Ep. 186 - This Former Dairy Engineer Thinks the Future of Protein is…Leaves?
SHOW NOTES
Before founding Leaft Foods, Ross Milne spent his career doing something very different from what he’s doing today. He was a dairy industry engineer who spent his time designing, building, and optimizing some of the world’s most sophisticated food-manufacturing systems. He knew milk inside and out. He understood whey, casein, processing efficiencies, and how to scale animal-based protein at an industrial level.
Now, not so much.
After years inside the dairy industry, Ross began asking a deceptively simple question: if virtually all of our food system starts with leafy green plants, why do we route so much of that nutrition through animals before it reaches humans?
That question led Ross down an unexpected path: away from dairy, and toward leaves.
At Leaft Foods, Ross is now CEO of a startup extracting Rubisco—the most abundant protein on Earth—from green leaves like alfalfa, and turning it into a highly digestible, highly functional protein for human consumption. In other words, he’s trying to replace some of the very proteins he once spent his career perfecting, such as whey, egg, and dairy proteins, with something that’s dramatically more land-efficient and lower-impact on animals.
In this conversation, we talk about why gorillas can thrive on raw leaves while humans can’t, and how Leaft is essentially doing that digestive work outside the body so that humans can enjoy leaf proteins. We explore why leaf protein might become a fourth pillar of the global protein system, alongside meat, dairy, and seed-based proteins like legumes. And we dig into what it’s like to leave an established industry to try to build something fundamentally new, using the same engineering mindset, but aimed at a very different future.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
You can buy Leaft protein products here.
Leaft Foods’ new partnership in Japan.
Not discussed, but Leaft is selling into the pet food market too.
Ross recommends reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
MORE ABOUT Ross Milne
Ross Milne leads Leaft Foods as CEO, driving the commercialisation and scale-up of Rubisco Protein Isolate—from pilot operations to full industrial production. A Chemical and Process Engineer with 20+ years’ experience building complex processing systems across NZ, Europe, and Asia, he brings a rigorous engineering approach to scaling new technology into high-performance food ingredients. Ross is focused on delivering consistent, commercially viable protein solutions that lift farmer value and position New Zealand at the forefront of sustainable food systems.
TRANSCRIPT
Ross Milne 0:00
Skip out the middleman and work directly with green leaves, instead of waiting for the cow to process that green matter into something more usable. What opportunities would that create?
Paul Shapiro 0:11
Welcome to the Business for good podcast where we spotlight people making money by solving some of the world's most pressing problems. I'm your host. Paul Shapiro, author of a nationally best selling book on food sustainability and CEO of a company in the same space. On this show, I speak with founders, investors and thought leaders who prove that doing good and doing well can go hand in hand. The biggest challenges facing humanity are solvable and are often profitable too. My hope is that this podcast informs, inspires, and maybe even helps repel you to build a business that makes the world a better place. I'm glad you're here. Hello friend, and welcome to episode 186 of the business for good podcast. I'm glad to be getting some feedback from listeners who are becoming watchers as this show is now available in both audio format and as a video on YouTube, and as a fun bonus for those of you watching the show on YouTube, I'm recording this very intro after going more than a week without shaving, the longest I think I've ever gone, all at the request of my wife, Tony, who asked me to try this out. I've consented to her request, telling her that I'm not really sure how long I'd do this, but after spending the last 46 years of being a queen shaving guy, if you want to see me as an unshaven guy, now's your chance. Feel free to give me your honest feedback on what you think now, this episode is the kind of story that I love. It features someone who radically changed his life in the middle of it, and I'll tell you what I mean. Before founding leafed foods, Ross Mooney spent his career doing something very different from what he's doing today. He was a dairy industry engineer who spent his time designing, building and optimizing some of the world's most sophisticated food manufacturing systems. He knew milk inside and out. This is a guy who understood whey casein processing efficiencies and how to scale animal based protein at an industrial level. Now, not so much. After years inside the dairy industry, Ross began asking a deceptively simple question, if virtually all of our food system starts with leafy green plants. Why do