Is Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome friend to the 103rd episode of the Business for Good podcast. If you're just joining us for the first time, welcome, and as you can imagine, there are 102 nearly entirely evergreen back episodes just waiting for you to enjoy. So after you're done listening to this episode and have of course left your five star review on iTunes.

Go check out the back catalog because there are so many inspiring stories that we have already told. But first, this is another inspiring one for sure. Just about 20 minutes away from where I work in Sacramento at The Better Meet Co. A company that many used to know is Joy but recently changed their name to ubi.

Has now raised 40 million since its inception to create a new type of sweetener based [00:01:00] on precision fermentation. I got to visit U'S office and lab in Davis just before they raised a recent 25 million series B financing round, and I got to taste all types of food made with what they call their sweet protein.

And then just this past week, their ceo, Ali. Kind enough to offer me a few bars of chocolate sweetened with that protein, and I can attest that it was indeed delicious and you would never know that it had 70% less sugar than a conventional chocolate bar. Everyone at the better miko who tried them felt the same.

They loved it. And as you hear in this episode, you too might get a chance to love it because. Uwe expects FDA approval to start selling their sweet proteins soon. So go to their website, which we will link to at business for good podcast.com, and get on the pre-order list for the world's first ever protein sweetened chocolate bars.

Okay, so what are we talking about anyway? We all know already that. Eating too much sugar. It's just not good for us. But millions of years of evolution led us to love sweet foods. After all, they provide us with a quick [00:02:00] boost of energy needed in an ancestral environment where we were largely active all throughout the day.

But needless to say, today, most of us in the developed world are far from being active all day, yet we still crave sugar. And we eat it in an abundance far greater than what was available to our distant ancestors from whom we descend. There have been plenty of attempts to create sweetness without the negative effects that go along with eating the refined sugars.

We seem to love so much from order products like Asper Tame to newer ones like Stevia or Allulose. A pot of gold awaits those who can help humanity satiate our sweet. Without contributing to the health crises that we now face. To that end, we are talking this episode with Uwe, c e o, again, Ali Wing, about her company's efforts to commercialize the world's first sweet Proteins.

Yes, you heard that right? Sweet proteins. So how do they create a sweet protein? As you'll hear Allie describe in this episode, . Some plants naturally produce proteins that happen to be sweet as an evolutionary trick. Now, it would be difficult to mass produce those [00:03:00] plants, but via microbial fermentation, UBI has figured out how to produce the bioidentical proteins themselves.

So rather than using. Refined carbohydrates to sweeten our food, we can simply use these proteins. It's an exciting way to sweeten the food industry without turning our health sour. I let Allie tell you the story of how she and her team at Uwe intend to make your life and your health a little bit sweeter.

Allie, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.

Ali Wing: Good morning, Paul. It's great to be here.

Paul Shapiro: It is really nice to be talking with you as somebody who is a bird lover, I must say. I love that your last name is Wing. I am envious. I think it's like a really cool last name to have. Has that influenced at all your way of thinking about winged animals on the planet, that you have a last name of wing.

Ali Wing: I don't, not probably about birds, but I will say that it's, it is a cool name of co course of which I can take no credit for lines of passenger. It gets a lot of great nicknames. My dad was wininger, I was winglet. I'm only about five foot [00:04:00] one, so I always got the little versions. I. Column in journalism in high school.

So yeah, it has lots of good uses.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Very nice. So when people hear my last name, like if they know anything about Shapiro, they'll know this guy is a Jew. But if people hear wing, what does that tell you anything about where you're from or anything like that?

Ali Wing: It is actually, it's a great question. Until somebody meets me, and depending on the part of the country, most people assume I will be Asian American. And if you. I only know this courtesy of one of my grandmothers, which was a genealogist. But if go back to the 14 hundreds when China was under the British crown, it does come out of knighthood and there's a very small, my dad's side of the family is very British.

It's a small British family that was a given name in England. But it does have Chinese origin of course for me, not biology. But it was through knighthood and during that time of how they made.

Paul Shapiro: Wow, so interesting. So are you the descendant of some type of royalty

Ali Wing: No, I don't think so. I think the way the names were often given was if you did something great, right? [00:05:00] You weren't necessarily wealthy. It was a way recognized. And somehow that name was passed down. And so you'll a lot of Chi Chinese and Chinese American wings, but there is a very small line of British wings and I'm one of those,

Paul Shapiro: Cool. Let's talk about your company taking flight here with Ali Wing at the helm. So I am really eager to chat about Uli, which was before named as joy. And before that was miraculous actually. You can talk about why all these name changes perhaps, but I got a chance to tour into taste your products, which are absolutely spectacular.

So we're gonna be talking all about that. I want to uh, definitely get into that. But before we do that, let me just hear from you, owie, in your own words, like what does the company do? What's the premise of Uwe?

