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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 is 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 For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.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. This is a very special edition ’cause we have today with us, Renée Paris. She’s the category manager for sustainable packaging for Molson Coors. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Renée.

Renée Paris: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.

John: Renée, this is both, we didn’t plan it this way, but we happen to be taping this episode, I’m in Fresno, you’re in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but it’s also National Beer Day. We’re actually taping this broadcast on National Beer Day.

Renée: Yeah. So, I encourage everyone to raise a glass of any Molson Coors products as often as you’d like to but especially while listening today.

John: That’s wonderful. And I want to give special cheers to you, Renée, and all your great colleagues from Molson Coors because today, you also announced the first organic beer you released today.

Renée: That’s right. It’s another great addition to our growing portfolio. It’s a really exciting time to be a part of Molson Coors. We’ve got a new hard seltzer is coming out, new flavors, we’ve got the organic beer, we’ve got non-alcoholic beers, non-alcoholic drinks, I should say. There’s something for everybody, and it’s a really neat time to be part of the company.

John: Renée, before we get talking about all the important work you’re doing at Molson Coors in sustainable packaging, can you tell us a little bit about the Renée Paris background – how you even got here. What was your background? Where’d you grow up? Where did you get educated? How do you even get into the whole world of sustainability?

Renée: Sure. I don’t know that there’s a typical path to a sustainable packaging career, because it’s such a new frontier to be involved in, but I probably have one of the least, sort of, straight and narrow paths, if you will, there’s not even that many straight and narrow paths to get here. But I have an undergraduate degree in International Affairs. In my International Affairs undergrad program, I took a course on Developmental Economics and learned a lot about microfinance and essentially harnessing the power of business for good, for doing something good. That was really my calling. It resonated with me on an almost spiritual level, if you will. I knew I wanted to work in business, and I wanted to work in business internationally, but I wanted to do something that was going to better the lives of others. So, I worked in microfinance and social services for quite some time and really went back and forth between getting a Master’s of Public Administration and a Master’s of Business Administration. I finally found a program not far from where I grew up at the University of South Carolina that enabled me to do an International Master’s of Business Administration and do the Peace Corps at the same time. So, rather than doing a traditional internship, I spent two years in West Africa. So, it really kind of harmonize all of the things that were really important to me, such as the international aspect and using business to do good. I was a small business volunteer and worked with cocoa and coffee farmers, and that’s where I really got into the supply chain aspect of things. You really realize that the people who work the hardest for our morning coffee and our chocolate bars are the people that get the least amount of value from what you pay for it, right?

John: Uh-huh.

Renée: So, you’re really starting to understand. This is almost ten years ago now when I left for Africa, so companies were just sort of getting to the point where they realize how much slavery was in their supply chains, especially in cocoa and coffee, child labor, destruction of natural habitats. So, people were really starting to understand the importance of getting some sort of certification. I helped a cocoa and coffee cooperative get fair trade certified so they could get access to better pricing and just a better sort of situation for them. I came back. I married a Cameroonian. I came back with a real passion for trying to figure out how to use business to make the world a better place. My first job after my MBA program was for Sonoco products which is a packaging company. Sonoco makes packaging you use every day even if you’ve never heard of the company. Things like Pringles cans and Planters cans and Oreo packaging and berry packaging for the plastic thermal forms you get, that do you have strawberries in or blueberries. I started off at Sunoco working on the supplier sustainability team and then also in a procurement function and then sort of was able to spend more and more time working on the sustainability aspect of it, of packaging and just understanding how far down the supply chain can you go, how much can you control what you’re purchasing.

I had a conference that I attended where there was a chief procurement officer, I think from Fiat Chrysler, who said that he had gone to his procurement team and they were talking about the factory collapse in Bangladesh that had killed, I think, 1,100 people or something and they all agreed that it was bad, and he said, “Now, how many of you can guarantee me that we have never spent a penny there. Either our suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers,” and you can’t. I mean, no one can say, “I know for a fact that the uniforms that our fourth-tier supplier used didn’t come from that factory.” You can’t, it’s just very hard the further down you get and so I got really to, again, this whole idea that these companies spend billions and billions of dollars every year buying products to convert into packaging or what have you and you can either do a lot of good or a lot of harm with that money. And so I ended up working full-time in a packaging sustainability role which led to my job here at Molson Coors. So it’s kind of a strange background but it’s always been rooted in trying to get for-profits to do the right thing, trying to help people, and, yeah, it’s something that I’m very passionate about.

People are increasingly aware of the effect that we as humans are having on the planet, especially the younger generations and so people – it’s used to be, you do sustainability for the fluff and whatever and now it’s a gatekeeper, everyone is expecting you to have, I mean, I’m not that old, right? And I can remember when I think Kmart was the first one that had a lot of trouble with slavery in their supply chain. And people are like, “Oh, well, what are you going to do?” And then a lot of brands went through it, and I think that we have run out of, sort of, and rightfully so, of goodwill with consumers and they’re now expecting us to have a slavery-free supply chain, to have products that are recyclable, to be good stewards of the world, to try to get to carbon-neutral, those are all now just baseline expectations that consumers have.

John: Well, really, when I was your age, ESG wasn’t a thing, Renée, and now it’s a thing that’s here to stay, an important thing like you said, it’s a gatekeeper issue. And your generation and younger and your daughter’s generation or my granddaughter’s generation, this is going to be part of our culture and DNA now, as we go forward, which thank God it is. And thank God your generation is taking the torch, is now running with this because there were no roles. First of all, when I got in doing with the business that I’m doing, when I even started this podcast 13 or 14 years ago, there was no such thing as a chief sustainability officer. And now, colleges and universities are teaching whole courses and whole suites of courses on sustainability and creating the next generation of Renée Parises and chief sustainability officers and sustainability managers, so I think it’s just a wonderful wonderful wave that’s come across us. I think other countries are way ahead of us. I think Europe was way ahead of us. I think great parts of Asia are way out of us. And I think America now is really on to this and really going to make a big move and thank gosh. Thank gosh for the work you’re doing.

For our listeners and viewers who just joined us, we’ve got Renée Paris. She’s the Category Manager of Sustainable Packaging at Molson Coors. You can find Molson Coors at www.molsoncoors.com, you click on the sustainability page, it is just a wonderful suite of information in terms of their imprint report from 2020, their ESG report from 2020, and so many other great pieces of information. I really highly advise and I’m on their site right now, it’s great. And today, the day that I’m taping this episode with Renée while she’s in Milwaukee and I’m in Fresno, California, it’s actually National Beer day and Molson Coors has rolled out today their first organic beer. So, three cheers to Molson Coors today.

Renée, let’s talk about sustainable packaging, it is an important issue. Packaging is all around us, both, of course, in the beer industry, but in everything we touch and all the consumer goods, talk about common misconceptions in the sustainable packaging world and things that we should disavow ourselves of that the media doesn’t cover.

Renée: Sure. So, I think that sustainable packaging can mean a lot of different things and if there’s someone who claims to have the definition, the ultimate definition of sustainable packaging, they’re either a genius or a liar. So for a lot of people, especially these days, plastic has got a big black eye and not unrightfully so, right? There’s been a lot of backlash against plastic, single-use plastics in particular. And so essentially, if I can just back up a little bit, a lot of events happen independently of one another a couple of years ago that really sort of started to bring people’s attention, particularly to plastic. The first, well actually I’m not sure, I can’t remember what was first. So the first one that I’m remembering is the Chinese national sword issue, which I think was 2018 or 2019.

John: Right. The green sword. The green sword.

Renée: Right. Well, it’s a national sword, green, yeah, there’s a couple of different names.

John: Got it.

Renée: So essentially what happened was we have these big material recovery facilities which are where you’re recycling that you put on your curbside gets taken to in order to get sort out – this is aluminum, this is this type of plastic, this is steel, this is paper so that it can go to the right bales and get sold into the market. Those are called MRFs, Material Recovery Facilities. So, the number one plastic is PET, which is like your typical water bottle, Coke bottle, Pepsi bottle, whatever you want to call it. And then number two is HDPE, which is like a milk jug, some of your laundry detergent containers, things of that nature, and I conceptualize it. Three through sevens are basically everything else. Well, number four is LDPE like a grocery bag, number five is polypropylene which is like a yogurt cup usually, six is polystyrene which is styrofoam, what we call styrofoam was actually expanded polystyrene and then seven is everything else. So, essentially, the ones and twos have a market in the United States, and what we were doing is taking the threes through sevens and shipping them over to China. So some smart person realized that we had all of these cargo ships coming to the United States full of Asian goods that we were purchasing and then going back largely empty. So I realized that even if you get five bucks for however much plastic, that’s still five bucks that were already going back empty.

And so, in theory, that sounds good if the plastic is being actually recycled and it’s already going on a trip that was already taking place. But what happened was, the plastic we were sending over there was usually pretty highly contaminated, really dirty, not sorted very well. And as you can imagine, it didn’t make for a good market situation with China and other Southeast Asian developing economies. And so China finally said, “You guys, we’re not taking any more of this dirty, unsorted, contaminated plastic. We’re closing our borders.” And they closed their borders for, not only plastic but for papers and for some other materials, and so all of a sudden, these material recovery facilities that had been counting on these Asian markets because after China, then they had the Basel Agreement, which covers some other Asian countries and essentially, they were all just closed off very quickly. So, we had all of this plastic now that was getting sold overseas, and “being recycled”, it’s not happening. So the MRFs, the material recovery facilities, lost this huge income because you know, five bucks is five bucks and if you got a lot, that’s a lot of money. And so it sent the value of a lot of plastics and papers way down because now there’s a glut in the market so Econ 101 situation, right? And that really negatively affected severely these material recovery facilities.

At the same time, National Geographic came out with a series called Planet or Plastic where they had this really ingenious picture where it was an iceberg jutting out of the ocean but instead of an iceberg, it was a plastic bag. And so, it looked just like an iceberg until you looked under the water and then it’s a plastic bag and so it brought a lot of attention to the plastic issue that is happening because what was happening a lot of times in these Asian countries and if you look, I think it’s something like 80 or 90% of plastic in the ocean comes from ten rivers, none of which are in North America. So these companies were buying this material and then if it wasn’t good, it was ended up improperly disposed of, going in these rivers that then feed out to the ocean, right? So people were starting to get very aware of this problem. People are going out on yachts. Ellen MacArthur started the new plastics economy, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to get companies on board to sign up for these commitments to get out of plastic.

This is a really long answer to your question but there’s a couple of things that people maybe missed a little bit from this analysis. The first one is, I can’t remember the exact statistic, but over 50% of the plastic in the ocean comes from fishnets, right? So just fishnets that have not been disposed of properly.

John: Really?

Renée: A lot of people don’t realize it.

John: So again, it’s not post-consumer waste, all the plastic, part of it is just fishnets.

Renée: Fishnets, right.

John: Never heard that ever. The media and I’ve never heard that ever.

Renée: Never. The people are shocked to find this out.

John: Wow.

Renée: Another problem is plastic, like PET, floats, right? So if it’s in the ocean, you’re going to see it. Who knows how many aluminum cans are at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Because you can’t get down there, right? So the problem is – it’s super visible, right? So if you’re going around, you can see these plastic islands floating around because it floats, right? Now, there are a lot of accurate causes for concern. So, microplastics – the jury I think is still kind of out on to, just like anything else, we haven’t had long term so we don’t know long-term effects on health, but they found it in human placentas and unborn babies. You’ve got microplastics in human waste. I mean, it’s everywhere. We are definitely consuming microplastics because plastic breaks down and it gets really fine. And so that is probably a cause for concern. I don’t know what the level of microplastics in your body that’s acceptable is, and what’s not acceptable? I don’t think anyone knows that but I think we can all agree that it can’t be a lot, right?

John: Minimum plastics in the body, I think that is a baseline hope for all of us.

