Chief Investment Officer of VegTech Invest, Dr. Sasha Goodman, discusses the firm’s recent white paper, in conjunction with Harvard University students, on Stakeholder Engagement for Plant-based Innovation & Diversified Proteins. Along with host of The Plantbased Business Hour, Elysabeth Alfano, the two discuss the top 5 findings of the white paper and the impact on the diversified proteins sector.
Specifically, we discussed
- What is the new white paper between VegTech™ Invest and Harvard’s Great Food Systems Transformation Course students?
- What prompted the White Paper on Best Practices for Stakeholder Engagement for Plant-based Innovation and Protein Diversification?
- Why is Stakeholder Engagement in Plant-based Innovation and Protein Diversification important?
- Of the 6 case studies in the paper, is there one that particularly stands out for you?
- What are the 5 best practices from the paper and how do they address overcoming roadblocks?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I wanted to bring on my guest, Dr. Sasha Goodman, who is the Chief Investment Officer of VegTech Invest.
There’s a significant amount of the paper, I want to say 25%, dedicated to the science of why plant-based innovation and diversified proteins are better for the environment, soil, regenerative agriculture, food insecurity, etc. Maybe you can talk about some of the main points of that.
Dr. Sasha Goodman: I think that’s often discussed. The main point though I think in addition to the details of it, is that the subject of plant-based innovation has a broad mandate and then I’ll get into the details. The more issues that are affected by this thing that you want to improve, the better it is for everybody.
Elysabeth: Well said.
Dr. Sasha Goodman: So we went through the climate change aspect, of course, with a dramatic portion of 18% of climate gasses coming from the sector and then how methane is really an effective lever to affect change to the climate in the positive direction within our lifetimes. And that is because methane only lasts for around eight years. We can stop methane production or slow it down and have an impact in our lifetimes. People don’t realize that carbon is such a focus of the automobile industry and that’s something that the planet will be dealing with for hundreds of years. But in the meantime, we need to have some impact now because we’re warming the earth, essentially.
We’ve said it so many times, it’s almost like, are people getting it? This is a main point, and so the climate affects everybody in different ways as well. So I think that’s a common good that’s being affected by companies. We also get into biodiversity loss, pollution and really how people don’t realize how materials can also contribute to climate gasses and just how much leather affects per unit of leather and we get into those details too. Then we look at the Higgs sustainability guide data on that.
So I think that the broader environmental impacts are also here in that when people have one more calorie of meat or an animal product compared to a plant product, they don’t realize the process that it took to get that meat to their table and how many calories and how much land it took and how much water it took. It’s the classic story of unintended consequences. The vast majority of farmland is being used to produce the vast minority of calories through meat. It’s almost like an 80/20 situation.
The inefficiency of that system is something that companies are starting to pick up on and that by starting to diversify their proteins they can reach some financial efficiencies that they hadn’t realized. You have to work to change the industry to grow it.
Elysabeth: I couldn’t agree more. You have to work to change the industry to grow it.
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