we root so much of that nutrition through animals before it reaches humans? That question led Ross down an unexpected path away from dairy and toward Yes, leaves at leafed foods. Ross is now CEO of a startup extracting Rubisco, the most abundant protein on earth, from green leaves like alfalfa, and turning it into a highly digestible, highly functional protein for human consumption. In other words, he is trying to replace some of the very proteins he once spent his career perfecting, such as whey, egg and dairy proteins, with something that is dramatically more land efficient and lower impact on animals. In this conversation, we talk about why gorillas can thrive on raw leaves while humans can't, and how leaf is essentially doing that digestive or outside of the body so that humans can enjoy leaf proteins ourselves. We explore why leaf protein might become a fourth pillar in the global food system, alongside meat, dairy and seed based proteins like legumes, they are, yes, seeds, and we dig into what it's like to weave an established industry to build something fundamentally new, using the same engineering mindset, but aimed at a very different future. I'll let Ross tell you his story. Ross, welcome to the business for good podcast, perfect. Thank you very much for having me here today. Hey, it is my pleasure to have you. I'm very intrigued by this idea, because people talk about leaves as being the biggest source of protein, like the most abundant source of protein on Earth, but we don't eat leaves, right? I mean, we eat leaves in the form of, you know, kale or lettuce, but we don't consider it a protein source. And I've always wondered this, because you see, like all of these, like animals who eat lots of leaves, who are gigantic, right? Like a gorilla or a rhinoceros or an elephant, and obviously they're extracting protein from these leaves because they're, they're beasts, right? Though, they are beast, but they're also, like, really muscular, but we can't our intestines are not the same as theirs, so we can't extract it. So is what you're doing at leaf Ross, kind of like you're just making, like, a gorilla's intestines outside of the gorilla and making it possible for us to get the protein from their protein source.
Ross Milne 3:58
Yeah, that's a pretty good summary, actually. So essentially, in a roundabout way, yes, we are. There's a high, large amount of really high quality protein that's sitting inside those green leaves. And what we're doing is figuring out how to open up those plant cells, open up the chloroplast, let the soluble protein, which is the protein that's interesting for humans. For monogastrics, let that soluble protein come out and then go through a series of processes which are isolating that protein so we can use it in food. So short answer, yes, okay, all right, you're creating it like a gorilla type digestion system. But my guess is that you're not using fermentation, right? So the gorilla is able to digest leaves and extract protein and become much stronger than us, and not because they have some isolation or fractionation or purification process, but because they have a fermentation process that breaks down the wheat, but you're not doing fermentation. It's more like a separation and an isolation process, is that? Right? Yeah, correct. So there's a whole lot of sort of mechanical, more mechanical type processes. Not dissimilar to imagine that you grab a bunch of spinach leaves, put them in your Nutribullet at home, blend those up, you get it into a liquid stream. Once things are in liquid stream, they're a lot easier to handle. And then we just run through a series of, as you see, a series of Fractionation processes that we can separate out the different parts, so we can separate out the protein, put that in one direction, take the fiber, put it in another direction, the carbohydrate. So we're trying to get those basic building blocks and separate out them, separate them out so we can use them for different types of foods or to go into different downstream processes, and our focus is really on isolating up that protein portion for human consumption. All right,
Paul Shapiro 5:48
maybe like, you need, like, it could be like leafed foods, but it could be like DBA, like, doing business as, like, Gorilla protein or something, you know, that is like, that makes it sound like you eat this, you're gonna be jacked, you know, man, like, Gorilla protein, or gorilla muscle, or something like that.
Ross Milne 6:06
It's funny. You say that gorilla gorilla protein was one of the brand names that was thrown around in the really early days. So yeah, so we definitely joked a fair bit about that. There's actually been quite a few, quite a few AI pictures generated over the years that have been stuck up around the around the office on the wall.
Paul Shapiro 6:24
Okay, cool. Well, you know, I'm saddened that I'm not the progenitor of this idea, but I do think it's a good one. All right, maybe some people listening have heard of Rubisco but I bet I haven't. What is it? Yeah.