Renée: Right. Exactly. And, we all right now are doing it, and probably, again, it’s hard to tell what’s coming off it because we all have it. So that’s a problem that I think is a legitimate concern. But plastic is also very flexible, very strong, and very lightweight. So essentially anything that you replace plastic with is going to increase carbon footprint a lot like two or three times the carbon footprint. And so if you’re Molson Coors or some other, I don’t know how many six-pack rings are used globally. Probably a couple of billion every year. If you increase the carbon footprint associated with that, times 3, that’s a lot. There are some scientists who have posited, of course, this is someone’s opinion, not a definite fact, some people have posited that rising ocean temperatures caused by global warming will kill more marine life than plastics will, somebody’s opinion but it’s just, we have to be really careful when we’re swapping out one thing for another. Because as my old boss used to say, “The role of packaging is not to be recyclable, the role of packaging is to keep something safe until you can get it home.” And so food waste is a really big problem in western society. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest generator of greenhouse gas emissions after the US and China. So what you don’t want is to say, well, plastic-free food is necessarily better because if a thin layer of plastic around your cucumber is the difference between you consuming it versus it goes bad before you get around to it, not that it ever happened to me, of course. But we’ve all been there, we’re you’re like, oh man, it’s so sad. And so if that layer of plastic would have made the difference, then the benefit of the plastic far exceeds the downsides of the plastic.

And so I think that a lot of people want to demonize plastic, and again, I don’t think that it’s always wrong but it’s not always right either. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. Something that’s recyclable is great but only if it actually ends up getting recycled so aluminum cans are infinitely recyclable, you can use them over and over and over again and they never lose unlike plastic that’s only going to make it through so many times but only about one and two aluminum cans get recycled in the United States right now. Only three in ten plastic bottles get recycled and so everything is only as good as the people who use it, right? Glass bottles, it’s the same way. The carbon footprint associated with an aluminum can or glass bottle is significantly lower. I think it’s 95 percent lower in aluminum cans to make a second aluminum can out of a first aluminum can versus oxide, rolling the aluminum, and all that jazz.

John: It’s the highest metal in terms of recycling. all metals are recyclable as you said and most are infinitely recyclable as you just said, but aluminum sets the benchmark up in 94, 95 percent, which is fascinating. Out of your materials, Renée, are you just in charge of the plastic? Or are you focused on, in terms of your division, in terms of sustainable packaging, is it both the paper boxes that the beers come in, the six-packs and also the cases and also the glass and also plastic or is it just plastic? And then someone else handles the glass, someone else handles the pulp?

Renée: Sure. So I have a bit of a hybrid role at Molson Coors. So I do category management for a lot of our plastic applications which are ultimately the most difficult to get to the recyclable goal we have set out for ourselves. One of Molson Coors’s sustainable packaging goals is to be a hundred percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025, and so much of what we produce is in a bottle, a can, and/or a box where we kind of started out pretty well done. However, what’s leftover is extremely problematic – it’s six-pack rings and it is shrink wrap and it’s some bottles that are malt liquor beverages come in that are not recyclable and current infrastructure most of the time. So that is a problem. And so I represent procurement on sustainable packaging initiatives and then I also manage a lot of our plastics bin.

John: So in terms of definitions. When you define, now with the background, the fascinating background that you had even leading up to joining Molson Coors and what you’re doing now and all the knowledge you’ve gained now, sitting in the position you sit, what’s your definition today of sustainable packaging? How far of a delta do we have to go between your 2025 goals at Molson Coors and 2021? Those four years are high-hurdle or you’re almost there? Where are you on the journey?

Renée: Sure, so kind of two different questions there. So the first one, I would say that when I personally go to purchase things, the sustainable packaging is whatever I can presume has the lowest carbon footprint associated with protecting what I’m purchasing. Okay? So, I was joking with a friend the other day about going to a gas station on a road trip and trying to figure out which water to buy, and I was just like, “Okay, let me pull up my life cycle analyses,” that I had the pride to figure out what and it’s like it can be a little burdensome, right? But to me and David Alloway, who is with the Oregon Department of Ecology? DEQ – Department of Environmental Quality. He did a study that basically was trying to figure out, like a rule of thumb. So if you have no other information and you have different packaging applications in front of you, what’s the one thing you can look for that you should at least say, “Well, with no other information, without a full-scale life cycle analysis in front of me and to paint with a very broad brush, after looking at a bunch of different packaging types and whatnot that recycled content in the package itself was the best predictor of low carbon footprint.” You should keep an eye out for any packaging that boasts recycled content and then after that, it’s the lowest weight and then after that comes recyclability, which I think is probably very backward from how most of us consider things because recyclability is just a concept that most of us understand that a lot of people for the most part believe in. Although, there are some concerns about what actually happens to the material when it gets to MRF and that’s a whole other conversation. But I think that that would probably surprise most people. So I would recommend that you look for packaging with recycled content in there and go on social media or whatever and demand companies do it. And a lot of companies out there have now got pretty aggressive recycled content goals.

As far as Molson Coors on its journey to the goals, we have our work cut out for us. There are options out there to replace plastic where we’re currently using plastic but essentially almost every alternative, costs more, is slower, and has a larger carbon footprint. Any one of those would be bad but all three together is very difficult. But ultimately, it’s what the consumer wants and so what we have to do is within consumer preference, find the best solution that we can that doesn’t significantly increase carbon footprint and that also still checks all the sort of, you might call them like invisible boxes that we have in our head. So, one thing I’ve learned is while reading through some focus grouping that we did is the importance of being able to pick up a six-pack with one hand and so you can do that easily with plastic, you trust that it’s not going to fall out but with some of the cardboard applications that are out there, you kind of need a second hand to sort of, and just that small thing of needing your second hand could make the difference between buying one brand versus another brand. It’s kind of amazing how things like that play into the conscience of the consumer.

So we want to make sure that we are not making anything more difficult. We don’t want things falling out and spilling or hurting people or anything like that, right? So making sure that we’re hitting the consumer preference, but also ensuring that again, if the package fails and the beer pops open on your sidewalk, then the packaging has failed. Everything that went into the beer, the growing up properly, the water, the energy, the transport, all of that is lost.

John: It’s a loss.

Renée: It’s all lost, exactly. So I’m working on that. So shrink wrap and six-pack rings, I think are sort of final frontier for us. Molson Coors in Europe and many of our competitors as well have found some non-plastic solutions for six-pack rings. And so, without saying too much I think that in order to meet our goals, we’ll have to find one that works in the states as well.

John: Got it. Renée, from where you sit now, is it sort of crazy and a shame that in 2021 in the United States, and correct me if I’m wrong, I thought we only have 11 states that have bottle redemption laws? Is that sort of close to the reality of it?

Renée: That’s correct. It’s 10 or 11. So I’m going to choose my words carefully. Bottle Bill States tend to have much higher recycling rates than states that do not have bottle redemption things. However, many companies have been hesitant to endorse a Bottle Bill which effectively is a tax on the product. So, I mean, in my relatively short time frame in sustainable packaging, companies are changing their mind. So American, for example, is the industry group for packaging providers. So I was very familiar with American when I worked at Sunoco and they did a webinar today on extended producer responsibility. Essentially what American has decided which mirrors some of what I’ve heard from other companies is that they’ve come to realize that something is coming, and it’s better to have a seat at the table and talk through concerns you have than pretend it’s not ever going to happen, you know? And so American ostensibly was formed to fight against EPR bills and so it was a little jarring today to hear them saying, “This is what we would want to see in one. This is what’s important to us. We want to make sure that this is included and that this is not,” and just sort of laying out what their asks would be, essentially, and sort of working with legislators, as opposed to just saying, “My position is I’m opposed,” because EPR, extended producer responsibility essentially is the concept that producers or brand owners, depending on the state and where you are, are essentially responsible for the cost of the end of life of your package. It’s very common in Europe. I think every EU country has a fee structure, every province in Canada has one, and nothing in the United States.

John Oliver, a week and a half ago on Last Week Tonight did a big push for extended producer responsibility which I would suspect a lot of people who are watching, it was the first time that they had heard of that and what it was and it’s one of those things that Canada is doing, that Europe is doing, what is it in the United States that’s preventing us from doing this, right? And so I’m curious to see if that will turn into action or if everyone uses the hashtag ones and forgets about it. It’s hard to say, right? But I think what the industry groups are starting to presume is that it’s coming and if it’s coming then you want to make sure that their packaging experts sitting at the table with people who are making these laws to make sure that the laws are going to have the impact that they are intended to have, that they’re going to cover what they intend to cover and that it’s fair.

John: Yeah. And Renée, to be fair. I didn’t ask that question to be a gotcha moment, because I know you represent a wonderful great producer in this country that everyone, and me including, enjoys your products. It was just more of a general question nor did I have any idea whatsoever that the American had a call today. Just the timing seems– let me just share this. While having watching John Oliver’s show that you referenced which I think was quite well done because it does make a case for that. And given that I’m in an industry that also has extended producer responsibility, the electronic waste recycling industry, and many of the producers and OEMs who are are my clients as well. I tend to take a more balanced approach in that – yes, it’s a shame that, yes, we only have 11 states or 10 states that have a bottle bill today, but the truth be known with your generation and I really say this with kindness and affection and also with awe because my generation is passing the torch to your generation right now and that’s great. And your generation taking over both media as Oliver and politics and Corporate America, where you sit, I think there has to be a balanced approach because the truth is – all the stakeholders in the process, the producers, the retailers, the consumers all really have a vested interest in breathing cleaner air, drinking cleaner water, and also enjoying your products. So to me, burdening just one stakeholder with the burden of keeping the world clean and making the world a better place is somewhat unfair given where we are in 2021.

So, from where I sit, I think there has to be a balanced approach. And yes, you need to be, as a stakeholder at the table if those laws are coming because your generation is now going to be taking over the Senate and the Congress and the White House eventually as well. Again, I think there has to be a balanced approach because all of us – all of us, no matter what political party affiliation, or any of that kind of stuff, agree. We want your daughter, my granddaughter, my children to drink cleaner water, breathe cleaner air, and we all want to leave the world a little better than we found it. So, I applaud what you just said, but I really believe we all have a vested interest in becoming a stakeholder that participates in the process as well.

Renée: Right. And I would say if you’re not a fan of government intervention, then you have to intervene yourself – are you recycling everything that’s possible? Have you checked with your local municipality to make sure that you’re not sending anything that they don’t accept? Because it does vary, municipality to municipality, and if you live in a big metropolitan area where you work and where you live and where your gym is and your children’s school might all go to different MRFs, which means they may all have little things that they don’t accept or they do accept or they only accept every other Tuesday or what have you, it can be a little tedious but it’s super important. And I will also say this – a lot of material recovery facilities pre-Covid and post-Covid, I’m sure, love to give tours to people and I think it’s one of those things that I can describe to you how MRF operates but seeing it is just so impactful and if you can’t see it, there are videos on YouTube but it goes through the sorting process and we’ll help you understand why you should flatten your boxes but not your aluminum cans, for example. And so, little things like that because they say that there was one MRF that added a second eddy current which is the mechanism that sorts out the aluminum cans. And I think captured something like 20% more aluminum cans which means something was happening that kept 20% of the cans that went into the MRF from actually being recycled, right? So either they were flattened so they ended up with the paper or maybe you drink your beer and then you put the can back in the case and then sort it back out, sorted with paper or what have you but you want to make sure that if you’re going through the effort of putting everything in your curbside bin and hopefully you are, that you’re making sure that you’re not doing something without realizing it that isn’t keeping it from actually getting recycled.

John: Great. Renée, you’re doing great work. I want to give you the last word to share anything, any tips, or anything you’d like with our listeners and viewers out there who are also your consumers and potential consumers. So, I like to give you the last word, and then I’ll sign off for us after your thoughts.

Renée: Yeah. I mean, thanks for listening. I hope you guys all go out and enjoy a cold Molson Coors product tonight. I enjoy the light sky a lot, that’s my favorite newer Molson product but when you do, make sure you recycle your package when it’s done and for the rare moments when you’re out buying something that’s not a Molson product, food, or something else, try to look for packaging with recycled content and try to make sure that you’re using the best lightest package that you can that still protects the product inside.

John: Thank you. Thank you so much, Renée, and for our listeners out there who want to find Renée and her colleagues at Molson Coors, please go to www.molsoncoors.com, click on the Sustainability page to get inspired and read their ESG report or their imprint report. They’re doing so many great things in sustainability. Renée Paris, you are making a great impact and making the world a better place. Thank you for joining us today on the Impact podcast.

Renée: My pleasure. Thank you, John. Take care.

