A Prime Pivot: Why Kimberlie Le and Prime Roots Are Going All in on Deli Meats

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, then this is the show for you. Hello, and welcome to the 85th episode of the business for good podcast.

As always, I will start this episode by giving a shout out to a podcast reviewer. So let me first thank Manny Ruelle who left a nice review of business for good on the apple podcast app saying business for good is a truly excellent podcast. The discussion and topics are really great. Well, Manny, you are great.

Thanks so much for your review. These reviews are really useful in helping more people find out about this show and hopefully drive some inspiration from it themselves. And who knows, maybe they will go do something good in the world too. Now to the rest of you listeners. That's why you too, should go leave a review for this podcast and maybe you'll get a shout out in a subsequent episode also.

Onto this episode, for those of you who've been enjoying business for good, for some time today's guest may sound somewhat familiar that's [00:01:00] because Kimberly Lee is not only our guest on this episode, number 85, but she was also a guest on our 49th episode way back in 2020. If you've not heard it, I do recommend that you go back and check it out, which will be helpful in seeing just how much has changed for this young startup, which was co-founded by two undergrads and has now raised 20 million.

So. As you hear in this episode, prime roots is undergoing quite a transformation as it settles into its new 20,000 square foot production facility. In Berkeley, California, I was fortunate enough to visit the prime roots headquarters, which is where we taped this episode in person, right after I had enjoyed their new products, which were truly phenomenal.

You may recall that the company started as Taino foods and was focused on using fungi fermentation to mimic salmon and then pivoted to pursue a wide variety of meat applications, including selling prepared meals and select whole foods locations. Well, at five years old prime roots is now making another pivot, focusing today, exclusively on using their Koji fermentation process, which you'll [00:02:00] hear more about in this episode to

manufacture

Paul Shapiro: deli meats and bacon.

Their HQ even has a beautiful deli counter, where I sliced their meat myself before enjoying a Koji inspired feast and bonus. You can check out the photos of that facility and the food on the webpage for this episode@businessforgoodpodcast.com. So enjoy hearing the latest about this exciting startup, which is betting that the future of meat isn't animals, nor is it plants, but rather it will be fueled by fungi fermentation that they are scaling up.

Right. Kim welcome to the business for good podcast.

Kimberlie Le: Hi

Paul Shapiro: Paul. Thanks for having me. You Kim happen to occupy a very hallowed ground in business for good podcast lore because you are now officially only the second person. To ever repeat as a guest, the first person was John Mackey, the CEO of whole foods.

And so you are in great company as a repeat guest. Congratulations, Kim. Thank you, Paul, for the honor. [00:03:00] the honor is ours because you have been building quite a lot. We are sitting in the new prime roots headquarters here in Berkeley. It is beautiful. We're gonna talk all about it, but for folks who maybe didn't listen to the first episode with you, which was like something like 40 episodes.

Or who maybe don't remember that episode. Just wanna hear the origin story of prime roots. So you were a student, an undergrad student at UC Berkeley, and you're studying in professor Ricardo, San Martin's class. And you're starting to think about the problems of raising animals for food, but people would do that.

They'd think, okay, well let's use soy or wheat or pee, or they're gonna grow animal cells, but you had a different idea rather than using animal cells or rather than using plant protein ISOs. You thought about something else. Where'd the idea come from. So at

Kimberlie Le: prime rates, we use Koji, the MyUM of Koji, more specifically to power, all of our meat and seafood products.

And really the insight came from just the really first principal's thinking. So we went to the drawing board and we learned about the problems of animal agriculture and dawned upon me, this is what I need to be [00:04:00] spending the rest of my life on fixing this issue that we're so reliant on such an unsustainable source of protein.

You really have to go like to the literal whiteboard and think like what makes meat meat? And like you said, you know, a lot of people are, in my opinion, you know, fitting square, pegs and round bowls, when you're trying to make plants or texture, vegetable proteins, or isolates into something that's well, textured that has.

