Chef-Crafted Plant-Based Meats with Jody & Todd Boyman

October 19, 2021

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Jody is an entrepreneur and life-long advocate for sustainable food practices, healthy eating and animal welfare. She has a background in whole-food, plant-based nutrition, marketing and sales and is committed to helping build a humane economy that feeds our deepest values while also fueling new levels of sustained prosperity. As Co-Founder & Chief Purpose Officer of Hungry Planet, and fueled by the firsthand challenges of eating plant-based since childhood and raising plant-based children, she is bringing to market the first full range of chef-crafted plant-based meats that are delicious and nutritious.

Todd is an entrepreneur who has worked globally founding and investing in a variety of companies ranging from tech to food to trading. As Co-Founder & CEO of Hungry Planet, he is working to bend the curve on human and planetary health by ensuring that our growing human family can be nourished in a way that is sustainable, healthful, and hopeful. He has eaten plant-based for over 25 years, and is dedicated to bringing the benefits of plant-based foods to carnivores, omnivores, and flexitarians. In addition to being a guest speaker at Harvard University, Dropbox, Myriad, and other organizations that are interested in learning about the future of food, he and Hungry Planet have been quoted and featured in publications, radio and podcasts ranging from The New York Times and The Financial Times, to NPR, CS Monitor, and The Chicago Tribune.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. And it’s the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so honored to have with us, I believe, our first brother-sister team ever. It’s the Boymans. It’s Jody Boyman and Todd Boyman, the founders of Hungry Planet Foods. Welcome to the Impact Podcast.

Todd Boyman: John, it’s nice to be with you. Thank you.

John: Well, this is really going to be a great and exciting broadcast. I love your food. As my listeners already know, I’m a vegan and a vegetarian, been so for years. These are your products that I ate last night. I’ve eaten them before last night, but these are some specific ones I just had last night. They are delicious, and we’re going to be talking about them. But before we get talking about how you started Hungry Planet Foods and what you’re doing there, share a little bit of each of your backgrounds. Jody, you go first.

Jody Boyman: We grew up in St. Louis, Missouri in the ’60s and the ’70s. Speaking for myself, I was always an animal lover and always being into environmental concerns and all of that. It became clear to me from a very young age that the food that we eat has served unintended consequences for our health, and the environment, and the animals. I’ve always believed that our daily food choices are sort of a vote for the world we want to inhabit and future generations will inherit.

I announced to my parents that I was going to be plant-based from a very young age. I think I was eleven or twelve then. That caused great consternation. Eventually, both my siblings followed along with that, my brother and our younger sister. It’s just been this journey for me as I know it has been for many, many, many years. But how exciting that it’s reaching this critical mass now and that we have all these delicious and nutritious foods to eat, particularly all these meats that people can just swap in and have with their regular recipes. That’s my background. It all started in St. Louis, Missouri, which is where our company is founded and most of our team is there. But it’s quite the journey. It’s really fun.

John: Jody, the options that we had 40 something years ago. I grew up in New York City. The options we had in New York City and Missouri were so limited, right? It’s crazy.

Jody: It was terrible. You’d do sorting off from [inaudible] or you’d have mixed it with water and then [inaudible]. The taste is terrible. Only long-haired hippie freaks went to the health food store back then. Now, you got Erewhon and all that out here, and people are actively seeking these alternatives. The times have changed for sure.

John: Todd, how about you? Share a little bit about your journey leading up to where you are today.

Todd: Yes, [inaudible]. Maybe an inside story here on Jody that just have fell out her back story a little bit. It really leads to ultimately why I also chose to eat and live these ways. Jody and our younger sister, Kim, when my mom would bring out our beautiful dinners, they would look at it and say, “Hey, Mom, where did this use to be?” That was when they were in grade schools. So we [inaudible] to really interrogate what was on the plate. You get these heavy downpours in the Midwest and the earthworms start crawling out on the pavement, and Jody and Kim were out there moving them all back onto the dirt. Both of them had a deep, deep connection to all living things and ultimately really connecting the dots in terms of how our few choices directly impact our human health, planetary health, and the well-being of animals. I don’t think you can help but to grow up in a family like that and be impacted.