Ali Wing: U'S reason for being is to use sweet proteins from nature and the marriage of precision fermentation and offer for the first time a great tasting game-changing healthy solution for giving us our sweet [00:06:00] tooth. And it ultimately can act as a rehabilitation solution for sugar and the role of sugar in our foods.

Paul Shapiro: What's a sweet protein like normally people think of sweet, they think of carbohydrates, so what's a sweet protein?

Ali Wing: Sweet proteins are a protein. So they're not a carbohydrate, they're not a sugar. They just are a protein, but they're these incredible little results of evolution that date back to. . We think human evolution and they've been found in places like West Africa and Eastern Asia where there were plants typically berries or fruits that were, grew in really hard to reach places and hard ecosystems, the type of ecosystem we wouldn't wanna go in and do anything agricultural and today, right?

They're the precious ones we need to protect. And they were, they evolved to actually start. Have a protein that really is a trickster protein to trick the T1 and R one taste receptors in our mouth. That is how we experience sugar because they needed to figure out a way to fit, to have a more calorically efficient way to attract [00:07:00] only large primates to come eat them and spread their seeds or they die.

And they became extinct. And actually it's really expensive for a plant in a difficult ecosystem to carry carbohydrates for sweetness because they need to use all of that energy for photosynthesis. And they found, they evolved to have this one protein that would actually trick you to think it was gonna be yummy and give you energy.

It was a dirty trick to the primates back in the early days. And it's the perfect solution for a world where we weren't really physically designed to have sugar recklessly abundant. And that's how it is in our diet today.

Paul Shapiro: Fascinating. So it's basically takes, it's more metabolically taxing to the plant to produce carbohydrates than proteins in that particular case. So it produces a protein that is sweet so that we or our ancestors would eat it. But what type of plants are these? You said they're berries. Like what type of berries that we know of have sweet proteins?

Ali Wing: So one of them is where you'll certainly see the association of the inspiration of our new name, ULI. It's the Uli Fruit protein the U.

Paul Shapiro: Ah, good. You're, I'm so glad you're, I was wondering, what does [00:08:00] this word mean? Is it a made up word or not? But there's a fruit. There's a plant called Uli. That's right.

Ali Wing: Technically our name is made up, but it is inspired by one of the Sweet proteins origins, which is the Uli fruit. And that there's a great sort of folkloric story of the villagers that used to eat this fruit. And they said it would taste so sweet, they would forget. The children would forget their mother's milk.

And that's the era the history behind why we were inspired by this name. Cuz all sweet proteins act very similarly. Uli. Fruit is one miracle. Berry fruit is one. Katam fruit is one. We know about a dozen in the world today. We believe there's probably well over that. That's just what's been discovered.

And today at ULI on our Sweet Protein platform where we're actively researching, we have about seven of these proteins and they all come from different fruits and berries.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. And so these seven proteins are I presume, have some different functionality for them. Like why is it necessary that you have seven as opposed to just one.

Ali Wing: It's such a great question. We are unlocking [00:09:00] a lot of that. I think at first we didn't realize there were sweet proteins like years ago. This started to get researched in academia. And then we started to find them and we thought, oh, they're very similar. And we did find out they're about. each. Each one of these fruit proteins is about maybe 60% the same from a homology point of view, but about 40% differences.

Now they grow in different places and they're grown in different species. So each of these fruits or berries in different environments was trying to figure out a way to. Use a protein to trick us and trick an ape into thinking that it's sweet and they got there in slightly different paths.

The way that shows up when we think about using those today and harvesting them and making them a rehabilitation tool for food is they're like different tools in a toolkit because, What we see across the differences of those fruits and berries are maybe some things like one's more heat stable than another one will be more soluble than another.

Because they each grew out of certain ecosystems, right? So they probably only had certain needs to solve. And so that leads to why it becomes so exciting for us because. , [00:10:00] when you think about the world of food today, 70, 70 to 75% of all packaged foods today have sugar in them. So it's a lot of different types of food categories, and when you think about those, they're each supported by very different manufacturing processes.

So the combination of sweet proteins we're finding two really important things are true. One is they end up giving us a broader toolkit to. Sweeter substitution across a variety of formats or manufacturing needs. And two, we found, and we don't exactly understand why this is true, but we're really excited about it on their own.

Any one protein seems to reduce the sugar without, and again, I'm assuming here you don't change the taste. By about 70%. So say you have your favorite thing and we've taken out the sugar and we've put it in sweet proteins, without making you aware of any taste change I can get about a 70% reduction.

What we're seeing is when we work across multiple proteins, we can usually get that closer to 90%. Our theory on why that's true [00:11:00] is really just that each of these, fruits and berries were working on their own in nature trying to solve this problem of tricking our T one and R one taste receptors to think it's sweet so they could trick an ape to be their lifeline to survival and have them eaten.