You know, these umami flavors that's that people love meat. And so, you know, what makes meat, meat, it's the texture, the protein, the umami, all of that. And my mom's a professional chef and I grew up in the food industry. And so for me, it was about making something that tastes good first and foremost, and something that actually wanna eat.

So it's not full of junk and just things that you wanna power your body with. And so really thinking about the problem. We came across Koji. And my salium just thinking about like the textures of meat, how do you replicate the textures without extrusion, without this isolates and all this processing, and you pretty quickly get to fermentation and you get to fungi, which is what, where [00:05:00] we're at.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. Very cool. So I wanna talk all about that fungi fermentation, but you mentioned Koji and you say it in such a way that you are familiar with Koji, but for the average person. Who maybe has never heard of it or maybe they have, but they're not sure. And they'd think of it like soy sauce, like what

Kimberlie Le: is Koji?

So Koji is a Japanese fun guy. It is indeed used to make soy sauce and miso. So traditionally used to format the soybeans to make these umami rich paste and the, the Koji add that umami richness. And it's really bio transforming the soy. But what we do is we think that Koji is this beautiful ingredient just by.

So by cultivating it in a liquid fermentation, we're able to get the textures of Koji, which are these long strands fibers kind of like chicken breasts. Like when you have, when you experience it raw, we're able to turn that into the base of all different types of meats. And so Koji, while, you know, is a humble ingredient that most people interact with daily, actually in, you know, meso and soy, we've actually really taken it to [00:06:00] another level by really highlighting it itself.

And we say, you know, Koji does 90% of the work for.

Paul Shapiro: Just to be clear. So if you are making miso, right. So Koji, which is the common name for Asper Joes RZA, which is the Latin name for this organism. It's something that's been needed for a very long time, but so you're gonna take, like how, how does somebody make miso?

And then let's talk about how that's different from what you're doing here. So what is the role of Koji or Asper Joes in Misa making? I'd say.

Kimberlie Le: So the role of Koji is to really take the, so and consume it for nutrients and releasing different umami compounds. So one of the beautiful properties of Koji is it does create these really umami, rich compounds that are found in meat.

And so what is Koji growing on soy for it? Just for nutrients. So we can do the same in a liquid culture to be able to get Koji, just to grow and to continue to elongate into strands rather than just consuming soy to make into a pace for us. Right.

Paul Shapiro: And so when you eat that pace, though, it is primarily soy.[00:07:00]

And so when you're eating, let's say prime roots product, you're eating primarily Koji. And so that's the real difference here is that you are taking like the culture and making it the product rather than just a factory to make something else in the way that you do. Let's say with meso. So we just tried a whole bunch of your new products.

And so I want to get there, there were phenomenal spoiler alert, and there'll be photos on the website that you can see of them on the business for good podcast.com website. But that wasn't the original idea. When you started this company, you weren't thinking, oh, I'm gonna make daily slice. My recollection is that you were doing salmon in fact.

And so why salmon then, and why not? Salmon?

Kimberlie Le: So we started with seafood. Cause that was really one of the big challenges, you know, at the time. And it still is today. It was huge white space, not, no, one's really making seafood. And also seafood's pretty difficult to replicate cuz you have problem with texture and you have very complex flavors and different.

Utilization levels and impact. And [00:08:00] so seafood is really hard nut to crack. And we actually did crack that nut in the sense that we could make a salmon. We made a salmon Fort prototype and we actually were tuning the flavors of salmon so we could understand what, like Atlantic salmon versus a Pacific salmon tasted like.

So we made tons of great progress. Obviously got tons of great press and people really. The concept. We really wanted to start with salmons as a proof of concept. And it was a huge white space. And surprisingly, you know, five years later, it still is a huge white space. And so the space doesn't move that fast.

And so, you know, as many more companies that can tackle, you know, everything from seafoods to really anything along the value chain, like. We're very supportive of it.