They both have been plant-based for 4 decades. It took me about a decade longer than them to let it sink in. I’m a slow learner in this family so it’s been a little over thirty-five years, but I eventually got it because even thirty-five years ago, the data was compelling. Well, today it’s absolutely overwhelming. Anyone who wants to understand why you might choose to eat differently, the data is all there. That’s really, for me, where it started as well with an older and younger sister who patiently brought me along on that journey until I wised up and said, “Yeah, this kind of makes sense for a whole infinite number of ideas.”

John: When people ask me, “Why plant-based?” I say, “Listen, this is not my opinion, it’s just the science, so you either can follow the science. You don’t have to follow science, but it’s just what it is.” [crosstalk].

Todd: It is. Like when people will say, “Why do you believe that?” It’s like well, actually, it’s not a belief, it’s an understanding, [crosstalk] right?

John: Right.

Todd: It’s an understanding of the science. A lot of people take a front at that, but the science is overwhelming. When people do it for selfish reasons or planetary reasons or as they understand what’s going on with and the latter culture, anyone of those reasons is pretty compelling. At the end of the day, it really is about delicious food, John. You made that point about how difficult it was in those early days to eat plant-based.

The data in the United States shows that any one time and this has been true for decades, now maybe 5% of the population was to eat vegan or vegetarian, but there’s an 80% turn over a 3-year time period, meaning that over 3 years, 80% of those people washed out because historically, it is so difficult to get really delicious food and easy on way up. That’s one of the problems that we’re solving with Hungry Planet.

John: When did you come together as entrepreneurs besides siblings and say, “Aha! There is a huge void in the marketplace. Let’s come together and put a company together to fill that void?”

Todd: Well, it was probably twenty-five years ago. Some of the first veggie burgers were coming on the market and Johnny Byrum[?] was out as well. It was like you could finally go out to eat with your friends and you’re like, “Okay, well, I’ll take that because finally, it’s not just steamed vegetables.”, right?

John: Right.

Todd: So that was a eureka moment, I think, for all of us. Then it was probably close to twenty years ago where Jody and I, and some like-minded friends really started to realize that we could spend a lot of time, effort, money trying to educate people as to why they might want to eat differently, but that really doesn’t work.

That’s when the light started to dawn [inaudible]. “Let’s figure out how to get people what they love to eat,” and so that was in the early 2000s. Before anyone was talking about this, people love to eat meat. There’s nothing wrong with loving the taste and the texture of that. So let’s figure out whether we can replicate that. That started in the early 2000s. It was just a very patient investment with patient capital, not outside money. There was no market for it, but there also were outside investors saying, “We’re happy to get something to market.” That’s really where it started.

It also started by looking at from a global perspective. Jody and I have grown up internationally. I’ve always done business in the tech world that I was in before doing business globally. When you look at the conventional meat industry globally, it’s about 2 trillion dollar market, and the most predominant meat is pork and then chicken and then beef and then lamb and others. So we just thought it through and said, let’s figure this out. Can we come up with basically a platform, come with software in terms of the design thinking and let’s see if we can replicate all these meats, the taste, and the texture. Let’s also make sure that we build into it a superior nutritional profile and then let’s also make sure that it handles stores purposely cooks like conventional meat.

That was kind of the vision that we started off with and close to twenty years ago with some like-minded individuals and patiently worked on it. Really, it’s just a passion project. Then over the past 8 years or so, it was clear that the food was fantastic, and let’s start figuring out when is the market ready for this, and let’s scale off the business. It’s been a long journey with us and other members of our team.

John: For our listeners and viewers out there that want to find Todd and Jody and their great products and find out where they can also buy them, please go to www.hungryplanetfoods.com. Jody, talk a little bit about where you are right now because as I’ve shared… I want to show this. I’ve had a lot of plant-based food. I chase it down, whatever city I’m in. Last week, I was in New York, Minneapolis, Detroit, and back to L.A. I’m constantly looking for more options, more alternatives, see what the latest and greatest is.