The reality is they each came up with slightly different solutions, and so they're complimentary to each other in rounding out what is a relatively complicated association between our brain and our love of sugar, right? It's a pretty fine tuned instrument, if you will.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, so let's chat about that. Cuz there's lots of ways to try to replace the conventional sugar that we have in our diets now, right? And so just take Stevia as an example, which is supposed to be this I'm not sure if it's zero calorie or just low calorie sweetener that you can utilize. And I'd love to hear, why what you're doing you think is preferable to Steve.

But the first question I have is like, how are you making these proteins because you're not. The fruit, you're not growing the miracle berry. You are using biotechnology to create the same proteins that are in [00:12:00] those plants. And I'd love to know like why you're going that route. Because with stevia, we now have large numbers of acreage devoted to growing stevia, and that's then going into all of these sodas and other candies and things like that.

So sweeten things that don't have the same metabolic impact that canned sugar, let's say has, but you're not trying to grow Uli fruits. You're trying to just make the proteins that they. Why wouldn't it be easier just to grow the fruit?

Ali Wing: That's a great question. I'm gonna answer that two different ways. So let's talk about it versus Stevia or any other small molecule solution in a minute. Before I go there, let me explain what it is we're doing. You are right. We don't have an agricultural step. We are however har using Nature identical dna, n a.

So we, there are people in the world, of course, in biotechnology today that can design d n A to accomplish some of this. What we see as a consumer demand is to keep it as nature identical, as pro as possible. And so we are choosing, partly we are choosing because that's what we think consumers want. Two, we are actually think they're really remarkable as they're found in nature [00:13:00] already.

And then we actually. Teach use yeast, pick you yeast. In fact, in our precision fermentation environment, and we teach our yeast how to produce that protein, when the consumer has the in product, it is the same d n a that was found in nature because our yeast is actually, we'd strain the d n a out of it, a powder, almost like a, a little packet of sugar at the end of it.

And that's just the DNA n that would've been found in nature in a plant that carries a sweet protein. The reasons to do that. Let's talk a couple about 'em and then go back into how are we different than so many choices today for alternatives to sugar, whether they're plant-based or otherwise. But the biggest, let's start with just the planet.

These are not, these are naturally occurring in places that we do not need more interruption, and we would consider them all precious ecosystems, number one. Number two, they only grow one tiny little protein. So from an agricultural point of view, There would never be a way to agriculturally grow them and make them mass accessible as a solution without kind of an [00:14:00] agricultural nightmare, right?

That would be really inefficient even if you could grow enough. So obviously that's one of the great gifts of precision fermentation and why you see so much excitement about the category. We do believe we can work with nature identical, d n a but get at it in a way that we can ultimately make this accessible.

And the way we define accessibility is this is a global issue about sugar. And we know the only way you're ultimately gonna get that change is if you can make it cost competitive with sugar, which is a commodity price, right?

Paul Shapiro: So what you're suggesting is that by doing microbial fermentation, you think that you can become more cost competitive, let's say, than growing stevia or other sugar alternatives that are out there today.

Ali Wing: We we definitely know we can. And here's a couple reasons and we think about it mostly versus sugar because that's actually the lowest price of all the choices today. But so you could bucket in all of the sugar alternatives. And it's really. For three reasons. One is the gift of sweet proteins.

Sweet proteins on a weight basis compared to sugar are 2000 to 5,000 times [00:15:00] sweeter. So a little goes a very long way. When, I'll give you the example, if we had a 16 ounce orange Fanta sitting on a desk between us, I could tell you that there are 17 cubes of sugar in that. When we would replace it with a sweet protein we would put.

Point oh three to 0.04 milligrams of protein in it, so it's a very efficient solution for sweetness. The rest of course, just being water when it comes to drinks. Yeah, so that's amazing. The second is just fermentation. We're big believers that sugar's a really important crop in all its form.

But we also know it's a top 10 most harmful crop today because we grow so much of it. Cuz we all have pretty big, sweet tooths and probably nothing to actually feel bad about that we're biologically hardwired to crave sugar. , it's just that we weren't really intended to have it now recklessly available.

And we know that it's, sugar cane is listed as a top 10 harmful crop, mostly because of the amount that's produced to, to satisfy this growing sweet tooth that we have. What fermentation [00:16:00] allows us to do is actually to upgrade its role and make it an input into the process rather. In product and because you've got this efficiency of yield of proteins we can really bring those costs down and therefore the amount of production required.

The last thing we get to do with this by making fermentation the method as opposed to agriculture, is we can use whatever local sugar stock there is. So whether that's sugar cane in one part of the world beets in another, if it's corn in another, we can use any of that as an input. Which also allows you to open up this idea.

You can do local production.