Paul Shapiro: That is an amazing thought that still today, less than 1% of all of the plant-based meat out there is seafood mm-hmm. like, it's just incredible how whi there is, which is especially odd because seafood, a lot of it at least tends to be more expensive than terrestrial animals.

So it's [00:09:00] very hard for companies to compete on cost. Let's say with chicken or with beef, but if you're starting to compete on cost, like with salmon or crab or lobster, it becomes a lot easier for the plant-based companies to, to do that. So it's always surprising to me that there isn't more going on, especially considering the need, considering what we are doing to the oceans.

But at some point you said, we're not gonna do this. So at least for, not for right now. So why, like, why was it something that you thought was better? Was there some problem with the salmon? Like what was it that led you to make that type of a product development? So

Kimberlie Le: once we had finished with salmon and making the best salmon burger out there, and we went to whole foods and tried their fresh salmon burger side by side with ours.

And we were like, this is better. And we sampled it to people. People loved it. We said, you know, Hey, like we're at this phase, we're really early in this journey. We've been able to make this really difficult product. What else can we make? So we went to try to make everything else and we actually did. And, you know, we were kind of start.

We're like, oh wow, we've made chicken breasts. We've made steaks. We've made bacon [00:10:00] also. And we said, Let's put a pull out and see what consumers actually want to try and eat. And, you know, we'll get consumer feedback. We'll actually launch something and, and really get that feedback. And so people resoundingly wanted bacon so that's where we become known very, very much for our bacon, obviously our Koji bacon.

And from there on, we've been iterating, trialing products in market with consumers and just really, it's been so exciting to put products out there and have people try them and give us. From all of those insights, we're now focused solely on deli as a category, just cuz it really meets a lot of the consumer needs that we kept hearing from our consumers time and time again, which is people want convenience and they want meats.

Yeah. And deli is something I grew up with and I have always had a dream of taking over a meat case. And why not the deli case.

Paul Shapiro: yeah. So there wasn't though, like this direct switch from, let's say salmon and Delhi slices. Cause I remember you had these really awesome, like prepared meals that you could get.

I think you were [00:11:00] selling them at whole

Kimberlie Le: foods, right? Yeah. So we wanted to test we're very, very analytical and. Scientific about how we went about testing products. We said, Hey, let's test, you know, different types of proteins. So we had beef, chicken, pork, and let's test different form factors. So everything from the most convenient, like a fully ready to eat meal, all the way to our bacon, which takes like 10 minutes to cook, just like regular bacon.

So we tested the whole spectrum, talk to consumers and really were able to refine like the product direction with all of those.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. So you now have stopped making those ready to eat meals, and you have shifted to basically be deli slices and bacon, which is the new primary focus, or is it the exclusive

Kimberlie Le: focus?

It is the exclusive focus of primary. So our mission is to make a better pet of meat that excites any type of meat eater. And this aligns with our vision from day one to take over the meat case. Ah, very

Paul Shapiro: cool. All right. Well, let's talk about where we're sitting because we were just at a meat case, the prime roots [00:12:00] meat.

And it was really exciting. We are inside of the new prime roots headquarters in Berkeley, California. How many square feet are we sitting

Kimberlie Le: in about 20,000 square feet, which houses our offices, our development labs, our production facility, and also our little showcase deli.

Paul Shapiro: And it was a beautiful showcase deli.

We will put photos of the product and the deli on the business for good podcast.com website. But let's talk about what we ate Kim, because it was a fun time. You know, it was a fun time to go there and. A chef using a deli slicing machine. And I felt like I was like a kid going to like Willy Wonka's factory.

I could like move the deli slicer machine myself and create some slices. But you know, if you look at the deli slice market in plant based, like it's not that big, like compared to, let's say burgers and meatballs and, and chicken nuggets, like deli slices are far more far bigger white space. So there are a few brands that are out there and there's.

I would say that for vegetarians, they're good, but nobody has come up with like the impossible [00:13:00] burger of deli slices, where that's really going for the actual Carver audience, as opposed to the vegetarian audience. So my understanding from having just been there and tasting it is that that's what you're going for.