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.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. This is a very special edition. This is the “Down Under” edition of the Impact Podcast. We’re so honored to have with us today, from Nourish Ingredients, the two co-founders James Petrie and Ben Leita. Thank you for joining us today. I know you’re both in Australia. So this is a long way away but it’s like we’re together, anyway. Thanks for joining us today at the Impact Podcast.

James Petrie: John, thanks for having us in and I think that this year, everyone’s grown really accustomed to Zoom meetings so this is nothing new for us here in Australia.

John: True. It’s nice. You know, before we get going and talking about all the important things, for our listeners and viewers out there to learn more about James and Ben’s company, you could go to “nourishing.io”. “Nourishing.io”. I’m on your website now. Talk a little bit about though, your backgrounds. How did you even get here? What were both of your backgrounds, both growing up and educationally speaking? And how did you come together to co-found this wonderful new brand?

Ben Leita: Could I jump in and go first, if you like James?

John: Yeah.

Ben: I’m Ben Leita. I actually grew up on a farm in country Victoria in Australia. So my parents were berry farmers and my father was into the whole sustainable farming for the future and growing these berries in a sustainable way. And a lot of that rubbed off on me, growing up and working hard on the farm.

I went to university, interested in chemistry. Pursued my career there as a chemist and did a Ph.D. in chemistry. And that same theme of, you know, using renewable organic materials and converting them into stuff that you can use in the real world whether it be plastics, food, and fuels just rubbed off on me.

So, after my Ph.D., I went and joined CSIRO, which is Australia’s premier research institute. And that’s where I met James. I was working as a chemist doing chemical conversions on renewable biomass materials. So I worked on things like making a bio-based PET bottle, for Pepsi and Coke. And we developed ways to do that from eucalyptus oil, and pine[?] oils, making them over a hundred percent bio-based. And during the journey there and meeting James, he was doing these… He’s a genetic engineer and he’ll introduce himself a little bit further. But I realized, if I was starting with the biomass, that was grown fit for purpose, then the chemical conversions I’ll have to do to turn it into something amazing in a product people could use was very limited. So when the two of us started working together and it was fantastic. We worked together on a number of projects over the years and eventually landed at Nourish. I’ll pass it over to James now.

James: Yeah, thanks. And I think the distinguishing feature like, in terms of how I think about this sort of space, I love to see impact-driven science, right? I love to see when we make something cool in the lab. That’s an achievement in and of itself. It really hits the road when you can get it out there into the marketplace and that’s what’s always driven my research interest. And there’s a very fine line between that sort of translational research and then actually turning it into a commercial product. You can’t really have one without the other in a lot of cases. And when we looked at this whole area of these sort of specialty food lipids for these plant protein alternative protein foods. It’s a bit of a no-brainer, to be honest, John.

John: You know, I haven’t had the opportunity yet. Well, I’ve had the opportunity but I haven’t been smart enough yet to get on a plane and get down to Australia. I’ve traveled the world my whole life. I’m going to make it down there in my lifetime, but talk a little bit about, socially and culturally speaking, has Australia been part of this sustainability revolution from the standpoint of adoption of vegetarianism and veganism early, or is it just now coming to the forefront over there now? Where are you as a culture with regards to clean eating and plant-based eating?

James: I think we’re broadly speaking similar to the states in terms of where we’re at as a nation. I think that there has been for a long time an undercurrent if you want to call it, that of veganism and vegetarianism, but it’s becoming mainstream, right? You’ve got a lot of people really turning to this and trying to make it their own and I think that’s the fundamental shift that has happened in this space over the last probably even only 5 years, right? You’ve got this shift from it being a niche thing to something that everybody knows is important and everybody is trying to start to do, at least at some level.

John: Yeah, and that’s so funny. I love what you just said, “At least at some level”. One thing that people come to me and say, “Well how do I become a vegetarian or vegan?” And I keep telling people, “It’s not a zero-sum game. You don’t have to be one or just the other. You can still eat whatever you want but maybe a portion of your diet will include plant-based eating as part of your day-to-day lifestyle.” And people who just do twenty to thirty percent of their diet change to plant-based eating find a huge pick up in their energy and also their quality of life and I think that’s part of it.

People thought, ideologically speaking, that this was all-or-nothing. “Either I have to just eat what I’m always eating or I have to only eat plant-based,” and I don’t think that’s the way. I don’t think that’s the way forward. And I think that’s why a company like yours has such a huge blue sky in front of it. I’m on your website now. I love your website by the way. And it’s so appealing, visually speaking. And again for our listeners and viewers to go to their website. It’s “nourishing.io”. “Nourishing.io”

Can you explain some of the science behind what you mean when you say “fermented animal-free fats and oils” and why that has an advantage, comparatively speaking, to what’s used currently today, and what’s state of the art today?

James: [laughs] Cut me off when you get bored because I could talk about this forever. The gist of it is if you look at a cow or a chicken or whatever animal you choose, it builds a certain type of fat in its body but that fat is not there because we find it tasty. Primarily, that fat is there because it’s an energy store for that animal, right? And so, the question that we have to ask ourselves is as we’re building all of this new frontier of alternative protein foods, whether it be plant protein, or recombinant protein, or cellular [inaudible], “How do we bring along the fat component into these new types of protein bases?”

And what’s really interesting is that then you start to think, “Do we necessarily need a cow fat for a plant protein bits[?]?” And the answer is, “Not necessarily.” Like the answer is, “Maybe we can even do better.” So we don’t have to be locked by the biology of the animals anymore in terms of what they’re built. We can actually go a step further and really tune the sort of fats that are going into these new plant protein type foods and really make them tailored to that. So what we do is we take microorganisms that make oil naturally in their cells, and we just tweak them a bit so that we are now telling that microorganism to make a slightly different type of oil. And this is now one that’s tuned specifically for these sort of plant protein foods has really good taste, really good flavor, and has some sort of health benefits. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Ben?

Ben: The way I like to describe how we make the fats that we do is, everybody’s familiar with the beer-making process or the wine-making process…

John: Yeah!

Ben: [inaudible] So you feed sugar, the yeast does the fermentation you end up with nice beer or wine. So we’re not doing anything different to that. We’ve got yeast that we programmed to produce the fats that we want. We feed it sugar, and this little yeast factory then spits it. Instead of spitting out a beer or wine, it spits out their fats.

John: So interesting. So you’re creating the ingredients that go inside of these new plant-based products, or in some cases, you are actually producing the end product as well. What is your business model? So our listeners and viewers can understand.

James: Yeah. Specifically in that lipid or fat oil part of the supply chain, right? That’s a really interesting topic, more broadly. Like, if you look at a lot of the plant protein food companies that have emerged in the last few years, a lot of companies are trying to do “A-Z”, I guess.

John: Yeah.

James: And what we’re about is… Well, we understand that our expertise is really around these fats and oils and we know how to make them well, and so that’s what we’re sticking to, at least at the moment. You know, it’s so tempting to try and push a little bit further down that value chain and try and go a little bit closer to a direct-to-customer product, but maybe that’ll be another day.

John: You got to remember something my listeners and viewers know (this is a fifteen-year-old show) that I’ve been a vegetarian, almost forty-three years, forty-four years, and a vegan for about fourteen or fifteen years. So, I have to tell you, I have so much hope when young guys like you come in and create better-tasting vegan products. You can imagine what we were being fed forty years ago as a vegetarian or even ten years ago, twelve years ago, as a vegan. Things have changed so much. I mean, when you see all these amazing companies with egg-based products, and the ice creams made out of soy, coconut milk, almond milk, and cashew milk, and Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers, and the list goes on. So it’s such a hopeful message that young brilliant people like you are making sure that these products stay on the cutting edge in terms of taste and quality.

Are these your kind of clients or some of the kind of brands that I’m mentioning become some of your clients? Or you are also supplying new brands that are being that are going to emerge in the months and years ahead?

James: We’re talking to everyone. We’re talking to everyone in this space and it’s really interesting when, you know, when we started doing this back in 2019, we went out and we did deep dives with potential customers and tried to figure out exactly where they were herding around this fat and oil part of the chain. And the messages, we started to get back. [laughs] They were the same across the board. Everyone’s using coconut oil, right? And that’s, you know…

John: Right.

James: …. one of the main oils that’s being used. There are others, but that’s one of the main specialty ones. And very few people are happy with it. You know, it’s got, its got a number of problems around taste, around mouthfeel, around flavor, and these are things that we can definitely better in. Not to mention the sustainability angle, and that’s a massive driver for our company where you’ve got products like palm, even coconut that come from rainforest plantations. If plant protein foods are going to scale to reach the sort of massive[?] option that everybody hopes and expects that they will, it’s unlikely to be off the back of that crop. Not unless we want to do a palm oil 2.0. So that’s something that we really have firmly in our mind that this is an area that we can take pre-emptive steps in to really give the growing industry an opportunity to shift to a more sustainable future.

John: So interesting. In terms of brands, are all the brands that I’m mentioning like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat and other great vegan products, are they readily available in your stores and your restaurants down in Australia already?

James: Yeah, we got a pretty good range. There’s a mixture of homegrown brands and the Beyonds and so forth, the international brands. It’s fascinating to see how quickly it’s changed, right? You know, even when you walk into the supermarket, just a couple of years ago, it was such a different sort of layout, isn’t it?

John: And a restaurant, dude. I mean, there’s even one of the most famous restaurants in New York that just announced that– I mean, literally one of the most famous restaurants in New York, Eleven Madison Park’ that they’re going all vegan. Not even part-vegan menu, all-vegan menu. All plant-based.

Ben as a business enterprise, are you– although I’m a huge believer in what you’re doing, I don’t know the landscape. Do you have 50 competitors in the space? Or you guys have sort of a quasi-monopoly on this carved out a niche or specialty that you guys have created?

Ben: This whole alternative proteins food movement, and the animal-free meats that have been produced by all these wonderful companies that you’ve just mentioned, they’ve all been so focused on the protein and the complex food formulation and going direct to consumer and they have done a fantastic job, right? In order to get them to compete and get regular meat-eaters to want to eat these products, now that whole eating experience needs to be better. So it’s a combination of a lot of things that’s, you know– Beyond’s just put out their Burger 3.0 and that’s going to continue to roll out and get better and better.

Where we fit into this and where we’ve seen the niche is that they haven’t really focused on the facts[?]. They’ve only used what’s existing and available to them in the real world. They didn’t know that we could produce all these alternative fats by fermentation. The niche that we’re actually filling is, we’re creating a whole new world of fats that will make these products into the foods of the future tomorrow.

John: Well, that’s — And on your website, for our listeners and our viewers again, Ben and James’ website is “nourishing.io”. “Nourishing.io”. It’s really a visual delight. But I mean, the products that you’re creating, your ingredients could go into everything from the next generation of burgers, to ice cream cones, to all types of alternative plant-based proteins, and plant-based products from here on out. Is that correct?

James: Yeah. It’s really cool to sort of — I mean, take that dairy example, that you just mentioned.

John: Yeah.

James: The importance of fats is so readily discernible there. You bite into a low-fat ice cream and you bite into a full-fat ice cream, and, you know the difference. [laughs]

John: Right!

James: It’s not hard to tell.

John: That’s right

James: Fat is not a sexy topic, right? People don’t like fat. I think that’s starting to change a little bit at least. People are understanding there’s more nuance there, but generally speaking, it’s one of these topics that have been a little bit ignored. And you know, brushed under the carpet. There’s so much room for improvement here and that’s the gap that we’re in. We’ve seen this, in my genetic engineering background as a scientist we built a product many years ago which was a fish-oil replacement in the seed oil canola. And that product was I think one of the forerunners of this type of technology where you’ve got the recognition that there’s an animal-type product out there in nature that is good for people that they need to eat but there’s just not enough of it, right? And so coming from the side with these sort of new solutions to build these types of products for these new consumers that are starting to understand how important they are is such a fascinating feel to me.

John: Talk about the advantage and the disadvantage of geography, assuming science is going to win and we’re going to get through this tragic period, that we’re all living through right now, doing what you’re doing as innovators, as inventors, as disruptors, are you at a disadvantage in Australia? Should you be sitting in the middle of California or New York, or Europe somewhere? Or does it not matter when you create and disrupt and make new products and new inventions? It doesn’t matter really where you are anymore, geographically speaking, in the world. The world of innovation has been democratized and geography really doesn’t matter. Explain that from a founder’s perspective and a creator’s perspective. I think a lot of our viewers and listeners would be fascinated by your thoughts on that.