Thai meatballs never had plant-ba-, these were absolutely delicious. Italian sausage meatballs, I’ve had vegan Italian sausage, never Italian sausage meatballs. These tremendous. Since I’m not a big crab person to start with, never was, I had two of these last night. Amazing. Just delicious. Plus your chicken patties I had, the fried chicken patties also. I don’t know what I did with that. Somehow, I brought it with me and I lost it en route in my car or something. Your products, all of them are just outstanding, delicious, easily digested.

Really, honestly, my final tell on anything I eat, given that I’m fifty-eight now, is how I sleep that night. If the food disrupts my sleep at all, then I know, wait a second, it tasted great and I’ll tell you, I slept like a baby. So your food is not only clean and delicious but it’s just absolutely on point. Twenty years, it doesn’t matter how long your journey is. When you get it right, the magic is happening. Where are you now and where do you both want to go in this wonderful journey and evolution?

Jody: Well, as Todd said, we’ve been really patient, right? We have a super big vision that this be a global company because people need variety everywhere in the world. People say, “What’s your hero product?” and I don’t even like the word “product.” I like to say “meat.” It is meat from plants. What’s your hero product? It’s not beef and burger because a lot of people are doing that. That’s great, but as a lifetime vegan pretty much, I’m kind of tired of beef and burgers. I want everything else so that I can eat pork, crab, chicken, and all these different foreign factors.

We were launching into food service right about the time that COVID hit. As food service sort of fell off a cliff. We quickly regrouped. We’re very nimble company, and we said, “Okay, people are still hungry. They’re just hungry at home, so let’s get this food to them at home.” We moved forward our plans by about twenty-four months so that we can include now of seventeen retail items, including 3 ready to heat full meals, which you haven’t seen yet. Salisbury steak and chicken piccata, and it comes with mashed potatoes and green beans. You just heat it up and you have a complete meal that is low in fat, low in sodium, high in fiber, really high in protein, doesn’t involve any animals at all.

You asked where are we going, now, we’re back in the food service because everything is starting to settle down a little bit with COVID. Our foodservice channel is firing like crazy. We’re on shelf at all three hundred and sixty-two sprouts grocery stores as of this week. [inaudible] products there or in lots of Albertsons or Lazy Acres. If you go on our website, we have a “find us” page and it tells you all the restaurants and all the places where you can get our great foods. We’re also available through e-con. We’re on Amazon. We’re on costco.com. We’re available for order on our own website.

If you don’t want to order a huge amount of food to start, that’s a good point. It’s the kind of taste a few options. Our strength is our diversity and it’s also our nutritional profile. We have about half the calories, a fraction of the fat, no saturated fat compared to others in this category, and certainly compared to conventional meats.

John: Got it. Wow. Todd, I know both of you have international experience living abroad, just a global citizen mindset. This is going to be a global company, right? Because the world is ready for plant-based products, the kind of products that you have.

Todd: Yes, John, no question about it. The transformation that is going on right now is global and it’s happening rapidly. We’ve actually been selling our products in Australia for about 3 years as part of a soft launch. We’ve been doing products in Singapore for about a year. We have boots on the ground in the Middle East that we’ll be launching there soon. As you indicated, we really did start with the global vision of what’s the opportunity and what’s the problem. You can’t address climate change. You can’t address food scarcity. You can’t address all these issues if you’re just thinking domestically.

You really have to be thinking globally and define that opportunity, that problem globally and then go after it. That is absolutely what we’re doing, and it really stretched us from the very first day to define this opportunity in a different way. There’s this thought that how you define a problem is really going to dictate where you end up. If you’re defining the problem as beef and burgers, that’s going to take you down one halfway. If you define it as every type of animal protein because they all impact human health, planetary health, and animal well-being and you look at it through a culinary lens, that’s going to lead you to a very different solution.

Your comment about discovering our foods for the first time and then it was like, “Oh, wait a second, no one else is doing this.” It’s because really, no one else set off with a vision that we set off with. By doing that, we’ve been shaft crafted from Day 1 because the food doesn’t taste great, right, John? You would’ve been like, “Okay, you know what, this food isn’t interesting.” If it doesn’t digest well, not a good thing. When you’re shaft crafted, you set the bar at a different level. Then when you think about globally, you’re thinking about not just the meat proteins that cultures around the world consume but you’re also thinking about how they prepare it. Is it a kebab? Is it a roast? How is it being prepared? If your meat can’t translate in all those cuisines, you’re pigeonholed into 1 or 2 parts of that solution and not the all-encompassing solution that’s required.