So tell me about that. How did you come to do this?

Kimberlie Le: Yes. So that is where prime roots comes in. And for those of you who are listening, Paul is an amazing meat slicer. So , we, I practiced

Paul Shapiro: for so long before coming here.

Kimberlie Le: so we, we slice some of our turkeys, some of our ham and some of our salami. It all comes in the whole muscle format, which, you know, I'm used to going as a kid, going to deli's and getting a slice off the slicer.

That's the experience that we we've replicated. And yeah, it's really meant to be a simple swap. So it's just as easy as it is right now at any coffee shop to get an O milk addon or sub or a almond milk sub, we wanna do the exact same with Koji or ham.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. Well, I tried it and I thought it was phenomenal.

I, I said [00:14:00] to you, I would, I would keep it real with you if I thought, oh, this was good, but you know, I've had other good ones. Like I would say that like for real, and I thought that it was the best. Plant-based do slices. I've had now I've not eaten. Animal-based do slices in decades. But I do remember when and what I told Kim when I first tried this, when I tried the ham.

It reminded me of like, when I remember when I was in seventh grade and my mom would pack up like a ham and cheese sandwich, which is particularly ironic for a Jewish family, but it was a ham and cheese sandwich that she sent me to school with quite often. And I remember that's what it reminded me of when I ate it like that memory, which I've not thought of for decades is what came to my mind when I started trying this.

So before we talk about how you make it, let's talk about what are the flavors here? What are the deli sliced flavors that you're.

Kimberlie Le: So we have a good assortment of hams turkeys and TCU. So we have our, my favorites are black forest ham. Ashley made with Juniper berries, true to like German tradition. We have our maple ham smoked ham on the Turkey front.

Of course we have like the roasted Turkey, black pepper Turkey, which is [00:15:00] my personal favorite and then a smoked Turkey. And we have pepperoni salami. We also have pats that go really well on our charcuterie board. The funny thing is you mentioned that everyone's making burgers. There's a lot of burgers out there.

Americans eat a lot of burgers on average, 150 burgers per person per year, which is amazing, but people actually eat more deli sandwiches per person per year. So when I learned that yeah, American consumption of sandwiches is in like the two hundreds per person per year with the majority of them being deli.

Like that was really motivating. And just, there is, like you said, no one else doing that. So the impact is to be made there.

Paul Shapiro: Wow. Amazing. More than 200 sandwiches a year. That's pretty interesting. So people eating, you know, a sandwich nearly every day. I mean, it's crazy. So, okay. Let me then ask you like what's in here.

So we know there's Koji and I looked at the packaging and there was beautiful packaging. So kojis the first ingredient on the packaging. Yeast is the second ingredient. So what what's up with that? What's what's up with this yeast in there.

Kimberlie Le: So Koji [00:16:00] is really the bulk of the product. It provides, you know, the protein, we do have fiber in the product, and it is quite literally the majority of the product yeast as used in many, many plant-based applications provides a lot of umami flavors to the products.

So we use yeast for different flavors to add more umami, to add more depth to the meat product. We also have oils. We use rice brand oil or coconut oil, so clean sources of fat and then colors, more flavors, very clean

Paul Shapiro: label. It, it was very clean. It didn't I, I was impressed to see that like virtually all of the plant based meats out there have at least some ingredients that people might not know what they are doesn't mean they're not healthy or they're bad for you or anything.

You know, you take methyls as an example which is kind of frowned upon because it has a sciencey sounding name. Even though it's totally safe, healthy, natural. There's nothing wrong with it at all, but it sounds kind of sciencey. It kind of reminds me of like dihydrogen monoxide and it sounds like, oh, that's so scary.

And then of course it's just H two O but yeah, you don't have anything like that. It's all commonly. Okay. I mean, presuming people know what Koji is. It's all [00:17:00] commonly recognized names on the ingredient deck there. Yeah.

