then people can grab onto it and then you go from there, and so that was a really interesting conversation. So this restaurant, along with my colleagues around that, are also doing like we really want to start something, start a movement, and movement is a. There's something that was in my in the topics that we talked about discussing. Movement was something I wanted to talk about because movement is. I think movement comes from the ground up. I don't think it's a top-down thing. Grassroots, grassroots, exactly, because if we wait for the top-down, it's never going to happen, and all policies and decisions made from the top are greatly influenced by what the population wants or needs or desires most of the time.
Speaker 1:Let's say, yeah, there is a potential or a very strong lobby power, obviously in the current food and agriculture system. But unless we show alternatives and other and viable demand, commercial demand, people want this, normal people want this, not just geeks and the geeks and gurus or whatever I was going to say, but the geeks like us, then why would you change policy? You must be a mad politician in any place. I feel there's a massive piece there, unless you have a shared voice and a shared. This is what we're doing and this is why it's different.
Speaker 1:We see that now with EADA in Europe, the European Alliance of Regenerative Agriculture, to show even that these farms exist, large and small successful. They just gave a fascinating report I'll put it in the links below on like how much photosynthesis extra these farms do, how much productions they do. It's not less Like. The yield is is, on average, of course depends on the crop 2% less, yeah, with massively less inputs, no like on livestock operations, no input brought from outside the region, and they're just much more functioning farms. And just to have that, because we keep saying it. But unless you put it down in Brussels or in Copenhagen or wherever the policymakers, they will end up listening rightfully so to whatever consultancy lobbyists came with a very nice PowerPoint or keynote talking about the input industry, how they feed the world, and unless we make a strong like, no and this is an alternative, not just no this is wrong, because then why would you change policy if there's no strong voice?
Speaker 2:And you also have to argue for the fact that if you can keep things closer, then that helps the local economy as a whole.
Speaker 1:So jobs, inputs, like resources flows apart from all the nice biodiversity and soil stuff, like this, like you want your money to flow out of this country and out of this region constantly, you want people to keep to follow that, because people leave the countryside specifically. And so these five let's say you don't have a name yet I'm imagining for the movement this is going to be like really feels like the next phase of hospitality. Is that fair? I, I, yes, and how are you envisioning to bring that beyond the I don't know if the right word is fine dining, but to the rest of the hospitality, going from more, even hospitals or other places where food is being served, because that's where the numbers are, let's say, in terms of meals that are currently knee and could be amazing. Like, how is your or you're saying I'm doing this restaurant now, let's see, let's get it up and running, and then like, how do we engage with the rest of the hospitality? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:No, let's get up and running. How do we? But then the thing is, you have to build things outwards, so we need to make a strong case for what we're doing between us. And then don't get me wrong there is somewhat of movement in the hospitality industry is going in the right direction, and I couldn't naively be saying that, because I probably exist in a little bit of a bubble with what I know.
Speaker 1:Goes to amazing farms, visits amazing restaurants, has all his friends run the coolest places with the best flavor.
Speaker 2:now, and the different restaurants that I engage with, though outside of Copenhagen there is people are thinking like this they just don't know how to do it, and I think that's the biggest thing. So this restaurant also, I might add. I have Endless Food Company, which is spun out of a mass, and that is a food-based research space where we are focusing on pretty much one product now, which is a chocolate made with no cocoa, which is made out of spent brewer's grain.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a whole other conversation. Yeah, no, but we're going there because Put a bookmark there, I will go right there. Let me finish this.
Speaker 2:So that's already existing. So we have done that and I have no desire to start another startup that is like so this restaurant? For me, is also about creating a platform that is 100% open source and communicating about all the processes we're doing, how we're doing them, and giving it away to everyone, and that, for me, everything from the lowest hanging fruit to the most technical parts of it, the whole spectrum Because everyone will be able to engage in a different way, and I think that and I might be naive about this, but I think if people have more tools like that, they'll start to engage. Another way that I really want to engage in this, to scale it, is that there are a lot of restaurants out there that don't have the resources. I don't want to say resources. I don't say resources from a financial point of view, because cooking like this doesn't cost more money. You're just cooking different things. You're not cooking, you're talking about the mindset, exactly, and so.
Speaker 2:But there are restaurants out there that maybe don't have the space to do it.
Speaker 2:They don't have the time to do it, which is also not an excuse, because it just in the beginning to shift, there's a little bit of, but in the end it's the same amount of time. So instead of making those restaurants feel bad about not doing it or whatever, what I want to build is a central processing unit which we engage with food and beverage operations whether it's canteens, hospitals, other restaurants where we identify maybe their three largest side streams they're producing Generally in restaurants. It's like citrus peels, coffee and bread. We then take them back to our space, we process them for them and then sell them back to them so they then can use them on their menu. Then, all of a sudden, you don't have five restaurants talking about doing this. You have 20 restaurants in the vicinity of the CPU that are able to tell the story. I don't even care if they say they get it from us. They can say they do it, I don't care. But then there's a common narrative starting amongst the restaurant industry.
Speaker 1:And there is economies of scale. Once you've figured out this technique for lemon peel or whatever, or citrus and or coffee, it makes sense to do a lot more of it and not just your quote-unquote. Could be enormous restaurant, but it's never going to be bigger than a nearby hospital or nearby canteen or like. There are quite a few offices around here. There's a lot of food going through that and then you have that interaction to, or that almost interlayer between okay, what happens in this kitchen is amazing, but how does it influence apart from the people people that visit it actually starts to interact with? Do you have that space Like, is it the restaurant, almost plus production or the?
Speaker 2:production unit is going to be the production will come later, will come later, exactly. Exactly, because I also only feel like when Mass was open for 10 years, we only really started to figure it out in the last two years. And if we've only started to figure it out in the last two years, what's the potential of past that? So this is like the next version of that. Also, me personally, I've changed a lot in the last three years since Amass closed, had new experiences Southeast Asia, also just engaging with different chefs around the world and that have really given me a new perspective on how to approach this. And at Amass, everything was like we just do it and we don't care, but that's not a sustainable business model. Amass was a good business model. It could have been better, and I think you can't talk about doing all these things without a strong financial model behind it, because if you can't prove that, then it's not. You can't scale it.
Speaker 1:It's a natural bridge to the question we like to ask. Let's say, we're doing this conversation live in a theater or here at Nortus, in front of an audience of mostly, let's say, people in the financial world which is a word I use broadly either managing their own wealth, investing for other people, the pension side, institutional, et cetera. They have an amazing evening. Of course. There's amazing food, we have amazing slides, there's a good show, let's say we put on, but you also know that the next day, people forget these things. They're inspired and they don't do what would be a seed you want to plant I love the metaphors, of course that they remember the next day when they're at their desk or maybe talking with a colleague, or something they should do Specifically invest stores in charge of a specific type of resource, in this case money, how, what would be something you want them to remember from an evening like this.
Speaker 2:I think that, first of all, from an evening like this, it's important to weed out the serious ones from the ones that are there just to make themselves feel better about what they've done in the past by being there and engaging in this. So it's important to weed those two groups out, Because I would say a larger section of that would be the ones that are just trying to make themselves feel good.
Speaker 1:Let's say 80-20 is probably fair. Yeah, okay, the 20% Generous 90-10.