Paul Shapiro: And just to clarify, so there's no confusion, you're not adding sugar to your final product. You're talking about using some local sugar source as the feed stock that you feed your microbes so that they then will produce the protein so you're not including that sugar as the final ingredient that you sell to the food companies.

Ali Wing: exactly. There's every fermentation process today uses a sugar feed stock. It just can change the yield needed to also have your sweet drink or your sweet candy bar, [00:17:00] whatever your choice is, right? So that's what I use.

Paul Shapiro: so first us on the Environmental Impact, there is a a really great book called Sugar, A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott, which I read and was highly impressed by. But it basically made the argument that. Sugarcane production has been particularly environmentally horrible for a long time, long before sugar became such a dominant global commodity.

And that basically even for folks who worked on sugarcane plantations, like in the colonial era, whether enslaved people or otherwise had much worse jobs than people who worked, let's say in cotton or rice. And she even says that the I can't believe people are keeping records of this, but apparent.

In the in the early era of the Americas, when we had sugar cane production here, the lifespan even of oxen, the lifespan of an ox on a sugar cane plantation was dramatically less than in other types of [00:18:00] plantation work. Just, it is just a really difficult thing to do. Of course there's major public health benefits associated with displacing sugar cane.

The environmental benefits other are, other benefits are pretty substantial. So I'm hopeful that you can do this via fermentation, but can you just explain Allie just briefly. Oh, and by the way I'll link to that book Elizabeth Abbott's book in show notes at business for good podcast.com for anybody who wants to check it out.

But can you just explain for those who. That familiar with microbial fermentation? Like people know that, if you feed, let's say sugar to brewers yeast, it's going to produce alcohol when you're gonna have beer or wine. People know if you feed sugar to baker's yeast, you're gonna get CO2 and it elevens your bread.

But what are you doing? Is there some natural yeast that creates this? Do you have to bio-engineer these microbes in order to produce the proteins? What is the actual biotechnology that UBI is engaged in here?

Ali Wing: I'll answer this as a c e O, not with my partner who is the cto O. So you don't have the technical lead here. And what I will tell you

Paul Shapiro: as a dumb c e o of another startup, I'll tell you I appreciate your ability to answer it. , I look forward to hearing what you [00:19:00] have to say.

Ali Wing: But I will say we use generally recognized as safe. So used in food and other fermentations all the time yeast called pia as our host yeast. And then there is a lot of the, what you and I would say is the biotechnology trade secrets around. Promoters and development in our strains to teach our yeast how to produce sweet proteins, whichever sweet protein we're working on.

And that is really just teaching it to react to it, to produce it out in a most efficient way as possible. And Paul, you probably know some of the people on the. Listening to us may or may not know that we talk about that in a biotech world as our titer sort of efficiency. How much do you actually produce of what you're trying to get out of every batch that you brew, if you will like wine or beer.

And that all happens with our strain development, which is the biotechnology application. And it's our instructor genes. They're, we think of 'em as our, the helper genes, the promoter genes that teach our host how to actually produce it. At the end of the day, once it's produced and you.[00:20:00]

Prepare the broth, you then dry it afterwards and you separate it. So everything that was in the broth, a lot like what in other types of fermentation is actually not, you actually separate out the Sweet Protein and it's a dried, separate powder on its own afterwards.

Paul Shapiro: So it doesn't need to be labeled as bio-engineered because the end product is just the bioidentical protein that the plants produce. You're not including the host mi microbe in there. Ki like how, most cheese today is produced with renit that does not come from calfs intestinal linings anymore, but rather comes from a synthetic biology process.

Where they have bio-engineered microbes that produce chime OFin or the enzyme that basically makes milk curdle so that you can have cheese that doesn't include intestinal lining in it anymore. But the cheese itself is not genetically engineered and doesn't have to be labeled as such because the end product, the chime OFin, is identical to that which would come from a capin intestine.

Ali Wing: That's right. That's exact. That's a great analogy. That's a great.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, so let [00:21:00] me ask you, Howie, oh, go on. Sorry.

Ali Wing: I wanna come back to your earlier question, if you don't mind, because you asked me how's it different, why is it important, or how's it different than whether it's STE or any sugar alternative. There's something really important that I think everyone will be excited to hear about Sweet Proteins and that's that it's.

Paul Shapiro: Cool.

Ali Wing: Sweet proteins evolved to be a trickster sugar, so they're really good at trickiness. So on one side of the equation, when you look at the last 20 some years of trying to figure out alternatives to sugar, I would argue that the single biggest thing that's ev evaded that market is taste, most people that are U eating something that's sugar. Intellectually, no. They've decided to have a trade off because it's a different taste for them because most of the things that are used for sugar alternatives today weren't designed for that. They're being used for that. Trickster proteins actually evolved to mimic the taste, so out of the gates.

That's a huge factor and it's a really huge factor when you think of this second point, because I don't think, without great taste it's easy to [00:22:00] get mass adoption. , but the reason I'm here and why I wake up each day and what I think the most important thing here is we have a global health crisis in diabetes, and obesity.