Kimberlie Le: And that was really important. You know, when we're going into thinking about how to develop the recipes is we want something that you can pronounce every ingredient, something that, you know, my mom is a chef would be proud of and like would want to put on her menus.

And, and also just something that people can understand, you know, how it's made, you know, as we are growing and scaling, we're really excited to have people come through and see how it's all. And that's, I think a really big part of it. A lot of people don't understand how meat is made. They say they don't wanna know how the sausage is made, but we're really excited for people to learn about how the prime roots deli

Paul Shapiro: slices are made.

Well, I tasted 'em and I would also love to see how they made, but I, from a taste perspective, I thought it was totally phenomenal. So, Kim, let's talk about this. You've been at this for five years now. So how much money is the company raised to date we're raised

Kimberlie Le: below under $20 million to.

Paul Shapiro: And you have this beautiful facility here, but it's nowhere near big enough to start supplying grocery stores by the thousands right now.

[00:18:00] Right. Am I right? Yes. The

Kimberlie Le: scale of deli and grocery and food, as you know, Paul is so immense, like big food is big. And so we're really excited. This is our pilot facility. We'll be able to raise about a million pounds out of this facility. So it'll get us a pretty good amount of the way

Paul Shapiro: there. A million pounds per year.

Yes. Right. I noticed that there's a lot of construction still going on here. So obviously you're not ready to start producing, but when will we start seeing a million pounds of Koji, ham and Koji Turkey and Koji bacon flowing outta

Kimberlie Le: here. We're planning on launching the deli products into the market this year in 2022.

And then scaling up in later

Paul Shapiro: years. So for people who are gonna want to get it later this year, where do you predict they will be able to. We'll

Kimberlie Le: be in restaurants, BI coastally. So some of the best chefs in the world in New York, San Francisco, I'm sure will be having the products. So kind

Paul Shapiro: of like an impossible food strategy where you're gonna start at higher end restaurants.

And this will be like a, a [00:19:00] more luxury item at first, and then move your way down to the burger Kings of the world. Just like impossible. We're

Kimberlie Le: definitely going after storytellers first, who can help tell a story around the brand and the products and Koji, and then moving towards, you know, the most beloved sandwich spots, obviously deli's and grocery stores

Paul Shapiro: soon after in a very small nutshell, Kim, what's that story that you want to tell?

What for your, if I'm the, the head chef at a awesome restaurant in New York city, I've got a whole bunch of this awesome prime roots Koji. Slice, what story do you want me to tell?

Kimberlie Le: It's a better cut of meat and it slices just like meat. And so we've had a lot of chefs who are meat eaters. They're they have meat menus who take a step back and say, this is crazy.

You know, some of like, a lot of your products are actually better than the real meat. And a lot of people want to put prime roots salamis on real charcuterie boards with real meat because they view it in that it is meat. It. Coming from Koji, which is so [00:20:00] cool. And so we're excited for chefs to tell the story around Koji and make Koji meets into something that is really exciting.

Paul Shapiro: It is really exciting. One thing we didn't talk about was the pepperoni also, which I noticed on, on pizza forms, a nice little cup, like a regular pepperoni wood when it was baked. It was very cool to see. So how different is that pepperoni from some of the other, let's say like the salami format that you're doing.

Kimberlie Le: So we have tons of D. Deli and char Cary formats casting a pretty wide net within this very focused space. We also have a, a sandwich pepperoni as well. Everything can cook just like meat slice, just like meat. And it's been very intentional so that our partners in food service and retail can tell our story just the way they tell stories of other purveyors and other, other producers.

Paul Shapiro: So what's the plan then Kim, for actually scaling this up, like you are going to presume we spend a lot to build up this facility and then you're going to wind up in some of the higher end restaurants by coastally, as you mentioned. But [00:21:00] your purpose in doing this company is not to be in high end.