Ross Milne 6:37
So rubiscos, firstly, it's actually the most plentiful protein on the planet. So it's a protein that's present in every green leaf as part of the photosynthesis cycle. So if you remember back to high school, you would have learned about the light side and the dark side of the photosynthesis cycle. Rubisco is a protein that sits on the dark side. Essentially, its job is to pull CO two in from the atmosphere and convert it into energy, into sugar so that the plant can grow. From a human nutrition point of view, it's often been referred to as the utopia protein. So it's this protein that has an amazing essential amino acid profile and is highly digestible in the human gastric system. And so that makes it incredibly interesting. There's been a lot of research to it into it since probably the 1940s people have hypothesized about this protein. It's used in the food industry. It's used for human nutrition. The big challenge has been how to isolate it, how to get it out of those green leaves, and that's quite a complex process. There's a lot of sort of enzymatic reactions that start to take place when you open up those those plant cells. So maybe think about it in terms of when you bite into an apple, you get that polyphenol oxidize, you get that browning of the apple. It happens really quickly. Happens within a minute or two, and that Browning is actually an enzymatic reaction. The same thing happens when you take green leaves and you tear them apart, you allow all of these enzymatic reactions to start to take place. And because this is a really highly soluble protein, it's also quite susceptible to many of those reactions. And so as soon as you do that, you're sort of in this race against time to to separate out the protein before those mostly detrimental reactions start to take place. They're sort of same kind of reactions that take place when those plants start to decompose. So that's, that's the challenge, that's the job to do. Interesting.
Paul Shapiro 8:42
You know, I, I have eaten a few times the Arctic Apple. Have you heard of this? Ross, this is, yeah, it's like the bio engineered apple that doesn't brown, like they've gene edited the apple, I think, in order to not brown when you can cut it up and leave it on the counter for hours. Would that help this process? Like, would that actually would, would bioengineering some plant to produce leaves where that didn't happen? Would that actually be beneficial for you?
Ross Milne 9:05
Probably would, yes. Look, we this is a non GMO process, so we don't make any modifications to the to the plant. So we're working with our raw material. Is a plant called alfalfa. It's grown pretty widely in the agricultural system, and that's our starting point. It is an interesting question. Actually, before we even get to that point of making those kind of modifications, there's a lot of work to be done just to understand the raw material, understand those fractionation processes. So we don't need to is the answer. And so that's the path that we have taken. But it opens up Interesting, interesting opportunities for Fractionation, either of the protein or of other compounds. Why alfalfa? Well, I like when people talk about leaves, they're thinking about trees or bushes, like you would imagine taking their weeds off of a tree. Tree. There's a lot more greenery there than there is in a tiny little plant. So what is it about alfalfa that makes it more attractive for you? Well, actually, if you think about alfalfa, so think about green leafy crops, you know? So alfalfa is this amazing plant that grows, that's already grown widely in our agricultural system. It has a really interesting history, actually, which is a bit of a side note that we can dive into. But when we think about how much food you can produce per hectare of land, there are a number of sort of green leafy plants that we could work with. Alfalfa always stands out as one of the best. And this is because we can grow, we can simply grow a lot of alfalfa per hectare of land. We can grow about, you know, 18,000 kgs of dry matter per hectare of land. We can grow about 5700 kgs of protein per hectare of land. With that alfalfa system.
Paul Shapiro 10:57
It sounds impressive, but I would imagine that most people would have no idea what that means, compared to, I'd say, growing soybeans or any other proteinaceous crop, right? So, if you think about,
Ross Milne 11:07
yeah, compared to dairy system, right? If you think about a dairy system, because when we think about dairy, we think about it being a pretty highly efficient system. Is the comparison you're growing, you know, it does about 1200 kgs of dry matter and about 500 kgs of protein. So there's 5700 per hectare of land compared to 500 you know, that's the difference. This is a step change in efficiency per hectare of land, per land area. So, and that is the really transformational aspect of this, of really high quality protein. There's another couple of cool things about alfalfa, so it's actually a legume, which means that it fixes its own nitrogen, so we don't require nitrogen fertilizer. It has a really deep taproot, so in areas where it's quite dry and arid up on the top of soil, but there's water further down then. This is an amazing plant to work with, because that taproot can go down and find water. We've got our fava that's been planted for only about a year and a half now, and it already has a tap root that's two or three meters deep, which is quite incredible. Is this a perennial or an annual? Like, are you that's a perennial? That's that's probably the coolest aspect, right? We're talking about a perennial. So it just, you plant it stays in the ground. You don't require cultivation each year. You're not turning over that soil. You're not