Speaker 2:And then once you've weeded that group out and you have this 20% that is serious about this group out and you have this 20% that is serious about this, then you probably will weed out another 10%, just by explaining to them that, if you choose to go down, this is not a VC-style investment. We lost half of the ground. Yeah, this isn't farming. This is producing food which you only really get results once a year for the season, maybe a couple of times with subseasons and stuff like that, but essentially it takes a year to get results and then adjust and then another year.
Speaker 1:And it takes maybe eight years to figure out things in a restaurant, and the last two it starts to flow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, so these are long-term investments, and these are investments that have the potential to have a huge return in the end. But it's not a return. It's not some dude in a dark basement with pasty skin computer programming that can just scale the next day. This is something that it's a long-term investment. I think you probably 10% weed eating out maybe 12% to 15% and you're left with the 5% that are willing to go this way, which is fine. That's how you create a portfolio of people that are really into it, Because I think the I was thinking about this a lot this morning before we talk about capitalism is a can be an amazing tool to move things forward.
Speaker 2:Do you know Helen Holliman? She's based in Austin. You got to connect with her, Helen Holliman, she's former. She basically Munchies and Vice was her brainchild and she ran that whole thing. She obviously left Vice a long time ago and she's really in the region ag space right now and she's got a substack. That's great, but her and I always talk about how to hack the system of capitalism, Because capitalism, that's where the money is, so we do have to embrace that and that will always be here. Everyone wants capitalism to die. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Capitalism you can say a lot of bad things about.
Speaker 1:It's been pretty resilient, so the chances are that there's a Lindy effect there. It's been around for a while. It's going to probably be around for another five to 10 years 50?, I don't know. It's here to stay, but it will be In the immediate future.
Speaker 2:So deal with it Instead of yeah, we need to deal with it and potentially use it to our advantage.
Speaker 1:The downside of capitalism is that you just summarized like the podcast, like this whole 380 episodes, yeah.
Speaker 2:But the downside to that is that capitalism also kills great ideas, and I saw this firsthand. A friend of mine has an impact fund and only investing in kind of projects that potentially move the food system in the right direction, but they're also like hardcore VC investors, so if they see that a project is not performing over a certain amount of time, they actually pay to kill it. And these projects are not short-term, even mid-term projects. These are long-term projects, and so if a great project is going and then the investors decide to kill it before it reaches its potential, then you've lost something, and so there's this dynamic there that you really have to be careful of On this exec chair where you're sitting.
Speaker 1:Not so long ago as in last week actually, or Friday, at the same time more or less, we had Thomas Hugenhaven I butchered his surname of Planetary passionately arguing for and showing that an evergreen structure, a long-term radical funder or fund, attracts the most radical founders because they know it's going to be a long journey, still super commercial, but with could be 20 years, could be 15 years. Why would you kill it at seven? Because you have to sell. The real impact comes at 12, 15, et cetera, like a mature agroforestry system. Why would you want to go out Just because there's a financial system?
Speaker 1:We created a financial product which is a fund, a VC fund, that needs three years of investment horizon, maybe 10 years total, maybe a few years extra if you're really pushing it. But basically you start the next fund and the next raising and we had Mike Valings of AquaSpark passionately saying the real impact happens after that. You'll be foolish to get out. Like the returns are there but you need to build and not kill after three, four years because you don't see the exit after seven Exactly. But then how do you raise enough money to do that?
Speaker 2:And also like why does there always have to be an exit strategy? Why can't you just why this? We've gotten so caught up in this startup venture capital sphere that is all built on building and selling.
Speaker 1:Building, raising and selling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, building, raising, raising and selling. And it's like why do we have, in the end, often at not a huge profit? Why can't we just build companies that run?
Speaker 1:A innate capital for that and there are ways to do that. But, yeah, let's not cut out. Why is there always an exit strategy, like why does that have to be? It's like starting a marriage with the divorce in like already in document in many cases, like you need to get out by this and this date.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but also the scary part about the exit strategy is that often the people buying are the ones that just buy to shut it down because it's competition. And then there you are again, we hire, yeah.
Speaker 1:So then, coming back to so that would be like a big message to the investment world. In a theater, whatever stage we have, the returns are there or will be there, but it's a long one. Let's not kid ourselves. This is a marathon to rebuild ecosystems, to rebuild mindsets in restaurants and hospitality, to regenerate. We've degraded quite a bit everywhere, including between our ears, so it will take time to build and will take time to figure out, and so, if you're in it, this means you're in it. For who knows? And yes, there's urgency, yes, we should do a lot of things yesterday and today, and it's not a weekend. This is not, let's say, a message to then just wait and see what's happening. We need to get running now. And so then, in this natural bridge, actually, what would you do if you'll be on the investor side, if?
Speaker 1:you had a billion billion euros, which is oh, my math is really bad like a lot of Danish crowns and you had to put it to work. Seven billion, seven billion. It could be a long-term, very long-term, permanent holding, evergreen structure, but it has to be put to work, meaning that it comes back in some form later. Like it cannot be just okay, I put a billion in lobbying in Brussels. That could be a small part of the portfolio.
Speaker 1:Let's say and I'm not asking, obviously we're not giving investment advice but I'm asking what are your priorities? Because I'm curious from people in the space and some people are like oh, a billion? We are getting those questions now already, like what do you do with that kind of money? Because that's what's going to be needed. But then we need to be very strategic when those questions comes. What do you do? What are your priorities? What would be your if you wake up tomorrow morning and you open your bank account with a very specific mission? This has to be put to work. Matt, what would you do if you are a billion dollar or euro investing this?
Speaker 2:has to be put to work. Matt, what would you do if you're a billion dollar or euro investing? For me, a billion is almost a number I can't even comprehend in my head. That's why I was chosen Exactly. It's infinite to me.
Speaker 2:First of all, setting up and establishing large scale regenerative project with a educational aspect attached to it, because you know that correlation between chefs and farmers and farms and restaurants is really important, and there's also a necessity to involve everyone in the chain in this conversation, because you can produce all the regenerative, all the regenerative veggies you want in the world, but if there's no one to buy it or no one understands it, then it's going to be fixed Exactly, and I think that there are some good examples out there of maybe not large scale, but farms that regen, farms that have popped up that are not super small but not large in the hundreds and hundreds of hectares, but they have an educational aspect attached to it which can fund the farm and you have people coming through. That's why we just basically had this conversation like 20 minutes ago about this. But you can fund the project via educational avenues in charging for education, and a lot of people want to know this.
Speaker 1:Hospitality, education throughout the agritourism movement. People want to hang out in these places.
Speaker 2:They do, they want to taste it, they want to eat it, they want to smell it they want to buy it. Yes, but do that at scale, so this is not like 20 or 30 people coming. You set up an educational program that is like a year to two year program where people commit and they come there, they go to school there, almost like an agricultural education center where you are able to put people out into the world with the tools they need to practice this type of farming and influence.
Speaker 1:That's 100 million. What do you do with the rest? Is it only 100?
Speaker 2:million. I don't know, I don't think. Amazing 900 million. We can buy helicopters, fly everyone in. No, I'm joking.
Speaker 1:I was thinking at least part of it should be an airport. We asked for the big chunk and then buying the land depending on where you are, obviously or long-term leasing. It is a piece there, but it's not like there are farms of a few thousand hectares that could go into transition, are in transition and building an education piece. It's not an endless, bottomless pit. I think there will be some money left, if it's 500 or 700 or 900, I don't know, but it will be, you'll have some money left.