Restaurants is to actually make a dent in demand for animal meat. And so. What's the plan for getting there? Like how do you envision going from prime roots today, which is in a great P facility to the prime roots, that's gonna be churning out a river of de slices by the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

Kimberlie Le: So right now, we're in this phase where we have everyone from taste makers to some of the largest grocery chains in the world, excited about the products who've tried the product, and they really are revolutionary. Obviously we're at a small. Ish scale today. So we'll be scaling up pretty quickly in the next few years to meet that demand.

Hopefully one day we'll be in every single deli case across the world.

Paul Shapiro: Nice. And so do you envision partnering with like the Boar's heads of the world or do you envision just competing against them?

Kimberlie Le: I'd say we're synergistic in the case, there's a lot of different options in the deli cases. There's still a ton of space.

If you look, [00:22:00] most deli cases have most items like doubled or tripled up in the case. And so it's another option for anyone who wants to try Koji meats, or for people who don't eat meat, who can't eat meat for whatever reason, or can't eat any of the products that are conventional. So it's a alternative, we're excited to be side by side in a category that has a lot of products that are really, really

Paul Shapiro: beloved.

So will this be competing on cost at first or will it still be above the price of the meat that will be at the same restaurant? We will

Kimberlie Le: be competitive with like, call it your Applegate organics and your Neiman ranch. So we'll be priced at the same as the same meats that these chefs and these grocery stores already

Paul Shapiro: buy.

Got it. So more expensive than commodity deli slices, like from, I don't know, Jenny. Yeah, Hellshire right. Which is, I think owned by Tyson foods, but comparable to some of the higher end.

Kimberlie Le: Yep. And in a few years from now, we will be priced in Pardy with the conventional options as well. And

Paul Shapiro: you'll achieve that just through scale or are there other, you're gonna reduce your cost of your fermentation?

Like how are you going to actually [00:23:00] get down to the Hillshire

Kimberlie Le: prices? Yeah. Scale mostly will drive a lot of the cost down. We're at a small scale today. And so we don't really benefit from a lot of economies of scale. But fundamentally, our process is so much more efficient. We did a lifecycle assessment and we're between 90 to 99% better in every single environmental metric you can measure.

And so just that sheer efficiency is a lot of the reason why our costs just look way better than animal.

Paul Shapiro: That's really interesting. So let me then ask you, what do you think it'll take? So obviously you want to have a much bigger facility. You want that scale that you're referring to. You've raised 20 million to date, which is, you know, more.

A lot of startups ever raised let alone one that was started only a few years ago by a college student. So you've achieved more than most people ever will, to be honest, but you want to do a lot more than that. So what do you think it's gonna take, like if you're going out to investors and they're gonna say, okay, what's it gonna take for you to become at scale so that when subway wants to start using you, you're gonna be able to put your product in subway?

Like [00:24:00] what type of investment capital do you think this will require?

Kimberlie Le: We'll definitely take a fair amount of capital. There's a lot of ways to. Finance and get the capital. We've had many large corporates once to help finance, like the facility or like really be partners in scaling up. And so we have a lot of options, which we're so privileged to be in this position to have many options on how to scale the business.

We're really excited to be continuing to scale. And raise venture capital money to really help and really have, you know, we only have true partners right now who are partner with us. So we have consumer investors. We have investors who are very, very deep into the food industry, so really experts. And we're excited to continue to have those folks around the table with us.

So for a little bit here, we'll definitely be, you know, more traditionally financed like a startup. But later stage, there'll be definitely a lot more opportunities. Do

Paul Shapiro: you need to build all of it yourself? Or could you use a co manufacturer? Like, so could you handle, for example, the Koji fermentation, but I presume the rest of it is standard daily slice manufacturing.

[00:25:00] Once you have your protein. And so could you go to a current co manufacturer of daily slices and you provide the Koji and have them manufacture for you? So we

Kimberlie Le: are most definitely looking into how do we craft our, I call it our Coca-Cola model. So how do we retain the secret sauce and all of the things that we uniquely do as a business, but we don't uniquely slice deli meats.

We don't uniquely package deli meats. So we're, we are thinking of how do we leverage external resources? Like co-manufacturers the deli industry is $300 billion and we're very excited. We're very confident that we'll be a very, very large player in this.

