Katrina Spade is on a mission to offer a better way to deal with human corpses, and it involves a process called natural organic reduction. It’s essentially a fancy way of saying she’s invented a method of accelerated composting for your body. Rather than cremating your corpse, which involves substantial pollution, and rather than burial, which typically means sealing your body off from nature with concrete liners, hermetically sealed caskets, preservatives in your body, and more, Katrina wants to turn your body into healthy, rich soil, within just one month.

Radical Plastics is essentially asking the question: what if all that plastic lining our highways or floating in the ocean would actually biodegrade? That’s the promise of the technology that they’re pioneering. They’ve discovered a mineral concoction that when added during the manufacturing of conventional plastic—at even less than one percent—will eventually convert that plastic into food that microbes will recognize and eat.

For the past 2+ years, I’ve often said that I may be the face of our company, but Doni is the backbone, serving as our Executive Vice President and overseeing all of our operations and logistics. She’s truly integral to the enterprise, and in this episode, Doni shares her secrets about what she’s looking for in job applicants, what the transition from nonprofit exec to scrappy startup has been like, how she thinks about compensation packages in Startupland, and more.

Mitchell Scott is the CEO of The Very Good Food Co., the world’s second plant-based meat IPO. The company has seen substantial success since its flotation in the Canadian stock market in 2021. The Very Good Food Co. designs, develops, produces, distributes, and sells a variety of plant-based meat and other food alternatives.

Meet Deborah Torres, founder and CEO of Atlas Monroe, a start-up making plant-based fried chicken. As you’ll hear, a chance encounter with a stranger in a supermarket led Deborah to become vegan, which ultimately transitioned her whole family into a plant-based lifestyle.

Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink is Head of Product Impact at Google.org, where she leads initiatives that leverage emerging technologies and Google’s expertise to address global challenges. She is currently focused on how AI can be used for social impact through efforts like the $25M Google AI Impact Challenge.

Enter the Material Innovation Initiative, a relatively new nonprofit organization started by veterans of the animal welfare and animal-free food space. Their goal: to be the Good Food Institute of animal-free materials, helping to attract investment and entrepreneurial activity to build a new industry of animal-free fur, leather, silk, and more.

Mélanie Broyé-Engelkes is the CEO of Ananas Anam, makers of Piñatex. It’s a leather alternative that’s made from the leaves of the pineapple plant, which are typically considered an agricultural waste product. These upcycled leaves are converted into a functional and luxurious-feeling material that can be used for everything from shoes to handbags, and more.

As you’ll hear in this interview, Jim has little hope that humans will give up eating meat, so he’s betting instead on simply making meat without the animals. In this conversation we discuss when he thinks such clean meat will be price comparable to conventional meat, whether price parity is sufficient, where he sees white spaces, and more.

Monica was born into the seafood industry, and for years has been running her family business, Van Cleve’s Seafood, from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. But as you’ll hear in this conversation, a series of events led her to start experimenting with plant-based seafood recipes. And while it’s no longer major news for conventional meat companies to develop plant-based lines since so many are admirably already now doing that, Monica announces in this episode something far more inspirational.

What if we could take a lot of trash and seed it with fungal cultures that would eat it and render it no longer toxic within just a few weeks rather than having to wait centuries? That’s exactly what Mycocycle is planning to do, and we’ve got their CEO, Joanne Rodriguez, on the show to talk about it.

Peter Singer is an author and ethicist, and has been routinely called the most influential philosopher alive. He’s widely credited with kickstarting the modern animal protection movement with his 1975 mega-bestseller Animal Liberation, and with popularizing what’s now called the effective altruism movement through his early writings on poverty and more recently with his 2009 book The Life You Can Save.

As you’ll hear from company CEO Akash Bakshi, Your Choice started as an idea in a UC-Berkeley lab, ended up going through the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program, and is now a funded startup aiming to bring new contraceptive categories to market.

Brian Spears is the founder and CEO of New Age Meats, making meat from animal cells instead of animal slaughter. Previously, he spent eight years as co-founder of Sixclear, creating software and products to automate the research labs and production environments of customers such as NASA, Cisco Systems, Sandia National Labs, and GE Healthcare.

David Breslauer is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Bolt Threads. He leads technology innovation at Bolt, creating and incubating biomaterials for improved consumer products. His obsession with biomaterials began with graduate research on silk during his Bioengineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and UCSF.

In this episode, we talk with Adam Grogan, an executive at Maple Leaf’s plant protein division Greenleaf Foods. We’re also joined by the company’s Chief of R&D, Jitendra Sagili, a meat industry veteran who’s in charge of a team of 90 food scientists, many of whom are working to innovate the best new alt-proteins for the meat-eating consumer.

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.

In this episode we talk about Kristie’s transition from the world of charities to the work of building a company aimed at helping animals. We also discuss how Rebellyous Foods intends to bend the cost curve of plant-based meat and what they’re doing with the $12 million they’ve raised from venture capitalists so far.

Susan Stone is CEO at Ubiquitous Energy. She has been a longtime board member and investor in the company. Prior to joining Ubiquitous, she was the founder and CEO of Sierra Wasatch Capital, an early stage venture capital firm, and managed early stage investing for Riverhorse Investments, Inc.

Chris Bryson served as the founder and CEO of Unata, an enterprise software provider (acquired by Instacart in 2018) that powers the eCommerce & digital experiences for major grocery chains. Recognized as the 52nd Fastest Growing North American Tech Company (PROFIT 500 2016), Canada's #2 best small business workplace (Great Place to Work 2017), and one of Canada's Top 20 Most Innovative Companies (CIX Awards 2016).