Ep. 57 | From Corporate Giant to Pre-Revenue Startup: Irina Gerry’s Journey to Alt-Dairy Newcomer Change Foods
Release Date: 01/15/2021
Ready for a Carpet Made of Human Hair? This Entrepreneur Turns Salon Waste into Textiles
Business for Good Podcast
What if one solution to fashion’s waste problem is literally growing on our own heads? Every day, salons around the world toss out millions of pounds of freshly cut human hair — a clean, protein-rich, renewable resource that mostly ends up in landfills or incinerators. But what if that so-called waste could become the next sustainable textile? My guest on this episode, Zsofia Kollar, is the founder and CEO of , a Netherlands-based startup turning salon hair waste into a high-performance fibre that behaves like wool — but with 43 times lower CO₂ emissions, 20 times less water use, and...
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From Fashion Model to Fission Mission: Isabelle Boemeke’s Nuclear-Powered Future
Business for Good Podcast
When you hear the word nuclear, does your mind flash to mushroom clouds, Chernobyl, or maybe the glowing three-eyed fish from The Simpsons? Well, what if nuclear electricity — far from being an environmental villain — is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most land-efficient energy sources we have? It turns out that former fashion model Isabelle Boemeke is on a mission to change how we think about nuclear energy. When she and I met a few years ago, in Italy of all places, she was known by many simply as , her online persona that blends fashion, futurism, and fission to make nuclear...
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Fungi-Filled Diapers: How Plastic-Eating Fungi May Change Child-Rearing
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever changed a diaper, you might’ve wondered what happens to it after it goes in the trash. The answer, unfortunately, is that it’ll sit in a landfill for hundreds of years—certainly longer than the baby who briefly wore it will live. In fact, every diaper you wore when you were a baby is still sitting around, at best in a landfill, or perhaps even in the ocean. And did you know the average American baby goes through 6,000 diapers before learning to use a toilet? But what if fungi could change that? In this episode, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal, the...
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Raising Capital for Alt-Protein in the Midst of the Winter
Business for Good Podcast
Recently had me as a guest on his show, the to talk about ’s . When it came out, more than one Business for Good listener heard it and told me they thought it would make a good episode to release to our audience too, so this episode is simply the conversation Alex and I had for his podcast. If you’ve been following the alternative protein sector (and the broader biotech sector), you’ve likely seen the wave of challenges that fermentation, cultivated, and plant-based startups have faced over the past few years. As recent reporting confirms, ag and food tech investment is at a...
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Bottling the Sky: Aircapture’s Carbon Capture Breakthrough
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about climate change solutions, your mind might go to renewable energy, electric vehicles, or eating less meat. These are all of course important. But even if we stopped all emissions today, we’d still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere and would need to pull a lot of our emissions out of it. That’s the bold mission of , a California-based company pioneering modular direct air capture technology. On this episode, I speak with , Aircapture’s founder and CEO, about how his company is not only working to reduce atmospheric CO₂, but also profitably supplying it to...
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Inside Mighty Earth: Glenn Hurowitz on Transforming the Meat Industry
Business for Good Podcast
What if the biggest environmental culprits were hiding in plain sight—right on our dinner plates? While most environmental organizations train their sights on the energy sector, Mighty Earth has taken a bold, and often lonely, stand in confronting the meat industry’s massive role in climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. In this episode, I sit down with Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of , to unpack why the meat industry typically gets ignored by the environmental movement, and what he thinks needs to be done. Glenn has spent decades fighting for the planet, from...
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Turning Waste into Bioplastic Gold with Genecis CEO Luna Yu
Business for Good Podcast
It’s rare that we contemplate where all the plastic we throw out goes, but rest assured that nearly none of it is being recycled. Simply put, it’s usually cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle old plastic, even the plastic you put in the recycling bin. Because it takes plastic centuries to break down, this means for each one of us you could build a mountain of plastic from all the packaging we use over the course of our lives. But what if plastic didn’t have to take centuries to break down, and could actually biodegrade in a matter of days or weeks? That’s exactly the...
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Turning Plants into Plastic-Free Packaging: The Xampla Story
Business for Good Podcast
Plastic pollution is one of the defining environmental challenges of our time—microplastics are now found in our oceans, our soil, our drinking water, and even in our bloodstreams. But what if we could make high-performance materials that look, feel, and function like plastic—without being plastic at all? Enter . Born out of the University of Cambridge, Xampla is a materials science innovation company that’s developed a new class of plastic-free, fully biodegradable materials that offer a drop-in replacement for the most polluting types of plastic. Their flagship line, known as Morro™,...
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Microbial Might: Can MicroHarvest Replace Animals in Pet and Livestock Feed?
Business for Good Podcast
What if we could grow nutritious, sustainable protein—not in months or weeks—but in just one day? This episode’s guest is doing just that. Rather than going big with animal agriculture, MicroHarvest is going small with microbial agriculture. A huge number of animals are used to feed both our pets and the animals we raise for food. Kate Bekers, the CEO and co-founder of , is seeking to change that. She’s running a fast-rising European biotech startup using fermentation to produce high-quality protein from microbes—in just 24 hours. Based in Hamburg and Lisbon, MicroHarvest is on...
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There’s no Eighth Continent to Farm: Mike Grunwald on Feeding Ourselves without Frying the Planet
Business for Good Podcast
In this episode, I’m joined by one of America’s most thoughtful national journalists: Mike Grunwald. You may know him from his work at Time, Politico, or The Washington Post, or from his critically acclaimed books about the Obama administration and the history of the Everglades. He’s also now a contributing columnist at the New York Times. But for the purpose of this episode, Mike is here to discuss his third book, . In this sweeping and deeply reported work, Mike tackles one of the most uncomfortable truths of our time: our global food system, especially animal farming, is a...
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.