Our team is led by an amazing culinarian, Chef Ron. [inaudible] is a certified master chef. There are only sixty-two out there. That’s the highest designation you can have. Every day, he’s monitored to the whole team if the food’s stupid. It’s got to taste great.

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While we have a lot of interesting science that undergirds what we do, it’s the food is stupid. And if the food isn’t great, it doesn’t get released. We’ve had the benefit of honestly working on this longer than anyone else on the planet so we have an iteration after iteration after iteration that when it was time to launch it, we don’t then later say, “Oops, sorry.” We can’t apologize for that. Let’s give you a different version. The first version should be spectacular. I think based on your experience, you’re seeing that we got it right across all these protein types.

John: The taste was incredible. I was blown away. Like I said, I’m not a big crab person. I couldn’t even tell the difference between your crab cake and what is known as a traditional crab cake made out of regular crab. It was that good. Just fantastic on every level. All your products were just incredible. Now, the chef is in St. Louis, Missouri with you?

Todd: Because we are a fairly large culinary team at this point, our chief culinary officer, Ron, is in New York but heads back and forth regularly so he can work with the culinary community in New York. He’s on the West Coast regularly and he’s in [inaudible]. One of his homes, quite frankly, is an airplane. He’s [inaudible]. He’s all over the place.

John: I know how that works.

Todd: Your point about the crab is interesting. We had an opportunity to serve a range of our meats to one of the largest meat companies on the planet. About 3 years ago, that was [inaudible] before we take the covers off of everything that we were doing. It was an opportunity to present our foods without it being revealed in advance that they were all [inaudible] meats. It’s an annual banquet of a hundred of the top executives and there’s significant others, and our food was being served as the appetizer without it being revealed that it was plant-based. When they all sat down, they have their main meal and they’re being walked through what the main meal was going to be.

The chef said, “Well, how did you all like the appetizers?” A round of applause. The best we’ve ever had in all the years of this banquet. Then he said, “Well, just so you know, those were all plant-based.” Dead silence, two hundred pairs of eyes looking up and then a round of applause of well-played. When you can do that and have people who really know meat not knowing that they aren’t eating conventional meat but they’re eating meat made directly from plants without the animal intermediary, you feel like, “Okay, we’re probably ready to now launch this for everybody to enjoy.”

John: It’s so funny, guys. People want to look good. Looking good is part of the vanity Instagram world that we live in and things of that such and they’re buying all sorts of stuff to put on their body. The truth is… I’m not giving away any secrets, but I know we spoke, had a lovely discussion prior to filming this and I know your ages. Both of you look at least ten years younger than you are. If people understood that if they put just cleaner products into their body when they eat, they don’t have to put all this extra stuff on the exterior to look good.

Both of you look unbelievably amazing, not only healthy, but extraordinarily young, and I think that’s part of the messaging here, also part of the messaging, I always find this… Somehow, Jody, you could go into this, but you’re both evangelists for plant-based eating. Somehow, people along the way who are vegan or plant-based feel that it’s an ideological movement, and it’s all or nothing but that’s so untrue. And you guys have created products that can be enjoyed and people can eat whatever they want during the day, come home and have an amazing vegan meal or a plant-based meal or a plant-based lunch and still do whatever they want during the rest of the day. It’s just, it never missed anything from a taste perspective.

Jody: Oh, that’s it. We realized early on that we were not… if we were really trying to move the needle and our mission to bend the curve on personal and planetary health, it’s not about the vegans and the vegetarians out there. I love them, they’re my peeps but I want my food to be consumed by the 99% of other people on the planet who are starting to wake up about what’s going on, like environmentally and all that and they’re looking for options. And they don’t want to be asked to eat wildly different foods. They don’t want to have lentil burgers, they want a beef burger or a lamb burger. We have phenomenal lamb that you smell wafting down the hall, it’s too realistic for me, but people who love lamb say it’s indistinguishable.