Speaker 2:So that's a great segue into the next version of this. So if there's an educational aspect of this too, and now there's money left over 500 million, then that 500 million becomes a fund. Okay, you educate people and they go, and it's almost like what do you call it? It's almost like a studio Adventure, studio, adventure studio.
Speaker 1:For our adventure studio.
Speaker 2:And so then and this idea comes from it, doesn't come from me Do you know who Eric Achenbach is? He has Astenor.
Speaker 1:Achenbach yeah yeah, yeah. He's a friend of the show and we had him on, I'm gonna say episode 250, but I'm probably wrong. But I will link it below yeah.
Speaker 2:I've known Eric for many years and I've been invited to some of the I always call them like Illuminati gatherings of like 40 people in some castle in France or something I know, which we're scattering.
Speaker 1:the words they weren't going to be speaking, but you just really get introduced to really interesting people.
Speaker 2:But in the first one I met one of their main investments, something called Soil Capital Chuck.
Speaker 1:Lederkircher Shout out to Chuck. Yes, probably one of the first people on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Definitely at the basis of this whole podcast. Yeah, so.
Speaker 2:I met them in the beginning when they were trying to do this, where they would go in, subsidize any losses that the farm have during transition and then obviously for equity in the farm, and then boom, they're on their own to this that essentially can send people out into the world or actually could bring existing farmers that want to transition into the space as well and then help to support them in the transition into their transition. That's the setup I would do, for there's lots of nuances around it.
Speaker 1:We're not asking for a business plan. We can ask Chet GPT to do that we can ask Eric.
Speaker 2:We can ask Eric for sure, if you thought about it.
Speaker 1:But I think that training experience plus then support when you start something somewhere, either a farm or hospitality, just to make sure, like almost a Y Combinator, like you've been through it, you've been through a program that, and at the end, when you're out of it, you're capable of doing this. And then, if you come with, I want to start this in France or in Italy or in Singapore or, and you're like, okay, there and there is potential financial backing and support and peer connections to then actually make it happen. Because I'm not like, okay, you did this school, great, and now good luck. Because we know how difficult it is to start some of these and I always wondered with, like Richard Perkins and other great trainers, if I would be a large land investor or interested in region ag. I would sit next to that and just wait for which ones come through there, the best ones. Ok, you're going to start in Luxembourg, let's go, because they're really good at numbers, they're really good at region farming. From an investment perspective, it's a good filter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's also. You mentioned earlier that there is this money out there that's looking for a place to put it. They don't know how to. They can all just come to one place, Just funnel it through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so in this new, like these five restaurants or the restaurants you're starting here, how are you approaching the farming side of things? Because we talked about the processes and how you approach the hospitality or will approach when there's more processing etc. In a bit of time. But then the other side, or the other end, or the beginning, or whatever we're going to call it, how are you and how do you see your colleagues, the other, like, say, the group of Illuminati of the amazing restaurants, whatever we're going to call it. It's not going to be that. How are they and how are you approaching the farming side of things? You?
Speaker 2:can start your own farm. I want to give a shout out to all of them, Chris.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's go All four.
Speaker 2:Domestic in Ojos, sim in Lisbon, portugal, silo in London and Nola in Helsinki. Shout out, I know I'll speak from my side, but I know they're on the same page. It's like pretty much you're not going to work with a farmer unless you've been there and you've engaged with them and you see how their growing practices are, and there's a constant dialogue with the farmer that's happening. I think that's like baseline. Then there's we now I'll only speak for myself when you're engaging with a, most of the time, a small scale farm. Most restaurants are engaging with small scale farms.
Speaker 2:First of all, for me personally, there's no when we touched on this earlier, before we started. There's no negotiation on price. The price is the price. Because I have this thing that rings in my head, an experience I had when I was quite young. I must have been like 12. So none of this was in my but I remember my parents are hippies. We grew up in Southern California and I remember I think it was one of my dad's friends had a VW bus and on the back it had this like this cartoon character of this, like really sexy girl, voluptuous girl, in like a farming outfit with a straw hat on and stuff and it says fuck a farmer, everyone else does and they're really good for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay so, but whatever, the price, whatever the price is that's the price.
Speaker 2:They're not. No farmer is driving a lamb Lamborghini around and it's like they're not making shitloads of money. So the price is the price. That's what they. It costs them to produce it. Often, the price is still too low for what it actually costs, and so that's don't negotiate on the price. If you're getting vegetables from a small farmer, it's just don't do it. And I've seen chefs do it and you're just like what are you doing?
Speaker 1:And how important is that? Like financially, like in terms of cost of, like margins, and because you're also saying, I want to show that this financially makes sense, does it even matter if you negotiate in terms of, like running a full restaurant, in terms of all the other personnel costs, et cetera? Like, how important is the input, not input cost? That sounds wrong, but how important is it potentially to negotiate or to pay a bit more? Do you have space for that? Is it such a small line item on your Well?
Speaker 1:it only doesn't matter if you do utilize the ingredient as a whole, because if you're paying something and then throwing 30% of it away, you're paying a lot, yeah, you don't have space to pay more Fundamental piece, and so you're saying for small, for vegetables, but are you engaging or planning to engage with larger scale or large scale farmers as well?
Speaker 2:One of the farms we're going to engage with is, I would say, larger scale than and larger scale is like maybe 100 hectares, which is a pretty large scale farm if you're operating it with like four or five people. But they're doing everything how it should be done and they're just recently this is a recent move for them. They're actually in this transition period now, which is exactly when you want to Of going from like 20 or 30 hectares to 100. Wow, and so I want to be on that journey. Laura from SEM, she puts a lot of really good content out. You should check her out. She recently put something up in the last few weeks where she's like I understand the importance of working with organically certified farms, but I think it's equally important to support the farms that are not organically certified, that are going through the transition. That's more important because they're vulnerable.
Speaker 1:The first three years is you get the same prices before, especially if you're large at a commodity site, et cetera. You have no way of distinguishing yourself. Your practices are still being fine-tuned. You probably have some kind of yield pressure and weed pressure, because your soil is like what is happening and, yeah, that's a very vulnerable, very financially difficult moment.
Speaker 2:And that was an extremely important point that she made. So, yes, organically certified is important, it should be baseline, but you also have to support the ones that are going in that direction, even more so because the people are already there. They're already charging more for their produce. The people are buying it. It's this vulnerable state that, as you said, that three-year transition period that we need to support those people, which is almost coming back to the financial piece.
Speaker 1:If you know that the customers are there afterwards this becomes almost a finance question. I'm still. We see some people in the US shout out to Mad Capital Perennial Fund that are financing the transition to organic and then to region organic as well, and there's because they have clients for ROC, like there's certification around it and but it's difficult, it's not that easy. And then what are you going to do on like the nutrient side, the measurement side, because some of these farms, I'm assuming but I don't know if it's fair that in that transition they might not be at the top flavor yet, or are they? And what are you doing with it? I also want the best on my table and on my kitchen counter, compared to if somebody's still figuring out what region means to them in the next couple of years. How do you deal with that tension From a flavor profile, yeah, flavor and nutrients, yeah and quality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would never let me see how to phrase this. Obviously, flavor is the most important thing to us. Through through processes, you can also manipulate flavor out of things, the. So we've talked about carrots quite a bit in the past. So the carrot, the dehy-rehyde carrot, what we do is we actually we take the carrot, we dehydrate it, and then we take loads of other carrots, juice them, reduce it to a very concentrated liquid and then rehydrate the carrot. So this one carrot now tastes like 10 carrots concentrated. So even if we do that, I would say with a less flavorful carrot, we'll still get something that's way more flavorful than a normal carrot, like by a hundredfold, and so there's ways around that. It's a great question, because a lot of chefs would say, uncompromised, I won't use any of their stuff.