James: Yeah, I mean– what are your thoughts on that Ben?

Ben: So James and I started Nourish Ingredients just before this pandemic.

John: Wow.

Ben: One of the investors, the partners in the investment firm that invested in us, I’ve actually never met in person.

John: Wow!

Ben: Yet through technologies, just like Zoom, like what we’re out here on today, I feel like I’ve [inaudible] for the year and a half that we’ve been in contact. While there are definite advantages if we were set up in Silicon Valley, in and around that ecosystem. There would be definite advantages there. And there are other places around the world with these food hubs in terms of resources and availability of different funding sources. While that would be great, we haven’t seen it as a huge barrier here. And the technology that we’ve been pushing and developing here in Australia, it’s applicable to all different food systems all across the world.

And like I said, using technologies like Zoom, people are happy to jump on these and talk now and it’s a really quick way to speak to lots of different people and it has really lowered that barrier, if you’d like. John.

John: So I think there’s a deeper element as well even than that. Not being in the Valley, it forces you to look at the problem differently, right? Because you may not have the same ready access to either talent or facilities around you. And it makes you look for homegrown solutions that are even more innovative in some cases. And so when we look sideways here in Australia, we see companies in this exact space. V2food is one example here, where they’ve just made massive gains in terms of how they’re pushing plant protein foods forward and they’re looking at it slightly differently in terms of what they’re trying to achieve. And I think, it’s similar for us, where we look and say, “Okay, we are in Australia. We could move to the States, but I think there are advantages to taking just a bit of a lateral approach to the problem.”

John: So interesting. Is the whole organization just the two of you as inventors or is there a greater amount of employees underneath both of you at this point?

James: Yeah, we got about two dozen at the moment and I don’t think we’ll ever stop employing. [laughs] What do they say, the number one problem is funding and the number two problem is people and that’s certainly true in our case.

John: How about the funding? Is the funding coming from him[?] Because your generation is on fire for ESG, circular economy, and impact investments. Are your Investments coming from traditional sources, your investors, or from impact funds and others that are more like-minded based for these new type of disruptive products and circular economy, ESG, impact-related products?

John: We’re talking to them all. Our current investors, Horizons Ventures and Main Sequence Ventures here in Australia, and Horizons in Hong Kong, these two, I think they looked at the — they were very familiar with the plant protein space and they looked at it and they said, “Yeah, this is something that we’re hearing is a problem, in this fat and oil component of the ingredient list.” And so, having a company that can address that not only for their portfolio companies but for the industry as a whole was something that was really appealing to them. And I think that’s just being reflected in, you know, I think we’ve raised eleven million US[?] Dollars[?] now in our seed round.

The goal now is the — [laughs] — let’s just turn all of that into some foods that taste absolutely fantastic. The goal here is not to create a little bit of a better coconut oil. The goal here is to add something to these plants protein foods, recombinant protein foods that just blows the socks off the sort of consumers that Ben and I are. We are meat eaters and we enjoy it and the sort of customers you’re trying to get over the line in terms of the real growing market opportunity is the ones who do want to change and they just want to be wowed by the sort of products that are out there. And I think we can achieve that by addressing the fat problem. So, I think we’re about to just blow socks off the growth potential of the whole sector as it were and it’s just by addressing this real, special part of that ingredient list.

John: What do you both think is the future here? When will I be enjoying your products contained in plant-based products that I would typically enjoy? Are we 6 months away? Or we a year away? Or we eighteen months away? Give me a little bit of vision of the future for Nourish Ingredients.

James: Well you might be a bit ahead of the curve, John. We’ll send you some samples when we got them ready.

John: I’m excited!

James: Okay. In terms of the commercial development where, you know we’re working in a few different sectors in this plant protein space, and some are a little ahead of others but overall, you know, we’ve done this before, we built these types of products before. We understand the challenges, both on the regulatory side and also that commercial entry side, that market entry side. We got our work cut out but I don’t think there’s anything major. I mean, look, the other way to look at it, you know, beyond specific growth sectors, say North America is if you look at the global picture, we’re not that far off ten billion people on this planet, right?

John: Right.

John: And even more important is that the middle class is growing so fast and the middle-class eats differently. The middle-class eats a much more Western-type diet and that’s just not feasible in terms of our current animal-based agriculture. So what are these people going to be eating? And we already know that the answer is not going to be the same sort of animal-based agriculture that we are currently enjoying in a lot of countries. And so how do we address that? Well, the answer has to be via plant-based or recombinant-based and it’s just such an obvious thing that I think this is why there’s so much interest in really trying to fine-tune these products and get them into the market in a form that just blows people away.

John: I agree with you. When Ethan Brown, as I shared with you earlier, when Ethan first came on our podcast ten years ago now, he told me that his first two investors, were Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, and Bill Gates, I said, “Why were they investing?” He said, “John, it solves some of the world’s biggest problems.”

James: Yeah.

John: And so I think that theme as you just laid out, James, it still holds today. That truth holds ten years later you’re really part of a revolution in food consumption and availability that is going to be — that void is going to need to be filled in the months and years ahead.

James: You’re absolutely right. And I think there’s an interesting twist here, right? Which is that, very often, agricultural or food chain developments are done for the benefit of the Big Corporate and the town[?] and that is appropriate in these sort of capitalist economies that we’ve grown up in.

But if you develop these sorts of foods with the consumer in mind and make sure that they have built-in, from day one, benefits to those consumers, in this case, sustainability and health. And our goal is to add taste and flavor to that list, right? And so if you can accomplish that with this new generation of agriculture. It’s fermentation but it’s still agriculture in that sense. Yeah, that’s a whole new world for us.

John: Well, you’re just creating a bigger tent and you’re inviting more people in. Ben, talk a little bit about the partners. Are you two the only co-founders?

Ben: Yeah, James and I are the two co-founders of Nourish Ingredients and we’re essentially the main drivers behind it for the first 12 months. And as James said, yeah, we’ve expanded now to over 20 people and don’t look like slowing down.

John: That’s wonderful. You know. So, you know, a lot of young people come to me about new business opportunities. And how do they start? How do they create? How do they launch? And I keep– My one of my common themes to them is choosing your partners. Something that is as important, if not more important than choosing the idea that you’re going to do.

James: Oh hell yeah.

John: And now that you guys have had eighteen months of baptism together, nineteen months of baptism together. Don’t you find that to be true?

James: It’s longer than that. We tried to– Ben, tell the story about way we, you know?

Ben: Yeah. And so when James, and I first met at the CSIRO and started working together, we were working on different projects that were making beautiful plants that did stuff. I would take them, extract them and turn them into beautiful products.

James: Yeah.

Ben: And, look, we decided to put one of the technologies into an accelerator program, people are familiar with that type of thing for startups. And we went out and talked to a bunch of customers and it was to do with making more plant-based oils but with just a different plant-based production system. And during those interviews, you know, we spoke to people by Perfect Day and a bunch of others. And we started to hear the same thing back up[?] instead of making more of, can you actually make these animal oils with your plants and I still remember the point we’re in a taxi in San Francisco coming back from a customer interview and said to James, “Why aren’t we making these animal fats in a yeast-based platform? We know we can do it,” and that was like the “Aha!” moment where we both thought, “Right. Let’s go back.” When we got back, we worked out how we could do it. And then pitched for the venture funding to kick things off.

John: That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. So, give me a view of the future. Where are you guys going to be a year from now? Two years from now? Five years from now? Explain to me what the evolution is going to be for your great brand Nourish Ingredients.

James: We’re not gonna give you the technical answer. We’re going to be a pilot-scale team[?]. We’re going to be a small-scale commercial and then we’re going to be a full-scale commercial. The challenge is answering “Who’s going to be the partners to help us do those steps?”

John: Right.

James: You know. That’s a lot of steel in the ground when you get to the sort of scale that we need to reach. So that’s something that where it’s beginning to have those conversations now. I think the irony is that in some senses the technical challenge of doing the synthetic biology of the strain engineering is not the major part of what’s potentially going to slow us down. It’s more of that scale-up side of the equation. So it’s a fascinating journey but not one that we haven’t been on before.

The problem is, in the past, when I’ve done it it’s been with crop plants. One of the things I often think is that it feels like we’re cheating now that we’ve switched to a fermentation platform because it’s so fast. It’s like the iteration and the cycle time on the traits that we’re developing is so much quicker than plant, and that’s really refreshing. It, lets you take a whole different approach to how you solve these types of metabolic engineering challenges in these yeasts. It’s such a fun thing to be doing at this point in time.

John: You have to build your own factories, to support the ingredients that you’re creating, or can you contract that with existing food-based factories?

James: You can definitely contract it. This isn’t rocket science. Fermentation technology is old as the hills and older. You know, this stuff has been around for thousands of years and it’s just a different type of yeast that’s producing a different type of product instead of alcohol. Now we’re producing oil and beyond that, the differences are somewhat superficial, you know. I’m sure that there are Fermentation Engineers who are listening to this pulling their hair out now. My naivety. And I think that is true to some extent when you look at, you know, you can’t necessarily just switch a wine fermentation tank or a beer fermentation tank into this sort of production, but it can be retro. And there are certainly examples out there where it’s been achieved.

John: That’s great. Any final thoughts from either one of you. I mean you’re both fascinating. I love what you’re doing. I want to have you back on impact as you continue your journey and share the products that you’re creating and the progress that you’re making. Well, I’d love you to share any last thoughts before we say goodbye for today.

James: I’d just like to say, John, thanks for the opportunity to come and talk to you and your listeners. I think it’s such an interesting journey for us to be going on but we try and keep right in front of their mind, you know, what’s the goal? What are we trying to achieve? Because if you start trying to achieve — “Are we going to raise capital or we’re going to create a valuable company?” I think that that tends to lead down a dismal road. If you think we’re trying to create the best experience for the consumer. You know, we don’t want people to be biting into these alternative protein foods and getting that alternative experience.

John: Right.

James: We want them to bite into it and say, “Oh, this is fantastic.” And that’s what drives us, you know. How do we turn that corner and make it? So yeah, it’s been really enjoyable talking to you. Thanks for your time.

John: Of course. Ben? Anything from you, Ben before we say goodbye today?

Ben: Oh, look, it’s been a pleasure to be on the show John and hopefully we’ll be speaking to you in the not too distant future after we’ve sent you some amazing samples.

John: I’m excited for that. I am excited one day when I get to meet you in person, whether you’re in the States or in Australia. I’m telling you, we will meet in person and I’m excited for that day. For our listeners and our viewers, to find Ben and James, and their great company, please go to “Nourishing.io”. “Nourishing.io”.

James Petri. Ben Leita. You guys are making the world a better place. You’re making a huge impact. I’m grateful for your time today. I’m grateful for the work that you’re doing. You’re always welcome back on the Impact podcast and continued success in your journey now.

James: Thank you, John. You have a good day.

Ben: Thanks.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Trajectory Energy Partners. Trajectory Energy Partners brings together landowners, electricity users, and communities to develop solar energy projects with strong, local support. For more information on how trajectory is leading the solar revolution, please visit “trajectoryenergy.com”.

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 is 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! This is a very special edition. Today, we’ve got Chris Helsel. He’s a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer from Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, the great and iconic brand. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Chris!

Chris Helsel: Thank you! Excited to be here.

John: Chris, thank you for your time. I know you’re super busy and you’re sitting today in Ohio. I’m sitting in Fresno, California, as we hopefully make our way through this tragic period in world history, this global pandemic. Before we get talking about Goodyear Tire and all the important work you’re doing there with your colleagues, I’d love you to share with our listeners you’re backstory. How do you even get here?

Chris: Sure! Thank you. I feel like I’ve never left Ohio, but yet I have. So I actually grew up outside, Cleveland Ohio, on the East Side…

John: Got it.

Chris: …in the suburb Wickliffe. I went to high school and then I went to Cleveland State. I’ve got an undergrad in mechanical engineering and I had the opportunity, at that time, to work for Standard Oil of Ohio, who’s now BP. Once again, I have Ohio in the name given. I got introduced to some computer modeling techniques, where you could actually design things without having to build and test.