losing soil carbon. And so you just almost, think about it, maybe not quite the right analogy, but think about it mowing your lawns, you know, just it's it grows out. We come along, we harvest it. It grows again. We're harvesting it about eight times a year, and we're harvesting it in that really sort of lush vegetative growth stage, and that's where there is a large amount of this Rubisco protein per kg of plant matter. So that's where that plant is really maximizing its photo. Since this is going right, I need to, I need to get as much energy as possible. I'm trying to grow quickly. That's when we harvest it. And are you actually growing these like as leaf growing it? Are you just purchasing alfalfa from farmers who grow it? We just work with with growers. So there's a, there's a lot of growers that have grown alfalfa, but has previously been grown to feed into livestock. And so there's a huge amount of understanding and experience and sort of, how do you grow that? How do you grow that plant? How do you how do you manage it? How do you optimize it? How do you make sure that it comes away as as as good as it can, etc. So that experience is sort of decades of experience that sits with our growers. So we work with the best growers here in Canterbury, which is where we're based, and we then, you know, they're obviously selling that material to us. Okay? And so you get that material right? You get the dried alfalfa. You're going to fractionate it. You're going to isolate that Rubisco protein out of there, which I presume is where your technological moat stands, right, like getting it out in a way that it still makes it easily utilized by a human intestinal system. But what do you do with it? You have protein, is the goal of it. You said, hey, it's more efficient than dairy. I love to know, as compared to maybe soybeans. Is it more efficient than that? But also, yes, yes. What do you do here? Well, you have a protein. Are you putting it in? Is it designed to replace whey protein in a smoothie? Are you looking to make plant based meat with it? Is it like? What is this protein actually intended to do all of that and more? And maybe there's a yes, it's more efficient than soy as well. There's, there's an interesting there's, probably, there's two aspects to this business, one, which is that front end that we just talked about, which is system efficiency. Could you create a food production system that is, you know, a step change in efficiency compared to what we have today? So one thing is, right, okay, we. Produce a lot more protein per hectare of land. That's That's pretty amazing. And now to your second question, okay, tell us about that protein. You know what? What is it? And maybe one of the most exciting things for us in this journey is that we, we've got a protein which happens to be a plant protein, but from a from a performance point of view, if we talk about nutrition, it's actually beating everything else that we have in the food industry today. And I'm talking about animal proteins and plant proteins. Oh, yep,
Paul Shapiro 15:39
let me double click on that for you. Ross, so when you're talking about it beats out these other proteins. Like, normally people think about like, protein digestibility. They may think about like a Diaz score, a PD CAS score, which is basically a measurement of, like, how complete is the protein, how digestible and usable is the protein that you're consuming. There are many foods that have a 1.0 right on that score, which is the highest you can get. So some strains of soybeans, egg whites, whey, even the mycoprotein that is grown by corn, that's Q, U, O, R, N, they all claim a 1.0 you're saying that you're better than any of those. Like, how does that square? Like, how do you get to be better than than what is perfect on the pdcaas score? Yeah, so
Ross Milne 16:18
this is this great question, right? So there's a couple. Let's layer this up. So firstly, we've got a complete protein, right? Then we can look at, as you said, digestibility. We've got a pdcas score of one. So that means that, you know, it is completely digested. We'll come back to digestibility just a little bit more in a second. But the other aspect, which is the typical measure, is essential amino acid profile. So what is the profile of those amino acids that our body doesn't produce itself, that we need to have from our food. And on that score, we're sitting above whey protein and egg white protein as an example, which are which have been the gold standard. You know, they have always been for for decades, been the gold standard up until now. So that's incredibly exciting. Maybe in addition to that, when we go back and just touch on digestibility, we run something called infogest, which just looks at how is that protein digesting and in which which phase in our digestive system, and we see that our protein is digesting about five or six times faster than other proteins on the market today, you know, other animal proteins, and that's in the gastric phase. So what's in our gastric phase? We've got an enzyme called pepsin. It's, it's once it's, you know, its job is to start to break down that protein so that our into peptides, into amino acids so that our body can absorb them. And it turns out that Rubisco is very susceptible to that, and meaning that our body finds it quite easy to break down this big globular protein into little amino acids, and does it incredibly efficiently and incredibly quickly. And so we can start to think about, what does that mean in an application such as performance sports, if you are able to break down those proteins and get them into your bloodstream faster, that offers, that clearly offers some Advent, some advantages in terms of repairing and building muscle, interesting.