They want to eat foods that are familiar to them but are better for them and their families and the earth, we are passing on this earth to our children. All of us on this call, each have two children, we are passing this earth along to them. And we are not living sustainably. How is it that we somehow manage to feed almost 8 trillion animals every year or billion animals every year, but we can’t feed 8 billion human beings. That’s a travesty. We’re doing something wrong there, right? And there’s all of these billions and billions of animals that are caught up in this food system and we just want to disintermediate that. We want to just say, we make meat directly from plants but you can’t taste the difference and it’s better for you and the plant and the animals, why wouldn’t you? Once a day, once a week, once a month, just lean into it and try it. Open your mind. And we find people come back over and over again and are so thankful. They were like, “I know I should be doing this and you make it easy for me.”

And that’s what fuels me every day. I want to be the easy go-to, delicious, nutritious solution. And in families where, by the way, and you probably see this, kids are coming home from college during COVID and they’re like, “Mom! Dad! I’m vegan”, and they’re like, “Oh my God! How am I going to feed you?”. Well, it’s easy, right? You just make lasagna with Hungry Planet and everybody around the table can eat it and feels satisfied, and there’s no questions asked. If you don’t say anything, nobody even knows, right?

John: [inaudible] For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Jody Boyman and Todd Boyman with us. A brother-sister entrepreneurial powerhouse team and the founders of Hungry Planet Foods. You could find them and their great products at www.hungryplanetfoods.com. Todd, talk a little bit about you and your sister have been doing this partnership, entrepreneurship thing now for almost 20 years as you’ve said, but diversity and inclusivity is becoming a bigger deal now just in 24,36 months it’s become a major social issue. I’m partners with my wife, who’s right over there, and we’ve been together almost 40 years so I understand the value of diversity. How does it make you a better entrepreneurial team and a better company, given the diversity of views that you have as not like brother and sister, but male, female and other points of view that you bring that are both aligned but also diverse of the same time?

Todd: Yes, we got some really interesting thing to think through. When you look at the food systems and you look at the cultural food, and you see how diverse our food desires are around the world, if you want any chance of figuring out how to provide those foods, you’ve got to design and architect an organization or company that reflects the rest of the world. Right? You can’t just have people just like you. And so to that end, we’ve got virtually no litmus test for joining our company. We actually don’t go looking for people who are plant-based. That’s another form of the litmus test and people might think, “well, does everyone who worked there be plant-based?” By intention, not, particularly among our culinary team, because what we want to do is we want to have our first principles question on an everyday basis.

Because when we do that, when we look at the science, and we look at the arguments for and against any decisions we might be making, it makes us make better decisions to understand what are the primary, secondary, tertiary impacts of that decision and making sure that they will scale and that they will meet needs globally. So if you’re looking to develop food that works, not just for this amazingly diverse community that we have here in United States, but then is tailored specifically for the Middle East, or a very diverse community like Singapore, or in China or in Japan or Korea, or Europe. You need to have that. So I think the issue of diversity was baked into what we did from day one.

Understanding that without that there’s no way we could be successful and there’s no way that we could achieve the objective and meet our mission, which as Jody said, is to bend the curve on personal and planetary health. The only way you can do that is to get all the voices in there with an equal seat at the table, have those good healthy discussions, and then make decisions and move forward.

John: You know, Jody, reverse logistics is always an issue for any industry. And since you already have so many of these recipes down and the taste profiles down unbelievably, are you able to contract manufacturer, your products where you want to be in terms of knowledge, domestically, in terms of a reverse logistics distribution basis? But also, as Todd was just talking about Middle East, Singapore, China, India, all either already in motion. Already happening. Are you able to then contract manufacturer in different parts of the world as well?

Jody: That’s a very good question. And it’s an ongoing process, right especially in the world of COVID. But we have a really nice broad, diverse network of places where we produce our food, different geographies, and all of that. So we’ve got redundancies, and we do everything, from raw to raw formed to pre-cooked to ready-to-eat. Unlike other companies that are doing one of those things, we’re doing all four. We’re playing three-dimensional chess, and we’re doing it in food service, and retail, and e-com, and now globally, right? So we do have phenomenal partners and we feel very optimistic that all the pieces will come together as they need as we expand in these other markets. And I don’t think that will be a hurdle. We’re getting some really great traction and some wonderful geographies where we want to make a difference.