John: Wow!

Chris: And then from there, I progressed into different industries. The Nuclear Navy, I’d work at Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio. I worked for Goodyear Aerospace. At one time, doing some work on wheels and brakes, again, using that technique. And ultimately, I found my way to Goodyear in 1996 when we are bringing those kinds of people on to do tires. So my career here started doing the simulation of racing tires, and then, just continue through technology and product development, and an opportunity to live overseas, run a business. And then, one day, I found myself a CTO and it which I’ve had for a bit over 3 years.

John: That’s really cool. So I have to ask you this first, because we’ve all grown up with the Goodyear brand. For one reason or another, because of our love of cars or whatever, it’s such an iconic and amazing American brand, have you ever been on the Goodyear Blimp?

Chris: It’s funny you should say that because I have my 25 year anniversary this June at Goodyear. I have saved that opportunity for that. I’m getting it lined up through my communications guy and it’s going to be how I celebrate my 25th year.

John: That is just a wonderful way to celebrate! There’s not a time that I drive up and down the 405 Freeway when I’m in Los Angeles. I passed by somewhere, I think, in the Torrance area. I’m headed north. I look over to my right side, and I see the Goodyear Blimp park down like, that would just be-Talk about one of the items on a bucket list, that would be just so much fun to go up in that. So good for you, you’re going to get to do it this year.

Chris: Thank you. Yeah, it’s one of those things. We actually brought it to CES in 2020, January 2020. It was part of our event. We had a nice event there. We rolled out some of the work we’re doing. We’ll come to talk about beyond tire space and part of it was you could get a blimp ride.

John: Wow!

Chris: It could be arranged.

John: Talk about the showstopper. That’s a way to bring people on board with what you’re doing over in CS. Because that’s such a big crowd and you have some of the greatest brands on the planet there to set yourself apart. I can’t think of a better way. That sounds like fun. Hey! For our listeners and our colleagues out there, we’ve got Chris Helsel with us, today. He’s a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Goodyear. To find Chris, and his colleagues, and all the great work they’re doing, you can go to www.goodyear.com.

I’m on your website, right now. I love your website. It’s colorful. It’s informational. It has a lot of great information about what we’re going to talk about, today. So talk a little bit about tires, they seem like, for a Layman like me, they don’t look like they changed that much over the years. But talk a little bit about since you’re the Chief Technology Officer. Tell us how they’re really changing and changing for the better.

Chris: Right. I’ll break it down really in 2 areas. One, I’ll just call tires, right? Which you say, well, that’s obvious, but that really is the physical tires you know it today. For that, what you really need to understand is how many different materials go into a tire. A lot of people think what it is, it is an injection-molded, you pour in his black stuff and outcomes a hardened tire. But actually, there’s a lot of materials that go into a tire. So if you think of the multiples of polymers, and the fillers, the reinforcements, it could be steel, they can be nylon polyester. Tires have more than 50, sometimes up to a hundred different components actually in them that come together to form a tire as you know it.

The important part about a tire to always remember is, it’s the only thing that connects your vehicle with the road. And it does that through 4 palm-sized patches, basically, that carries all the load that has to happen to make your vehicle traveler[?] sign on your trip in a safe way. In that area, there are all kinds of innovations in materials. Some of them are like sustainable materials. We use soybean oil instead of petroleum, has been one of the bit innovations, and one that we use both, not only because the sustainability play, but it really gives you better performance, in particular, in traction. Traction, being so important for your stopping distance, your cornering capabilities. Sustainable materials are really exciting area.

The second area is really how do you design the tire? For that, we’re doing a lawful lot building on- When I first came to Goodyear to do, which was computer modeling, we’ve actually invested in full-scale simulators. If you could imagine, cutting the hood off of a vehicle and the trunk off of the vehicle, and you put it on these huge actuators surrounded it with a 270° screen, that’s almost two and a half stories high and total immersion is though you’re driving on the road. We’ve invested in that in Akron and we’re now bringing that online on how we design tires without having to actually build and test. We committed to our second one in our sister Innovation Center in Luxembourg.

So, those are the 2 areas in traditional tires to really highlight. The technology that’s coming, that wouldn’t have been the technology we would have had, let’s just say, a short time ago.

John: So excuse my ignorance. Goodyear, I know to be such a big brand. Obviously, the brand is over a hundred years old now. Where does it fall in terms of size, in terms of other tire brands on the planet?

Chris: A lot of people think of Goodyear. They do think of some other big brands, right? You’ve got your Michelin, your Bridgestone. Clearly, we all compete and we compete in these big areas. We are the biggest in the Americas, and North America, and then, compete in the top three around the world.

John: Throughout the world.

Chris: We are a very big player, obviously, in tires. And we’re really excited about what we’ve announced, which is our combination with Cooper Tire which is only going to increase our scale, all the more.

John: What is an exciting position for you to be in though, because it seems like in a world that we all get to, even today, you and I are talking over the zoom call when they spend less and less traveled because of the pandemic that we’ve all faced. Everyone leverages technology. For being the Chief Technology Officer at a company that’s a legacy company and leverage technology to take it to its new future, talk a little bit about that. How many teams of people do you have under you and how open is a legacy brand to changing evolving while you still want to maintain, of course, the great things that made you the great brand that got you to where you are today?

Chris: Sure. Maybe, to give a sense of the scale of my team, right? We’ll talk first, on the technology side, we’ve go to market regionally. So I have a product development leader for each of those regions, we have 3 regions. Then to feed those folks, those areas that I just described the new materials and things, prior to their even starting their product development. I have a leader who’s developing technology ahead of time. Okay? Then, the whole side that I haven’t even mentioned yet is what we call our be on tires[?]. And in that space, we have a couple of leaders who are doing two things, one in the market: They’re learning. What are some of the new needs for future mobility? And when you think of future Mobility, it’s hey, consumer vehicles, your Individual Car ownership. Some of these Trends have been slowed a little bit. Some are accelerating, but they’re still very much here with COVID. Fleets of vehicles instead of Individual Car ownership, autonomous driving, connected vehicles where they can actually transmit information and data. And then electric vehicles in terms of replacing internal combustion engines. And in that space, when you think about an exciting area as much as our traditional tire area for innovations exciting, we’re really doing some cool things over there. Maybe two of them that I could talk about would be first, our AndGo digital platform wherein you basically, we call it the Vehicle Readiness platform, you can put your connected vehicle on there and we can schedule. Today, we can service out of our own footprint, over 60% of all your service needs. And then, we could connect others in, in order to serve the rest of those needs. And we’ve been growing that platform significantly. We’ve got some announcements out there, some of our great customers, who are trying that service. People like [inaudible] who are shaping this new mobility. In the other area is tire intelligence. And that’s basically, how do you put a sensor in a tire? Collect real-time information and use that in order to drive both better maintenance for tires. But also, how do we take that to drive even better vehicle performance?

John: Is that sensor already in use or not yet commercialize?

Chris: So we’ve got it out in Pilot. We’ve done millions of miles on these sensors. Actually, we use spine sensors quite a bit, is in the commercial truck arena. They’re not necessarily tire mounted, but they are there to monitor temperature pressure. And from that information, we can actually predict and prevent downtime incidents by noticing the trends that are coming in those data as they’re put through some of our proprietary algorithms. The cool thing is, it’s great to give people a signal, but what we can then do is connect you into our footprint of service locations where we have thousands of them, right? In region. In fact, in the U.S. anywhere, you have a service need for a tire. We can have you up and running in under 2 hours. Anywhere of the entire U.S. So, it’s kind of taking that model into this emerging consumer mobility area. Enabled by a digital platform to do it, as well as sensors on the tires themselves.

John: So it’s really more of an ecosystem opportunity. Where they sell the tires to the new consumer but then, you also get to talk to them during their use of them. And if they need repair get to also take care of that need. So you’re keeping them in the Goodyear ecosystem.

Chris: That’s exactly right. Because one of the number 1 ways in which everybody listening here, can get the most out of your tires. Including the best performance, simply keeping the right amount of air in them. And that belief are not happens very infrequently. Most tires are running around without the exact proper inflation. So, just that job in and of itself, makes tires last longer, perform better and safer.

John: And those last two initiatives that you mentioned, they’re coming out of your innovation labs? Is that where the community…

Chris: That’s correct! Yeah, the way to think about that is they both come out of some of our traditional innovation centers because we do have to connect into data of the tire. Characteristics themselves to do things like, the where prediction. But we’re doing an awful lot in like San Francisco. So, an example, there was- We started only a few years back with a couple of people. Go learn about the ecosystem where all the innovations happening. Who are the people putting together these shared fleet type concepts. And what we did was start making those connections and we started to identify what our potential jobs we can uniquely do In this idea, Vehicle Readiness is a big one because tires are one of the number one reasons that a fleets can do its job seamlessly. So, being able to help them anticipate those issues or respond quickly when they happen, it really helps their efficiency which of course, is there a cost? That’s a big deal for fleets.

John: I read in some of the information on Goodyear when I was preparing for today’s interview. Of course, when Goodyear started back in 1890s, there was no such thing as we know it today as Silicon Valley. But you actually, now, as part of your technology initiative, you actually have an office in Silicon Valley. Is that true?

Chris: That’s correct. We grow in that office more than tenfold. And so, we actually have in market, they’re the people who are then collaborating. As well as that we really do a lot of the programming on our digital platform. Because you get access to some of the best talent around with respect to doing that type of work. [crosstalk] [inaudible] it give the access to the customers and access to the talent. And we then blast to get some good one on both sides.

John: [inaudible] Well, let’s just say great engineers. You’re actually competition against Google, Facebook. Now you’re in the hunt because you’re over in Silicon Valley.

Chris: There you go. It’s one of the ways in which, even though we’re a hundred years old, you might think of us- Hey, we’re one of those original startups and we’re starting up again.

John: I love it. That’s exciting. Chris, what are the big movements right now when we turn on CNBC and Bloomberg and any of the other business channels, Wall Street Journal or New York Times Business? This ecosystem of ESG investment, or for lack of better terms also known as a circular economy, the shift from the linear economy, to the circular economy, can you share some wisdom as to what you’re doing? Goodyear informs us that tires are no longer going to be just part of the linear economy. That what you’re doing in terms of your innovations are also preparing the Goodyear tires to be part of the circular economy in the future.

Chris: Sure. So I’ll start with what are these tires are made out of, right? And I mentioned I work on Soybean. We’ve also done work on some of the fillers. Silica is of one of the strong fillers that’s used to bond to the rubber or the polymer. That’s what gives its stiffness and its resilience etc. And so for there , we use what’s called rice husk silica ash. Basically, it is the husk of rice. So the discarded waste is then turned into an ash which can be made into the silica. And then, that silica can be reclaimed and we use it, of course, in tires. So there’s things were doing to use and connecting to other industries’ waste products in order to tournament ours. Even our Soybean isn’t competing with the bean[?] for food. It’s actually a part of the byproduct from the process of processing soybean. So, we’re being very cognitive of where did those sources come from? So there’s one area. The other areas, how can we recover tires at end of life? Now, while people don’t know, but the majority it’s over 90% of tires are reclaimed at end of life and repurposed. However, what we’d love to be able to do is repurpose from back to at least equal, right? So, if we could find ways and there are some startups that we’re partnering with and working with to break those end of life tires back to their fundamental building blocks, the oils, the resins, the fillers, the part polymers. And then repurpose them back into the next generation tires. We’ll really make that progress on that circular economy, right? Because the majority of as we think about sustainability comes from our product. We make lots of those products, right? And so the more we can do that, the better. One thing that people may not realize that even happens day and day out today is on the commercial tire side, how much of a tire is we used multiple times in its life through retracting? So, retracting is a huge part of our business model when it comes to commercial trucks. That tire is sold new once. And then it can be reused two more times by taking the old tread off and only replacing the tread. So those tires, although maybe in first life only may go a couple of hundred thousand miles. You can actually redo that a couple of two, three, more times through life, sometimes almost nearing a million miles on a parts of that tire. So that’s another way in which we do participate, even today, in circular economy.

John: I never even knew that. How often is that happen out of the percentage of 18-wheelers or trucks that we see on the road today? Is that happening to 10% of the tires that are being used today? 20%? What are the what are the best guest that you can give without having to be perfectly exactly force.