And while not the only culprit, a chief culprit is sugar and the amount we consume, our bodies just weren't designed for the amount. And what makes sweet proteins so different. , any of the sugar alternatives that you described? I don't know a single one that this isn't true for is Sweet Proteins are a protein, so they're a large molecule versus a small molecule.

All of the other ones, whether they're plant-based or not, that are small molecules are interacting with your metabolic system. Now they may do it in degrees that are different depending on the different solution but they're all having an impact. They're absorbed into the blood sugar system and they're interacting through your digestion with what has been our controls for how we produce insulin, and they're also interacting with your gut microbiome.

What we know about protein is it doesn't do that at all. Once you swallow it, it unfolds and it [00:23:00] digests. And our bodies, which are 50% the weight of protein, know how to digest protein very well. And even though they're designed to trick us to think they're sugar, they're really just functioning in our body as a protein.

Paul Shapiro: So let me ask you about I, I don't know anything about this, so I'm asking out of pure ignorance, not rhetorically. My understanding is that these foods, like Allulose and erythritol and so on, have no glycemic impact at all. Is that not true?

Ali Wing: The research there's a really interesting article and I can send it to you to make it available. It's medical research that just came out of France earlier this year, published in cell that's actually studying that in humans for the first time and still confirming that wow. Every there are differences of the amount that are, the amount of glycemic impact across these different sugar alternatives.

They are all still interacting with the glycemic system, and intuitively that makes sense to us in biology because they are a small molecule and the way they get absorbed in the system.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay, cool. I'm eager to to read that and yeah we'll include the, [00:24:00] a link to that at the show notes at business for good podcast.com also. I really look forward to that and e even if it is and I don't know this to be true, but even if it's so that Stevia or Allulose or other sugar alternatives today are fine for you, I still think it's a great idea to.

More and better ones coming out. So I'd be thrilled for sweet proteins to be in my foods, and that's where I want to go now because I've got to try these. I got to come to your office and see your fermentation system and taste the the protein fruit of your labor here, the protein, ACEs, fruit of your labor.

And it was really good. I certainly wouldn't have known the difference in, in trying them. And you admirably gave me back-to-back tastings too, so I could see what, what the conventional product tasted like, and I don't consider myself a sommelier of sweets here. I do think of myself as somebody who, pays attention to the food I'm eating, and it tasted good to me, so I really liked it.

So let's just ask, I, I see on your website that. People can sign up to order chocolate bars, but they don't look like they're available yet. So first, when can people start eating these [00:25:00] sweet proteins? And second is the business model that you have to create your own branded products that are sweetened by this.

Or do you intend to be somebody selling a B2B ingredient to other food companies to sweeten their products?

Ali Wing: So we'll start with the win. And the win is any day. We haven't technically announced our new products. You can sign up so we can let you know when they start to go on pre-sell. And that's mostly just because we're in the middle of the final part of an F d A process. We're really excited about all our results.

We're not surprised by our results cuz we know the history of proteins, but we have, we took a very sort of gold standard approach to making sure that this was really a safe category for consumers because. Not only is that the right thing to do to go through this process but this is our first protein to go through the whole process and we intend have our whole platform go through the process.

So we really wanted to be as aggressive as possible in testing every possible way that we could think about how might. Having sweet proteins become the substitute [00:26:00] alternative impacts somebody's health. And we're just thrilled and excited that we're in the dialogue we're in with the F d A which is, we have Jason, my partner, and c t o likes to say, we have this study of boring results, which is what you want in safety, right?

We definitely have the study of boring results which is we're thrilled about. So the timing thing is, I hope that you can get chocolate bars by Christmas, but I'm also. In the final steps with our F D a process right now. We've completed everything and now we're just waiting for their timeline of publication.

Paul Shapiro: A, and just to be clear, you're referring to the Christmas of 2022.

Ali Wing: I am.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, got it.

Ali Wing: chocolate on our side are sitting in inventory and ready

Paul Shapiro: Oh wow. Okay, Allie. I, if you happen to, be able to get one my way even before then, maybe I will eat it and discuss it in the intro of this episode. We'll

Ali Wing: I would be happy to do that. That would be fun.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. I already tried the products even without the FDA green light, so I, and I felt fine afterwards, so I don't, I, I don't mind assuming the risk

[00:27:00] Wow. That's exciting. That's really exciting. Now noticed in the ingredient deck on those Chaco bars, I was looking at it on your website. I didn't see nutrition facts, but I saw the ingredient deck and it was basically a combination. It appeared to me like was a combination of both coconut sugar and sweet protein.

So if these are so sweet why the coconut sugar.

