From Sophomore to CEO: Jessica Schwabach of Sundial Foods is Flying on Plant-Based Wings

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the business for good podcast to show where we spotlight companies, making money by making the world a better place. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro. And if you share a passion for using commerce to solve many of the world's most pressing problems than this is the show for you. Well, friends, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling 22.

Well, I'm actually feeling 42 to be honest, but our 22 year old guest on this episode has got me not only listening to Taylor swift song 20. But are you ready for it? You just might be enchanted by her impressive story and think that even though you thought you knew what the path to entrepreneurial success was, yes.

Everything has changed. Okay. I managed to get in four Taylor swift song references in those first few sentences, but if you know her songs all too well, it's actually now five. All right. For real, what were you doing during your sophomore year of college? Probably not what Jessica Schwab was doing, which was starting her own plant-based meat.

Two years later, Jessica has now [00:01:00] gone through two prestigious accelerator programs, creative products that have been sold in dozens of stores and just raised $4 million in a seed round, including investment from food giant, Nestle. Just what is this new founder CEO doing? That is so many people so interested.

Well, she and her team at Sundi foods have created some alt chicken wings with skin and. That are apparently knocking people's socks off. I've not yet tried them myself, but having seen the photos and read reviews, I can assure you I'm eager to make that happen. I have a feeling you're gonna be hearing a lot more about Jessica and sundial foods in the near future.

So enjoy getting to know one of the newest faces on the alt meat block in this interview. Yes. Jessica seems fearless and yes, that is the sixth swift reference of this opening. Enjoy Jessica. Welcome to the business for good podcast. Thanks. It's really great to be talking with you. Congratulations. I know that you just raised a 4 million seed round, a, a very aggressive seed round.

So [00:02:00] first of all, congratulations on that. Thanks very much. So I think both myself and a lot of people listening had never heard of Sundi foods until. You had raised this round and it was impressive. You had Nestle, which is this huge food company investing in such an early stage company. So, so a lot of people, Jessica who want to hear the story, but before we get to that and your fundraising success, you wanna just hear about where you came from.

So I know that you were going to UC Berkeley and that you decided to start this company during school there, but were you thinking about food technology and were you interested in food sustainability even prior to being in college?

Jessica Schwabach: It's a good question. I feel like I can't really answer this without also telling my co-founder's story, but for me personally, I went to UC Berkeley with every intention, like a lot of Cal students of becoming a pre-med following a very typical path.

I was majoring in molecular and cell biology, uh, with an emphasis on genetics and doing some research in a, a space I was really passionate about was also vegan, mostly [00:03:00] for personal reasons of not really liking the taste of. And also wanting to do my part to hopefully combat animal agriculture in a small way.

Really didn't think I had it in me to be an entrepreneur and didn't consider the idea until I randomly signed up for a class at UC Berkeley. My sophomore year called the alternative meets challenge lab. And I really took this class because I thought I would meet other vegans and have fun eating vegan food.

What I didn't expect was to get randomly assigned to a group project. Where I met my co-founder and we started working on a project about plant-based meets. And my co-founder Sowan was in the last year for PhD planted microbial biology at UC Berkeley. Also no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. She really wanted to go into academia and research always saw herself as, as she says, as a doctor for plants and to improve agricultural sustainability very much from the plant engineering on genetic engineering side.

But what we found together was that the plant-based [00:04:00] meets industry presents a really unusual opportunity for us as students to sort of immediately step forward and take an idea and have an impact. Uh, and so we got really carried away with our school project at Berkeley, and that's how we ended up founding a company

Paul Shapiro: together.

Wow. So you are in this class as a sophomore at UC be. You meet your co-founder and you decide, Hey, this is a cool project. We could make a company out of it. Or was there somebody encouraging you along the way? Like what made you think, Hey, this was a cool project. We should devote our lives to this.