Speaker 1:There's ways of they leave them hanging for the three, four years or whatever it takes to get to. Okay, now I got the most flavor and like no, actually, with processing. Of course, if you start with horrible carrots you're not going to get anywhere. But if you start with good enough, yeah, in on their way too, then you can use them for the juice, for the starch.
Speaker 2:You can make kimchi out of it. You can do different ferments and preserves Everything. You more or less lactate, ferment anything and dry it and grind it to a powder and it's like the best seasoning mix you've ever had. So there are so many things you can do to still support that farm. Really interesting answer.
Speaker 1:And then let's talk endless, because you bring this stuff out of the kitchen as well with a very specific like only one product or only. That's not negative what you meant one product at the moment. You mentioned it in passing.
Speaker 2:Two.
Speaker 1:One is to market already actually, though, and so what made you start Endless? Was it referred to? I don't want to do another startup. Is that Endless as a startup, or what's there?
Speaker 2:I don't want to do another startup after.
Speaker 1:Endless, it's going to be Endless.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Definitely not an exit, because if you're called Endless, that would be tricky. How did that start and happen? Because it's very different to start in ingredient business.
Speaker 2:So we started. Endless was what actually came out of Amass as the research part of it, and Max, who was my former head chef and head of R&D at Amass, and then Christian, who is the director of operations at Amass. The three of us broke this out and started Endless I love you having a head of R&D in the kitchen and so initially we were engaging with like we were a company that was focused on taking the byproducts of industrial scale food production and taking them and turning them into new ingredients that these conglomerates could actually work back into their production. So, for example, there's a plant-based dairy company called Green Dairy, based in Sweden. They produce hundreds of thousands of liters of oat milk to sell to China. They produce tens of thousands of kilos of residue oat residue.
Speaker 2:After this production. We spent a year on a project with them where we took this oat residue. We turned it into like 13 different plant-based dairy products, from yogurt to crumb, fresh to ice cream and then, over the year, narrowed it down to like two or three that they were like okay, these are the ones that we can. Actually, we see that we can use. It makes sense, yeah. And then we handed that off to them. We did it as a consultant. Basically, as a consultant, we're like hired guns. Yeah, then we did a project with ikea.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna remember this. I'm gonna use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you then we did a project with ikea and then we did our first project with a large bakery called Yamobi. They produce bread for, like hotels and grocery stores and SAS Airlines and like pretty big, and they have a lot of bread that is either over fermented, the wrong shape to fit in the bag, all this stuff that they can't use that is either over fermented, the wrong shape to fit in the bag, all this stuff that they can't use. So two years before we met them, we had done this bread ice cream, where we took leftover bread from Lily Bakery, we added a cocktail of enzymes to it to turn the starches to sugars and then we used that liquid as a base to make ice cream, bread ice cream, and then. So then we started.
Speaker 2:Yamil B called us like hey, we love what you guys are doing, we want to work with you. We don't know how, let's have a coffee. So they came and at first we were like, okay, let's make. Let's take our lactic, fermented and smoked tomato skins into a powder and put it through the bread, or lactic fermented kale stems and swirl it through the bread and season the bread. And you learn very fast. Do not mess with Danish people's sourdough bread, do not mess with it.
Speaker 1:Bread is very important to this culture, I've found out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay. So no tomatoes in your bread, nothing extra fermented except for the sourdough starter. Yeah, so then in the second meeting or the second or third meeting after that, where we decided this is not. We were talking there and kim, who is my head of r&d, at the time, we were like, wow, well, we did a bread ice cream like, or when we hadn't even thought of that, for some reason we'd done it.
Speaker 1:So much earlier, because you didn't see the, not the waste, but you were thinking more on the product they were selling already, like to how to infuse something into the bread that goes to the airline or so to not set up a whole other production.
Speaker 2:So then we're like, okay, well, let's go for this bread ice cream, they were stoked on it. They're like deliver us 25 kilos of your bread and we'll do a large scale batch of it, because we would only make like five kilos at a time, max.
Speaker 1:And they were like how many tons do you want?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for two years we worked on this with them. We would go to like food shows and serve, soft serve of this ice cream and all this stuff. And then, but we just couldn't get it Like how do we get it to market, like how do we scale this? Because we just, they make bread. We're chefs First of all. Chefs are experts at nothing. We know a lot of things, but we're experts at nothing.
Speaker 2:And so then all of a sudden, marco, who was doing MLB, is like, hey, I know the guys at Hansen's East, which is a 100-year-old ice cream company in Denmark. Rasmus and his brother run it, and they're like third generation that run it. Rasmus is a madman, you call him. You're like I want to dip one of your ice creams in miso. He's like, yeah, let's do it. He doesn't care. And so we called him up about this project and he's like, yeah, let's meet. And for two years two people that know nothing about ice cream couldn't get it to go anywhere. Within three months of talking with Hanson's East, it was to market and so that was a collaboration. So the point of that is collaboration was is. We found is like key, because we're not experts in ice cream, we're not experts in making bread. We're really good at-.
Speaker 1:But they would have never found each other, never.
Speaker 2:But we're really good at doing the middle part of turning something into something.
Speaker 1:Could have been a bit faster in two years. Yeah, if somebody remembered, I know this ice cream, not small, they might be up for a crazy experiment. Anyway.
Speaker 2:And so that was our first product be up for a crazy anyway, yeah. And so that was our first product. So it went to a market as a ice cream bar. So it was salted caramel, sourdough ice cream dipped in chocolate, and boom off to the races still, and you still buy it. They're just actually coming out with a new flavor, with perfect segment into with thick, this isn't chocolate. That we're doing an endless. So endless is now more or less primarily focused on this product that we're making called THIC T-H-I-C. This isn't chocolate.
Speaker 1:It's not. People are not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a product that is made out of spent brewer's grain. Four million tons a year produced in Europe alone of this product spent brewer's grain.
Speaker 1:Which goes now biogas, if you're lucky.
Speaker 2:Animal feed and biogas, and a lot of animals can't process. The fiber is locked so it passes through them. I think cows can process it but pigs cannot, which suggests you need fermentation or not. Well, you need to be able to unlock the fiber or you need to split the fiber from the protein and there are processes that there are other companies that. Do that as well For a million.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you have enough raw ingredients. I think we have enough right now.
Speaker 2:So we're essentially how did?
Speaker 1:that come about, that you thought let's turn that into-.
Speaker 2:Well, it came from a mass because we were at a fine dining restaurant. You, essentially there's two things that people think have to exist in a fine dining restaurant. One is coffee, one is chocolate. We haven't figured out coffee yet.