Chris: So, you happen to be talking to somebody who ran our retread business. So that looks like comes to North America. The two front tires to steer are always new, okay? It’s the tires than those steer tires will last about a hundred fifty thousand miles. You then take those, you buff off the old, you put a new tread on. You put them in the drive. They’ll go about 250,000 or so miles. Then you go buff those off and put them in the trail and they could last let’s say another hundred fifty thousand. Although trailers don’t run day in day out, there’s more trailers and there are tractors. Okay? And so, actually the majority of tires on trailers are retread. At least F, I would say of your drive tires are retread. So, more than half the tires in the drive position in the trailer. So on an 18-wheeler, 16 of the tires, 50%, I would say is my good estimate of that are retreaded at any given time.

John: So really from a commercial perspective, you guys are already in a big part of the circular economy from that perspective. From a commercial down to just a man on the street or a woman on the street, like you or me are regular cars, not able to leverage that same retreading. Technology is not part of what happens today?

Chris: Yeah. One of the big enablers to that, to make it happen, with our great customers like a J.B Hunt, Schneider, or a rider is the fact that in the United States, 80% of truck tires are only two different sizes. So therefore, you’re able to keep using those on truck unit to truck unit. If you think of the proliferation of new trim levels and things on cars, you don’t have that consistency. Correct? The second thing is the carcass of the tire. So not to get too techie geeked out on the tire technology, its steel and it is designed for that in a truck tire. Now, in per tire you do have a steel belt which you have fabric plies because they are more designed for single life use. So, only passenger type tires that you see, that are significantly retreaded is everything you see on the post office. Those post office vehicles because they’re under a controlled environment by large. They don’t go overly high speed. They do use significant retreading as well.

John: No kidding. So, going back to the issues of sourcing materials like you mentioned of soybeans. And then also working with different joint venture opportunities on people who can take a tire and recycle the material efficiently and get it back into your ecosystem, given those balancing act of those two things will turn in materials and then also recycling materials and the circular economy sense. How much of a Goodyear tire today compared to 90 years ago, 80 years ago, 70 years ago are made out of either sustainable materials or recycle materials? If you were to say, what percentage today are?

Chris: Yeah, sure. Today, if you look at like our weather-ready type of product. It’s about a third [crosstalk] [inaudible] sustainable type material. That’s correct. And we’re very much on track. We’ve laid out for ourselves a challenge of a bold goal is to demonstrate. We could make a hundred percent one by the end of the decade. Now, that’s not saying we’re going to sell all of our tires being a hundred percent. But to show it’s possible. And the reason I say that is you got to understand in order to really make it mainstream to where we could have a hundred percent sustainable recycled tires. Just think of the huge supply chains that we have to set up. Total new partnerships, a start-up as to get to the point where they’re providing the millions and millions and millions of pounds of materials and things that go on tire, right? So, you just got to figure somebody like, go to even. We make let’s say approximately a hundred fifty million tires, average weight of about 20 pounds a piece. We ended up it’s ourselves consume. Three billion pounds of materials, right? So, just to get the supply chain set up and that’s just us, let alone the whole industry. It’s going to take a while, but it’s going to start by showing it’s possible and we want to be the first one to say it’s possible. And that’s why we laid out that moonshot goal of a 2030 demonstrated.

John: I love it. For our listeners and viewers who have just joined us, we’re honored to have Chris Helsel with us today. He’s the Chief Technology Officer of Goodyear. To find all the good things that are doing a Goodyear and Chris and his colleagues go to www.goodyear.com. Chris talked a little bit about the differential when you’re thinking of technology. The race car business, which we all grew up with, which we all still love in America and around the world versus dealing with the new ventures that have gotten so much of our minds face now like a Tesla or any of those other great new brands that have come out to help our environment improve. How does that work with from the seat that you sit in?

Chris: Sure. I would say this, I’m going to go back to my- I’ve introduced this idea of tires, which is our classical innovation. Then this be on tires and its really required. We almost have this dual innovation set of tools. One is very much when you think of a tire it is a safety product. And we run that and it’s got to be at scale that we could do things in a very traditional kind of stage gate process, right? Where we start out, here’s the attributes of the product and you’ve got to get alignment of all your investments. So that out the end you can make it very large scales. These products that time and time again are going to be in performing the safe way, right? Again, I go back to it’s the only thing connecting you to Earth, that I think is really important to think about. When we get into though the area of like I describe this and go for the intelligent tire. If you’ve ever heard of The Lean Startup, it’s a hey, we got to get to a real minimum viable product. So let’s get there. So we can quickly test it and then maybe we put it out in a beta version and then we update it. And so, it’s a very different mindset. It’s very inquisitive experimental because we just don’t know what you don’t know. So, we basically have to have [(26:27)]those capabilities in order to work in innovation today. Because on one side to do like IoT, Internet of Things, Internet of Things type of innovation, it’s learn fast. It could be we create something. We try it. Somebody says that’s interesting but it really doesn’t solve my problem. Well, on the tire life, we have pretty good predictability of what it is that we need. Because we have good insights into the market. Because the market is pretty mature. So we need both of those sets of skills.

John: Got it. Hey, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we’re still on the other side of working our way through science is winning on this pandemic. What were some of your greatest lessons learned on how you navigated Goodyear through the pandemic and what lessons learned you’re going to take forward and how has that affected your supply chain?

Chris: Yeah, I would say the number 1 thing that many of us learned, I can give this example, we were sitting in a senior leadership meeting talking about how we are going to test out whether Microsoft teams was going to work for some small percentage of our people to prove to ourselves, we could start working remote. And then I remember by the end of the meeting, we are getting phone calls, saying different countries in Europe are being shut down etc. By the end of the meeting said we’re just going for it. It really did perform. I mean, we’ve given a lot of accolades to our IT group and probably other people have do that. This stuff was much more ready for prime time and we gave it credit. And so I’d say, one of the number 1 thing we talked out and learned is, sometimes we should just go for it, right? We think if we hadn’t just gone for it, we’d probably still be arguing if the pilot was successful today. I’m joking. But I think that’s a leadership lesson learned, right? And I think that’s one of the things we want to hold on to. That decisiveness, that agility, I think those are a couple things for everybody to hold on to.

John: People talk about supply chain disruptions and we’re all working our way out of it in different industries, some affected more than others. Did it affect your supply chain or you’re in good shape right now?

Chris: So interestingly, I know this might sound strange to some folks, but my title is Chief Technology Officer. The senior vice president is actually a global operations. So I actually have responsibilities who are decentralized group of procurement and its quality etc. And then, doing that on the daily basis with our regional businesses, right? So we’ve very much partner. It’s a matrix responsibility and I’ll tell you, the challenges are out there, the challenges are real. But what we’ve found is our team performed pretty darn well. They had gotten ahead of getting some of what they needed to do, the shipping that they needed to do. They had previously booked some containers. We had it some increase safety stocks and things. So, knock on wood, so far we’ve had no lost production, been able to keep our plans up and running. And good job by, I’d say some of the operations team to keeping our people safe while they’ve been up and running. So, I’m both sides of the COVID threat and the supply[?] So far, we’ve been able to keep the trains on time.

John: I love your moonshot goal. I love by the end of the decade, you’re going to try to make tires fully out of recyclable materials. You’re at a third now, approximately sustainable and recycle material. Chris, 25 years, you’re there. But you seem to have the energy and the excitement of someone who just into this thing 3 or 4 years. What gets you out of bed right now? What’s in the future for Goodyear besides the moonshot goals that you’ve shared with our listeners?

Chris: I would say, we talked about the tire intelligence and I guess I should say this, I’ll start out because you got to be a little bit- You and I started our conversation with the family. I love all my children the same, so I get up in the morning because I love my supply chain folks. And I love my innovation body but you can’t pick who’s your favorite child, right?

John: I love it.

Chris: What are the exciting things? I think is, when we talked entire intelligence, where I didn’t get the conversation with you so far, is the job beyond monitoring is how the tire can become actually an active sensor. And I’ll go back to that idea. The tire is the only thing touching the road. And what really important to know, at any given time, is that tires sticking or slipping? Because if it’s slipping you want breaking action occurring, you want practicing it at happening etc. Through those automated systems. So one of the areas we’re also working is, how can we have a smart tire talking to a smarter braking system? We’ve proven already that as a tire wears, it breaks, it takes a little longer. Its characteristics change. We can recover almost a third of that by integrating just knowing the current state of the tire with breaking. And now, if you take that concept to know what’s happening at that interface, how can we inform the future autonomous driver, right? And then autonomous system is counting on, what’s happening at that interface? If we can inform that system of exactly what’s going on. Boy, we can help unlock a new use cases for autonomous driving, maybe instead of only being able to drive under ideal weather conditions. Like today, which is really a great engineering achievement. How about under wet conditions or snow conditions because you know better exactly what’s happening at that interface. And then, I’d even take it further if we’re the ones you know what’s going on on that interface, right? It’s one thing to know it’s cold outside. So maybe the roads need treatment, but it’d be another because our intelligent tire rolled over that road, that only for this hundred feet does the road really need treatment. So let’s go prioritize that. And we can inform maybe infrastructure maintainers or provider. So I think there’s a lot of other cool things we could do because of two things we’re working on. The fact that we’re the only thing touching that road. Secondly, in the intelligence that we’re trying to add to that. Now, those are moonshots to for us. But I think, that kind of really gets you going, right? That we could really take safety to a new level.

John: So that’s a one-two punch. What you’re saying data collection from the tire touching the road and collecting all the data. And then the data analytics event who it informs and how it informs them.

Chris: You got it, you got it.

John: Brilliant. Now give me like get moonshot. I love it that you’ve already put it under that umbrella. Well, you said on the recycled tires, hopefully, by the end of the decade. Hopefully, there’s no guarantees, we know big hairy goal. How about that? How many years do you think where you’re talking about that moonshot project?

Chris: You will see this year. The intelligent tire released for doing the monitoring.

John: Wow!

Chris: And then, what you will see, I would say before 2025, 2027ish, the tire actually being a sensor. That friction work is still under- We’ve got some promising avenues to pursue on that.

John: Well, wonderful. Chris, thank you for your time today. I really hope I get to meet you one day and I want you to know that you’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast to share all the new innovations you do in Goodyear. For our listeners and viewers to find Chris, his colleagues, and all the great works that Goodyear is doing, go to www.goodyear.com. Chris, you are making a huge impact and making the world a better place. And thank you for joining us today in the Impact Podcast.

Chris: Thank you.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by the Marketing Masters. A 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 the marketingmasters.com.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking engine revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With hundreds of athletes, entrepreneurs, speakers, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for your next event. For more information, please visit letsengage.com.

John: Welcome back to another edition of Green is Good. This is the Hollywood edition of Green is Good, and we’ve got my friend and co-partner and co-host today, Debbie Levin, with us. She’s the President of the Environmental Media Association. We’ve got for a second turn on Green is Good Ethan Brown, the CEO and founder of Beyond Meat. Welcome to Green is Good, Ethan.

Ethan Brown: Thank you very much. I appreciate being here.

John: We have you in person today. Next time we have you, we’re going to go down to your location and we’re going to eat and cook and be right there and show our listeners and our viewers how amazing and delicious your products are.

Ethan: Thank you. That’s what we love to do. We love to show people that plant-based protein can be a real source of protein and enjoy it just like they do animal protein.

John: It’s amazing. I’m a vegan for many years and I eat your products all the time and they are truly just delicious.

Ethan: Thank you very much for saying that.

John: For our listeners and viewers that didn’t get a chance to listen to the first time you came on, I want to start a little bit with the Ethan Brown journey. How did you even get here to become the CEO and founder of Beyond Meat and literally changing how we approach protein in the world?

Ethan: Great. It’s a long story, and I’ll try to just give the highlights of it. I really started when I was a kid. I was exposed at an early age to animal agriculture. My dad is professor, but we had a hobby farm that became a business farm, so I learned a lot about livestock and dairy cattle, in particular, and just sort of took that information with me and went on into a career in the clean tech space, where I worked on fuel cells for a long time, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, which is a great technology.

Debbie Levin: We actually work with Toyota forever, and we’re helping them launch the fuel cell car.

Ethan: It’s a really wonderful technology.

Debbie: I’m so glad you’re saying that.