Jessica Schwabach: Definitely a lot of encouragement. I think actually, while taking the class, the class itself didn't become our company, but really the professor Dr. Ricardo, Sam Martin inspired not only us, but actually a couple of other plant based startups, too. Prime roots and, uh, black sheet foods. Our two notable ones, uh, also impact foods, which is doing plant by seafood.

He put us as students in front of a lot of industry leaders from different companies, from larger companies, also from startups to just [00:05:00] sort of tell their stories and speak with the students that connect directly. And sometime the class started in January, sometime around April Sowan and I realized that this was something we could genuinely step forward and do it.

Didn't have to be a research project. We could actually just start and try our hand at founding a company. And so we were really confused and lost. We kind of went into the Berkeley entrepreneurship center and we were like, Hey, how on earth do we do this? And they were like, don't worry. You're not the first ones.

And they walked us through a lot of the very basic things we would need to do, like how to incorporate, how to get legal support, things like this. And so UC Berkeley definitely, definitely helped us get ourselves off the ground

Paul Shapiro: or what a blessing to have that infrastructure. So Jessica tell me, you're in this class and you're thinking, okay, There obviously is some hole in the plant-based meat world.

You already are vegan. You recognize why there needs to be a, some type of expansion in the plant-based meat sector. But what was the hole that you saw and what were you trying to [00:06:00] fill with sundial? That's an

Jessica Schwabach: interesting question. Kind of a few parts to it. The first was that when we were actually taking the class, we were presented with different industry challenges, the one which was assigned to, to our group.

To create a project around the problem of dryness and plant-based meat. And so there were a lot of different directions. We could go with this thinking about different binding ingredients, different ways to increase the, the melting point of the fats we were using. Even decreasing the, as stringency of the protein in our product would also would also sort of improve the mouth field.

But we thought that maybe the simplest answer was just that if you look at a label for a plant-based meat, it already has enough fat. It probably has enough water. What's missing is that when the consumer's cooking this product, the fat melts very quickly and the water leaves very quickly. And so they end up with a dry experience.

So we thought, why don't we just put a physical barrier to prevent that moisture loss and started wrapping pieces of plant-based meat and showing that if we cooked one that was wrapped versus unwrap, almost like in a [00:07:00] bag that of course the one that was wrapped would retain more moisture inside and then ultimately takes better.

This is kind of our very initial idea. It didn't become much until the summer after taking the class. When we realized that if we wanted to put some kind of wrap around a plant-based meat, that if we had this sort of plant-based quote skin, we actually needed it to be on a whole cut. We couldn't put that on the chicken nugget without it being pretty weird.

So we sort of explored current industry standards for meat production. We were looking at, uh, high moisture extrusion for instance, which is an industry standard and starting to see that if we wanted to create using these standard industry process, Different kinds of whole cuts of meat. We would need a lot of different processing steps, a lot of bind ingredients that we didn't necessarily want to use just in terms of difficulty costs, but also nutritional value.

So really first, so one and had the beginning of sun was exploring how to create a new, uh, meat production process for whole cuts of plant-based meat. This was in the beginning, very basic research, trying to understand [00:08:00] when we mix different plant ingredients together. Two by two matrices of what we called fractions enriched for star or enriched for fiber or protein, how they would interact, whether or not we could form fibers or something similar to some aspect of meat.

And in a way it was just very basic research and basic plant science and understanding. But ultimately it led to us developing a process where we take different plant ingredients and kind of explore based on these enriched fractions of different sort of macronutrients, how we can. Generate a fibrous structure, not only in the individual bite, but also different muscle bundles and layers and ultimately 3d shapes.

And on top of that, we put the plant based skin and that's our product.

Paul Shapiro: How did you do this? Is there an extrusion step? Is there some other layering that you're doing? Is it 3d printing? Like how do you make a whole muscle cut from using what I presume are extruded plant protein is isolates, so we

Jessica Schwabach: don't use any extrusion.

Uh, and we don't use plant protein, isolate. We just sort of look at other functional properties of plant [00:09:00] ingredients that we use. So it's not really about protein Islip, but also about looking at different binding properties, for instance of plant starches and how we can combine these different fractions under a single thermal processing step.