Speaker 1:Chocolate. I know a company in the Netherlands I don't think they're listening, but shout out to I think it's Norden, norden Coffee or Norden. Anyway, they're on their way. I've tasted some of it. It's getting there. Yeah, it's getting there.
Speaker 2:There's a company in Denmark as well, doing it as well, and I think not to go off track. But in the new restaurant we're going to serve regular coffee side by side with it and give people the option to order either or and sometimes not tell. We'll put it down and say guess which one Taste it? Because the one in Denmark. I can't recall the name right now, but it's being developed Like a lot of them are cold, Like it's already made liquids. This is dry and brewable, so it's interesting.
Speaker 1:We're getting there, I think they're so okay. So chocolate and coffee Coffee is being worked on, but chocolate wasn't.
Speaker 2:So, then, the existential question is are you replacing a product or an experience? Because the easy way out is just to buy the best bean to bar chocolate directly from which is not what we're trying to replace, because generally, like freeze-form chocolate in Denmark to me, best chocolate in the world he is paying way over market value for these beans. He is supporting very small farmers and everything about that chocolate is the right way to do it. We're not replacing that chocolate, mikko, we're not replacing your chocolate.
Speaker 1:But it does raise the question the experience versus the product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we are trying to replace shitty chocolate, which is probably let's be generous again 90, 10. Yeah, exactly 80, 20, no 90, 10, 95. 95, 97. Yeah, it's starting to get better, but I think people underestimate the horrendous coffee and chocolate is similar, probably Very similar Practices, impacts, colonialism, exploitation, extraction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Super interesting plans because there is a world of quality. We've had quite a few conversations on the podcast around that there's an inherent world of quality. Now, to a certain extent, If you grow it, of course, shade, agroforestry systems, et cetera you don't need to prove that the nutrient density is higher, et cetera. No, if you can grade it, you can find a market for all your coffee beans Exactly, but is high, et cetera. No, if you can grade it, you can find a market for all your coffee beans Exactly, but it still doesn't mean like, yeah, it's probably 3%, so replace shitty chocolate.
Speaker 2:We're trying to replace shitty chocolate and we're also not. We have no desire to make a bar and make a brand. We are 100% B2B and so we are really trying to get into this and we are producing it at the same price right now and it will, and we're not even to scale.
Speaker 1:as soon as we scale, it'll drop below the cost of chocolate which I think is such a and then we're going to unpack it fundamental piece in a lot of these fermentation or replacement games, like a lot of people in our space, in the region space, get very upset on precision fermentation milk or other.
Speaker 1:First of all, the goal is to replace shitty which is again, let's say, 97, 98, et cetera, not to replace the absolutely outstanding examples we have in all sectors. And there's an option to cut it out in price, which means you disrupt the horrible dairy industry, the horrible dairy industry, the horrible chocolate industry the horrible. Of course, there is a potential side effect there. If it really crumbles, literally what happens to the farmers in Togo that currently farm, unfortunately, shitty chocolate because nobody has invested in them for over two decades. But we still need that because the chocolate demand is going up and so you can't, it's not going down and it's not going down anytime soon unless we have a horrible chocolate and chocolate prices I don't know if you follow that Exploded in the last few years.
Speaker 2:Anywhere from 600 to 1,000. Back down to 600, like percent over.
Speaker 1:So if you're running an ingredient business where there's no way you're going to differentiate with your amazing chocolate or cacao beans bought from this cooperative, et cetera, you're pretty screwed because it goes like up and down. Okay, so unpriced meaning you can really undercut a few yes.
Speaker 2:And that, for us, is important, and the only way we've been able to do that is because we the food tech space. I'll go to a little rant about the food tech space because I spent some time, after a mouse closed, in that space because I wanted to understand it. It's important, it needs to be there, it's innovation. So I wanted to spend some time and I listened to some pitch decks and advised a couple funds on potential investments. And I remember sitting with one of the guys that I won't say his name or the fund and I was like, all right, he was a good guy and I remember looking at him and going. After we listened to a pitch online, I was like this is all like a Ponzi scheme, right, and he's like you're not far off. But it made me really start to be critical of what people were starting to innovate. The problem is, first of all, everyone is way too caught up in IP.
Speaker 1:Coming back to your open source point you made before Way too caught up in IP.
Speaker 2:So what that forces companies to do is to create processes that are so complicated so they can create IP to raise money for something that will never be scalable Because it's so complicated. Because it's so complicated, so the investment world has pushed the food tech industry into this space in order to raise money Now. But now you're seeing a pushback because these absorbent evaluations that we had in like 2018, 2019, are being most of those, oatly being one of them. Beyond, meat just plummeted. Their value plummeted because it's not there.
Speaker 1:It's not there. It's also not a tech company or software tech company. With one guy that, scaled with 18 people, you sell WhatsApp to Facebook. These are real production factories.
Speaker 2:We're talking about, and so now you're seeing a lot of these kind of food tech-based funds that are being very squeamish about investing in heavy IP products. We chose to go the opposite direction. We chose to get to market as quickly as possible, and if you look at every other alt chocolate company out there there's maybe five or six that are out there None of them are to market to the scale we are. And because we have IP, but it's not based in crazy bioreactors, in precision-based fermentation, whatever that means, let me tell you, if anyone says they're doing precision-based fermentation, most likely it's the type of fermentation that's been done for a thousand years. It's probably the most loosely used term.
Speaker 1:It's such a loosely used term, coming from someone that knows fermentation inside out and the potential. And so now, at what scale are you and how difficult was it to get into these supply chains? Or actually, they're like okay, this tastes pretty much the same, or better, has a nutrient profile that fit in my chocolate cookie or in my, whatever it ends up being into, and it costs the same. Great, give me a batch.
Speaker 2:We're into this under the radar and I appreciate it how they're doing this, but we are one of the biggest kind of chain. Being careful, my words here, one of the biggest convenience store chains in the north in the world but we're only in the Nordics right now is using all of our chocolate in its cookies and they chose not to tell anybody about it and just replace it, which I love. But if you look on the ingredients, do you see? No, they're loose. They're loose cookies, and so that is amazing, because they're like and nobody complained.
Speaker 2:They've been six months now. They've been buying and making. Not one person has said anything. Wow, yeah, okay. So I really appreciate that tactic, because as soon as you label something, you give people a pretty fancy notion of how it's going to taste. They're going to be critical of it, or extra.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, exactly. So I remember somebody using some kind of meat replacement for chicken, I think, and like with satay, which is like a peanut based sauce, and it tasted better, honestly, and like he wasn't using it because in Latin you can say satay and everybody imagines that it's chicken. Yeah, he didn't lie. Yeah, unlike these buffets like for big Well, these cookies are called light and dark cookies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so for catering, light and dark cookies? No, yeah, so for catering, like nobody ever asked. Of course you need to watch out, because if there's somebody soy allergic etc. There's a piece there. But it worked better with sauce. It was way cheaper, way less complicated to get properly and like, why not? Yeah, and so you're saying two products? Yeah, are all our attention is now on chocolate, not chocolate. Are you then developing others? Because I think chefs by definition are interested in that development piece as well, not necessarily. Okay, how do I scale the biggest potential factory to turn into this stuff and open a location in Germany, because that's a big brewer country or not? How do you? Of course you're setting up a restaurant, but how do you split that almost that tension or that time now? Because now, if you hit it, the impact is going to be enormous if you just keep scaling this company.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm lucky enough to have, like, Max and Christian are running the day operations in that and we've built a team as well. We have five people employed for us. Now, for a startup which is, I was like, oh shit, we're a company. So they're running the day-to-day and they're doing an amazing job.
