Show Notes
In episode 12, we welcome Ethan Soloviev, Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, to Five Lifes to Fifty. Ethan is also an owner of High Falls Farm, and is the author of "Levels of Regenerative Agriculture" and "Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance."
Ethan is an international expert on regenerative agriculture, regenerative business, and innovation, with experience in 34 countries. He is the founder of the Regenerative Enterprise Institute, an Associate of the Carol Sanford Institute, and a member of the Regenerative Business Alliance. Ethan holds a B.S. from Haverford College and an M.S. in Eco-Social Design from Gaia University.
At HowGood, Ethan's focus is on driving product sustainability and business model innovation for Fortune 500 Retail and CPG companies. HowGood is an independent research company and SaaS data platform with the world's largest database on food product sustainability.
In this Episode
Shelley: This is the first time we've had a guest from a technology company on the podcast. Could you tell us a bit about what HowGood is and who it serves? [00:33]
Ethan: HowGood, as you mentioned, has the world's largest database on food, product and ingredient sustainability. We're a non-traditional startup in that we're 17 years old right now. So, we've really spent the better part of two decades building out a massive picture of what global supply chains look like and what are the impacts that happen in three key areas: carbon, nature and human rights. From that massive amount of data that we've gathered for 33,000 ingredients, we've built up the capability to, automatically, using AI, calculate the impact of any food ingredient or product in the world. We've built it all into a software platform that is, I think, fun and easy to use and we have six of the ten largest food companies in the world using the platform to understand their impacts and to automate reduction strategies. We have major retailers around the world, from Ahold Delhaize in the USA to Carrefour in the Middle East, and we even have ingredient suppliers like Ingredion and the Kerry Group, who use the platform to understand their impacts and communicate downstream to their consumers. So overall, you can think of HowGood as a social network for impact data on food and agriculture. It’s the place where the industry comes together, whether you're a formulator or a procurement specialist, or someone in marketing and sales or a sustainability team needing to do reporting; everyone comes to us for a single source of sustainability data truth, so that they can coordinate, collaborate, network, engage with suppliers to transform the impacts of their products. [00:41]
Shelley: Thinking about the broader picture, you're bringing all these groups together, what do you think the role technology does play? Because it sounds like you're playing a role already, but what role do you think it plays for these food formulators and food companies? And what is it doing for them to achieve sustainability? [02:27]
Ethan: I'll just tell a little story that is part of how we got to where we're at now to answer that question. This was a number of years ago in San Francisco, it was at a co-lab, a sort of weeklong sprint event and I met somebody from Danone who said, look, I have 1000 product formulators globally at Danone and every day they are innovating and they are renovating new yogurts, new plant based beverages and those people, many of them really care about sustainability, but many of them weren't trained in it. They are food scientists. They are formulators. They are making delicious, beautiful food. But they don't necessarily have the information and the data to create a circular food product or create a regenerative food product. They have a desire to and more and more, we're being asked from a corporate level to improve or to make every new renovation have a lower carbon footprint or even to know the carbon footprint of our products. But I can't send every single one of these formulators through a master's or a PhD in sustainability. How can we help them more quickly? And I said, well, I think we have all the data for that, so if we could use technology to put it at their fingertips, even before going to the bench, that should be able to speed everything up. That was the inception. That was the idea that launched lattice, which is the HowGood software platform, basically to use technology to put the data at everybody's fingertips, in the same way that you would look at the different physical qualities, the different taste qualities of an individual ingredient, the same way you might think about, well, what's the price differential going to be if I swap from this one to that one? Just like, you know, and have information on those factors, we thought, let's just put the carbon footprint, the water footprint, the biodiversity impact, the labor risk, the processing energy use, the animal welfare. Let's just have clear quantitative data in that format right at formulators fingertips. Because I think formulators are at a very potent and powerful place to change the food system, much more so than I think are often given credit to them. What formulators do and how they create products is such a huge, potent spot to change upstream impacts because of where impacts actually come from, which I think we'll talk a bit more about as we go. [02:41]
