The Future of Food

Welcome back everyone! Today I wanted to share a recent conversation I had with journalist and food tech visionary, Sonalie Figueiras.

The founder of the publication, Green Queen, she and her team were the among the first journalists to discuss the importance of sustainability in food production. And she’s giving us her thoughts on cultivated meat and the future of investment into food tech. Let’s dig in.

Thank you so much, Sonalie, for taking the time out of your busy work schedule to chat. I really appreciate it.

It’s my pleasure! I really like what you guys are doing.

Let’s get straight in. What made you create Green Queen?

Honestly, it wasn’t meant to be a business. I had certain health issues that weren’t getting solved by doctors and traditional medicine, so I ended up going on my own journey to do some more research. And I basically ended up going down a big rabbit hole of learning about food, asking how it’s grown and why the connections between health and food had not been made.

It got to the point where I felt like if people knew what I knew, then there would be a movement. And that led me to meeting super interesting people in the industry, from chefs to business owners.

And when did it become a “real business”?

Well, much earlier than I expected. I had to experience a lot of cynicism from people who didn’t take a woman in media very seriously. I should have taken it seriously much earlier, because Green Queen had influence right away.

And I know that you had a Liberal Arts education. How did that help with creating Green Queen and a media business as a whole?

I mean, it allowed me to be good at speaking, writing, editing and persuasion. Essentially, you learn how to do really good due diligence, often better than someone who has been in a technical subject.

I became a great writer, editor, and persuader. I learnt how to spot trends, which I found out I was really good at.

Not to mention that you’re one of the first people to have a media company devoted to the food industry, healthy eating, and the future of food itself.

Yeah, absolutely. People come up to me now and tell me how smart I am. But, at the time, no one thought that. I felt like I was very much on my own, especially in Asia. There’s no support for women or even for media ventures.

This brings me to my next question, actually. Singapore was the first Asian country to legalise the sale of cultivated meat (meat grown from stem cells). Does this mark a shift in attitude towards innovation in the food industry in Asia?

Well, you gotta hand it to Singapore. The government was really focused on making the country a food tech centre.

Their sovereign wealth fund invested in huge companies, like Eat Just, back in the mid-2000s, because they saw food security as a problem in the future.

They even had this plan, in which 30% of their food would be grown locally by 2030. That was really quite forward-thinking.

Speaking of investment, the popularity of cultivated meat and alternative proteins – a topic which Green Queen covers quite frequently – has seen a decline. Where do you see that going?

There is no doubt that there was a hype bubble. There were things that received investment that shouldn’t have. Venture Capital (“VC”) money was plentiful, non-prejudiced, and due diligence was not happening the way it should have been.

Right now, though, investment has dried up and investors, who followed the hype, have now fled. So, the only investors remaining are the activist investors that are dedicated to food and climate.

The fundamental thesis, though, has not changed. We have a food system that cannot support our population growth and cannot continue because of climate change.

A more diverse funding environment needs to be created.

What do you mean by that?

It has become very clear that VC funding is not the best fit for the long term investment that is needed to get food technologies off the ground.

What would you recommend?

Take cultivated meat. The industry will have a much longer lifespan than 10 years, and so will outlive the average VC fund. And at the end of the day, the fund will need to get a return sooner rather than later. So, the VC isn’t really thinking about long-term potential.

If you look in Europe, there is often a lot of public investment. We need more public support and debt financing, rather than just one type of money.

What people need to understand is that this technology will help the whole world and we need that same support that has been given to renewable energy, for example.

But, food still remains a really politically divisive subject.

So how do you convince people in Europe, where food culture in incredibly conservative, or several states in the US that traditional farming will not work anymore and that we need other forms of food production?

I don’t think you need to convince the public. Much more, there are things that you can’t convince the public about when the current narrative for food technologies is “we’re coming to steal your grandmother’s cooking”.

It’s much more important to convince the government to create incentives and allocate money to these projects. The same thing happened with electric vehicles. Governments started investing in infrastructure way before the public got on board.

And how do you explain this to governments? You advertise food tech solutions as “de-risking” for the future.

When it comes to cultivated meat, then, what would you say to those who believe that this is “humans playing God”?

I would say their views are totally off. How many of them have actually been to a production facility? Have they seen it? Here’s what I think of people who have opinions of things that they don’t know much about… proceeds to give two thumbs down.

There is so much disinformation about this. And these negative opinions, what they don’t realise, have been paid for by Big Meat lobbying groups. I mean this is straight out of the Big Meat, anti-food tech playbook.

But the idea that, right now, we’re eating food that your grandmother would recognise, and is fresh, is outrageously ridiculous. Chicken is obviously the biggest example of that. Let me tell you that THAT is not your grandmother’s chicken.

These modern-day chickens are completely processed. They’re “franken-chickens”. So, the idea that you can’t get people to eat “franken-food” is not true, or that everything that we eat is so much healthier than lab-grown meat is rubbish.

These people are repeating Big Meat’s messages and have been brainwashed, even though they may not realise it.

So let’s clear up some misinformation about cultivated meat. How do we tell someone that they are eating something healthy and sustainable?

Firstly, everyone is allowed to eat what they want to eat. What’s really going to define this is economics. If cultivated meat is cheaper, then people will buy it.

Do you see cultivated meat becoming mainstream in our lifetimes?

Maybe in 15-20 years. It will be primarily adopted by countries that have less water and land. So you’ll see much more progress on this in Asia.

Overcoming the narrative in Europe will be a challenge because so many people there have grown up with fields around them where in Asia that’s not really the case.

French farmers are against cultivated meat, yet the French government is investing in cultivated meat. Smart governments know what’s up. They know you have to invest in solutions to prepare for a food crunch. You have to give these things a shot because we are in a crisis.

And how do governments appeal to farmers?

Most farmers I’ve met are very smart. They know there’s a problem and they know that climate change is an issue. They’re worried about their livelihoods and that their voices are not getting heard. If we were to include them in the vision, then that’s something.

Victimising farmers is the strategy of Big Meat.

Shifting the conversation to a more positive tone, what are you excited by in food tech and the food industry?

What’s really caught my eye is a lot of things happening around food waste. Valorising methods of reducing food waste, like using the wheat stalk to make flour, instead of using just the grain, or using ugly produce to make snacks.

That’s what interests me: looking at what we are already making to deal with this incredible overconsumption we are seeing today.

And what would you do to help someone convert to a more sustainable diet?

Well, you just have to lead by example. Invite people over for a wonderful meal so that they can see how delicious environmentally friendly food can be.

I’m also a believer in reduction rather than elimination. Reduce your meat intake by having it less often. Perhaps once or twice a week.

Everyone’s path to sustainability is different. It’s not going to work if we tell everyone that you have to be vegan tomorrow. We can never take away people’s traditions and we have to be patient.

Most importantly, we shouldn’t mix what we do with people, one on one, with what we should be doing on a policy level. Right now food is artificially cheap and big food companies are, essentially, making money because the cost of their product is not reflected in terms of damage to our health and damage to our planet.

What really needs to happen is transparency on those costs, which then need to be included in the price. And as soon as the price is conveyed honestly, changes will happen.

Sonalie, I could sit here and chat with you all day. But, for the sake of the audience, let’s stop here. Thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it!

Thank you for having me; it was a pleasure.