Speaker 1:And so next, things you're looking at, things you can share, obviously, or you're excited about in the same realm OK, what to potentially disrupt next? Or you say, ok, actually not for the next couple of years, we're just going to scale this and hit the bank.
Speaker 2:Right now, the chocolate for the next couple of years. We're just going to scale this and hit the base Right now. The chocolate for the next couple of years is it Because I know we can get that to a very large scale and we were already getting approached by there's a large organic. It's organically certified as well, the not chocolate. But we're already getting, most recently, a very serious inquiry so serious the fact that they said their logo with our logo on a mock box. He does organic granola in Germany and sells a lot of it, and so he's really interested in using our chocolate.
Speaker 1:And so why now? Why is this now possible in the chocolate replacement space compared to a few years ago? Is it technology? Is it technique? Is it the team that came together Because there have been some companies working on, or have they been mostly focused on complicated IP and VC returns? Why is this now and not five or 10 years ago?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the all chocolate's important because there has been a lot of attention on the downsides of inexpensive chocolate production, as you mentioned, from a labor point of view, how people are the cost point of view. I mean there was a statistic that came out I don't know how long ago, it was probably out for a while. I just saw it for the first time time where, like, what you pay at the end for chocolate represents only 5% of that actually goes to the farmer. And you're like what?
Speaker 1:And it's not such a processed ingredient. Yeah, yeah, okay, and so it almost sounds like there's a combination of momentum attention, price craziness, which helps to probably wake up a few large food companies like, okay, what's happening to our ingredient? Yeah, and to shift gears and to ask a question Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Before we go past that, because you just made me think of something. We did a survey a while ago to all the people that were buying the chocolate because we're selling it to loads of bakeries in town and stuff like that and it was why do you choose to use this? And in my brain when we sent this out, I was like, oh, it's all going to be about the sustainability part of it. 80% said it was for the innovation, the fact that it was a new product that they wanted to work with, which I was not expecting that.
Speaker 1:So, speaking on that, like, what are you thinking about as next steps? Or, as I asked before, like double down on this for a while, because that requires all the attention, of course as well. Like, how do you scale something to this to hundreds of tons and the batches and the this and the that? Or are you like I'm actually already innovating with, and not coffee, but something else that we want to tackle next?
Speaker 2:As I said, we really need to get this to a certain point where it's really scaled up. We had a meeting with Nestle a while ago and someone made the comment like, oh, if we just replace 2% to 3% of all your chocolate and make like a hybrid, the impact of that would be huge. And actually the woman from Nessa was like I actually don't see it like that at all. I see it that chocolate itself, in 20 years, itself, no matter the quality, is a super luxury product and this replaces all of everything else.
Speaker 1:And I was like, well, that's also a so the 95 or 97 won't exist or will be this, yeah, exactly, and the high quality remains. And so a question we'd love to ask, inspired by John Kemp, definitely an agronomist, farmer and guru in our space and deep thinker and farmer.
Speaker 2:I love farmer philosophers.
Speaker 1:It's actually a series. We've been making the Farmer Philosophy Series because we've seen so many farmers on the regen path. They turn, I'm going to say surprisingly, but not really actually super philosophical, Because there is a mental shift there, or mindset shift, and we've done a series on the region mind as well. That is needed to go from waking up and killing everything pretty much except for your one monoculture cover crop. I'm making this very black and white going from now how do I facilitate life on the farm? How do I get more complexity, how do I deal with? And that's a massive internal shift and and we've just basically put microphones on people and asking philosophical questions, Also about the farm, but walking it like walking the land with a farmer and it gets philosophical very quickly, which is just fascinating.
Speaker 1:John is definitely an example of that, but he likes to ask where do you think differently? Or what do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't? So where are you? A bit contrarian in your thinking and in this case, take it wherever you want Could be in the sustainability chef's movement, but also in regen food and ag. Where are you? We have heard a number of things, but what came up when we sent these questions.
Speaker 2:So, as much as I love the philosophical point of view, maybe I'll retract back to a more databasebased answer. And the only reason that people don't understand this is because we don't have enough data yet to understand it. And for me, the thing that people don't understand about regen ag is that there is such a connection between the soil and our own personal microbiomes that is such a barely scratched the surface of what that means. And yeah, and there I had. I was listening to Zach Bush talk about this a while ago and he made such an interesting comparison a while ago and he made such an interesting comparison. He's like our knowledge of the relationship between our gut and the soil is the equivalent of our knowledge of surgery in the 1600s and he knows we had him on.
Speaker 1:And then we hosted a conversation at groundswell with him and bickley, which I'll put in the links below because it's just hilarious. That note, yeah, it's so. That connection, like we say your gut feeling and we've done 25, 30 episodes probably about healthy soil leads to healthy produce, leads to healthy gut system, healthy people and healthy ecosystems, like that line. But you'd be surprised how many people, even in our space no idea they were like I've literally had conversations with people that have been 15, 20 years in this space invested hundreds of millions into agroforestry systems for the big chocolate guys. And he was like, yeah, it would be great if there's research on this. I'm like there is A lot and every day we see more Like this is not a hypothetical thing, this is a real, peer-reviewed, a lot of studies in all kinds of from the tomatoes to the grains, to the meat, like to the milk. You can like this. So like how your farm influences the food.
Speaker 2:But this is a bigger question of how and I have this conversation with my wife all the time. It's usually just me talking at her and her just agreeing.
Speaker 1:It sounds like a conversation, not really. Yeah, all the time.
Speaker 2:Usually it's just me talking at her and her just agreeing. It sounds like a conversation. How is the conversation about food and what we eat and where it comes from not the most important conversation that everyone is having? How is that true? It is the only thing that we do that directly affects eating. I'm talking about that. It directly affects us instantaneously Our guts, our brains, everything about us. How have we gotten so far away?
Speaker 1:Disconnection, as Zach and Joan like to call it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that a normal household is not even talking about this. It's crazy and the thing, the data is out there, it's all out there.
Speaker 1:So we don't need more data, like you just said we need more data.
Speaker 2:We definitely need more data because we know that it's affecting it, but we don't know the depth of the nuances of how it's affecting it. There is still so much more that we're going to learn about what's actually happening in our guts and how it affects our brain function how it affects there's even a conversation about that. I know where you're going. There are guts are a part of our conscious being.
Speaker 1:They call it the second brain or first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I also I love the conversation about how our body is made out of like 90 billion microbes and that are acting autonomously in our bodies. So then, who's actually in control?
Speaker 1:Who is you?
Speaker 2:Who is you? Who are you?
Speaker 1:You are made up of. We're an hour and 40 in and we get into. Are you part of nature?
Speaker 2:or not, consciousness.
Speaker 1:Which is such a fundamental piece. And then how? Because I remember we had not to name drop, I had to do this. But Franco Fubini of Natura on, many of the chefs they work with don't know that, even Like, of course, they look for flavor. So in your world of chefs I mean you're part of many worlds, but let's say the world of chefs how can we have that connection? More that a tomato is not a tomato. It could look like it comes from a magazine picture, or it could actually taste like something which, almost by definition, means the farmer has done something very interesting, or it could actually taste like something which, almost by definition, means the farmer's done something very interesting. That notion of these two things. They might look the same but they're almost a completely different product. You can't compare them. Chefs are like, of course, flavor. Flavor no, but it's because of seeds and management. Those are the two. Farm management, nutrition is directly related to flavor.