Paul Shapiro: Well, there are some companies like big companies in the deli space, like deli star that are really interested in plant-based products and they have really big manufacturing capacity and they may be good partners.

I don't know, but I mean, there, there could be ways that you would not have to reinvent the entire wheel, which would be very expensive to do, obviously. Whereas your special. As you said is [00:26:00] probably not in the manufacturing of the daily slices themselves, but rather you all are correct me if I'm wrong, but the real specialty is in the Koji production.

Kimberlie Le: So a lot of it is in the production and the development of all of the products. So fundamentally at our core, we are a product company. We have this platform built off of Koji that we can make any type of meat or seafood. We've chosen to go very deep into deli as a category, but yes, we're excited to be kind.

Thinking about scaling, we're gonna be scaling our own facility for this next phase of growth, our own large scale plant. And then beyond that, we're definitely looking towards how do we leverage existing infrastructure? I mean, it's 300 billion of deli meats that needs to be tackled and made more, more sustainable and more delicious.

So. So how

Paul Shapiro: many people are working at

Kimberlie Le: prime roots? Now we're about 30 people right now. We'll be scaling to about a hundred within the next like year and a half, two

Paul Shapiro: years. [00:27:00] Wow. So it's obviously like very substantial growth. I mean, the difference between running a 30 person company and a hundred person company is, is dramatic.

So for somebody like yourself, who has, you know, five years under your belt of being a CEO, but you've never been a CEO of a company that large. Is there anything you've done that you would recommend for other people who might be interested like anything you've read, any types of resources, courses you've taken, anything that you think are actually useful from a managerial perspective?

Kimberlie Le: Lots of books. There's a lot of books out there read a lot of articles and. I'm fortunate enough to have lived in a family where both of my parents have been CEOs and entrepreneurs. And so I actually started working full time when I was 11 years old in finance. And so I have this very unique experience where by the time I got to college, I had.

A good seven years strapped under my belt of like legitimate management experience. so I'm very fortunate to have that experience, highly recommend it. But for those who don't have that, I have a lot of [00:28:00] friends and colleagues who have started companies really leveraging the network of entrepreneurs around you.

You know, Paul we've talked a fair amount. Running a company and there's tons of people in the space, especially in plant based, everyone more or less are very amicable and friends with each other. So it's a great space

Paul Shapiro: to be in for sure. You mentioned a lot of books, Kim, are there any specific ones that you recommend to people that you think have been useful in your own journey as a CEO?

Kimberlie Le: Depends what you are thinking about at the moment. So right now I've been thinking a lot about how do you scale a management team? How do you scale a leadership team? One of the books I've been working on is called multipliers. It was recommended to me by another entrepreneur. It's about like, how do you set up systems and processes to really empower your people?

So that's been a really good read who it's a very commonly recommended book about hiring. So how do you hire the right people? Sometimes hiring or people are your biggest cost and also your biggest [00:29:00] driver at a startup? Let me think. There's, there's so many books out there. I'd say, go for recommendations over, over Amazon or Google

Paul Shapiro: So we will link to those books in the show notes of this episode at business for good podcast dot. So that people can check that out. So in terms of though, not necessarily what you've learned from books, but just what you've learned from your experience, are there any takeaway lessons, things that maybe you wish you would've done differently?

If you could go back and start the company again, the

Kimberlie Le: biggest thing for myself is trusting your gut. I think has been a common theme that I've felt. Sometimes when you go against your gut and you say, oh, this person that has 50 years of experience in the industry told me this, or my board, or whoever says like, you know, we want it to be done this way.

And you're like my gut. I don't know if that's the right thing to do. But you know, I'm of the opinion of, you know, if you have consensus. And you disagree, but you commit, then you put your a hundred percent towards it. And sometimes it doesn't, you know, [00:30:00] what the risks are and you, and you come out the other side and you're like, I learned from that, but at my gut, like I knew what the right thing to do is so trusting.