Ethan: Yeah, I worked almost 10 years in this sector.

John: So you were early on that stuff.

Ethan: Yeah, absolutely. I worked for the best company in the world, Ballard Power Systems, leading a fuel cell exchange member, so it was a really, really great experience for me. But I kept coming back to this question of what if you could basically take the animal out of the protein production equation? What if you could think about getting amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, minerals, and water, not from an animal, but from plants, and building animal muscle, essentially, with those direct parts? That’s all the animal is doing. They’re basically taking from grass and now from feedstock and assembling the amino acids, lipids, and carbohydrates in a certain form that we’re very familiar with. The thought was why not go ahead and do that directly? I knew something about technology because I had worked in the clean tech space and I had a real passion for this because I felt that by doing that, you could simultaneously solve or contribute to, anyway, the solution for four different problems that I cared a lot about. One was human health. I looked at heart disease, diabetes, cancer. I do believe that Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang are right, and I have yet to see a convincing scientific analysis to suggest they’re not, that livestock contribute the most greenhouse gases of any singular cause today. They said about 51 percent. Whether it’s 30 percent or 51 percent, it doesn’t really matter; it’s a massive contributor to greenhouse gas. The second would be climate, and the third natural resources here in California with the drought, etc. The fourth is animal welfare, which is something that is near and dear to my heart. I said if you can basically affect all of those things by changing out the three or four ounces at the center of your plate, isn’t that something really meaningful? You say, OK, how do I get people to do that? They’re not going to stop eating meat. There’s no way that’s going to happen. In fact, the world is going the opposite direction. As countries industrialize, they’re consuming more meat. The quest then became how do we basically recreate meat directly from plants? I don’t mean make a soybean behave like steak; I mean how do you actually rebuild meat? What’s so cool about it is you can do it. That’s the really neat part about it. You can take those constituent parts and you can assemble them.

John: What year was this when you’d had the epiphany, the germs, of this idea?

Ethan: 2006-2007 I started thinking about it. It took me a while to get comfortable with the idea. I was anxious about taking a career which I built in clean tech and becoming the guy that produces tofu. I didn’t want to do that. So I really wanted to take a rigorous scientific approach to it, so I read a lot and learned what some very bright people were doing in this space and contacted some scientists at the University of Missouri and asked them if I could come out and talk to them. I did, and they just blew me away, so I started working with them.

John: Oh my gosh. Talk a little bit about the journey from beginning, so now we’re in 2015, and Beyond Meat is at Whole Foods. You’re becoming part of our eating vernacular in terms of if you’re into vegetarianism or veganism or just giving your body a break, you’re now part of the future. How did that go? How has that journey been? Talk a little bit about raising the money, which I’m going to ask you some other questions, you know what I’m asking, and how’s that gone.

Ethan: I view it as a real blessing. There’s a Victor Hugo quote that I like to say, which is “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” I really view that about what we’re doing. I somehow have been fortunate enough and blessed enough to be part of an idea that’s coming around at the right time. If you look at when I was growing up, the book that my parents had on the shelf for child-rearing was by Dr. Spock. In that book, he talks about the vegetarian diet being the best diet for children. Of course, meatloaf was at the dinner table for most nights for me. It’s not like these are new ideas. Then you look at Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971. It’s that there somehow is a tipping point, and that happens to be happening now, and I happened to be working on this idea at that time, I think. For me, it’s been a process of being part of some momentum that is much larger than myself and it gets to tapping into what you feel most passionate about and what your heart is telling you. Once you do that, the things that start to happen are pretty interesting.

John: For our listeners, we’ve got Ethan Brown. He’s the CEO and founder of Beyond Meat. To find out more about Beyond Meat, you can go to www.beyondmeat.com. We’re not going to let the show go by without talking about some of your bigger investors. You have Biz Stone, you have Bill Gates. Your idea has come. Why did they invest in your idea that’s come of the time? What got their attention? What got them really so excited about Beyond Meat?

Ethan: Sure. First, they’re just fantastic guys. There’s a generation now of investors that are putting their money where their values lie.

Debbie: How did they find you?

Ethan: When I first got involved with the University of Missouri, I worked for about two-and-a-half years with them, just trying to commercialize this technology. It’s basically a process of taking disorganized protein and amino acids and organizing it in the fashion of muscle or animal protein. We were taking amino acids and running them through this heating, cooling, and pressure process. There’s no chemicals. If you’re comfortable eating pasta, you should be comfortable having our products. I was working with them on that. We got to the point where it was something that could be commercialized, so at that time, Time Magazine came in and ran a piece on the technology. I always say that big companies have R&D programs and entrepreneurs have universities. I’m always amazed that people don’t just go to universities for the next greatest idea. That’s what I had done. I was working with the University of Missouri. They got contacted by a firm called Kleiner Perkins, and being the good Midwestern values and everything else, they said we’re already working with a guy. It was just me spending money out of my pocket. I had to license the technology. I had offers from other firms other than Kleiner Perkins for less of my company and for more money, but I called up a friend who was a Vice President at one of Kleiner’s companies, and I said should I do this deal with Kleiner? He said something funny. He said even if it’s a total disaster, working with Kleiner will be a great thing. It’s a really good plug for them. I turned down the other offers and I accepted Kleiner’s, and it was a great decision because they’ve done everything they said they were going to do.

Debbie: And they brought you these investors.

Ethan: They basically positioned it as not only the people that work there, and their networks, and I just got off the phone with Ray Lane, who’s the guy who’s on our Board, and he’s a terrific individual. It’s the network there. When it came time to expand our funding and to bring on other investors, they made introductions. It’s incredible who they can introduce you to. One by one, we’re able to assemble this group of people that are very passionate about disrupting industries that need to be disrupted. I think the question was about Biz and Bill Gates and those guys, was why would they be interested in this? If you look at what they’ve done, they’ve transformed computing, they’ve transformed communication, and this is a process that we’ve been relying on for 2 million years, the consumption of animal protein. What would be more fascinating than disrupting that?

Debbie: Can you explain your products, like really explain what they are, what they look like, what they taste like, so that we all know what you’re talking about?

Ethan: Sure. The first product I came out with was a chicken product. It was basically plant-based chicken. What we really focused on was the fibrous texture of chicken. If you pull apart a piece of chicken breast, it kind of has a striation that you’re very familiar with, and that’s very important to how it feels in your mouth and on your teeth. We worked very much on replicating that through using plant-based inputs. We used pea protein, soy protein, and others, and we ran it through this process that reorganized those proteins to take on that muscular fiber. Then we introduced a beef product.

Debbie: Wait. What are you buying when you buy the chicken? What does it look like?

Ethan: It looks like a strip.

Debbie: So you’re buying chicken strips.

Ethan: Exactly, chicken strips, yeah. The success that we had early on was Mark Bittman came out to our facility, which at the time was in rural Maryland, and saw the process and had us up to New York. We basically put dishes that were animal protein and plant protein right next to each other, and he had trouble telling us the difference between the two. He wrote a big article on the front page of the Sunday Review talking about that and what that meant.

Debbie: I remember this article.

Ethan: Yeah, so that really put us on a path to people taking it seriously. We had other really good media events. Good Morning America had a thing where they couldn’t tell the difference, so that became something people associated with our company, that if you want something that’s really like meat, go ahead and have something that Beyond Meat has produced. The future for us, though, is not just about replicating the meat experience; it’s also about improving upon meat. I’m a big fan of Elon Musk and of the Tesla, and I believe what he’s done is right, which is if you’re going to ask people to shift away from something that may be environmentally damaging, do it in a way that’s going to excite them and inspire them. What we’re doing with our newest products, for example, the beast burger, we’re creating things that the animal couldn’t create. The beast burger, for example, has antioxidants, it has omegas, it has calcium, it has all these things that you wouldn’t get if you had the cow or chicken.

Debbie: Looks like, tastes like, but is enhanced.

Ethan: Right, exactly. It’s a better experience for you, so it should draw you to it. People say why aren’t you more active in Meatless Mondays? Because I actually don’t believe in Meatless Mondays. I don’t believe that you should be asking people to sacrifice. You should provide them with something that is better, so they go do it seven days a week, so it’s not something where they say if I can just get through this day. That’s not the way you change the world. It’s just not the way innovation works.

Debbie: So it’s chicken, it’s meat.

Ethan: Yeah, and actually, this year we’re working on something which is, I think, groundbreaking, which is a raw beef product, which is fabulous. It’s so cool. You’ll take it home, you’ll be able to manipulate it with your own hands, put it on the grill. It is cool, and that is made out of a combination of pea protein and yeast. Yeast is a fascinating input. It has actually a higher amino acid profile than beef and it’s abundant. You can get yeast from a brewery. It’s a real opportunity to create some new protein platforms. It’s pretty cool stuff.

John: Talk about the process of making your great products. When people bite into it, what do they tell you their experience is? I’m a big fan. I eat your products, and I love them. They burn real clean and make me feel strong. They feel great. When you’re out there talking to your consumers and your growing base of fans, how does that work?

Ethan: It’s really around allowing people to continue to eat what they love. That’s a big thing for me. You can only pick so many battles in a day. Our battle is not to convince people to eat kale and quinoa. I think it’s terrific for them. They should. My own kids, eight and nine, I try to get them to eat as much as they possibly can. But it’s really around allowing people to enjoy the dishes they grew up with, but having healthier versions of it, so that you can have that lasagna that you want. You can have tacos, not just one night a week, you can have them three times if you feel like it because there’s no cholesterol, there’s no saturated fat in it. We deliver on that promise of what it’s like to bite into a piece of meat, what it’s like to feel satiated and full, but not have the downside, not have the cholesterol, the saturated fat, not have the carcinogens, etc. It’s all about delivering what people love and taking away the downside.

Debbie: And it’s much different than the other soy products that are out there or grain products.

Ethan: For me, the point of departure really is, and it’s a big one because it costs a lot more money to do it this way, but I want to rebuild meat directly from plants. I believe very strongly that you can think about meat in two ways. You can think about where it’s from, and you can get hung up and there’s not many productive solutions that come from that. You can’t make an animal much more efficient than it is. This gets back to the climate thing for a second. One of the things that Robert Goodland did, who is the economist behind the 51 percent greenhouse gas figure I cited, he actually added in the fact that animals are all respiring and they’re emitting carbon when they do that. They’re all breathing, and as part of that process, they’re emitting carbon. There’s an unnatural number of animals on the Earth’s surface. You can do a lot of things towards manipulating animals, but you can’t create one that doesn’t breathe. There’s an inherent efficiency limit with animals. With us, we can basically break through that efficiency limit and create a really, really efficient process. It’s all about transitioning people away from the concept you have to get meat from an animal, and thinking more scientifically about what meat is. If you describe meat in terms of its core parts, it’s those five things I mentioned. It’s amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, minerals, and water. That’s it. If I present you with those same five things in the same exact architecture as what you find in animal muscle, who’s to say that’s not meat?

Debbie: I have a really practical question. In terms of price, and where’s the distribution for this?

Ethan: We’re in about 7,000 stores now, everywhere from Whole Foods to Target. In terms of price point, a couple different answers. One is there’s parts of the animals we’ll probably never be able to compete with, which is the remnants and the very low value parts of the animal. We get asked a lot can you make pet food? We can do that, but pet food is full of things that are very low, chicken breast, for example. We can be very cost competitive with a chicken breast. If you look at what Tyson and Perdue sell in the store today, as chicken strips, we’re actually already competitive today. That’s a pretty interesting point because our scale is so small compared to their scale. If we can already be competitive today, imagine what it will be like.

Debbie: So you are in Whole Foods, you’re in Targets.

Ethan: Yes, we’re in Whole Foods, we’re in what would be Safeway out here, Ralph’s, etc. We’re in Vons, we’re in Texas in ATB, in Publix in the Southeast.

John: 7,000 stores. If they go on your website, beyondmeat.com, they can put in the zip code locator and find out where they are close to you.

Ethan: Absolutely.

Debbie: That’s tremendous that distribution is already amazing and accessible.

Ethan: It’s been great, and I think it’s about this concept of let’s allow people to continue to eat what they love. My point of departure is people aren’t walking around defending the landline. They love the iPhone, so you have to give them something that’s better. My entire focus is always on how do we create a better experience for consumers so they’ll desire this versus feel compelled to have it?

