Ep. 57 | From Corporate Giant to Pre-Revenue Startup: Irina Gerry’s Journey to Alt-Dairy Newcomer Change Foods
Release Date: 01/15/2021
Investing in Biodiversity with Venture Capitalist Tom Quigley
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if the next great venture opportunity isn't in AI or fintech but in protecting nature itself? In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Tom Quigley, Co-founder of Superorganism, one of the first venture funds built entirely around biodiversity protection. With a freshly closed $26 million fund, Tom explains why over half of global GDP depends on healthy ecosystems, and why the degradation of those systems creates massive risk exposure for industries and supply chains worldwide. The conversation covers how biodiversity...
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Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if AI could help prevent bird strikes, train collisions, and livestock attacks by communicating with wild animals in ways they already understand? In this episode of Business For Good, speaks with Sára Nožková, CEO and Co-founder of , about building AI systems designed to detect wildlife and guide animals away from danger. Sára explains how her company combines machine learning, wildlife science, and real-world infrastructure applications to reduce human-wildlife conflict across airports, train tracks, roads, farms, and other critical areas....
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Turning Green Leaves Into High-Performing Protein with Ross Milne
Business for Good Podcast
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Vasectomies, Family Planning, and Environmental Pressure with Dr. Douglas Stein (The Vasectomist)
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: What if one of the highest-leverage climate and poverty interventions isn’t a new technology, a policy mandate, or a venture-backed breakthrough, but simply making permanent contraception easier for men to choose? In this episode of Businesses For Good, host sits down with , a Florida physician known as “The Vasectomist,” who has performed 45,000+ vasectomies and taken his work internationally, including providing free procedures and (in some cases) small cash offsets for travel and missed wages. Their conversation moves beyond the clinic into...
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Feed the People Authors on Abundance, Food Policy, and Meat Demand
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary What if the global food system isn’t “broken” in the way sustainability debates usually claim, and treating it that way leads to worse decisions? Paul Shapiro sits down with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, authors of Feed the People, to unpack how industrial scale and trade created unprecedented food abundance, why “eat local” and small-farm nostalgia collapses at 8 billion people, and what practical policy levers can improve outcomes without fantasy. They explore a clear framework, more food, less feed, no fuel, why animal agriculture remains...
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Bruce Friedrich (Good Food Institute) on Taste, Price, and What It Takes to Scale Alternative Meat
Business for Good Podcast
Alternative meat looks like it is collapsing. Startups are shutting down, funding is drying up, and headlines are calling the category finished, but that reaction may reflect a misunderstanding of how technological revolutions actually unfold. Bruce Friedrich, President of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future, explains why most people will not change behavior for values alone, why price and taste are the real adoption gates, and why “only” $3 billion in cultivated meat funding is far...
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Modern Mill’s Chris Guimond on Upcycling Rice Hulls Into Low Maintenance Building Materials
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary A rice field does not look like the starting point for a scalable building materials company until you understand the economics behind it. In this episode of Business For Good, Paul Shapiro sits down with Chris Guimond, Founder and CEO of Modern Mill, to explore how discarded rice hulls are being transformed into ACRE, a wood like siding, decking, and trim product designed to replace old growth lumber. Chris explains why deforestation is a supply and demand problem, how Modern Mill cracked the manufacturing and adoption challenges that derail most composites, and...
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Deep Fission: Using Boreholes to Cut Nuclear Costs and Deliver 24/7 Clean Electricity
Business for Good Podcast
What if the fastest path to reliable clean electricity is not a new reactor design, but a new place to put one? In this conversation, Paul Shapiro speaks with Elizabeth Muller, CEO of Deep Fission, about a plan to place a conventional pressurized water reactor roughly a mile underground to use geology, gravity, and groundwater for containment, pressure, and emergency cooling, potentially cutting total nuclear costs by as much as 80%. They unpack how a narrow borehole reactor could serve always-on demand from data centers and industrial users, what “proven tech combined in a new...
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The Incredible, Edible… Pea? How Meala is Using Biotech to Render Eggs Obsolete
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they’re simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they’re also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who’s avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs aren’t exactly a welcome ingredient to find on the ingredient deck. Enter Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, CEO and co-founder of , an Israeli startup that’s figured out how to make peas...
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From Oil Wells to Oak Trees: Ben Dell’s Half-Billion-Dollar Pivot to Carbon Offsetting
Business for Good Podcast
What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I’m talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of — a company that’s raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he’s already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1. Ben’s journey is a fascinating one: he began his career in oil and gas private equity, helping fossil-fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the...
info_outlineYou’ve heard the old adage: Humans plan, and God laughs.
That truism could nicely describe Irina Gerry’s life, which has been pretty remarkable so far. She started out growing up in communist Russia, but with fate helping to defy odds, Irina ended up coming to the US and attending Harvard Business School. She eventually worked at one of the biggest symbols of capitalism on the planet: Procter & Gamble. But soon, Irina was in the dairy industry, working at milk product behemoth Danone, or sometimes known as Dannon in the United States, managing their plant-based brands Silk and So Delicious.
After years of spending time advancing alt-dairy within the walls of one of the world’s biggest dairy companies, fate struck again in Irina’s life. Following a chance virtual meeting on Linkedin during the pandemic with the CEO of a brand new, pre-revenue, animal-free dairy start-up, Irina decided to leave the comfort and safety of a good job at a major company to try her hand at entrepreneurship.
So she left Danone to become the Chief Marketing Officer of Change Foods, a company recently started by Australian plant-based entrepreneur David Bucca that’s using microbes to brew real dairy proteins without the use of a single cow. So far they’ve raised nearly $1 million and are seeking an additional $5 million in 2021. Change Foods has already brought on other heavy hitters from major food brands, and their first product, they claim, will be cheese that melts and performs just like conventional cheese.
In this episode we discuss Irina’s journey from corporate Goliath to start-up David, just what makes Change Foods different from other precision fermentation start-ups, and what Irina thinks are examples of great—and not-so-great—marketing in the plant-based space.
We also get into why plant-based milk has become so much more successful than plant-based meat, at least so far. And we discuss the vexing question: is real dairy brewed from microbes vegan or not? After all, it’s real dairy protein, so if you’re allergic to cow’s milk, you’ll be allergic to this. But no animals were used, so how should marketers describe this kind of food?
So enjoy learning about the brave new world of sustainable protein and a remarkable life journey so far in this episode!
Discussed in this interview:
- Our past episode featuring Perfect Day’s co-founders.
- Forks Over Knives had a big impact on Irina.
- Irina recommends The Tipping Point by Malcomb Gladwell.
- Paul’s article on how cheese consumption is increasing even while milk consumption is declining.
- The RethinkX Report on the future of animal agriculture.
- Irina praised companies like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Miyoko’s. She also questioned Lightlife Foods for its ads attacking fellow plant-based companies.