Neil: I think you've mentioned two very interesting words. One was circular food products and regenerative food products. Could you tell us what those mean? [05:09]
Ethan: If you look at the definition of a circular economy, most of the time for food, they’re pointing to regenerative and regenerative agriculture as one of the main routes to create a circular economy of food. There are aspects of design, there are aspects of packaging, but really most impacts in food happen not in the manufacturing plant, not in the packaging, not in the transportation, but they happen upstream, they happen where food is grown and that's where regenerative agriculture plays a huge role. So, to focus on regeneration, the key concept there is for a long time, at least 100 years, probably 1000, but really the last hundred years, the production of food has had a massive negative impact on the world. Emitted lots of carbon, destroyed soil, deforested landscape, killed different species, poisoned people, poisoned waterways, and in many ways still does. It still does have those deleterious effects. We still have a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We still have significant loss of species. Food emits 33% of the carbon emissions in the world, the greenhouse gas emissions, but it's responsible for a much larger percentage, like 80% of all freshwater use and a huge percent of the biodiversity loss that's happening is from food and agriculture. So that's, you could call business as usual agriculture or degenerative agriculture. And that's most of what's out there. [05:19]
Ethan: So, there's been some good focus in the last two decades to try to move away from that and towards a sustainable agriculture. A sustainable agriculture would be kind of like a net zero impact, but really, who just wants to sustain? If somebody asks you about your relationship with your sweetheart or your spouse, and they said, how's the relationship? And you said, it's sustainable, is that really what we're going for? Or if you're on your deathbed and somebody says, what impact did you have in this world, in your life? And you said about net zero. That's not really enough, and regeneration steps beyond that. The idea with regeneration is we go to net positive. We're not just doing no harm, we're uplifting people who are growing food, we're enhancing biodiversity, we're capturing carbon in the soil and fighting against climate change. Regeneration generates new potential and doesn't just get us to sort of like a midpoint of sustainability. It's actually possible in food in a way that it isn't in other industries. So, like transportation or buildings, you can reduce harm, you can reduce impact, you can get towards like a zero point, but it's really hard to do positive. Somehow, you got to build the vehicle and drive it around or build the ship and sail it around. You can get to zero, but you can't quite get positive. Food and agriculture is this incredible opportunity where you can do good, you can add more carbon to the soil than you take out, you can have more life in a place, you can have richer, more delicious recipes and meals and food products coming up than was there before. You can heal degraded land while growing food. So that's why I focus on regeneration. That's why HowGood says, let's set spectrums where you can track your progress towards that regenerative impact in the world. [06:47]
Neil: Is there a framework you have for what are the different aspects of regenerative food production and kind of recipes, so to speak? Imagine people who are creating both: The ones who are growing food, I think, is one aspect, but the ones who are using them in recipes, what should they be looking for as indicators for what a regenerative food ingredient would be like? [08:40]
Ethan: You asked two questions there; both are really good questions. One is like, is there a framework or playbook to work with to get you there? And to that I would say, yes. I've written a couple papers that will lay out sort of a big picture framework of how to think about and move from degeneration to regeneration. And then in terms of food product creation, one of the places that popped to mind when you said framework is I did a webinar earlier this year on artificial intelligence on AI for food, and in that I followed the course of a food product right from the ideation phase, through piloting, prototyping, through the scale up, through the procurement that's needed all the way to the end, the marketing. And in that case, I was talking about, here's the artificial intelligence tools you could use at each of those steps. But really what I was going towards is how do you transform the food system through each one of those individual steps? And so ill just say that webinar is freely available; we can put it in the show notes, so you can sort of see that particular framework, which is like basically how to use AI to regenerate food production from a formulator's point of view. But then it gets to your second question of what’s the indicator of a regenerative ingredient? Which is such a cool question. And the first thing I would say is there is not a lot out there. Its not like 10% of the proverbial formulator’s supermarket shelf or of the materials you can procure from many of your suppliers, its not even 1% of global supply of food ingredients that I would say are achieving a regenerative