Ali Wing: It's a great question. Remember at the, when I talked a little bit about what we found out about the platform as any one protein can without if we assume that the standard is we don't wanna change the taste for somebody, we can reduce the sugar by about 70%. But once we can start working with multiple proteins, we can bring it closer to 90.

We put a little bit of sugar in there. In order for you to get the immediate reaction, because one of the differences with a small molecule is they absorb in your bloodstream right when they hit your tongue. And with a sweet protein, they actually bind your T1 R one taste receptors. So in somebody's mind, and this will sound really short, but it's amazingly amazing how sensitive we are in our tongues.

It's a one to two second delay of that initial sweetness. So we put a little bit of sugar in there to avoid the delay. We notice [00:28:00] when we're working with multiple proteins that. Less than that. That's partly how we get to 90% sugar reduction. But we could give you a sugar free and a sweet protein only chocolate bar right now, but you'd be tasting it and thinking about it as a reduced sugar chocolate bar.

We actually think about our chocolate bars as an alternative to not a sugar reduced chocolate bar, but any one of your favorite full sugar bars. That's how sweet they are. They're just now with 70% less sugar in them.

Paul Shapiro: Cool so that chocolate bar that is advertised on your website today has 70% less sugar than a conventional like Hershey's chocolate bar.

Ali Wing: that's right. That's right.

Paul Shapiro: Oh, cool. I, is there a pathway to marketing this as an ingredient for consumers in the same way that, I can buy little packs of Stevia granules that I could put on like a meal or something is there a pathway to that, or is this gonna forever be an ingredient that's in a pre-formulated product?

Ali Wing: I think there is a pathway, but it's not a first step. And this kind of goes to your earlier question about will we make our own products only or will we [00:29:00] someday make this even available to businesses, let alone consumers, and the answer is both. But there's a sequence. We feel like it's.

Really important for consumers to get introduced to Sweet proteins. And so one of the most important roles of our own products is giving us an opportunity to have the conversation of introducing this concept of a novel protein that's sweet. That's frankly just a very new concept to consumers. What we like about that and what we think is important about that is when you look at the research around consumers today, 72% of consumers are actively working to reduce sugar in their diet and look at the last 20 years of health results and the health results would defy that.

The challenge is they've lost their way finding with sugar and sugar labeling and what it means to them. There's about 50 different types of sugar. So what I'm really excited about is not being in the abyss of that, but just removing it and. Here's a protein, and this protein gives you sweetness because what we also know is consumers already really trust proteins and with good reason because our bodies are really good at handling protein.

So an [00:30:00] important piece here with our own products is starting that education of how proteins can be a path to sweetness. That's a game changer for their bodies. And of course, then we believe for the planet as well. That's number one. Now, none of that means that we don't think we ultimately wanna make this available to partners.

And we are talking to partners, and actually we will talk about a couple of our first partnerships next year. The reason why we think we have to do both is the education for consumers we think is important and done with our own products long term. We think the business to business is important because, A reason I, Jason, my partner and I say we, we get up every day to work on this is really to, we're really here to try to tackle the global health problem.

And the only way to do that is to have this become an available rehabilitation tool for everybody. So I would say every business, I ultimately want them to have access to that. And then ultimately to your most recent question to consumers for sure. The reason we can't come out of the gates with just a sugar packet approach.

is. [00:31:00] Remember we talked a little bit about this, about the unique nature of sweet proteins? Sweet proteins are 2000, 5,000 times sweeter on a weight basis than sugar. So imagine a sugar packet and imagine you probably get what, maybe 150 little kernels.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. But you could have it on some carrier that is,

Ali Wing: right?

Paul Shapiro: Not gonna have any impact.

Ali Wing: So we just haven't decided to start to plan what will we put it on as a bulking to make that available to everybody, and that's why we, it's a hundred percent in the roadmap, but probably not our first step. Why we introduce to consumers this idea.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. And to the broader point about, let's say you're gonna create your own chocolate bar to compete against, I don't know. I, it sounds like you're not trying to compete against the Willys of the world, which is like reduced sugar bars, but rather you wanna compete against the Hershey's of the world the full sugar bars.

You guys at Uwe have great expertise in fermentation and biotechnology. Presumably the companies that market chocolate bars and sodas right now are far more expert at how to market [00:32:00] and in distribution and supply chain and everything else. If the goal were to get as much of your sweet proteins into as many as intestines and replace as much sugar as possible, I would think that having these type of partnerships, like what you're referring to, Allie, would be a pretty efficient way to do that.

So you guys focus on the biotechnology and let the big food companies worry about marketing and distribution and so on.

Ali Wing: Yeah, for sure. We're a sweet protein biotechnology company first, and we have a lot of that talent. Paul, you and I have. Met a couple of times and but I come from a career of consumer goods, , and I came into the biotech world to be their matching partner and the reason for that, and build out a team that is really good at building consumer education and relationship around a new concept that's disruptive to a market.