But without the sheer that you would see an extrusion and then generate a fibrous structure. And the really nice thing about the process we've developed is that because there's no sheer force, we can also combine that with different kinds of layering and then create these 3d

Paul Shapiro: shapes. Wow. Have you filed for a provisional or a utility patent on this thermal process or any of the layering or any of your technology at all?

We

Jessica Schwabach: filed, uh, on a P C T application, which became public, I think, September of this

Paul Shapiro: year. Great. And for those who aren't initiated, what does P CT stand for Jessica? Oh no.

Jessica Schwabach: And patent cooperation. Treaty. I

Paul Shapiro: think so. It's, it's in many different countries. Yeah.

Jessica Schwabach: And so the, the P C T is around the meat production process, but also around the application of the.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. And so that is still pending. Not granted, I presume. Yeah. Still pending. [00:10:00] Cool. All right. Well, well, good luck with that. After you figured this out, was this, while you were still, like, were you doing this still as part of your class, or was that after you started looking into the accelerator route? This was after

Jessica Schwabach: the class.

This was mostly in Wan's basement, to be honest. And some of it was being done. Also, we were working out of Berkeley sky deck, which is affiliated with the univers. But not using any of the labs there. And so the first accelerator program we joined was actually around fall of 2019. After working on this idea for a few months, we got in contact with nest also through UC Berkeley, and they told us about an accelerator program.

They were running in Switzerland. And so that was the first big step that sun made towards the realization of a product was joining Nestle's accelerator in Switzer. Were

Paul Shapiro: you still a student in school though? Like how did you manage to move to Switzerland to go through Nestle's accelerator if you were still at school?

Jessica Schwabach: Well, we started talking to them October, 2019. They told us thesis were gonna take a [00:11:00] while. So I had enough time to finish my semester. So one really impressively managed to finish her PhD a semester early by just aggressively convincing her thesis writing, which is insane. She's a machine and I for the following semester when we moved to Switzer, so that I dropped.

Paul Shapiro: So you have entered that, uh, rarefied group of entrepreneurs who are dropouts from prestigious universities, and you're looking to make it big with your new startup, right?

Jessica Schwabach: Not quite. I maybe did the cowardly thing. I went back, um, and finished it up. This only had eight units left, so

Paul Shapiro: okay. Well, on a personal note, I'll say that after I attended one semester of college, I viewed it as a big waste of my time.

And so this was admittedly more than 20 years. But I viewed it as a waste of my time and I did drop out and went into the workforce and I just wanted to help animals. That's all. So I went to go work at an animal advocacy organization after about another semester of, of [00:12:00] working there. So after having dropped out and working, it became queer to me that there were some real social advantages to having a college degree.

And I ended up going back to school and then finishing. You. And I have at least that in common that we were college dropouts who have gone back and finished. So, or that you'll hopefully finish soon. So I wish you, the best of that, I know that running a company must be taking up an extraordinary amount of time.

So to do school with that, I'm sure is a lot of work

Jessica Schwabach: because we have a similar story there

Paul Shapiro: though. okay. So you were in Switzerland working with Nestle. So how was it being in that accelerator? And, you know, Nestle has a pretty big footprint in the plant-based meat space themselves. And so do they have joint IP with you?

Like what do they get from having you in their program? Are you concerned that now that they know the secrets of how you do what you do, that they might go off and do it themselves? Like, what is the protection that you have here? I guess a

Jessica Schwabach: few things to unpack that [00:13:00] joining the Nestle accelerator program was a huge learning experience for so one and myself, especially coming from sort of more biology back.

Missing, both the food experience and also the entrepreneurship experience. We had a lot to learn from them and they told us that for the accelerator program, you know, we'd walk in with our bench prototype of aick with, and we would walk out with test results after watching it in real grocery stores in Switzerland, which we thought didn't sound very possible, but we're definitely willing to try.