Paul Shapiro 18:13
So I don't know anything about the speed of protein digestion. I know a little bit about the speed of carbohydrate digestion, which I know we want to be slower, right? You don't want a massive rapid spike from like refined carbohydrates, is that it has a negative glycemic impact. But you're saying rapid digestion of protein is actually favorable. You don't want a slow and sustained digestion. You want it rapid. That's that's what
Ross Milne 18:36
you're saying. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And these things always dependent on, on application with our with our consumer product we're really targeting, you know, kickstarting the day, having one of these products when you wake up in the morning and
Paul Shapiro 18:53
and actually using protein before and during exercise. So quite often, protein is reserved for after exercise. So what happens if you have the ability, from a format point of view, to start to include protein before a training session, you know? Can you trigger muscle protein synthesis, which is the repeat, you know, the building of muscle tissue? Can you trigger that much, much earlier, and take advantage of that window, which is typically called, like a dead zone, where you would be not building any, any, any muscle. And so that's the unique opportunities that we could start to explore and think about when we use Rubisco protein as the starting point. Okay, really interesting. Yeah, I know, for you know, people who lift weights, they want to consume protein shortly thereafter, because there's this belief there's like an anabolic window, and if you don't get protein within that window, you may be whizzing out on some gains. How true that is? I don't know. I think you have modern, modern methods may suggest otherwise. I don't know that to be true, but it may be true. But you're saying you want to actually get some of this Rubisco protein in you beforehand. That's interesting. So you're making a case, Ross, that the protein. Protein is good for people who are like real serious athletes, who don't want to miss out on any muscle hypertrophy at all. But I'm presuming that you're viewing this as more than just a protein supplement for athletes, right? Like you're thinking about this much wider you said it, you said it's much more than what I was suggesting. So what else is it like? So you might have something that's way more efficient, way more sustainable, than whey protein, which is typically what like muscle building athletes use. But you're saying it's not just a whey protein replacement. What else is it doing?
Ross Milne 20:29
So if we think about the food industry, there's there's applications where we're just focused on nutrition, and then actually, many of the applications in our food industry are for protein is actually to enable a texture or a certain characteristic. So if we think about you, know, you were touching on on egg white or eggs, right? So their job inside bakery is actually to to create structure, right? They have the ability to to whip, to aerate, and then upon baking, they hold that structure. And that's what gives us our nice, fluffy pound cakes, for example, or, you know, going into a pavlova. And so what the other aspect of Rubisco is, when it's sitting inside, if we go all the way back to the start, right inside that plant cell, inside the chloroplast. It is a protein that has a job. It's a big globular protein that's sitting in a soluble state. And that starting point actually means that it sort of acts and looks very much like an animal protein. And these are these animal proteins that typically allow us to form structure. So the example there of egg into baked goods, or think about milk proteins making a yogurt or a cheese. And so Rubisco exhibits many of those properties as well. It's a highly, functional. And in this sentence, when we say functional, we're meaning food functionality. So we're saying when you apply heat to it, it has the ability to form a gel type structure which generates texture into a yogurt, for example. When we put it into a milk and whip it or aerate it. It causes a lot of foam. It foams a little bit like egg white foams. So we can make a plant based milk that has amazing foam characteristics, from a foam density, but a sheer amount of foam, either into a milk going into a coffee, or even in a cold, a cold foaming application, like a frappuccino at a Starbucks. And so this is actually how proteins become more mainstream across the food industry, is their ability to cause textural change in various applications. So this is a protein at the end of the day that we're going to see down the bakery aisle, down the dairy aisle, in binding agents and meats, for example. And so that's what allows us to really scale. And so that's the kind of build on top of amazing nutrition. Then it's this functionality piece.
Paul Shapiro 23:12
How interesting. It makes me wonder, Ross, why you're doing this. So you you know, if you look at the CEOs of a lot of the like, so called Sustainable protein companies. A lot of them are vegans. They're environmental activists. And like, oh, I want to find some way to replace egg proteins and dairy proteins and meat proteins. You're an engineer who comes from a long history in the dairy industry, right? You're not coming from, like, some one of these, like animal rights organizations. You're coming from the dairy industry. And this entire time you're saying, Well, we're going to replace whey protein and egg protein, and we're going to put it in meat. Like it's a very different view. So what happened that you decided, after a career, a prestigious career, is an engineer in the dairy industry, and you're like, you know, actually, I think I want to replace dairy. What happened?