impact. There are some out there. There are some certifications you can look to of varying levels of depth. There's a regenerative organic certification, there's a certification for animal products that's called land to market. Those are great to look for, but certifications alone aren't going to be sufficient because there's just, again, there's not enough supply in any which way or form, especially to of just switch to a regenerative product. So really what it means to find a regenerative ingredient is you actually have to think beyond the way that you currently think about just finding the ingredient that solves your problem. Instead, you have to start looking at and collaborating with your whole company internally, and then a whole network externally. You are going to have to help generate the supply of regenerative ingredients for the types of products that you are working with. And that takes a broader collaboration, but it takes a more fun, creative thinking that I think formulators have, but maybe haven't always been empowered with data to do. So, the path to find regenerative ingredients is you must help generate regenerative ingredients out in the world through broader cooperation. [09:03]
Jim: Ethan, is there collaboration? I mean, do folks in that regenerative supply chain, they say, let's get together in a precompetitive space and collaborate and come up with solutions that drive a more net positive regeneration system? Do those kinds of things exist? [12:07]
Ethan: I pick out one thing you just said that I think is cool and important. You said regenerative supply chain, and then a little later, regenerative system. There is no such thing as a regenerative supply chain. In fact, there's no such thing as supply chains in general. We use the term supply chain because we think like machines, and we think everything is a machine around us. We say, we're hardwired to do this or hardwired to do that. Humans don't have wires. We're not computers, we're not machines and nature doesn't have any chains in it. There are webs, there are networks, there are systems. But part of the reason that we still say supply chain, and this is difficult in a lot of ways to hear, is because we used to chain people up in order to produce the goods that created our products. And so, there's still this mechanistic (from the chain) and colonial concept that we are pulling things with the chain up from supply. And even though you didn't mean any of that when you said it, and nobody does when they say supply chain, we are unconsciously creating and keeping that chain intact, which is going to make it hard to regenerate. [12:26]
Neil: But could you explain why? For me, a supply chain is a sequence of steps that get to an outcome. That's why you call it a chain of events. And of course, you could have many supply chains that are sort of a web, actually. It's almost like a fishbone diagram; different parts that come together to get to where you want to get to. But why do you say that thinking in terms of supply chains is what is holding us back from thinking about regenerative products? [13:43]
Ethan: I mean, you just said part of it, which is oh wait, it's not a chain, it's a web. And that is a more accurate representation of how supply systems are. It is a complex, interconnected network that has many nodes that all are communicating and talking to each other in the context of a market and prices. It is a network, and if we just treat it as a chain, if we think of it as a chain, we tend to oversimplify. We tend to think one to one connections: I buy from this person, who buys from this person, who buys from this person, and that makes it harder to do that pre competitive collaboration that Jim was talking about, where it's not just about how do I chain up and get my farmers to grow in a certain way. We need to collaborate in the supply shed in the region where all of those growers are growing and help them as a whole enhance and transform their agricultural practices, because then we can lift everybody up, and many companies are going to source from that, and many farmers are going to benefit from it, and many community members benefit from it. And that all happens in a network, not as a one to one-to-one connection. [14:10]
Ethan: So yes, there are many great precompetitive collaborations out there. One is called the Sustainable Markets Initiative; this is one that HowGood is part of. You can see a couple of great reports we put out for COP over the last few years on scaling regenerative farming. Another is the WBCSD, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which especially recently at COP 28 in Dubai, I got to be there as they launched the Action Agenda for regenerative landscapes which is something that was put forward by the UAE presidency in collaboration with WBCSD and set targets for the many millions of acres that were going to go into regenerative agriculture. We also see some really great work coming out of the One Planet business for Biodiversity Coalition, as well as some good thinking recently on financing the transition from the Rockefeller foundation. So there’s a bunch happening and we need more. We have leading companies who are part of it. We have got Danone, we have Unilever, we have Nestle, we have General Mills all stepping up and pushing it forward. But we need every company, we need every brand. It’s got to be a massive collaboration on a scale that we have not seen before and it also has to go outside of just the brands and manufacturers. It has to be the ingredient suppliers. We need the ABCDs, we need the traders on board, and some of them are stepping in this direction. We also need the banks. We also need government support. So, we basically need a big, blended network of coordinated action if we're going to move anything close to fast enough to prevent the really rugged stuff coming from climate change. [15:18]
