B4G EP 159

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome friend to episode 159 of the Business for Good podcast. I'm so glad that so many of you enjoyed the last episode with Lanzatech. I always appreciate hearing what you think of each episode, so please feel free to let me know your thoughts via our website, which is just businessforgoodpodcast.

com. Now, onto this episode. Did you know that it takes 140 liters of water to make a single cup of coffee? It turns out that coffee, as far as plant crops are concerned, has a fairly heavy footprint on the planet. And it's getting harder to farm, with climate change altering where and how many coffee beans can even be grown.

You've heard of making meat without chickens. You've heard of making milk without cows. We even did a recent episode on making chocolate without having to farm cocoa. You can now also get coffee. without beans. This episode's guest is the CEO of Minus, a startup reimagining how you enjoy your daily brew.

Minus has developed an innovative way to replicate the rich flavor, aroma, and experience of coffee without using coffee beans at all. Minus's beanless coffee emits [00:01:00] 86 percent less carbon than traditional coffee, and it uses 94 percent less water and utilizes 92 percent less land. Made from upcycled ingredients like date seeds and grape seeds, this alt coffee is primarily marketed to women for reasons you'll hear about from their CEO, Maricel Saenz.

The traditional coffee industry is rife with challenges, from deforestation and water intensive farming practices to the instability of supply chains caused by climate change. Minus. aims to address these issues head on with a sustainable, scalable alternative that delivers the same satisfying experience without all the environmental baggage.

We'll explore the science behind beanless coffee, the startup's journey from concept to reality, and the potential impact of this bold innovation on coffee lovers and the planet. Whether you're a caffeine connoisseur or just curious about how cutting edge food tech is reshaping our world, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.

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Paul Shapiro: Marisol, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.

Maricel Saenz: Hi, Paul. Great to be here.

Paul Shapiro: I am really glad to be talking with you. I have to [00:02:00] ask you, you look like you're drinking coffee right now. Are you in fact drinking minus coffee or are you drinking plus coffee?

Maricel Saenz: I am, I am drinking minus coffee right now.

Paul Shapiro: All right, cool.

So what are you drinking? What's in this glass right now?

Maricel Saenz: So I'm drinking our newest coffee, which is an instant oat milk latte. Um, so we just launched this product. It has a half the amount of caffeine than a traditional cup of coffee. So 50 milligrams, a hundred milligrams of L theanine to smooth the absorption of caffeine and six grams of plant protein.

And the goal is for it to give us sustained energy throughout the day instead of those like really intense ups and downs that we get with caffeine.

Paul Shapiro: All right. And is this commercially available right now? Can people buy this online or buy it in stores?

Maricel Saenz: It is. You can buy it online on our website. Um, drink minus coffee dot com.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Well, we will definitely link to that in the show notes of this episode at business for good podcast dot com. But Maricel, let's start from the beginning. You're growing up in Costa Rica. You've got a lot of coffee growing around you. Why do you want to change that?

Maricel Saenz: Um, yeah, so I grew up in Costa Rica.

Then I spent time in Canada. Then I [00:03:00] came to San Francisco. I love coffee. Um, I drink a lot of it. It like wakes me up, but also makes me happy. Um, and when I started to look at how much harder it was to grow coffee, not only in places like Costa Rica, Costa Rica, it's a big exception around other coffee growing regions.

It was just harder and harder to grow coffee. Uh, one reason is climate change, you know, yeah. Coffee is a very sensitive crop, um, it likes the tropics and the areas that it grows because it likes very temperate temperatures, you know, um, moderate levels of rain and climate change is just drastically changing that.

So the crop is at risk to fulfill the amount of demand and I didn't want to live in a world without coffee. So we started to think about what is another way that we can achieve the same experience of coffee, um, but in a way that's kinder to the planet.

Paul Shapiro: Did you come up with this idea independently where you think about other companies that were trying to make being less coffee where you think about other industries that were trying to make for example meet without animals like what what was the actual catalyst in your mind to think hey [00:04:00] maybe instead of trying to figure out better ways to grow coffee beans in a climate changing world i want to just create a different way to make coffee that doesn't involve you Yeah,

Maricel Saenz: so, um, at the time I was living in Berkeley, we just finished the sky deck accelerator and I was working on another company in biotech.