John: Todd to democratize your products which deserve to be democratized. Again, for our listeners out there, hungryplanetfoods.com, you can find all 17 of their products, and where they’re being sold right now. Takes capital, how are you both approaching the word “capital” to go democratize your products, both nationally, and also, obviously, internationally?

Todd: Yes John, we’ve had the benefit of working on this for so long, and being self-funded that we could afford to be patient to get it right. And to derisk the model that we ultimately took to market. When you take a look at this space, most people understand that there’s a huge amount of risk just in the early R&D stage of just trying to figure out one plant-based protein, let alone 9 different types. We had the opportunity to do all that on our own dime with a collection of insiders who weren’t interested in that, you’ll say let’s rush something out.

So by doing that first before we went out to talk to the capital markets, gave us a huge advantage to be very selective in who we partnered with, how much we brought in, and when we brought it in. So our capital needs haven’t been kind of in the same ballpark as others because we’ve done all the R&D. And our capital needs were really about scaling what was already proven. And so we’ve been able to bring in some phenomenal partners, which we brought in at the beginning of this year, we did a raise that we brought in 25 million. We had people wanting to write checks much larger, but we really didn’t know how we would use that wisely and too much money actually can lead you to make really poor decisions.

So we brought in the amount that we wanted to bring in and rapidly been further building out that team, expanding the geographic reach, and further building out a lot of our social media assets to get the words out there in addition to our website of hungryplanetfoods.com where when people go there, we have all types of recipes. We’ve got videos of how to use the food, our chefs are making it very easy for people on board, whether they’re in the food service area or consumers. But then we also have channels on Instagram, on YouTube, on Pinterest, on Facebook, all @hungryplanetfoods, where consumers can really discover what we’re doing. And so we’ve found that we’ve been able to do this in a way that is smart. We believe that the timing is right, that we’ve made the right decisions at the right time. And we’ve surrounded ourselves with people who have been absolutely aligned with the mission from day one, and have let us go at the pace that we thought was the right pace to introduce these foods.

John: You talk about building a team. You guys are a great team. Obviously, you’ve already had so much of this down. Jody, I know you probably do a little bit of everything every day, but how do you, generally speaking, divide and conquer to go? Because this is a big idea. This isn’t just a nice little business, domestic business, even regional business, this is truly going to be a big international company. What’s the division of labor typically?

Jody: Well, it wasn’t that long ago that we did almost everything. And we wore all the hats in the company, right? That’s just the nature of a startup, we were working hundred-hour weeks. As things got rolling, and as we saw that the time was coming. And we were perfecting and ready to launch. We were working, we still are but crazy hours, right? But the key is to surround yourself with people who are really good at what they do and just invite them into this very dynamic community that we’re developing. We’ve grown quickly, and we just have the best team and everybody communicates well. We’re on Slack channels all day long. We got emails, and Google drives, and everything. But we’ve let the people who are really good at what they do, do what they do in terms of the operations. But I personally am plugged in every day, to sales, marketing, and design.

Those three areas, I have my fingers all over all of that, I was the original salesperson at this company. And I’ve never sold anything in my life before I started selling Hungry Planet meat. I had other careers as a wildlife photographer and a clinical psychologist, and I was like, “Oh, but I could sell meat, sure I can sell meat”. So off I went, Todd has more of a sales background. So that’s where it is. And Todd, as the CEO, oversees everything. And the commercial side is really important for him to do, but also the operations side. Because we’re playing three-dimensional chess, has its challenges, but it’s so exciting because we’re able to fire on all of these cylinders.

John: How big are you now like in terms of not… I don’t want revenues or anything like that, but how many people are full-time employees now?