Jim: I know a lot of the greener products is that the purchaser, the big company who designs a product but also who purchases it like a Walmart or in the US, the US Government, is going to be buying sustainable products and that drives the whole market; and you mentioned that just a minute ago. But we have found in the EU and North America, there's the government making decision to buy greener products. So, if the government makes a decision to buy regenerative foods, that would be a pull for all these brands to do more. Do you see that as a path forward? [16:55]
Ethan: Yes, I definitely see that. I would love government procurement to specify in the United States they should go with what the USDA calls movement in this direction, which is climate smart commodities or climate smart agriculture. I actually don’t care too much what it’s called but that would be a huge step if the government would say we’re only going to buy food that come out of our climate smart commodities program. The US Government just put $2 billion into innovation at the farm level to be moving more in this direction. That's important. I don't think it's as important as the first thing you said, which is the retailers, and not just Walmart but what all of the retailers choose to do. And I think we're starting to see it. There are some really interesting collaborations, for example, Ahold Delhaize USA has a collaboration they're doing now with Kellanova, with a very iconic product of theirs, and really engaging a full supply system, right down to the individual growers, up through the mills, the manufacturing, right into the stores and the storytelling. [17:31]
Ethan: In my role as chief innovation officer, I both geek out in regenerative agriculture, the realm that we're in right now, and on product design and data. But then I also help manage our presence and collaboration with these global coalitions we're talking about - that also means at events like the climate COP or the biodiversity COP in Colombia, we're going to, or at climate week in New York coming up at the end of September. We have a house, a sort of a venue, it's called Regen House. You won't be surprised hearing that from me now. So, Regen House is in New York City in Climate Week, and one of the evening sessions we're going to do is really focused on this iconic product from Kellanova, but it's in collaboration with the retailer to kind of tell the story and really make the full supply system visible and present so we can see how that collaboration is necessary to move us forward. When retailers head in this direction, that creates a massive mark. [18:41].
Neil: Absolutely, absolutely. I think there's two ways to look at this. One is you regulate to create a minimum criteria that everybody needs to follow: Don't pollute water, don't put poison into the soil. So you create a regulation around that and so there's some things you can do there. But I think the bigger power is, at least outside of the food industry, it's in differentiating, it's how do I position my product as being better than others? And in this context, you said there's not so many certifications out there. If you look at other products, there's tons. I think in Europe there was a survey that was done - 500 certifications or labels that you have out here. What is in it for the product manager to look at regenerative ingredients in their product? What is needed for them to pay more attention to it? Or, I think that's a wrong. Two different questions; I think what is needed? I think there's a different thing. Ideally, customers loving it, but customers don't even know what regenerative products mean. So how do you solve that problem? [19:38]
Ethan: I don't think we have to only have regenerative product. Regenerative products are great. It's an idea. We should strive for it. It's fun. We want to go in that direction, for sure. But it's not the only path and it's more like the guiding star to head towards and along the way, there's a lot of great things we can find. So, I agree, there's too many certifications out there. They're all well intentioned, many of them have great value to them, and many of them now do show an uptick in sales. If you have a certified organic product, that's still a very quickly growing category. But I think part of what's happening from the consumer perspective and the retail perspective is it's a little much, 500 different certifications to pay attention to and know what they all mean and know how to differentiate between. You know, if you're in the egg aisle: cage free, free range, organic, non GMO, pasture…; it's a lot to figure out. [20:35]