So that's who ended up joining as far as the model of the accelerator program. It's not really as typical as a lot of the other biotech accelerators you see in the bay area and elsewhere rather than take equity, it was more of us working with them in exchange for things that might happen in the future, which I know is a super vague answer, but I'm afraid.

I, I can't disclose more than that.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. So it's a, they do not take equity though, from you, for, for participating in the accelerator. No. Yeah. Okay, cool. [00:14:00] So I, I understand though, that you have gone through an equity based accelerator with indie bio. So that came after Nestle for you.

Jessica Schwabach: Yes, it did. So we went to Nestle, ran the shop test and then came back actually March of this year of 2021 and joined Indi bio and SF.

Paul Shapiro: Before we get to that, what happened with the shop test? So my understanding is that you were selling your product in dozens of supermarkets in Switzerland. Is that. It was

Jessica Schwabach: super interesting. We started a lot of the work for us was on the real challenges of scaling up the process because we weren't using extrusion or anything.

Very typical. It was a lot of figuring out, can this actually get off the lab scale and how are we going to do that? So we were very lucky to be at their research facility with a pretty big pilot by at least by our standards. So we were able to drag around with a lot of equipment, run trials and get ourselves up to a pretty modest.

But workable production line by late summer of 2020. And then we used this to launch product in about 40 grocery stores [00:15:00] called co-op COO P in Switzerland, under the garden gourmet brand, which belong to nest and using garden gourmet. We were able to collect a lot of feedback from consumers. So it wasn't always what we expected.

People really liked the appearance of the product. They liked the concept of a whole cut of meat and that it was very real. Compared to chicken. It especially resonated with me eating in flexitarian consumers, not as much with beans and vegetarians. We saw that people liked that it was clean label and high protein, which is awesome.

Cuz we were able to do both of these things with our process, but definitely the most interesting thing we learned was that the favorite aspect of the product was the skin. And we weren't necessarily expecting that. So one and I are personally very proud of the, the meat production process, which has been kind of our heart's pride with Sundi.

Uh, What the skin is able to add in terms of not only the initial appearance of the product, but also the eating experience sort of heterogene of texture was something that consumers really liked. So it sort of taught us to focus on that more in the future. [00:16:00]

Paul Shapiro: Cool. What's the skin made out of, uh, it's a protein

Jessica Schwabach: lip aggregate.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. All right. Well, I remember a long time ago. So before Miko Shiner started her ter dairy company, Occus she had a company called now in Zen, which was. A plant-based Turkey and it now it went under sadly, although we might not have Occus Creamery without it, without that going under, but now in Zen had a Turkey that had a really good skin on it that was made out of Yuba, like the tofu skin.

And I would order that, and this is like back in the mid nineties and I would order that and I loved it. It was that skin was like by far my favorite part of the whole thing as well. So there must be something from a sensory perspective. Biting into like through that crispy skin, into the meat that makes it such a delectable experience.

So I'm not surprised that people were, were really psyched about your protein lipid aggregate skin. We gotta come up with a [00:17:00] better name. That sounds a little bit more secular than protein lipid aggregate, but something catchier. Yeah. Speaking of your proteins and your lipids, you have an unusual list of ingredients for plant-based meat.

If you look at plant-based meat today, virtually all of it is made from wheat P or soy or some combination of those three. And they're usually, uh, protein is isolates that have been extruded, uh, from either wheat P or soy, but you're not using that. So what does somebody see on a sundial package if they go and they look at the ingredient deck there, what are they gonna see?

Jessica Schwabach: Our main ingredient is chickpeas, which I think is gonna be labeled in the form of both whole chickpeas and chick be protein concentrate. Admittedly, it does also contain gluten and soy, although in smaller amount. No piece though. And so we have eight total ingredients. We're missing a lot of the binders and additives that most of these products have because of our process.

We're able to avoid those. So it's, I guess gluten chickpeas, chick protein, concentrate, water, soy, nutritional yeast, salt, and I am missing one thing. [00:18:00] Sunflower

Paul Shapiro: oil. Nice. Well, I'm an avid fan of nutritional yeast. I use it on a daily basis. However, I have. I have a long running, extremely unsuccessful campaign to encourage a renaming of it.