We were working out of this, um, really like co working lab space in Oakland. And there were a lot of people around us that were really trying to make cheese without the cow using microbes or whether it was like cell culture, um, fish or meat. So this was, um, around 2019. And there was a lot of, you know, food innovation happening around the Bay Area.

So it was around challenging, you know, could we do coffee as well and look at what are the specific compounds that make coffee taste like coffee? And is there a better way to get there? Um, I had spent some time in the food industry with our previous company, looking at reducing the use of antibiotics and protein production, but it really came from a environmentalist perspective.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. You talk about you reducing antibiotics and protein production. That means reducing the number of animals who are given [00:05:00] antibiotics. Is that what you were looking to do?

Maricel Saenz: We were, um, we were working on engineering bacteriophages so that we could replace the use of antibiotics and do more targeting control.

Um, so instead Our first target was salmonella in chicken production. So instead of, you know, prophylactically giving them antibiotics, which is a big reason how, of how antibiotics reach our bodies, um, could we use a different way to prevent infection in the animals?

Paul Shapiro: And what happened to Next Biotics, which is the name of that company?

Like, what was the fate of the company?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. Um, so around 2019, um, I decided to step down and my co founder took it over my co founder, he's a PhD in synthetic biology coming out of Berkeley, really passionate about the technology we'd built this partnership with one of the largest animal health companies in Brazil that were interested in running the pilots and deploying it.

So he took it over and took it down to Latin America and transitioning it over to that company.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, nice. And, um, is there still going today? Even five years later,

Maricel Saenz: the company is not going, um, anymore. But the technology has been passed on [00:06:00] to this larger company that's running the trials. And

Paul Shapiro: I see. Okay, well, good luck to them and reducing the salmonella rates.

That would be nice. Um, but Eventually you decided you didn't want to work on antibiotic replacement. You want to work on being replacement. So why was that? If all the people around you are making cheese without cows and, and things like that, what led you to think, what about beans?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. And I think for me as well, I was like, um, at that time particularly, I was a very strict vegetarian and it was difficult to think about protein production in the way that we currently do it, you know, like, Enhancing or, or helping that, that means of production while like really challenging how we make things.

So it was like thinking about, you know, instead of trying to do a 10 percent improvement in an existing system, could we really rethink, um, industries? And coffee for me, it's like a very personal relationship in the sense that it feels like it's a product that I understand that I consume, that I want to continue to consume, um, and that we also had a better understanding.

that a lot of other people of how coffee is grown, you know, like what a [00:07:00] coffee farm actually looks like, how difficult it is. I think that there's a huge disconnection between farm on cup more less and less every day. And I think that there's a lot of wonderful companies, particularly roasters here in San Francisco that are doing a great job around telling the story of who grows the coffee and how that gets.

to your cup, but overall there's a lack of awareness of how complex and long that process is. So because we had, um, this closer connection to a coffee producing country, we felt we had a better understanding of some of the things that we could leverage from existing ways of producing coffee and then reinventing the pieces that were tricky.

Um, so for us, it was about thinking about the substrate. I'm saying, okay, what if we don't use coffee beans as the substrate, but still keep parts of the process, like the fermentation process to improve some of the flavors and to change some of the flavors. So always drawing inspiration from what the coffee industry is already doing.

Paul Shapiro: So your original idea was to harness synthetic biology, right? It wasn't like you wanted to do something, let's say. Like a beyond me where you're going to basically do traditional food science to transform peas into something [00:08:00] that tastes like beef. You want to actually engineer microbes to turn them into little tiny factories that would create compounds that taste like a coffee bean, right?

Okay. So what, how did you even come to be in a position to be? Um, pursuing synthetic biology. And what was the first step that you took to try to recreate the bean?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. So we started to just really do research around what compounds we could produce and started to shorten down the list of compounds. Um, we did a lot of research from like analytical chemistry to really create a molecular map of what makes coffee coffee and building this relationship between chemical compounds and flavor nodes, which is very difficult because, you know, specifically in a, in a product like coffee that has over 800 different compounds.

And it's not like. Um, cheese, right? Where you want to produce cassine. And if you produce cassine at a really high rate, then like that's the main product that you need. It was like, we needed a lot of different compounds in different ratios, perfectly balanced. And ultimately, after doing research, um, and, you know, we engineered strains, we were able to produce our target [00:09:00] compounds.