Ross Milne 23:56
It's probably not so much almost, sit here and replace dairy. That maybe wasn't quite the starting point. It was. It actually started at the other end of the business. It started at a really systems thinking, how do we, how do we fundamentally create a food industry that is that is more productive and has a far, far lower environmental impact from a system point of view. And so that's where, that's where it all started. Actually, it's quite an interesting thing to sort of step back and think about our food industry on one hand, you know, it's incredibly complex, and what happens in these very, very large scale food manufacturing facilities that you're right? I spent, you know, a career working in them and designing and building them. It is really, really complex. But if you take it back to a raw material, our food industry is very, actually, very simple. You know, we grow green leafy crops. We feed those. We either feed those green leafy crops to to an animal, to a cow. Cow, and that cow produces, you know, either milk or meat. The other option is that you let that green leafy crop grow out and go to seed. Those seeds are then harvested, those seeds are milled, and you get, you know, your soy protein, pea, Father, etc, and the carbohydrates fraction that comes from that, and the oil fraction, and so actually, from a raw material point of view, you know, it's really simple, and if we want to, there's lots of talk really around, how do we change our food production system? And, you know, and why do we want to do that? We want to do that because we've got a growing population, and many of our current approaches have a massive environmental impact. And so the question becomes, from a, you know, you're right to call me out as you know, an engineer, from an engineering point of view, or a systems thinker point of view, well, that's the bottleneck. What would it look like if you changed the raw material, and what would you have to believe or achieve when doing that? And so that was the journey that we went on to to really lead us to hold on, if you just work with, you know, skip out the middleman and work directly with green leaves or the middle cow, yeah, the middle cow or the middle seed, or whatever, right? So, acidically in the plant, go to seed, just go directly to it, when it when it's in that green leafy state, or instead of waiting for the cow to process that green matter into something more usable, can we skip that out? So what happens if we just go directly to that source, which is the green leaves, that's the starting point for everything else. And how would we, you know, what opportunities would that create? And so that's in that that's challenging from a technical point of view. There's a lot going on. So you have all of those same building blocks that we look at downstream. All of those building blocks are in that green leaf, and that's a great from an opportunity point of view. It's also incredibly complex, right? So, yeah, you got 4000 different individual compounds sitting in that green leaf that creates a lot of complexity that you have to figure out how to, how to deal with. So that's, that's the sort of challenge and opportunity that sits when we, when we change raw
Paul Shapiro 27:17
material, yeah. Really like the way that you're putting that Ross, which is, you're basically growing crops, feeding them to animals who are going to eat them, and they can make a different use of it than we can, because they can extract all that protein, but you're basically replacing the animals and creating a process that is far more efficient, far more sustainable and far more humane, that can extract those nutrients without the animals, And then making it available to us. It's a very interesting way to to look at it, and I appreciate you putting it in that way.
Ross Milne 27:48
You've raised, from what I can tell, about 15 million US dollars for the company so far. Is that accurate? Yeah, a little bit more these days. But yes, that's that's accurate from some pretty amazing investors, both here in New Zealand and over in your part of the world, and
Paul Shapiro 28:03
in San Fran, every founder thinks their investors are amazing because they bet on them, of course. So you've raised approximately 15 million USD. How much do you need in order to be successful like you have a product, right? It's not widespread on the market yet, but how much do you need in order to actually start making the dent in the world that you want
Ross Milne 28:20
to make? It's a great question, right? This is real technology, you know, this is real tech.
Ross Milne 28:27
The cool thing about that is that you can actually make a meaningful change, you know, we can create, you know, essentially, a fourth leg to the protein industry globally. I firmly believe, like technology starts to take off, you'll see it. You'll see it used in multiple
Paul Shapiro 28:46
sorry, to interrupt you, Ross, you said a fourth leg? What are the first three legs? You got plants and animals?
