Senior Research Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Jen Bartashus, joins host and CEO of VegTech™ Invest Elysabeth Alfano on The Plantbased Business Hour with Elysabeth Alfano. They discuss conference and their panel experiences as well as their predictions for the sector in the next five to ten years.
Specifically, we discussed
- What are some of the hardships that the animal agriculture industry is facing at the moment?
- Is there a growing interest in protein diversification?
- Are there financial benefits to protein diversification?
- What were some key learnings coming out of the Bloomberg Intelligence Farm, Food & Fuel Summit?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I’m over the moon to have back with me- she’s kind of a regular on this show, Jen Bartashus, Senior Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. She covers big box stores and the food industry.
I love that they have, and a hundred percent, they have made great strides and they’re taking it seriously. I’m talking about the current protein industry, the meat industry, taking it very seriously. But I worry that, you know, once you plug one hole in a sinking boat you just have to go plug another hole and their list is so long. I’m saying this compassionately. I don’t know how you fix the math. There are too many holes in the sinking boat.
Jen Bartashus: I would agree. There are a lot of places that you have to plug and it is, I think, an ongoing challenge that just isn’t going to go away. You know, the good news is that people are working at it. So hopefully we find better longer term patches for those holes in the boat, but it’s going to take people working together and I don’t think anyone can achieve what we need to achieve by being in a silo. So the idea that there’s openness to have discussion, have engagement, understanding where alternative proteins can help fill those gaps can help stabilize supply chains and transform the food system, but nothing can happen in a silo.
So I think one of the big takeaways for me is just that being able to have a panel where we have the beef association, we have someone who understands the poultry industry, the pork industry, and then alternative protein all together, is a great step forward to having that ongoing conversation of working in a complementary way instead of a confrontational way.
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