Ethan: So HowGood has for a long time been a proponent of a simpler, more unified, very holistic system that takes into account all of environmental and social impacts but simplifies it down to something that's much quicker to understand. You could put this in the realm of eco labeling, whereas opposed to many different certifications, there's one unified system that happens throughout an entire grocery store. Europe is taking some strides in this, but actually in the US, a number of retailers, like Ahold Delhaize who I've mentioned a few times, they have taken the lead and they have used a system that Haugen developed that is very simple. For products it says good, great and best just for the top 25% or top 15% or top 5% of products that are out there. That's a combined impact of carbon, water, biodiversity, labour risk, animal welfare – a very holistic look. But it simplifies it to something that I'm looking at six cheddar cheeses, one of them says, “great”, I'm gonna grab that one. Or we also have some little attributes, some labels that are very simple. They say, ‘climate friendly’, or they say ‘water smart’, really simple things. And wherever we've done trials with these and done good, hard science against controls, putting simple, clear, unified communication across the whole store lifts sales. And this is going to your question, Neil, of why should a product manager pay attention to this? Why should they care? Sustainability sells. More sustainable products, products that are further towards regeneration, products that have an attribute that says climate friendly on them - they'll jump in sales. We did a trial in the UK - this is published, there's a press release out there about this - sales jumped 25% to 45% for these different attributes. [21:27]
Neil: Hey, the fastest growing sector of all in Germany right now is organic food. And this is organic food. Nobody knows what that means, but it's organic. And there's organic stores all over the place. It's growing faster than any other commodity out here. [23:15]
Ethan: And NYU and the sustainability index that they do...
Neil: Yeah, the Stern school, right?
Ethan: That shows 3X category growth, Nielsen, something similar, and showed the same growth. So why should managers care? Forget about regeneration. Do you want to make more money? Would you like a better top line revenue? Cool. This is the way to go. This is what millennials want. This is what Gen Z wants.
Neil: And 70% of buyers in ten years are going to be those guys.
Ethan: And then Gen A, right? I got to go to the IFT conference recently, which was really excellent - the Institute of Food Technologists, where maybe many of your listeners were - and I heard a panel there on Gen A, who's coming up, and they really care about sustainability even more. Forget all the things about climate change and uplifting species, just think about the money, and we're going to be heading in a good direction here. [23:59]
Jim: We've been talking about the upstream, but when I hear a podcast or some news, all I hear about is food waste. Food waste a major problem. Where does that fall in this spectrum of sustainable food? [24:26]
Ethan: I don't know. I'm sometimes controversial in this realm. I think that some of the downstream things like packaging and food waste, they're a bit of a red herring in terms of where many in the food industry can have potent impact. We should prioritize our efforts and we should allocate resources to change based on the percent of impact that something has in a product's life. So packaging: 3 to 7% of the impact usually comes from packaging. That's about the amount of time, attention, and resources, if we're trying to make a sustainable product, that we should put into packaging. Food loss and waste in the design of a product and a product life cycle, it's not usually that significant. [24:46]
Neil: No, no, but that's downstream, right? So, there's a statistic that says 70% of food that is produced never gets eaten. That's a pretty big number. So, farm to fork waste. I think that's what Jim mentions. Is there something in terms of product design that allows one to consider this and minimize this? [25:38]
Ethan: Not really. From a formulator's point of view, that's not where you have the power to make change. Like you can use upcycled ingredients. Sure, upcycled ingredients are great. Take what would otherwise be a waste stream and turn them into something. Yes, useful, good thing to do, no problem there. But using a bit of an upcycled ingredient is meaningless if what you also have in your product is palm oil and cocoa. That's where the impact is. 90% of the impact of any food product is in the ingredients and it's at the growing and production of the ingredients. The fastest thing you can do is change ingredients, or change sourcing locations, or change ingredient suppliers, or change some of the practices of how the food is grown. Those are the biggest levers, and many of those are in the hands of formulators. Switching from palm oil to some other vegetable oils can have a significant positive impact. Switching the location that the palm oil is coming from or the certifications that are with it, you can have a significant impact. There are many colors in the palette of how do you improve the impact of a product. But we should not go with the thing we hear about most or the thing that is marketed the most. We should go based on real hard data of where the impact is in our products. And that's the way to figure out, where do I focus my creativity as a formulator and how do I make this product better? There are some products. If you have a bottled water, packaging is important because water doesn't have a big footprint, so the packaging is really important. If you're making bottled waters or essence waters or anything like that. Yeah. Pay more attention to packaging because there it's 30% to 40% of your impact. But for pretty much all other categories, your biggest bang for your buck is not going to be in the packaging or it's not going to be in trying to solve food waste. [25:58]