We were improving yields. It was just very difficult to make the economics work because ultimately, specifically in food, but also in. You know, alternative crops cost is, and will continue to be one of the main drivers for change. Um, so when you're competing with a commodity, a very high tech solution, like engineering, you know, hundreds of compounds to create the specific balance we, it was difficult for us to see the unit economics work in the timeline that we needed them to.

Paul Shapiro: So you started with SynBio, but you eventually stopped using SynBio and converted over to processing basic food ingredients that primarily are being upcycled from other crops, right?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah, exactly. So what we did was, um, start to think what were some other ways that we could produce those compounds that might be You know, equally efficient in terms of quality, but simpler and easier in terms of cost.

So again, when we looked at what coffee farmers do with fermentation is they can grab the exact same coffee bean and then have very different flavor notes by changing the fermentation process as well as the strain. So we started creating. [00:10:00] A library of strains. We source coffee chairs from different places around the world to understand how this different natural microbes, non engineered microbes could help us develop the flavors.

And then we, where we created from an upcycled perspective, it was trying to reconstruct the molecules that we would find in coffee so we could feed them to the microbes. So instead of engineering a microbe to produce the specific compound, giving the microbes, um, the food as in the base, and then using them to develop the acidic nodes, the floral nodes.

The sweet notes and having that library of strains that allows us to create a bunch of different flavors.

Paul Shapiro: So how did this affect the culture of the company? Because presumably you had raised money at the beginning of the company, telling investors you're going to be harnessing biotechnology, doing sin bio and actually creating real coffee compounds.

And now it's a food science company, right? Where you're essentially trying to find ingredients that you can use, as you put it, to more efficiently and more cost effectively recreate. The bean experience, but not making literal coffee without beans. So presumably the [00:11:00] type of employees you need are different.

The type of investors you may be seeking are different. The type of equipment you need in your office are different. How did this affect the culture of the company to pivot from the initial idea to this new idea?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah, so fermentation was always a part of it. Our, if you look at like our first slide deck, we had, you know, we're going to make a base using food science.

We're going to create, uh, we're going to use microbes to ferment and change those flavors. And we're going to use synthetic biology to produce the very, very high quality flavors that are going to like get us over the line. Um, so those three components were always a part of it. When, when we started to look at the economics of.

Scaling or synthetic biology strains and how that would come back. We had a conversation with our investors around like what makes the most sense in terms of investing our time and resources. We had an R and D team. Um, and we started, we continued to do R and D, but more connected to the, as I was mentioning, the analytical chemistry and the sensory science of how those two, two things connected really well.

Um, so we had. One phd [00:12:00] that was focused on the synthetic biology in which she kind of like transitioned off, but most of our team was most focused on fermentation. Anyways.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. And so is this fermentation that you're still doing inside of bioreactors? Or is this like a solid state fermentation? Like how does the actual fermentation look?

Maricel Saenz: So it's solid state fermentation right now. We do it at a coparker because we're now at scale. Um, and we it We use a brewery and a computer manufacturer where we give them our mixed microbial consortia, you know, our process and they make it for us these days. So now we're, we've like transitioned that R& D out of the lab and as a company, you know, we've moved away.

R& D was incredibly fun, you know, we spent a couple of years just like really, really, um, committing to understanding, um, from building our molecular map to building those connections to building our library of ingredients, mapping out the molecules in those ingredients. To building our library of strains and looking at how we could combine all of that.

Uh, I would say today the company looks very different because our efforts are mostly commercial. Uh, we're doing a lot less R and D these days that we were [00:13:00] at the very beginning.

Paul Shapiro: So how many folks work at, at minus now?

Maricel Saenz: We are a team of five.

Paul Shapiro: And the company has raised how much from inception to present?

Maricel Saenz: We've raised over 10 million.

Paul Shapiro: Okay.

Maricel Saenz: Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: And if I look at the ingredient deck now, what will it show? So if I purchase a can, uh, the minus coffee, like it's, it's going to have ingredients that I recognize. What are they?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. Or a pouch of instant coffee. Um, so our. Beanless coffee, it's made out of date seeds and grape seeds, which are upcycled.