So it's a fantastic product that is delicious and nutritious, and it has a disgusting sounding name. People don't want yeast and they don't want nutritional. So

Jessica Schwabach: admittedly, that's true. I don't

Paul Shapiro: know what you would call it though. Well, Jessica, you are in for a treat because I do know what you call it. So there's been an effort to rebrand it as Nuch, which I think is very bad.

It sounds disgusting. I don't know. But there are people who are, I don't disagree with that. It's not good. However, here's my proposal that I have made many times and has not yet caught gotten any traction, but maybe with you, it will not nutritional yeast, not Nuch golden flakes and that sound good golden flakes.

That sounds like a really good product. I would like to eat golden flakes. It sounds a

Jessica Schwabach: bit like cereal, to be honest.

Paul Shapiro: well, you know, maybe [00:19:00] it's not a bad cereal. Maybe somebody should just start a brand of nutritional yeast called golden flakes. That would be like, like, cuz there's that's true. There's no brand that people seek out on in the nutritional yeast space.

It's very generic. So maybe there's an entrepreneur out there who wants to create like their own enhanced nutritional yeast, golden flakes. That'll be, I don't know, higher in iron or B12 or something that is out there. And then we'll all go buy from you that, so maybe there's somebody out there who wants to do it.

But it's a pretty cool ingredient deck, Jessica. And I can't wait to try it myself. I hope I get a, a chance to try it, but I just wanna go back to your story here though, because after you were done selling these products in Switzerland, you came back to California and you decided to go into the indie bio accelerator program after going through Nestle.

Why go through another accelerator and tell me about how that was and what you learned at ind bio. So

Jessica Schwabach: we decided we wanted to do another accelerator program because coming out of Nestle. We felt, we learned quite a great deal on the technical side [00:20:00] of how to run and launch, um, food company and how we were going to get product to market and work on issues like manufacturing, scale up food, safety procurement.

So one, and I was still wo short of knowledge on how to actually run a company. That was a big reason for joining indie bio. And also we had some technical challenges that we really wanted the space Specifally laboratory to. So we started in bio technically February, and it was a mix of virtual and in person, but because we're both in the bay area, we ended up being in the lab most of the time and really just learning a lot about the future direction that we wanted to take Sund dial in how on earth we were supposed to fundraise and grow our team and strengthen our go to market strategy.

Um, just really interesting experience ending in July of this year. Definitely invests it a.

Paul Shapiro: July of 2021 for future listeners of this show who listen at some other point, other than when it airs. So Indi bio is mainly known as being a biotech accelerator. Would you say that the processes that you were using, uh, fall into the [00:21:00] biotech category?

Yeah. So

Jessica Schwabach: what we really wanted to work on at Indi bio. Was more of a focus again on the skin. What we ended up doing was also revamping the inner texture of the meat and exploring that a lot, but we kind of have some ideas for a 2.0 version of this product. If you will, about half of suns effort or maybe two thirds of the moment is focused on how we're going to get this first product of ours scaled up enough for our launch in the us next year, but much more exciting for us is sort of what's coming next, which is how far we can take this product in terms of the layer generation, which can.

Right now it's creating meat and skin, but we think there are other things we can do too. That create more complex products.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. Well, uh, speaking of your us launch, I read that you're intending to launch in restaurants in the spring of 2022. So how are you gonna do that? Like where will you produce this at a co-manufacturer or do you have a place where you can produce it yourself?

How, how are you gonna get your wings into some restaurant?

Jessica Schwabach: We're gonna make it actually at Rutgers university. So we've just [00:22:00] moved out to the east coast in New Jersey. Rutgers has a food innovation center here where they've worked with some other startups, including impossible to do the initial scale up and commercialization.

