Suzi Gerber, Chef and Research Fellow at Tufts University

Elysabeth: So let me bring on my guest today, Chef Suzi Gerber, who’s really the Tufts research fellow working on nutrition and investing and this hybrid, as well as marketing plant-based products for our sector. We’ll get into it all. How could one person wear so many hats? Let’s go ahead and find out. Suzi, thank you for being with me today.

Your paper with FAIRR really talks about the protein and nutrition framework that investors can consider when they make investments, and I thought this was a very interesting topic. With VegTech Invest we focus on this a little bit, but it was interesting to see how you and FAIRR- and it was Sophia Condes from FAIRR who’s your co-author. She and I were on a panel at COP28 together, so I have fond memories of Sophia. She’s a great person. I’m interested in why you choose this subject for investors.

Suzi Gerber: Yeah, well I mean, sort of apropos to your last topic, not that it was the core of it but it’s one of these pernicious rumors, right? The idea of processing. There are these undying myths that plague the food industry, especially around protein foods and especially once you start comparing animal foods and plant-based alternatives to those animal foods, all these sort of myths and I’m not going to call them religious beliefs because they’re not, but they have that level of commitment to them, right?

These are core beliefs that people have, and I say this all the time. You’ve never eaten a piece of meat that’s not processed. Not a single piece of meat is not processed. It requires processing. Dead animals, ourselves included, rot the second we start dying. An enormous number of things have to go into arresting that process. However, you’ve probably eaten an apple. You’ve probably eaten various forms of vegetables and other things that have some, none, or minimal processing comparatively.

So the processing thing is definitely something we talk about in that sort of research overview, among other kinds of things. I think zooming out a little bit, the number one thing we identified is that investors like everybody else, really do not necessarily understand the evidence based facts about nutrition. However, investors really have a huge amount of influence on what our food supply includes, and how things can develop across time.

So a lot of investors have expressed an interest in wanting to change the world for the better, increasing healthy food supply or other ethical stances like sustainability, animal welfare, and public health. In order to do that they have to know the facts. So FAIRR and I teamed up on this mission to help drive a healthier, more informed food system using one of its most powerful agents and stakeholders because, as we say in the paper, investors have an interest as shareholders in protecting public health, right?

This is the future of national economies, global economies, labor markets, the way that things develop, the success of individual companies, of entire portfolios of theirs, all of these things actually are impacted by all of these decisions and they can’t be made if they don’t have the facts. So that’s where we come in.

FAIRR is really good at developing questions that help investors communicate these things with their portfolio companies, what to ask before investing, during investing, how to drive P-Mixes and I can supply the nutrition science evidence and get in the mindset of what are the impending risks, reputational risks, but also regulatory risks that might be coming down the pipeline, as well as how to consider some of these nutritional facts in real ways that help you understand, “Am I supporting healthy foods or not supporting healthy foods?”