Ross Milne 28:52
Oh, sorry. Think about in terms of meat, in terms of dairy, and then in terms of everything that comes from seed. So everything that comes from the soy or pea or Faber as a starting point, like those are there probably makes up about 65% of global calories those three, three sources. And so we can really just think about going directly to green leaves as a fourth source. But the majority of our food industry, from an ingredient point of view, and a food manufacturing point of view. Really come back to those, those three as the key sources. Yeah, that's
Paul Shapiro 29:25
pretty cool. And for those of us, like myself who eat a lot of mycoprotein, we're also, you know, there's, there's another pillar there of getting microbial fungi into our systems, which are also pretty pertinacious. But, yeah, that's really cool. I like the way they were looking at that, as there's meat, milk and then basically plant proteins, or rather, like seed proteins, and you're talking about leaf proteins. I like that. So let me ask the question again. You're saying it's real technology, implying that you need real money in order to scale this. So if 15 has gotten you to where you are now, do you think you need another 15, another 100 and 500 million? Like, what? Is it that you need? Do you think over time until you know, I could go, realistically, to Walmart and need a product that has your Rubisco protein in it?
Ross Milne 30:08
It's actually an interesting question that probably comes, I suspect it comes a little bit from some of the old protein technology that we've seen over the past six or so years, we probably don't quite think of it in the way that you're framing up the question. We think this is not a business that requires significantly more investment to come down a cost curve. At this point in time, we have developed a process that we are running at what we call commercial demonstration so on real equipment, and we're able to produce our Rubisco protein already at a efficiency or essentially price point that makes it pretty competitive in the market. So the further investment is really to scale this, rather than to reduce manufacturing costs or prove out assumptions that give us a higher efficiency. And so that's probably a pretty important point of difference. And therefore, when we think about capital, it's just a direct correlation to how quickly we want to scale this and that capital will most likely come from various sources. So we can think about it in the sort of classic VC world for, you know, developed for for the early stage, I suspect that it quite quickly shifts to other forms of capital, from either existing food manufacturing businesses, where we can either utilize, you know, their capital or their process processing facilities, or just other forms of capital in terms of, you know, debt and the like. So Right? It's, it's probably more of a question of how quickly we should scale this, rather than how much money is required to scale it. I'm imagining that this is considered a novel food by many in many countries. You're nodding your head correctly. Do you have generally recognized a safe status in the US? Have you achieved, you know, regulatory approval in a variety of jurisdictions already. Yeah, so for our consumer product. So we've got a couple of things going on. We talked about the ingredients, and we talked about, we're talking about a consumer product, and I'm sort of flipping between them quite freely. The consumer product is really our, our first example of this protein and what it can do from a nutrition point of view. So that's the leaf blade product. You can actually buy that product in the US, so it's for sale. So yes, we do have FDA grass there in the US and are selling that that product. They're available from purchase on your website. Can you get it on Amazon? How do you get it directly on our website? So it's pretty early stage. So yeah, if you just go to left blade.com you can buy a subscription there, and you can be among some of the first people in the world to be trying, trying Rubisco, trying this protein. And my and I
Paul Shapiro 33:06
just want to make sure for listeners when, when Ross says, leaf blade, there's a T at the end of leaf, so it's not leaf blade.com it's leafed blade.com Correct.
Ross Milne 33:18
Check out our Instagram as well. And this is, this is a really exciting proposition, in terms of, you know that product is developed to exemplify nutrition, like, if you care about nutrition, this is the product that you should be buying. And we can expand on that, and in just a moment, if you like. So that's that's happening on their side, you can also buy that product here in New Zealand. So those are the two markets that we're operating in at the moment. Really just just getting going with this. That product is, to be honest, realistically, only been available in the US market since just before Christmas, and any we had a few samples up there earlier last year, but now we have some some meaningful volumes, so you can buy that product in those markets, and then we're flow. We're following through with our ingredient. You would have seen maybe in the media that we announced a partnership in the Japanese market. This is our ingredient, our pure, more purified, white robisco protein, which is highly functional going into the bakery category, among others, in the in the Japanese market. We're working pretty hard in the US market on that front at the moment, and then closer to home as well. And so we've got these two things going on which are actually very complementary to each other, the consumer product, making this this protein available, and the ingredient product, enabling us to work with other in other categories, with other food formulators, to bring them many of the benefits that we've talked about.