Jim: I think that's the point. When I go back, early on in product sustainability, there was a producer responsibility and product responsibility. There was a big debate. Europe had more of a producer responsibility. The US was more of a product responsibility. But I think it's evolved towards the producer responsibility; producer has responsibility, not only through design, but all the way through the entire lifecycle. I think what you're arguing here is that from a formulator, it's really the product. I've got responsibility there, but it's a shared responsibility with others, and I think that's part of the conversation. This goes back to collaboration on the regeneration, but there's also collaboration and partnership on the food waste and the use and end of life of that product. Of the food, in this case. [27:47]
Ethan: Exactly. I don't want to denigrate all the incredible work that's happening on food waste, and I don't want to say it's not important. But I do want to say that for a product formulator, it might not be the place to focus all your energy and effort and to your point, yes, let's collaborate with the larger ecosystem to make some motion on that also. Another thing to kind of speak to this food loss and wasting is I'm a farmer. I have a 30-acre apple orchard, do grass fed sheep and lamb grazing in a kind of agroforestry silvopasture way underneath the apple trees we have shiitake mushrooms. Our farm has multiple other farmers growing vegetables between rows of chestnut trees. They're raising chickens that are rotating through and fertilizing the soil. We have a small integrated, hoping for aiming towards regenerative agriculture farm. Food waste happens on farms. Food waste isn't all evil. Yes, there's food that gets produced that does not get eaten on a farm. You know what happens to it? It feeds the chickens or goes into the compost and that feeds the soil for the next year. So, it's like there's a certain degree to which food waste has been vilified. It puts the problem somewhere else, in somebody else's hands instead of grasping changes, big changes that we can make ourselves with what's right in front of us. [28:36]
Neil: Except for one thing that food formulators could keep in mind - this idea of best before versus used by, which is about the longevity. So how long can you preserve the food product on the shelf? And this has to do with what ingredients you put in there, how you package it, because there's certain packaging that will actually... I mean, we had this huge thing in Germany, where we used to package cucumber. Every cucumber packaged in plastic. And so we had this huge movement that says, hey, we do not want plastic and that same cucumber, instead of lasting for seven to eight days on the shelf, now lasts two days. This is where I think you may do the best, and I think this is not an ingredient, this is not a food product per se, but it's the same thing with biscuits and bread and stuff like that, where by thinking about how you package, thinking about packaging itself may not be the most significant impact, but it can influence how much of your food overall actually gets wasted at the end. So, I think that is a thing that I worked on, I think probably 15 years ago when we were doing work with some of the big retailers and looking at where is the biggest bang for the buck. And yes, one of them is ingredients, and I think the other is in reducing the amount that actually falls out of this supply web, as you call it. [29:59]
Ethan: Yeah, I think it's interesting, and then also to speak to this point of collaboration we've been hitting on: another realm that helps with that cucumber that only lasts two days, this brings it back to regenerative agriculture. We're farming in a more regenerative way, and there's a higher nutrient density in the foods, which is like, this is a big unlock for the food industry. Like regenerative farming actually produces food that is healthier, that is more nutritious, that has some of the nutrients back in the vegetables and the fruits and the wheat that has degraded over the last 50 years. That will also lead to helping your vegetables last longer. My cucumbers don't last for two days, they last for two weeks, sitting out because of the richness of the soil and what they're coming out of. So, we can do both and what you're saying definitely makes sense in our situations when you look at the data where that packaging is really important. And I think the whole idea here is that we're looking for a polyculture of solutions instead of a monoculture. In agriculture, there's only one thing growing, it's just corn or it's just soy, it's just cucumbers. Whatever it is, that's a monoculture which brings in all of these challenges. It's that same monoculture mind that we were talking about with the chain, where there's just one to one to one. Instead of a monoculture, we need a polyculture of solutions, all working in a coordinated way together. [31:24]
Neil: Great.