So our hope is to sort of collaborate with them for at least the next year and a half on this first launch. What

Paul Shapiro: are your parents think, Jessica? So this idea led you to drop out of school, move to Switzerland, move to New Jersey. What do your parents think about this? They're very

Jessica Schwabach: confused, but they're generally very easygoing people.

So I haven't heard anything negative about it yet. They have tried the product before and they like it. My dad's vegetarian. I remember a childhood of him refusing to buy us at tofu on Thanksgiving, cuz he'd rather just eat plants. But so he is one of those vegetarian

Paul Shapiro: that's so funny. My experience actually is that the more realistic plant-based meat is the less interested most of the vegetarians and vegans who I know are in.

And there's a, it seems to be like a, an inverse relationship. Also, like the longer you have been eating a vegetarian or a vegan diet, [00:23:00] the less interested you are in those type of foods. I think that's been my own experience. What about you?

Jessica Schwabach: I actually have a really embarrassing story from yesterday, which I feel like I should admit, which is that I was at the airport and ordered a, a veggie burger.

And when I got it, I was like, oh shoot, this is beef. I have to bring it. And you know, had to do the awkward. I'm so sorry, but I, I don't eat meat. Can you take this back and, and give me a vegetarian one. The woman behind the counter was like, oh no, that's plant based. And I was like, there's no way I refuse.

It was at the Toronto airport. And so then she went

Paul Shapiro: and was it burger king or

Jessica Schwabach: no, it was, I'm not sure what it was called, but I think it was, it was just existing there in the airport. Maybe Tim Hortons, not Tim Hortons. I'm not entirely sure. I would've to look. I was that person who refused to believe that the plant-based burger was actually plant-based.

I really thought it was beef and it was, it was freaking me out

Paul Shapiro: of it. That's really funny. Well, I had a similar experience. One time, my wife and I were at a restaurant and they served an impossible burger and [00:24:00] people at the table were completely incredulous that this was not meat. And they like, I mean, I'm not getting one person, like had them bring out the box to show the ingredients.

It was so embarrassing. It was just. It was a horrible, horrible experience. But anyway, it just shows how, how convincing they've gotten. I will say interestingly, my, my dog, Eddie is a very keen nose for plant-based meat and he will usually reject it pretty much anytime. Interesting. However, with impossible, every once in a while, he beyond both of them, it's impossible.

Who'll eat it every time. We're gonna do an Eddie test on sundial here and see what he thinks to see if, if he passes muster. That's

Jessica Schwabach: stressful. I'm so curious. I wonder if it's because of the, the hemoglobin that he eats the impossible

Paul Shapiro: for. I don't know the answer to that, but I can assure you, he is quite eager to eat it when he has the chance and he will not even let most other brands pass his lips.

Hey, by the way, why sun dial? What is that a reference to him? I mean, I know what a sun dial is, but why is the company named Sund [00:25:00] foods?

Jessica Schwabach: So we called it sundial because I guess it's a bit cheesy. But we think of a sun dial as a super early form of technology that harnesses the power of the sun and uses it to directly help people with something.

And we sort of see plant-based meat as taking the power of the sun, skipping the animal intermediate and just using plants to create something that's useful for people.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Very cool. I like it. Good origin story here. So Jessica, you are on a, a wild ride. Uh, how old are you? Uh, I'm 22. Okay. So most people, uh, when they're 22 are.

Not thinking about starting their own company as let alone raising millions of dollars to run a company that you founded a couple years ago. No less. They're thinking about other things. So if there are people out there, maybe they're undergrad students also, and they're thinking, geez, I really am impressed by what Jessica is doing.

How can I be more like her? Are there any resources that you would recommend, any things that were useful for you that you learned either at Berkeley or Nestle or in bio or anywhere in [00:26:00] between that you think would be helpful? For folks to check out if they're interested in following in your footsteps.

Jessica Schwabach: That's a really great question in terms of resources. I really think it's the folks around you. And just if people that you know are aware that it's something you're interested in, then when it pops up, when they make a random connection somewhere, it might be useful to you then maybe you'll hear about it.