We use chicory, carob, and millet malt. Three of those go through a fermentation process, which then we extract like traditional cold brew. And we make this really intense concentrate that we can then dilute and formulate into our RTD cans or freeze dry and formulate it into our instant coffee products.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. So, uh, you know, as somebody who would have no idea where to buy date seeds, right? Like there are purveyors of date seeds out in the market. I presume there are grapeseed purveyors because because people buy grapeseed oil. Um, but what, [00:14:00] where, where does, where does an upcycled ingredient like a date seed, which is obviously trash for most.

Yeah, strings that would use dates. Where does this come from

Maricel Saenz: from the from the date producers themselves? So, you know, they're selling pitted dates and they're throwing away the dates so we can buy literally their trash, um, and put it back into the into the system. It's different to work with upcycled ingredients in the food space.

Um, and it's important to do it. The ones that are coming out of a process, right? So they're like pitting their dates and then their date seats end up in, you know, a separate pile, which then we can use, but it's like very clean. Um, you know, the highest food standard, although it is technically considered waste.

Um, it's not like

Paul Shapiro: dirty waste. Okay. And so with these date seeds, you're grinding them up and that is the basis of the minus coffee. Interesting.

Maricel Saenz: And we have, you know, a database of, you know, hundreds of ingredients and our proposal is not, it's to be ingredient or feedstock agnostic. So it's not like we're trying to replace one [00:15:00] coffee with one other product, but it's really this mixture of different ingredients where we also have backups of like, let's say the supply chain of one of these products gets compromised at some point, we can go back and replace it for a different ingredient in our database.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay. So how are you received when you actually talk to coffee growers, whether in Costa Rica or elsewhere who think, okay, well, you know, she was concerned that about our plight and now she's trying to replace us all together.

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. You know, it's, um. It's been a lot of different conversations.

Uh, I would say that there's some resistance, uh, and there's some openness. It really depends. Like it's, it's also very different from like the farmers. Obviously the farmers feel, you know, like, what are you doing? But then there's the importers and exporters who are just like really moving the product.

Then there's the roasters. Um, then there's like the brands or the coffee shops. Um, there's definitely a A small percentage of a very loud percentage of the market. That's the specialty coffee. Um, that's the people who have very, very high quality coffee, very expensive. They spent so much time and [00:16:00] money on like sourcing programs and making sure that farmers are treated fairly and that they're paid fairly.

Um, and they are very, very proud of coffee. Therefore, their openness to a product like ours is, is limited, which is understandable because they're doing things really, really, um, good. You know, thoughtful and, and they're being very careful about solving those problems, but then there's the other really big segments of the market, which is the commodity coffee and it's the coffee that is, um, you know, grown in regions that are not very well regulated, where, you know, people aren't treated fairly, people aren't being paid fairly.

And that's how they keep those costs super, super low. So it's. Very, very different segments of the market. And therefore they have very different reactions. And the commodity side ultimately is a cosplay. And if you can offer them something where there's a cost advantage, there's, there's more openness, um, on the specialty coffee side of things.

I think their philosophy is more to go back to the farm origin and solve problems from there. So the way that I think about it is we're looking at the same problem, but coming at it from different [00:17:00] angles. Um, and you know, such a huge market and such a big problem that my perspective. We need all of the different solutions to see which one will work long term, but it is, it is a different approach.

Paul Shapiro: You mentioned the coffee cost consciousness and all this commodity coffee, presumably minus cost more than regular coffee, I would guess. So how much more does it cost and who's the buyer? Like, why would somebody go out and purchase this? Is it somebody who's concerned about the environment? They're concerned about labor practices?

They just want something that tastes really good? Like, what is the person paying more for and how much more are they paying?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah. So, um, our RTD and, and our instant, um, their, They're at the premium side. We price them premium in terms of comparing herself to premium coffee and a premium offering. Um, I would say there's definitely been a shift within our, our focus as a company and our product, and that's why our current product looks so different than, um, the first iteration of Minus.

Paul Shapiro: How so you mean one was a can that was RTD and the other is a powder that you make [00:18:00] yourself?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah, but the powder is also looking at what are the benefits that we would get like I get when I'm drinking minus it's like I am making doing something better for the planet but also I'm doing it because so for me it starts from 2023 was an incredibly intense year I think for everyone that was in food and I just heavily burnt out you know it was like driven by Just a lot of anxiety and nonstop.