So we, I would consider us very different than probably a year ago, having that expertise in house. As an introduction to a new concept. And typically, if you look at most large industries when you really have a category defining opportunity and listen, sweet [00:33:00] proteins are new. There's this, our products will be the first ever on the market sweetened by sweet proteins.

Those are typically things that larger companies need to understand the consumer demand profile before they can go fast enough with it. So while there's a ton of interest to. Talk to an uli, work with an uli. Look at different sugar alternatives. Their businesses, as large businesses are more in the risk mitigation business, and they're not likely to go where they don't already feel like there's an absolute demand that this is my choice.

So important in this for us, is really establishing that understanding for consumers and pro proving the demand and ha actually helping the large con companies rationalize their movement to it. , which we believe ultimately will allow them to go faster and with more impact over time. And that's really the

That's why they're not an either or. It's really just a how and a win. We're doing both.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay, so let's chat about your own career trajectory then, Allie, because you mentioned that you've done some other things in the past prior to being the c e [00:34:00] O here and I noticed that you were. At Nike, you've done a lot of work at these big companies. You're now running a much smaller startup.

So what led you to want to go from the world of mass marketing to the world of running a tiny pre-revenue startup, and how has it been for you? What's been the culture change for you as to being in, in this new world for yourself?

Ali Wing: I did start my career at a large company, but the arc of my career, 70% probably of my time has been in growth companies growth or expansion. I grew up at Nike and I'm very feel very lucky for that in terms of probably one of the best of practices of how do you build a relationship with consumers.

Afterwards, I went out and spent the next 10 years in the Silicon Valley and I actually helped growth companies across mostly consumer and B2B technology companies solve sort of their problem with the consumer to drive growth. And then I actually was a founder and built a company that I sold about eight years later.

Paul Shapiro: Congratulations. What was that?

Ali Wing: a company was called Giggle and it was about healthy baby products.

Paul Shapiro: [00:35:00] Nice. Who purchased it?

Ali Wing: There was our. Product lines were all sold to a division of Lean Fung. Which again was years ago at this point. And that was part of our better basics line. And then we actually rolled out a big expansion with JC Penney.

And at that point I was moved on to do turnaround work and they were part of a retail rollup.

Paul Shapiro: Nice. Hey, congratulations. That's wonderful. So this isn't your first entrepreneurial rodeo by any.

Ali Wing: It isn't. But I will tell you, this is a, it is been a while since I've been back pre-revenue, and this is my first time in biotechnology, but it's my fifth industry. I've actually been in consumer products. I've been in retail, I've been in software as a service. I've been in healthcare technology, and now here.

What I will tell you is anybody I've, this is not my first time to work with our investors. And so they were the ones who introduced me back to Jason, our co-founder and team. And it was because I was in healthcare technology because I was really, Anxious to be figuring out the unlock for some of these large health issues.

I tend to be very [00:36:00] motivated by mission-based businesses. And I just started feeling like we were just too late when it's in our healthcare system, cuz our healthcare system is probably a stronger sick system than a preventative system. And so I started to have this thesis about the food role and how do we build data models around.

Things other than prescription compliance. And I got very interested in the food is medicine and of course that led me to what's happening in food tech and biotech. And I reconnected with the investors and we all agreed, wow, this is a very special intersection because this business will be made on consumer products.

Very much my background. Has a huge healthcare play because of the food isma aspect of sugar and diabetes. And then of course, like all great food tech working on the climate prog problem precision fermentation has a great planet play. So I feel very lucky that it's the trifecta for me of the things that have been important throughout my career.

And it's one of the few times where I get to do them all at the same time.

Paul Shapiro: That's definitely exciting. Congratulations on that. [00:37:00] And speaking of exciting, you all raised a 25 million series B round. You raised it in the midst of 2022, not a. Exactly the easiest time in the history of investments. So congratulations on that. So with that infusion of 25 million aie, what does that bring the total fundraising of the company up to?

And how are you gonna use all that new cash.

Ali Wing: The total fundraising. That was my first round since I've been at the company. And the investment to date's a little under 40 million. So that's something where we're The primary focus of this, we, when I came in I quickly realized what we needed to do to build the consumer proposition, to start that educational journey about this idea of a novel protein that's sweet.

And where we would wanna invest on three sort of axes. One is what do we need to do with our technology to start to drive? Some of our growth with automation, so we could be working on multiple proteins at once, not one at a time. So that's one big use of resources. The second is how will we build this sort of initial [00:38:00] relationship on a very advocate based direct to consumer model around teaching consumers on a target market, what sweet proteins are and what they can potentially do for our bodies and our food.

And then third is for the first time looking at ways to accelerate beyond any one protein acting on its own as a solution, but potentially looking at the impact of combinations of proteins. So there's a new element of our r and d and that's really where the focus of funds.