Speaker 1:But that pea those two things together. That then Barbara keeps hammering like this is the same thing Of all people. Chefs should be there Like the first one, like, of course I know I got this in school or I got this in the first kitchen I worked in.
Speaker 2:School is the root of the problem. That is not taught in school, which is crazy. I've been spending a lot of time in the educational space in the last six months and there are many things that are not taught in school that should be taught in school. One is the direct relationship between nutrients and flavor, and how do you get nutrients into something. So there's a gentleman who you should, sasu Laakunen. He's Finnish.
Speaker 2:He used to have a restaurant called ora in helsinki I'm getting a whole list of people where you're going to hear them after matt made an introduction yeah, sassu did a great project, the eu funded project, where they actually it was a culinary school and an agricultural school and they made the chefs and the farming students switch positions for a certain amount of time. And it was. I'm getting goosebumps. That's very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and then if you don't add, like a medical school to it and you make the three of them rotate, because there it's the same, you get an hour of nutrition, maybe in your whole career. Two hours, let's be generous five. And that's.
Speaker 2:But those three can change your food system, which is ironic because you probably get more education on nutrition in chef school than you do as a doctor. But it's direct nutrition, it's not. Where does the nutrition come from? I think that's the missing key. How does something become nutritious? The process to get there. Then you unravel the whole farming, agriculture behind that Soil needs to be alive.
Speaker 1:There are certain bacteria in the soil that, if they make it into the carrot, are extremely important for your mental health, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Exactly what types of soil give what types of nutrients, based on what type of vegetable you're growing. It's infinite, infinite the variables of nutrients, based on what type of vegetable you're growing. It's infinite, infinite the variables.
Speaker 1:We could do so many other directions, but I'm going to also slowly wrap it up and ask you a question we love to ask, which usually leads to other questions. Actually, if you had a magic wand, so you take away your fund of a billion, we are, let's say again, doing this in a theater in front of an audience and you could change one thing. Of course it's an impossible question because we have a super complicated, complex system with everything is interrelated. But I'm interested. What are nodal points of intervention? And of course it's an aladdin question, so you cannot rub it and you get three x around, so you get one wish. Most people then say, ah, but then I would do these two things like no one. What would you do if you had that magic one? Tomorrow morning we wake up in a different world because Matt said tomorrow X happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this would. It's a very simple answer which this one answer, I agree, or I believe, would affect the entire system, and that would I would remove glyphosate and any other herbicide and pesticide in that family from.
Speaker 1:So the fungicides are okay? Trick question Okay, yes, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you remove the and I would remove them from our conscious mind that they ever existed. How could we ever allow this to define Exactly? And what that would do would force the rest of agriculture into adapting and dealing with the issues that these things solve. Because at this point, glyphosate is in all of us, no matter if we only eat organic. It's in the air, it's in the water, it's in Every person on the planet Earth has some. You've been listening to Zach. Yeah, glad to say it is. And by removing that, first of all, you would, as I said, it would force innovation into a way of farming, whether it's regen, or maybe we discover a new way of farming, we don't know, but it would force us into that. It would also solve, I would say, a large percentage of health issues in the world, because we know we're eating glyphosate and we know glyphosate is poison and so there-.
Speaker 1:I did a test in the Netherlands, actually done by Fokker Engelsman, who we had on the show as well. You could pee in a pod, send it, and then it would tell you the level of glyphosate. It was quite low with me, luckily, because I was scared.
Speaker 2:But not non-existent.
Speaker 1:Not non-existent. But they also said something else interestingly If it was scarily high, go on an organic diet for a month and retry just to see the effect Again. It wouldn't go to zero because you can't escape it, and just I think I'll put it in the show notes. This week a big research out of Italy came from I don't remember the name. It's an institute close to Bologna, independently funded. I think we even put some money in the crowdfunding because they didn't want to be funded by either the industry or the progressive industry in that sense, like we have been lobbying against Iphosate for so long because they wanted to do an independent study.
Speaker 1:I haven't read the study it was on animal, I think of animals, but I've seen a lot of things pop up on on social media on the results. Henry roland, who we had on, was very vocal, has been very vocal on hair testing and etc. On pesticide and it's not pretty like it's very clear meta study. This is poison and not to say how do we transition as fast as possible could be overnight, could be. You can cut tremendously in a couple of years. Like this is not a given and let's not replace it with something else even worse, because there are cocktails out there that are even more poisonous.
Speaker 2:So that's a simple answer which would shock the system, yeah, into change, probably it's like a root that would spawn into, like numerous other from that which I think were important. I also think it's important to point out that, because people are quick to chastise people and to knock them down if they're trying to move in the right direction and maybe they're still doing this, but they've gone in the right direction is that everything is a process, like this whole transition is going to be a process and, yes, we all want it to happen now, but that's not the reality of the world. No, it has to. Except we have a magic wand.
Speaker 1:Except, yes, and that's why it's called magic.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and so I think we need to embrace the process and be positive about it instead of lashing out at people the amount of people that I would say lash out at me about certain things that I say or think I'm just like first of all, I don't know you, so I actually don't care what you think.
Speaker 1:But second, of all let's just embrace the process, like in system change.
Speaker 1:I think the activists or the pioneering species, let's say, in the centropic agroforestry, are very quick at commenting on others, in a sense, instead of acknowledging that it's not perfect. It's a process. We got way further than we've ever been, or we got like there's so many steps already taken. We're all the same team and there is still 97% or 98 or 95 in whatever sector or context you're in. The rest hasn't made big steps yet or steps, so let's focus on that instead of commenting if that farm is absolutely perfect or that I saw the chef throwing away something, or like, okay, there was a plastic bottle somewhere, which shouldn't happen, but that does. There is a much bigger process in saving more than 100 liters a day, or he or she is flying everywhere, again not saying that that's fine, but there's a process here. There's a process of massive steps and we're just getting started.
Speaker 2:We're very quickly to criticize each other in that front-runner piece because it's sort of part of that, Well, so it's like I'm in front of her. It's ego-driven, yeah but we need.
Speaker 1:It's ego-driven and it's also very not relevant because we're talking to each other instead of the other 97 to get them going Exactly and that infighting is not going to help. Like, okay, organic, is that what need to be certified? Unless it's organic, it cannot be that agroecology and it's all true, but all the time we lose it talking to each other, we're not making energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cindy from footprint nordic has a great approach on this, and because the organic society is quick to criticize the region ag. But cindy is like you know what, let's not lash back at them. She's like we can learn a lot from the organic movement they've done.
Speaker 1:We're standing on their shoulders. People have learned to look at a label. Nobody did that.
Speaker 2:So let's embrace what they've done and then just take it and build on that which has been, which was amazing because I remember when, because I sat on the board for Free Print Nordic and I made the intro, so thank you, Cindy. Yes, Shout out to Cindy, but I remember we had this conversation and my initial response was like why are they being? She's like?