Um, and I think caffeine was fueling that in a very big way. And then it's like, I'm tasting coffee all the time and I'm drinking coffee all the time. And I'm just like wired all the time. And it's messing with my sleep. And it was just like a lot. And when we were just like really rethinking around where we wanted to take minus, one of the things that we think about is.

You know, coffee is amazing. Coffee is an incredible product. You know, I, I thoroughly enjoyed drinking a delicious cup of coffee. It's getting super expensive and it's quite prohibitive for, for a lot of people, but it is a great product. So when we think about what can beanless coffee really do better than traditional coffee, where is a value proposition where it's different and it is better.[00:19:00]

It is really in this ability to modulate the amount of caffeine. A traditional cup of coffee has the caffeine that it has. If you want to change that, you have to decaffeinate it, which is both a very intense chemical process and a very intense, um, water used process. In our case, we add caffeine to our mixture, so that gives us the ability to be able to launch a completely decaffeinated product, a half caffeinated product, a double caffeinated product.

So we decided to focus on looking at Consumers and their relationship with coffee. So they are the ones who love coffee, want to buy a really expensive specialty coffee, you know, 25, 12 ounce bag and enjoy it. There are people who like, just want to get the caffeine in their bodies and they don't really mind where it comes from.

And there are people who are like looking for alternatives and our transition into coffee alternatives that are other products that have similar benefits, but don't, don't make them feel as. Anxious as jittery and doesn't mess with their sleep as much. So that is the solution, the group that we're creating a solution for today.

So it's people who feel very anxious [00:20:00] around coffee, gives them jitters and then makes them crash. I don't know if this happens to you, but you know, like you have a cup of coffee and then you feel when you come down, so you have another cup of coffee and you feel when you come down and it's like, we live in this cycle and then you don't sleep very well.

So you have more coffee in the morning. And then you crash again. And it's like this, like really intense cycle. So we, we were really intentional about developing a formulation that thought about how could we give the most sustained energy versus having those very intense peaks of energy throughout the day.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. So the functional benefits for the consumer or what, or the primary marketing point here that it's going to be, uh, the flavor of coffee, less caffeine and other functional ingredients in there that are, that they might be seeking. Yeah. Cool. So how does it differ from other beanless coffee makers?

So, you know, there's companies like a Tomo or voyage who are making coffee without the bean. What's the difference from minus? Like if you're trying to describe, um, what separates you from those companies?

Maricel Saenz: I think today, um, minus has a very clear value [00:21:00] proposition and a very clear set of consumers that we're going after.

We're actually focusing on women as our main consumer target. So we're focusing on both, um, women who, you know, Like me, don't want to be caffeinated and crashing all the time, but also women who are going through transitions in their bodies. So women who are starting to go through perimenopause, a lot of the times, the amount of caffeine can heighten some of the symptoms like the hot flashes and the night sweats, and they also need to be consuming more protein.

So we designed this product with women in mind, thinking about specific needs when you're going through different. Uh, points in your cycle as well as transitions within your body. So I think today our target market is very clear. Our value proposition is very clear and we're, um, straightly focus on that audience, which is different than a lot of the other bean list coffee companies who are just going a little bit more general for the coffee market, um, and for the coffee replacing.

So I think today from the. Four or five that I know there's differences in terms of, you know, how the product is made What the format of the product is and what's the channel I would say probably [00:22:00] everybody has a slightly different approach today Um, but it's going for the general coffee replacing

Paul Shapiro: nice and so If you have your basic formula down, you say you're not doing much R& D, what's next for the company?

Is it simply to increase production, increase demand? Are there, will there be new SKUs that are coming out? Like what's the next step?

Maricel Saenz: We are developing new SKUs. We're super excited. One of the cool things about launching a consumer product is just like really learning of what people love about our product, what they would want to see more, you know, and there's a lot of different things that we can flex from like launching a totally decaffeinated product to increasing the amount of protein.

We're working on some really exciting partnerships to launch new products, new flavors, um, a new within our consumer group, really looking at, um, what's the ideal, right? It's like, we're really trying to make something people want, people love, and that helps them solve the problems in a, in a day to day basis.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. Very cool, Maricel. So you have now done two startups that you've co founded. You are somebody who [00:23:00] lives your life in that milieu, right, of a lot of interesting technology startups. Are there other ideas that you wish somebody else would do? Like, you've obviously been motivated by trying to solve more problems, whether it's overuse of antibiotics or now the coffee crisis or that's impending because of climate change.