Todd: So we’ve built a team of about 40 people right now. It’s flexing up every single day, to build just a phenomenal team here in St. Louis, where we’re headquartered. But we have individuals, again, around the world who are a part of the team as we start preparing various markets for launch. And I think what everyone feels energized about as they come in, and they really deeply understand the mission of the business. And they understand how what we’re doing is making a very tangible impact, that energy just drives that team. And it’s all pointed out to me recently that with a team of, call it 40 people, we have more people focused on kind of this ESG category of making a change to environmental, social governance than some of the largest your multibillion-dollar food companies on the planet who might have one person who’s assigned to that, to figure it out.

Here we have virtually every member of our team focused on the exact center of how do you make the world a better place by building a sustainable business to make a difference. And so when they said that it has to bring a smile to your face and you’re thinking, “Wow! You’re punching above your weight.” When you look at it through that lens and say, “Yeah, 40 people at a massive multi-billion dollar food company doesn’t seem like that many.” But everybody is absolutely focused on this mission and are making a difference. That’s really, really satisfying.

John: So interesting. By the way, I agree with you tremendously and not there’s no greater trend and ESG. That’s not only here, but it’s here to stay. And that I think is going to be tremendously beneficial. One of the other anecdotal trends that I’m seeing, I want to know, have you both seen this? And obviously, if you have, do you believe that your brand is going to be a big beneficiary? I have friends that are doctors, and they’re not only MDs, but they’re holistic doctors as well. And I go to them, I’ve been going to them for many, many years. And they both tell me the same thing. One of them is in his 40s, the other one is in his 70s. And they both tell me that their business, as we come out of COVID, has nearly doubled, because people’s interest in health and wellness now, and proactive instead of reactive medicine, and proactive behavior is greater than ever before. And if that anecdotal information is true, that has to be a tremendous windfall to your mission.

Jody: We have always felt that food is medicine and our younger sister is a medical doctor and has been for about 35 years. And she uses her plant-based learnings every day with her patients. And like you, I have many, many friends who are doctors and who are, holistic medicine and all of that. And, I think that is one of the silver linings of COVID, right? People did say, “Okay, what can I do proactively for myself, to eat cleaner, to eat better, so that I can protect myself against, this virus?” And Hungry Planet’s a great option for that.

John: Right. This is your show, this is all about both of you. Any last thoughts or words before we say goodbye for today, but it’s not going to be the last time we talk, because I’m going to have you back on to continue to share your great journey. Any final thoughts that either one of you would like to share with our audience today?

Todd: First of all, thank you for having us on the show. Wonderful to meet you. And we were delighted to be able to share with people our ancient[?] learning about this category. And Hungry Planet, our focus truly is to provide simply, authentically delicious meats made directly from plants that span every meat protein type are available in every cuisine that you can imagine. That you can buy these products as grounds, and you can make them as a substitution in any of your existing favorite recipes. Or you can get the pre-cooked items. And you can know that with Hungry Planet, we are always going to consistently deliver authentically delicious food that is demonstrably better for you. We don’t believe it’s appropriate to have the halo of being plant-based without delivering on the promise of what plant-base should mean, which is better for you, as you were talking about here, the health elements of it.

And so our commitment as a brand is to make sure that the food is delicious and will work in any cuisine that is demonstrably better for you. And that we are absolutely focused on making a difference wherever possible. So to any listeners out there who are working to make a difference, we would love to connect with you whether it’s through our website at hungryplanetfoods.com or on any of the social media channels which are also hungry planet foods. We would love to enter into that discussion. Share our foods with you, and just expand that conversation to help drive positive change. So again, thank you for letting us be here with you. It’s a pleasure, love what you’re doing to help share important ideas with people who are wired to learn more. So thank you.

John: Thank you both. Again, hungryplanetfoods.com, I’ve eaten their products, they’re delicious. Go to their website, find out where near where you’d live, where you could buy their great foods, change your mind, change the planet. Thank you both for making the world a better place, a more sustainable place. And that’s why you both were invited on the impact podcast today. I’m going to have you back on because I can’t wait to see your great products democratized across the planet. Todd and Jody, [crosstalk] thank you so much.

Jody: It was great to meet with you. Thank you so much.

Todd: Bye-bye.

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by The Marketing Masters. The Marketing Masters is a boutique marketing agency offering website development and digital marketing services to small and medium businesses across America. For more information on how they can help you grow your business online, please visit themarketingmasters.com.