Paul Shapiro 34:49
Very cool, yeah, I did see we'll link in the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast.com both how you can buy it in the US and also your Japanese Partnership, which is very exciting. It must be a wonderful feeling after, I believe you've been at it for seven years now, to be bringing it and have your creation actually entering human intestines and building muscle for them, like it's gorilla muscle. So congratulations on on that, Ross and I would imagine both as an engineer and as somebody who's been a CEO of a startup now for the better part of a decade, you have a lot of ideas about other things that people could do, maybe to build a more sustainable food system, or maybe something else that's unrelated. I don't know. But if somebody's listening to you, Ross, and they're thinking, Oh, I really think this is cool. I admire what Ross is doing, maybe I should do something and start my own company. Is there an idea that you have anything that you while you're doing leaf today, you have some listener will do,
Ross Milne 35:44
yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a pretty long list of ideas that gets bantered around on whiteboards from time to time. Maybe I'll give one quite close to home, because it's quite it's quite challenging to kind of quickly state a whole lot of ideas that that sit tangential, but we touched on something here, which is, if we think about green leaves, there's 4000 roundabout individual compounds sitting inside those green leaves. We've spent the majority of this call talking about just one protein called Rubisco. We haven't explored any of those other opportunities. And actually, globally, there's been relatively little amount of research into how would we best utilize those other compounds. And these are things like all the way from pigments. There's a plethora of pigments there and how they might be utilized, either in the food industry or in other industries. Dietary fiber. We have large amounts of dietary fiber inside, inside those leaves that could be used directly for human nutrition. We've got a lot of bioactive peptides that sort of merge into the pharmaceutical industry or wellness industry, and so like that is a lot of things which might sound kind of very, very close to leaf and in many ways it is, but it probably just speaks to the amount of opportunity and the fact that, you know, as one company, we're focused on one aspect, I'd love to see other companies that are looking at some of the CO products that we produce and how to extract or generate further value from those co products, I think there's, there's just, yeah, so much excitement and opportunity in the space right now for somebody to to jump into. So the future is leaves, according to Ross Milne here, yeah, I think so, yeah. While you were talking, I had an idea for if you ever do a CPG brand, not the blade, but like, you know, protein powder, instead of leafy greens, you call it leafy gains.
Paul Shapiro 37:46
Like, easily show, like, you know, like some bodybuilder, maybe even a gorilla, like, eating a bunch of leaves or something, and with their arm, like Popeye eating Spanish, you know. So, yeah,
Ross Milne 37:55
I could be our ambassador. We joke about that affair, but they pretty good. I like you. I like your gorilla idea. We can maybe go into some more detail over a beer one day over on that one,
Paul Shapiro 38:06
I can't wait. And I'll tell you if you create or if somebody using your ingredient creates leafy gains, I'll be the first customer, I promise you. Finally, Ross, I imagine, as somebody who's been at this for some time, like you have that there have been a number of resources that have been beneficial for you. Is there anything you'd recommend that other people check out that might be beneficial for them if they're thinking about trying to implement some cool idea in the world?
Ross Milne 38:28
Also probably one that sticks out for me. Anybody that's worked with me will sort of know this. You know, one of my big things is around velocity, particularly in teams. And you said something interesting, you've been at this for a while. You've been at this for nearly seven years, and that's true, but I would argue what we've achieved in that time is sort of similar to what it took the dairy industry 20 years to figure out how to generate highly functional proteins such as whey protein isolate out of out of milk. So in that regard, I say we work incredibly quickly. But it's always something that I'm that I'm focused on, how do you get teams to work faster and faster? How do you measure velocity, and how do you increase that velocity? So there's one book that stands out that is sort of can actually be read by anybody, whether it's a startup or not, which is scrum by Jeff Sutherland. It's probably, Gosh, 15 years ago that I read this book, but I still go back to it and and used at least on a daily or weekly basis. I used key things out of there that that I learned. I'll have to check it out. We'll link to that book scrum by Jeffrey Sutherland on the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast.com
Paul Shapiro 39:55
and I hear you on seven years being a very short amount of time. It's. Long amount of time. You know, it's like a maybe a 10th or maybe a little bit less of your life, depending on how long you plan on living. But I was thinking about, I mentioned corn and mycoprotein earlier. And, you know, it's wild to think about, they started that research in the 1960s right? They didn't commercialize until, like, the 90s, and so, you know, it's like this overnight success story that was like three decades of R and D before they ever made any money from it. So yes, good ideas, especially that are above a lot of technology, take a lot of time. So I look forward to eating some leafy gains and getting getting a little bit more jacked because of the Rubisco that leaf foods is growing. Ross, so I appreciate all you're doing. I admire the trajectory that you're on, and I'll be rooting for your success.
Ross Milne 40:46
Thank you very much.
Paul Shapiro 40:47
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