Helping Alt-Protein Startups Survive the Winter: Ahimsa’s Consolidation Approach
Release Date: 02/15/2025
Why Jim Mellon Is Still All In on Alternative Protein After Five Years
Business for Good Podcast
Episode Summary: Five years ago, billionaire investor Jim Mellon came on Business For Good and laid out his thesis that cultivated meat and precision fermentation would transform the food system. Since then, venture capital has fled the space, plant-based stocks have cratered, and many startups have gone under. So why is Jim putting even more money in? In this episode, Paul Shapiro reconnects with Jim Mellon, Author of Moo's Law and Chairman of Agronomics, to find out what has changed and what hasn't. Jim reveals that his portfolio company, Clean Food Group, is producing precision...
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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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Using Wildlife Intelligence to Prevent Animal Collisions with Sára Nožková
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
Episode Summary: What if the most abundant protein on Earth has been hiding in plain sight inside green leaves? In this episode of Business For Good, sits down with , CEO of , to explore how a new approach to food production could unlock massive amounts of high-quality protein directly from plants. Instead of feeding crops to animals or waiting for plants to produce seeds, Ross explains how his team isolates Rubisco, a highly digestible protein found in every green leaf, through mechanical fractionation processes that separate proteins, fiber, and carbohydrates. ...
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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...
info_outlineIt’s no secret that the alternative protein startups are struggling these days. A combination of lower revenue, intense competition, and less available venture capital is leading to a contraction in the sector, with countless alt-meat and dairy companies conducting layoffs, declaring bankruptcy, and even folding altogether.
Enter Ahimsa Companies, a newly formed investment group acquiring promising but distressed plant-based brands. This isn’t charity, though. Ahimsa's belief is that, with their consolidation strategy and pooled resources, these brands that are built on a strong underlying product can become profitable under the Ahimsa umbrella.
As Ahimsa CEO Matt Tullman says in this conversation, pendulums swing, and many of these companies can be brought to profitability, meaning they could ultimately be sold at a much higher price than their valuation during this period in which plant-based products are in the valley.
So far the company has acquired Wicked Foods, Simulate’s Nuggs, Blackbird Pizza, an Ohio plant-based foods manufacturing plant, and more.
Matt is a man of many talents, as you’ll hear in this episode. In addition to being CEO of Ahimsa Companies, he founded and sold his own education tech company, and is also the co-founder and CEO of Outlier Health, the parent company of supplement company Complement and of No Meat Athlete. He’s both a missionary for plant-based lifestyles and a mercenary seeking to combine his passion for plant-based foods with profit.
Discussed in this episode
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Ahimsa Companies is looking for plant-based startups to acquire. Here’s an analysis of their strategy and history.
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Interview with Matt in which he describes Ahimsa’s goal by declaring that “we’ve got to step up and try to help these companies survive.”
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Story about Ahimsa’s acquisition of the Plant Plant in Ohio.
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Both Paul and Matt are interested in AI’s potential to enable human-nonhuman communication, something Noa Weiss discussed on a past episode.
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Matt recommends reading both The Hard Thing about Hard Things and The Surrender Experiment.
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Matt also recommends Paul Graham’s essay, Do Things That Don’t Scale.
More about Matt Tullman
Matt is the co-founder and Group CEO of the Ahimsa Companies – a private equity firm acquiring and operating best-in-class plant-based food and manufacturing companies. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Outlier Health, the parent company of Complement and No Meat Athlete, which have served nearly 13 million people just in the past three years. He’s also an investor in health/food/bev startups, and a contributor to Inc. Magazine. Previously Matt founded a ed-tech firm that was ultimately acquired by Stride Education (NYSE: LRN). Matt is most proud of bootstrapping a business that was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in 2021. He has dedicated his career to growing nutrition-first health companies to help catalyze the movement to a plant-based lifestyle for the mainstream consumer.