Surely there are ideas that you wish that somebody else would do that you just don't have time to do yourself So if there's somebody listening and they think oh, I really admire myself. I want to be like her What ideas might you suggest that that person pursue

Maricel Saenz: i'm like, um, okay, so I think I should have a list, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is I am a huge scuba diver and I love the ocean and there are so many problems around ocean management right now, everything from like how we're managing fisheries, you know, and the amount of that we're fishing versus what it's we're producing.

But the main thing that I'm worried about, um, I would say less than having solutions or ideas. I have problems that I think are important to think [00:24:00] about a desk. Cause that's honestly how you should start. I think a lot of the times that I've learned that too, right. It's like you have a solution and you're just like thinking about, you always got to start by the problem.

And I think one problem that needs more time and attention is to really think about the amount of plastic that there is in the ocean, right? Like we're finding plastic. Deep, deep, deep in the ocean. We're finding plastic in almost every fish we're finding in, um, everywhere. And we were also using it everywhere, you know?

Um, so I'm, I'm very concerned about the state of the ocean from a plastic perspective. I'm also concerned about it from, uh, um, just like residue, you know, we throw so much of our trash, like our agricultural waste. The water in great parts goes to the ocean and it's bringing a lot of the pesticides and the problems and that's destabilizing the entire ecosystem.

And the problem with the ocean, it's a tragedy of commons, right? It's not mine. It's not yours. It's all of us. Therefore, you know, politicians and four year cycles are not really interested in taking care of a problem that needs just like very intense, holistic solutions. So that's a problem that I hope somebody is also thinking through.

Um, Yeah, and I, you [00:25:00] know, there's always like small ideas, but I think as an entrepreneur, you know, they say this a lot at the beginning and it's funny how after you've done this for a few years, you come back to the basics of like what it really takes to be successful in this space. And I think it's one, fall in love with the problem, right?

And like be committed to solving that to make something people want, you know, like just really spend a lot of time understanding your customers. And I think the third really important thing is just who you work with, right? Like at the end of the day. Our jobs and our lives are the day to day. And it's the people that you show up with and work with, um, every day.

And that includes your team, your investors, your advisors, the people around you. Um. And then the fourth one is just like really learning how to take care of yourself. I think that's that's what a lot of founders are learning around me. At least today.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I feel like, um, among founders, there's a little bit of a shift in that there used to be like this Um, like valorization of this extremely hardcore [00:26:00] work ethic, right?

Where you're working every evening, every weekend, every holiday, and at least among some, I find that there's now more of a shift to saying, hey, you need to do more to take care of yourself and so on. Have you seen that as well?

Maricel Saenz: Yeah, I mean, I I've seen that and I feel like I am definitely a part of that change where it's like I, you know, when I first started, it was, um, you're working 24 seven, and it comes from a beautiful place of fashion, right?

It's like you're building this incredible thing that you're incredibly excited about. Um, you know, I was also younger. But it's, I think it's about learning how to build the fuel of like working hard and recharging and like finding those tools and making sure that you're doing it on a constant basis. I think a lot of what happened was people would push, push, push, push, push, push really hard.

And then where you're trying to recharge from that, it's like you have a dead, you know, you have a sleep dead, you have a rest dead, you have like, you know, not paying attention to a lot of their relationships. So you have your community and ultimately, um, it takes a while to recover [00:27:00] those things. So it's more about.

I think from what I've discovered today, being somewhere in balance and From my perspective, it also allows me to make better decisions, you know, like when I am more clear minded, when I am more calm, when I've like slept well, I've gone to the gym, I'm like eating well, like all the things that people tell you, you know, when you're like not feeling good and people are like, are you sleeping well?

Are you exercising? And you're like, no, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but when you are doing those things, then I find that, um, I'm just like making better decisions faster and being more productive. So. Cool. I think the output ends up being very similar. It's just about how you distribute your time and what you focus on.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. Okay. Uh, yeah, I definitely find that, uh, the amount that I work like it's, I don't know that I can get as much done if I work less, but I do find that, um, it does seem to promote long term ism for myself, at least in that sense.

Maricel Saenz: You know what? I think the main thing that has happened for me. I don't think I'm working any less hours.