My gut is definitely something that I am getting better at.

Paul Shapiro: okay. Then, let me ask you finally, Kim, like obviously you are in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. You come from an entrepreneurial family, you know, a lot of folks in this space share what you must think about other companies. Not that you're gonna go start them, but ideas that you wish maybe somebody else would go start.

So imagine that you didn't have prime roots. Is there some other company that you think would be good for the world that you hope that somebody maybe is listening to this podcast will go and start themselves?

Kimberlie Le: Yes. I definitely think about a lot of exciting ideas. I actually have a notebook, but I write all of my like random thoughts and like random ideas.

And I technically dropped out of my PhD. I actually don't even have a, a undergrad degree to my name. So I was actually starting agricultural microbiology research, studying the soil microbiome and how it really [00:31:00] helps plants to grow. It's not just like nitrogen, you know, you're feeding to the plants. It really is a holistic system.

And so understanding what is those mix of microbes? I think there's a ton in agriculture that can be done to make our food system a little bit better off. I mean, before we hopped on, we were talking about organic farming and whatnot. So there is a lot to be done. To think about holistically, how do we rejuvenate the soils?

How do we actually feed the growing population? And I actually, I dropped out of, of school to start prime roots because, you know, I was spending all of my time on plants and I was enamored by agriculture and I was like, wow. There's like, Monsanto is bad. Syngenta's bad. There's so much opportunity to create the next, you know, Monsanto and Syngenta, which is huge.

But I learned what we did with all these plants that we grow. We literally feed it to animals. So the lower hanging fruit, which is what we're doing is obviously cutting animals out of the food system. So hopefully by growing 30, 40 times less [00:32:00] food, we have less of, we have, we can solve that problem later.

I think this is a much more pressing problem. So if anyone's out there. Definitely save animals and focus on protein first. But I think agriculture is, is definitely also needs a lot of

Paul Shapiro: change. Interesting. Yeah, we were actually speaking of organic Kim and I, before we were recording, we're talking about the recent episode on business for good with professor Rob Palmberg from Harvard and his book, resetting the table with link to that episode on the show notes as well.

If you didn't listen to it though, go back and listen to it, cuz he has. Very strong critique of why he asserts organic agriculture is not so good for the environment and that we should be trying to minimize the number of acres that we're farming. So we can have more room for wildlife habitat. And if we could use soil microbes to get more productivity out of the soil and grow more crops for acre, we could leave more room for our wild animal friends out there to enjoy life as well.

Because deforestation. Growing food is a leading driver of wildlife extinction right now. So in [00:33:00] short embracing 21st century agricultural methods, rather than going back to 19th century agriculture methods may be the best thing that we could do to try to create a more sustainable food supply.

Kimberlie Le: I think there's so many things.

There's not a silver bullet solution. And. Every time someone says, oh, but what about this? Or what about that? It's the, what about that is going to kill us all. I think as long as, you know, we're making strides towards, you know, positive changes, all of these solutions can exist together. So it really doesn't serve us any good to hate on anything.

Anyone that's trying to do better.

Paul Shapiro: Welcome. I have a feeling that not that many people are going to be hating on you or prime roots, especially after they try these deli slices out because they really are stellar. And I hope that people get to try them, hopefully by the end of 2022, if you live on one of the coast, you will be able to try them.

But if not come to Berkeley, they have a beautiful little like mock deli where you can go in and walk in and try some of these products there truly St. I really admire what you're building here. Kim, it's [00:34:00] incredible for me to see somebody who not only is a young person, but somebody without a college degree, who's now at the helm of her own company.

It's raised 20 million overseeing a team of a, a few dozen people or a couple dozen people now, but dozens pretty soon, and you're doing great things in the world. So my hat's off to you and I'll be rooting for your continued. Thank you, Paul.

Kimberlie Le: We it together.

Paul Shapiro: Thanks for listening. We hope you found use in this episode.

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Paul Shapiro: 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.