All of that is talent investment, as I am sure you can imagine and CapEx.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah, I speaking of talent, I noticed on your website you all have a team photo. It looked, I didn't count the people. It looked like you had about 30 people in at the company. Now I imagine you're gonna be growing that substantially with this new cash infusion. But I also noticed, Ali, that in your team photo, it's a typical team photo, right?

Normally in these company team photos, you have a bunch of people smiling at a camera. However, in the Uwe team photo you were standing in the middle, we wielding an ax. So tell me what is the intent to convey here by the c e o wielding an ax in the middle of the team?

Ali Wing: We were just [00:39:00] out doing a fun group event. And yeah, the team has grown. It's been a big growth. We're about 40 employees and about a year ago we were about 20. So this year has been a. Big expansion around sort of those three pillars, if you will. And honestly, it's just us coming together and having a good time together.

It's a very fun team

Paul Shapiro: Okay.

Ali Wing: position with our.

Paul Shapiro: All right. I was viewing it as, you're gonna slash through the company's problems or something that was like more more intentionally motivated for why have anx in there? But that's cool. I'll tell you a funny story. A woman who was our senior accountant for a while at the Better Meco was known for tracking people down who were going over their budget.

and her last name was Ali. And so I got her a hammer that, and engraved the hammer called the Ali Hammer. And so she could bring up this hammer that was Engraves, said that Ali Hammer, anybody was going over their budget and bring the hammer down on them.

Ali Wing: That's cute. I wish we were that creative with our aie. We honestly just had an, a throwing event and they all thought that was [00:40:00] a really funny thing to put that in my hands. So

Paul Shapiro: that's

Ali Wing: I did not win.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. It is good to have something memorable. Okay, so o obviously, Allie, this is very far from your first time being at the helm of a startup. It's far from your being your first time being engaged in some new and interesting marketing. But let me ask you, is there anything that's been helpful for.

Along this journey that you've had from working at big companies to small companies and everything in between that has been useful, that you would recommend any resources that you think people would benefit from?

Ali Wing: I am a big believer, big company to small. In sort of OKRs of the methodology, I grew up on the, you could say, brand to product to customer management side, which is somewhat gets skewed to kind of people thinking that's a tech model. But agile systems are so critical in any of these disruptive models today.

And I think the O K R methodologies that John DOR I think gets the [00:41:00] most credit for being the original source on I do think are a tool that are worthy. Of the reputation. And I've, again, I've used them as much now cuz I have done large company even turnaround work as I do in a smaller growth company.

So they're a great tool and one that every entrepreneur should know.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. John Dor has been somebody who a lot of folks love will link to some of his work at the in the show notes for Business for good podcast.com. Finally, owie, you've done a lot. I imagine though, that you have a lot of ideas for things that you hope somebody will do, even if you don't have the time personally to do it.

So are there any company ideas that maybe somebody listening who's thinking, I wanna do something good in the world. What type of company should I start? Do you have any suggestions for them?

Ali Wing: As a category. I don't have the solution, but I was thinking a little bit about this cause I've listening to your podcast and I was thinking, where I am most passionate about that I think we haven't even scratched the surface for solutions, is this idea of how to make healthcare is what part largest part of our g d [00:42:00] today in the us.

It's really an expense we can't afford. Nobody would argue that we have best in the world when it comes to sick medicine. If you're sick, you probably are really. To be in this country, but we know what evades us is this idea of being a great preventative or how to take care of our health system ahead of that.

And part of that unlock, I think, is a relationship between food and our healthcare system. And some of that's rooted in the fact that, we've really only ever done. Double blind studies with drugs, which are almost impossible to do with food as our basis for when something's working or not.

In our bodies and our western medicine training was, is pretty light for doctors on the role of nutrition. So when I think about the merger of technology, Of what's going on with food tech bro, biotech broadly. I think we haven't even started to scratch the surface of what should be game-changing opportunities and really ripe for any entrepreneur to figure out how to unlock the role of diet in our healthcare models.

And we're at the [00:43:00] very beginning of that.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. I certainly am passionate on that issue as well, Allie. I think it's just totally absurd that we spend such an enormous amount per capita on healthcare, and yet our health is really not that great compared to some countries that spend even less than we do. So I agree if you break your bone or if you have cancer, great place to be, but just preventive.

There's a lot to do there, so I appreciate everything that you're doing. Allie, congratulations on an illustrious career so far, and congratulations on the big series B at Uwe. And I'm really looking forward to trying this chocolate so you knew where to reach me if there's a way to to make that happen.

But I would be honored to get, to be one of the first consumers of the first Sweet Protein product hitting the market.

Ali Wing: Thanks Paul. I would be happy to get you chocolates and I would love your feedback, so I will make sure you get that along with the articles we talked about today and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the show. It's fun to start to share with the world this really exciting idea of proteins that are sweet.