[00:28:00] I think before when I was like not managing my stress appropriately, even when I wasn't working, my head was going, you know, so I was like going to bed thinking about it and I was waking up thinking about it now, you know, so it's like this, which is like, you're not really resting, but the hours that you're like working are very similar.

So if you really work on like, and here's where like meditation disconnecting for me, like reading or these things are like you turn off that part. So when you turn it on again, you can like see it with a fresh perspective versus just like. I think I

Paul Shapiro: got it. You mentioned reading Marisol, are there resources that have been really useful for you as a founder, either for Next Biotics or for Minus that have been useful that you would recommend for others?

Maricel Saenz: I think there's amazing resources out there, right? Like from like the YC guides and like all the classic books that I'm sure so many other people have recommended on this, on this podcast because they're, there's the classics that are really helpful. Um, I actually have really recently enjoyed this book in the, in food specifically called ssis by George.

Um, Mon, have you read it?

Paul Shapiro: I have read it and I thought [00:29:00] it was excellent actually. I loved Regenesis and will link to it in the show notes at business for good podcast.com.

Maricel Saenz: It is so good and I like found myself. It's like you're learning about soil at such an intricate. Deep level, but it is so interesting to read.

And he does like a deep dive in all these different methods of production, looking at the good and the bad and reaching some important conclusions about how we transform the future of food. Um, I found it really insightful and really inspiring.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. One of the things I really liked about regenerate, uh, about regenesis is that, you know, there's really two, like among people who think that the current food system is broken and needs to be fixed, there's two groups.

One people who think we need to go back to like 19th century methods of agriculture and another think we need to embrace 21st. Century methods of agriculture that is, you know, more biotech, uh, you know, higher yields and so on. And I really find myself in that ladder camp right of thinking. Actually, we need more technology and food, not less if we're going to feed the [00:30:00] planet without destroying it, right?

Um, and that's what regenesis is, is about, I, I think, and I really appreciated that about Monbiot's argument.

Maricel Saenz: Yeah, but he, and he starts all the way from the other side, right? To be like, what if we go back? What if we go back and try to do this, like, incredibly holistic, you know, interdynamic, interconnected systems of agriculture?

And what are the pros and what are the cons? But ultimately, it's just like, We look at the population growth. We look at the amount of resources that it takes to feed, uh, you know, a person, a family, a country, a planet and the resources that we have. And it's just like, the numbers don't make sense. So we like need a solution.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I guess the question is, do you want more land for wildlife or less, right? Because the, the, um, the so called holistic techniques that you're talking about are extraordinarily land consumptive, right? They take up a lot more land than more modern methods of agriculture do. And if you don't want to have to deforest more and take away even more from wildlife from the limited amount of land that they have left, [00:31:00] yeah.

Uh, we have to embrace 21st century techniques of food production.

Maricel Saenz: Like we're literally running out of space, you know, like as of today, there's already so little that it's like truly wild, you know, like even the places that you think you're wild, when you go visit them, you're like, this is becoming more of like a park.

You know, it's like, it becomes smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter. And the truth is cities are growing. Right? And that's not stopping. There needs more housing. If anything, we have a housing crisis. We need more housing that starts to expand. So the idea that we're going to now use more land to grow more food.

I'm like, not really sure where we're getting it from,

Paul Shapiro: right? Yeah, we're not going to be farming the moon. We're not going to be farming Mars. We have one celestial body to farm. And the reality is, is that we're going to have 2 billion more people on the planet in the next 30 or so years. Transcribed And, you know, we have to feed them.

So we want to feed

Maricel Saenz: them like with good, high quality food. Right. Like, I think that's something that we keep forgetting. It's like, we can. There's cheap ways to feed people full of like, you [00:32:00] know, food that is not good for you, but like we need we don't need vegetables and we need fruits and we need food that are, you know, high in nutrients.

So it's a challenge.

Paul Shapiro: Well, I very much hope that some of those 2 billion people in the future are going to be drinking minus coffee, Maricel. Me too. They will be having a lighter footprint on the planet as a result of it. But congratulations on all of your success from founding the company and raising 10 million and getting product into market.

Uh, it's a, it's a very high bar to, uh, for these food tech companies to finally get something on the market and you're doing it and I wish you the best of success with it.

Maricel Saenz: I really appreciate that. Well, thank you so much. And thank you for having me here and sharing a little bit about our story.