Speaker 1:no, it's fine, let's embrace what they've done, it's fine and there is a sense and their region somehow and I don't think we still figured out why is hitting a nerve that organic never has and it's being greenwashed and it's being taken, of course.
Speaker 1:But it's also and it's questioning how far organic has come, especially the large-scale industrial organic where you can ask a lot of questions about there are better conventional farmers in terms of soil health than there are the worst organic ones and there are way better organic ones, of course.
Speaker 1:So it questions a lot of things on process versus outcome, like. You start to ask a lot of questions like did it lead to better soil health and better quality? And some in the organic movement have really good answers to that and some are like oh yeah, but we just swapped inputs and thought it was fine. So it creates a lot of questions, which is only good, but also a lot of sensitivity of the attention region gets and suddenly buyers talking about it, which, of course, is interesting. But there's funding coming in, investors are excited, there are movies about it and there's all this buzz and it's only possible because Organic was there and has built it for 100 years, not because this could have never existed, but it is another wave and it is catching, and you can choose, you surf it or you don't.
Speaker 2:Well, in all of your conversations, Organic is clearly labeled and certified.
Speaker 1:In most places, yeah.
Speaker 2:But there's not really that in.
Speaker 1:Regen. Yet Okay, we're one hour and 52 in, and now we're getting to a rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:Well, just because I don't have the answer to this and maybe I don't know enough about that process, but in your conversations, is that coming? Is it hard to measure? Why hasn't that come yet?
Speaker 1:Probably both People have been working on attempts to do that.
Speaker 2:there's roc region organic certification push the government stations, because I think it's important on top of organic.
Speaker 1:it's mostly dr brunner's rodeo and patagonia and very like, really the golden standard, like what they look at. Of course there's things they don't look at, but really organic is the baseline and at. Of course there's things they don't look at, but really organic is the baseline. And then we go beyond because there's no animal welfare in organic In the US at least there's no et cetera, et cetera, farm workers' practices, things like that fundamental pieces. Of course it's costly to do that. Often the issue with certification is that the cost is on the farmer again, and so if you have a great market that wants to pay for that, then you can just factor in the cost.
Speaker 2:Great but it's not there. You should invest it, because then their prices double.
Speaker 1:Of course. I think there are attempts there, of course. How do you capture something as complex and you've been on many farms as a regenerative transition into a yes or no, certification, very binary zero-one? There's an immense debate about if that's even possible, because it's a journey and it's this and what's the baseline? What do we actually measure? Outcome? Okay, we're going to measure soil health. Great looks completely different 20 kilometers from here versus a thousand. So how do you do that? Context specific I think we're going to have a lot of issues with trying to capture it into one number like, okay, your region because you're above 80, or something like that. We're going to see attempts in that. We're going to see people say I will pay extra if there are these five or six, or if you do from this 10 different practices. You do five and you don't do others, and we know it's a process.
Speaker 1:I think what we're also going to see and I don't know enough about it we're going to do an people, in a sense, by other farmers, by people that really know. Like, how do you make a trust-based system that is scalable We've seen that, I think in South Korea quite a bit that doesn't cost extra, but still, as Matt the chef, you're buying from people that are certified by this movement and it's good and it's way better than anything else, but there's no costly third party that has to do it. Again, I'm butchering the terms because I don't really know how it works, but I've seen examples of that. I think it's called PSG, which sounds like the Parisian football club, but it's not. I will put some in the show notes, like how do you do this at a level in the scale that makes sense for farmers, because we many farms are too small, they don't like the certification, because one guy comes up, has a checklist, has never heard about agroforestry and then says, yes, you're fine and like as long as your manure is certified organic coming from elsewhere, you're okay, even if there's microplastics in it.
Speaker 1:So, but I think there are solutions there to do it actually much more decentralized, much more trust based and still effectively work like, okay, I need good stuff, I need to and I need to make sure there's no literal shit in it. So I don't think we're going to see a global, as we've seen with organic, because that's process-based If you do this and this, you're fine Not outcome-based. I mean, we are in a studio, thank you, rasmus, but we don't need perfect quality. In that sense, absolutely fine. So I think there we're going to see innovation more local, probably decentralized, and we're going to see some attempts which might work or not work, with bigger certification, because some companies need that.
Speaker 1:Because I'm an organic supermarket, how I'm going to deal with this region stuff that is on top or not. Or some people are still using something or a fungicide what am I okay with that? Or, yeah, but they're in a process. Yeah, that's great, but I need to buy and so, yeah, I think that we can do a conference of a week just on certification, because it's such a journey and how do you say it's also like a minefield as well.
Speaker 1:Like oh my God, Especially if it's a it's such a business model as well, for certifiers.
Speaker 2:If it's a private certification because I just always think of like MSC, which is such bullshit, it it doesn't mean anything. People buy the certification. It's like you just. I mean, of course, if people like Patagonia are involved, you know that they are like serious, yes, but still it could be very expensive.
Speaker 1:What does it do for the farmer? Is it another checklist and things they have to fill out? Is it another? Or is it something that is an integral part of their management Because they already need to do? If you're lucky in a subsidized country, you need to fill out an amount of forms that don't make any sense for you to get anything. So I'm always worried about but I know what's the value added?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I know we figured it out in some places around this, like on more local food system, wise, okay, how you make it trust based but still strong enough that you kick out the things you don't want, because there needs to be some kind of penalty otherwise. So I will report on that and we'll do some interviews.
Speaker 2:The certification is one thing, but educating people on what it actually means is even harder, because most people don't even know what regenerative agriculture means.
Speaker 1:And do we need to, or is it such a Sorry to open that?
Speaker 2:cap. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:It's a really good question, because where we don't just certify it like organic, and then which certified organic, which took 40 years in most places to do as well? We know people that were at the and some people in the original organic movement are horrified by it because it simplified it so much and actually they were on a complex journey and now it's these 10 questions or 50 or whatever, and you have to pay for it now, suddenly to be called again Like why is that? So we can ask a lot of questions if that's possible and relevant, but it got us to where we are. There's no, but it got us to six or in this case, 10% of the country, of the stuff bought here, which is like, after 40, 50 years, Okay, how do we get to 20, which is the tipping point, or 30, 40, 50?
Speaker 2:How do we Even a place like Denmark, where it's like 10% max of everything that's grown and sold in Denmark is organic? You'd think Denmark is so progressive, but the problem is 80% of what's grown in Denmark is animal feed, so you'll never get to that high point here, because the majority of what's grown here is for animal feed Unless you fundamentally change the food system Exactly.
Speaker 1:I want to wrap up. Thank you so much, Matt. This could go on for another few hours, but we won't. So thank you so much for the work you do, for coming on in this very busy time. You're opening a restaurant soon, working on disrupting the cacao, the chocolate business, the chocolate world and industry and so many other things culinary, schools and other things we didn't discuss. So thank you for taking the time coming here and spending sharing your journey with us.
Speaker 2:No, thank you for having us. I also think you guys are doing amazing work, because you mentioned before that you did have an interest in being a farmer or a chef, but it's like I think having these conversations is equally as important as both those.
Speaker 1:So thank you. We're trying, yeah, we're trying to play our role in this complex ecosystem and our role is to ask a lot of questions, silly questions, and connect and share that learning journey. The sillier the questions, the better.
Speaker 1:Sillier the question, yeah thank you 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 like 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 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.