Jim: I like that a lot. One we haven't talked about is social - the workers and child labour and slave labour. I'm assuming that's part of the ecosystem of food sustainability.
Ethan: Yeah, it's part of the ecosocial system. It's a big part of what HowGood looks at and thinks about, and there is the danger sometimes if you're only looking at carbon footprint or you're only looking at water, you get that single topic tunnel vision. There is then the possibility of unintended consequences and doing more harm just focusing on greenhouse gas emissions or carbon. This is part of why HowGood has always from the beginning built into its system, the ability to track carbon right alongside human rights and labour risk, right alongside animal welfare. We think this is really essential. We think it's one of the gaps. You see a lot of stuff out there that's like a carbon management platform or carbon accounting, which are good. Don't get me wrong. I like all of them. I want more and more of them. But if you're using AI to just focus on a particular thing that's carbon, you get this thing where you can over optimize. Just like if you over optimize for price, then you're going to hit all of the environmental, social aspects. If you over optimize for carbon, you might leave out the labour risk. This is a really important thing that we pay attention to and track in the database and want available to everybody. It's also even more difficult than agriculture thing to work on and to create positive change in. But it's really worth looking at, understanding and making choices on and towards labour situations that uplift people as opposed to oppress them. [32:57]
Jim: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if you really highlighted the importance of taking a life cycle approach, multiple impacts, not just single impacts. So, I fully support that. [34:23]
Shelley: Ethan, as we come to a close on this, what's a final thought to leave our listeners with? [34:35]
Ethan: It's so fun to work in here, right? You can tell in this conversation we're having there is great purpose in moving positively for the world instead of a single bottom line focus. Here I go again, monoculture to polyculture. We shouldn't just be focusing on that single thing even in our own careers and I find formulators to be so creative. You’re designers. Your listeners, really design the future of what we're going to eat. And so there's a huge amount of power in your hands. Can't be done alone, again, you got to collaborate to do it. But let's go, get access to some good data and make your products better. Go find and make some regenerative ingredients. And I'd be happy and honored to be with you and have our data with you and just come think and play with you on it as much as I can along the way. [34:41]
Links to Things We talk about
- HowGood - https://www.howgood.com/
- Regenerative Agriculture Continuum by Ethan Soloviev - https://medium.com/@ethansoloviev/regenerative-agriculture-continuum-4346f78dde3e
- How Technology is Transforming Food Sustainability: Data and Metrics as a Path for Transformation - https://www.howgood.com/blog/technology-transforming-food-sustainability
- Land to Market Certification- https://www.landtomarket.com/
- Sustainable Markets Initiative - https://www.sustainable-markets.org/
- HowGood Announces its Climate Impact Labels will be Displayed on Food Products at COP28 - https://www.howgood.com/blog/cop28-climate-impact-labels#:~:text=Stone%20Ridge%2C%20N.Y.%2C%20November%2028,at%20COP28%20in%20order%20to
- COP28 Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes: accelerating the transition - https://archive.wbcsd.org/Programs/Food-and-Nature/Food-Land-Use/COP28-Action-Agenda-Regenerative-Landscapes-accelerating-the-transition
- One Planet Business for Biodiversity - https://op2b.org/home/
- World Business Council for Sustainable Development - https://www.wbcsd.org/
- Climate Week NYC - https://www.climateweeknyc.org/
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