And a lot of it may be is chance, but also, you know, if you have the intention to, to pursue entrepreneurship at some. When the opportunity comes by, even if it doesn't quite seem like an opportunity yet, then you can make it one, which I think is cool in terms of resources that I would use. I dunno how cheesy it is to say this.

If I would just continue to pursue what you really like, and if it's the right thing for you, then, then it'll come across it. Okay.

Paul Shapiro: Fair enough. I was, uh, joking the other day, my friend and I were listening in the car to Taylor Swift's song 22 and. Obviously she [00:27:00] thinks it's like the perfect age to be.

However, I am 42, which is a very convenient thing because I can sing the song as saying instead of 22 as 42. And so, uh, however, I wish that when I was 22, 2 decades ago, that I had had the experiences and thought processes that you have had to start your own company in this space. It's been, I think this is among the most compelling ways to help animals.

And I, I wish that I would have gotten into that space earlier. So my hat's off to you for that, Jessica. Congratulations on taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. And I'm sure though that as somebody in this space you've started your own company. You're focused on sundial. You wanna make some really awesome chicken wings.

But are there any other ideas that you hope that somebody else might start a company to do any other white spaces that you think need filling or any other places you think need more augmentation that you hope maybe some listener of this podcast will take up the mantle and start his or her own company [00:28:00] doing?

Jessica Schwabach: Yes, definitely. A lot of things. I think in particular, there's a lot of folks working on this already, but declassifying, the planet is something we panic about a lot. We have to sometimes take a step back from what we're doing and look at the irony of saying. Plant based meat is doing something good for the planet.

And we realized just like everybody else, how much plastic we're using and everything, and how hard it is to avoid just in terms of food, safety, and quality, and what's required in order to meet certain standards that there's no other material besides different kinds of plastic that will meet a lot of the needs that we have, not just what you see in terms of like when you pick up a package on the shelf and there's three layers of plastic and that's rough enough, but also in terms of manufacturing, you know, it's everywhere in terms of our raw material.

During our process and then after. So I don't know if there's some magic bullet out there, but for everybody who's curious about doing something really sustainable. I think that's the biggest area and biggest issue right now that worries us because we feel like we're

Paul Shapiro: part of it. Well, there's always room for improvement.

We've had a number of episodes in the [00:29:00] past and in the show notes for this one will link to some of them about companies that are making plastic alternatives or they're making biodegradable plastic. One of the things that concerns me though, is yes, we need to stop making so much plastic that isn't biodegradable, but we also need a way to deal with the plastic that's here.

You know, virtually every piece of plastic that's been manufactured for the last 70 or so years, if it hasn't been incinerated, it still exists pretty much. And in the same way that I think we need to not only reduce our emissions, but also draw CO2 out of the atmosphere, we probably need to reduce.

Creating more plastic problem, but we need to do something a little plastic that's here and find ways to degrade it. And I'm particularly enthusiastic about some of the methods of using, for example, fungal fermentation to actually degrade the current plastics that are here, because there are some species of fungi that do enjoy consuming plastic.

I'm pretty bullish on both plastic alternatives and ways to degrade plastic. So if you're out there and you have some [00:30:00] interest in doing that, I hope that you will not only listen to the back episodes of this podcast about that. Maybe, uh, start your own company and do something really cool in that space as well.

So, Jessica, with that, I wanna say, thank you. And congratulations. I'm rooting for your success and am looking forward to trying my own sun dial wings at some point, whether in spring of 2022 in a restaurant or maybe some other time as well, but I look forward to that very much and congratulations on all the success you're having.

And I hope that you will continue to grow this and have an awesome. Company making some really fantastic plant face meets.

Jessica Schwabach: Thank you very much. And we'll definitely get you some

Paul Shapiro: wings at some point. Very good. We'll give 'em to Eddie as well. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for listening. We hope you found use in this episode.

If so, don't keep it to yourself. Please leave us a five star rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. And as always, we hope you will be in the business of doing good.[00:31:00]