Debbie: What kind of marketing do you do for this?

Ethan: I love this part of our company. I hired a guy. The head of our marketing is from Silk soymilk, and I love what they did in terms of getting into the dairy aisle, and that’s very important to me.

Debbie: We used to work with them. That’s interesting.

Ethan: I really want people to be able to walk into the supermarket and buy protein, not buy meat and meat alternatives. When you walk into progressive grocers, you have basically a protein aisle. We can create this ground beef, for example, we can create it ultimately from things like lentil protein, we can create it from camelina, you can create it from different feedstocks. People can come in and they can pick an animal version or one that’s from many different types of proteins from plants, but today we’re nowhere close to there. On the marketing side, we’re able to get some real interesting people involved. Jeff Manning, who is the architect of the Got Milk? campaign, we hired him because we want to basically recreate the Got Mik? campaign, but with plant protein. We have three tenets of our marketing program. The first is to prove the taste and texture. We’re out there sampling, we’re on shows, etc. having people taste it, blind taste test, etc. The second is really to demystify plant protein. For moms, we have to make them super comfortable this is something that’s very healthy for their family. We want to explain that. I’ll take peas, for example. Our peas are grown in very rich soil in France. The protein is separated through water, so it’s an aqueous process, and it’s heating, cooling, and pressure, and that’s it. It’s, in many ways, a much more direct process than industrial animals. The third is we want to create this desire. We’re working with athletes and celebrities.

Debbie: We should be working together.

Ethan: Absolutely. If he’s listening, we’re waiting for DeAndre Jordan to sign.

Debbie: I think that it’s the education process and it’s getting the people to endorse you and to support what you’re doing that have a voice. Honestly, our community is not that aware of your company.

Ethan: If I could look five years in the future, I want to be able to walk into a gym in America and see, it won’t be Derek Jeter anymore because he’s retired, but somebody up there on that sign with a Got Milkesque argument about our product. I was amazed that you can walk into high schools all across the U.S., into cafeterias all across the U.S., and see one protein advertised, and that’s milk. I would like to be that protein.

John: Debbie’s line of questioning is great in terms of how you’re marketing this thing. It’s so interesting. You’ve got Got Milk? Talk about getting the guy. Is there also a B2B vision of yours on going to chefs and food platforms across the United States, beyond B2C?

Ethan: The thing that’s very near and dear to my heart is the school lunch program, so we’re working hard on that because it’s a way to get kids to start doing this early.

Debbie: That’s the harder one because we have gardens in schools in Los Angeles and LAUSD. We actually work with their afterschool programs so that we don’t have to fight with the system, and it’s worked so incredibly. We go into any school we want, but if we were telling them how to change their school lunches, we would still be on our first school. It’s kind of a nightmare, I know, but it’s great. That is where you need to go, but it’s also through the parents. It could be through all the parent associations as well because that is really at home.

Ethan: That’s where you start. We’re also working with one of the largest quick serve restaurants, so there will be something hopefully that we’ll announce later this year, as well as the leading meat company in a certain sector. We’re actually coming out with a product with them. It will be all vegan and all plant-based, but it will be co-branded. It’s pretty exciting.

John: Do you talk to Biz or to Bill Gates at all about marketing, about scaling? Do they coach you at all, in terms of where their experiences have had success?

Ethan: With Biz, the guy is brilliant on marketing. You definitely want to touch base and get his thoughts. Both him and Ev are extremely creative guys. Bill Gates, I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with him twice. He’s not as accessible. He’s a great guy. It’s interesting. They had me so scared to go in there and pitch him. They’re like, he’s going to find a number in your presentation that somehow doesn’t compute, and he’s going to have you do it right there on the spot. So I went in there. As I was going in, three guys were coming out in rumpled suits. First of all, I hadn’t worn a suit, so I was like this is tough because these guys come out with suits. They look demoralized and everything. I go in there, and he’s the nicest guy in the world. We talked about his family, about his kids. His big point about the company and his enthusiasm for it was if you can drop the price of this below the price of meat and if you can scale internationally quick enough, you can make a real contribution to human nutrition. That’s what got him motivated.

John: We’re down to the last couple minutes. I know marketing and getting the word out is really so much of the battle. Ethan, I know you do events every year. Can you give a little plug for the events that you have coming up here in 2015?

Ethan: Sure. One thing we did, which was quite fun, at Expo West, which just happened, we did a McDonald’s. We turned the M on its side and turned it to B.

Debbie: I was there. I didn’t see that.

Ethan: Yeah, it was very popular. It was cool. We did it with Taco Bell last year, and the New York Times wrote a piece on it. We’re trying to enforce this idea that this is mainstream food that you can actually go back to enjoying and not feel guilty about eating. We’re doing a series of activations around this concept of the Got Milk? campaign I was mentioning. We’re doing barbecues with athletes. We have Sports Spectacular coming up here soon in LA, so we’re really trying to show that people who are fit and healthy, but yet want to enjoy great tasting food, are embracing these products in droves.

John: Where else can our listeners and our viewers find you, besides beyondmeat.com?

Ethan: We’re very active on Twitter, Facebook, and out in the community. You can come to a store. You’ll see us there. We have a lot of people out in the field working hard.

John: In a couple months, Debbie and I are going to come, and we’re going to bring one of her celebrities from Environmental Media Association. We’re going to come to your facility, and we’re going to sample these great products with you.

Ethan: Come try the raw ground beef. I think you guys will be blown away.

Debbie: I am so excited about all this stuff. This is amazing.

John: You can buy Beyond Meat at 7,000 locations now across America. Go to www.beyondmeat.com, put in your zip code, and you can find it right there. I thank you for joining us today, thank our guest, Ethan Brown, my co-host, Debbie Levin, and Ethan, turn and show the camera this. He is the Elon Musk of protein, the future of protein, Ethan Brown here. Ethan, you are truly living proof that green is good.

Ethan: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thanks for having me.

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. It is 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 so excited and honored to have you with us today, Deborah Dull. She’s the founder of the Circular Supply Chain Network and also a Principal at GE. The famous iconic brand General Electric. Welcome to The Impact Podcast, Deborah.

Deborah Dull: Hi John. Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

John: You know, you and I were digging a little bit offline. This is the first time I’ve had 1500 of shows here at Impact Podcasts over the last 14 years. I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure and the honor to interview someone in Hawaii.

Deborah: Wow, can you imagine the honor? This is the place to start the interview.

John: This is wonderful. But listen, before we get going into all the important work. It is very important given the times that we live in that you’re doing both of GE and the Circular Supply Chain Network. I’d love you to please share a little bit of your backstory. How do you even get here? This is important and really interesting work you’re doing. What was your journey leading up to these great roles that you have right now?

Deborah: Yeah, thanks. The shortest version and I’ll give a mid-length version.

John: Okay.

Deborah: I love Supply Chain. I think it’s the most interesting topic in the world. But listen, don’t leave everybody. Stay with me. I promise I’ll win you over. Inventory is super interesting. If you look around everything in front of you right now, it was brought to you by a Supply Chain Manager. Somewhere in the world, when you bought the shirt you’re wearing and you bought blue instead of purple, an inventory manager panicked somewhere in a corner planning. It’s wonderful and marvelous. I tripped and fell into the Supply Chain and I’m so glad I did. I actually originally started studying marketing. I grew up in the smallish[?] town in central Washington State. Apple capital of the world. I really wanted to get out of a rural setting and out of America. Gosh, the world is such a big place. What could I do? And my guidance counselor at my small High School said, “You could become a stewardess if you like to travel.” Literally, the word stewardess. I decided not to do that. But I thought everybody buys something so I’ll go into marketing.

John: Good choice.

Deborah: Yes. What has been a very fun life, I think. But I still get to travel a lot. A lot of really lovely flight attendants have there of course called now and help me out. Here I am in my undergrad. I am taking my required operations and management class. On the first day of class, my professor has us plan thanksgiving dinner. And so here he’s saying, “What are we going to have for dinner?” And we say turkey and lobster and cakes and pies and everything. And he goes, “Okay, now you’ve got one burner and one oven. How are we going to pull it off?” It was the most brilliant first day of class. I don’t remember any of my other first days of class. But he’s taught us resource constraints. How to exploit within your constraints a work back schedule? Really cool elements. I said, “Wow, is this actually something I could get paid to do?”

Anyhow, we fast-forward and I learned to become a Supply Chain Professional Microsoft. A brilliant place to grow up in a profession and got a chance to move around to a lot of different roles and move internationally. I then really pivoted and started to use Supply Chain to figure out how can we make the world a better place. I got to spend a couple of years with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I lived in Ethiopia for a year spent the majority of my time in resource-constrained environments and challenging everything it is that I learned what was true about Supply Chain. To try to figure out how to bring equity through public health and international development, a fascinating time. And then I pivoted. So I really focused on health people communities. I thought, what else can be done with Supply Chain? I discovered the Circular Economy 3 years ago. One of the big reasons I actually came to GE was thinking about the breadth and scale of the industrial operations that we meet around the world. We use almost every element in the periodic table. The impact we can make internally and then the majority of my customers are actually external is just really very exciting to me.

Along the way, I have found lots of other Supply Chain nerds, who think this is really fun. About six months ago, we started this nonprofit called the Circular Supply Chain Network, which is just a free slice of the internet for all of us to get together and nerd out on what’s happening now. It went needs to happen for us to truly transition. So, Circular Economy and as I say, avoid water wars. Because let’s face it when I’m 90, I am too old for that. I can’t fight for ice for my cocktails. You really got to look out for ourselves in the future.

John: It’s so true and for our viewers and our listeners out there that want to find Deborah’s Circular Supply Chain Network, go to www.circularsupplychain.network. I’m on that site right now. It’s a beautiful sight and you’re doing great things there. But let’s talk now about the interrelationship. A principle of GE is a big role. Being the founder and now also overseeing your vision at the Circular Supply Chain Network. How do you intermingle those and let both of those inform each other and make both of those opportunities even bigger?

Deborah: A great question. One that I think about all the time as we’re recording this, we’ve all spent 15 months inside. If you’re like me, you’ve taken everything that used to fill your life with joy and instead filled it with commitments and new hobbies, and new ideas. That’s what I’ve done. But I spend my free time really exploring the relationship between the Circular Economy and the Supply Chain. I find that to be very fascinating. So, how do we balance? There are discussions in the land of manufacturing, automation, execution. How do we run industrial processes and manufacturing better? Over these last couple of years, I’ve spent in the company, we’ve gone through a couple of leadership changes. My current leadership, I have incredible amounts of faith in. I think we’re on a great path where we listen very, very carefully to what our customers are asking.

Right now, it’s clear our customers are all making commitments towards circularity and recognizing that we need to change the relationships we have with materials. We’ve got quite a few really exciting and it’s just going on working closely together with our customers. Now, how does my other half fit into this? Now part of the shift we need to meet is the ability to take our corporate hats off. There was a time when we were really our companies and when we go out in the world. Everything we say then is due to the company. But I see a lot of that shifting and changing the role of social media obviously is making a big change there. The network allows many of us to come together take our company hats off, and really show up as Supply Chain professionals. Through this work, I’m able to speak with Chief Supply Chain Officers, Vice-presidents, Inventory Managers, Junior Analysts from all different types of companies all around the world.

John: Really.

Deborah: We usually have room for four continents throw up for meetings. And I can then start to share and populate learnings between both of those different platforms.

John: That’s fast. Really the access that the Circular Supply Chain Network has created for you has been informative and beneficial to your principal role at GE and vice versa. But for our listeners and viewers out there that are new to this type of discussion and new to this terminology, can you explain, Deborah where we were historically as a society as a country in a Linear Supply Chain Network? How we’re moving to a Circular Economy? What that really mean? What does a Circular Supply Chain Network mean?

Deborah: Sure. Right. So listen, it’s probably not a surprise that you’re not familiar with today’s economy which is built on what’s called a Linear Economy. I personally well, I have an example, most people don’t go out to a happy hour and talk, “Oh, men not Linear Economy today.” Listen, what we’ve done is spent the last hundred years or so perfecting what we call the Linear Economy. We extract items from the planet. We make something extremely efficiently using the technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions and lean management all of the work we all have learned. We put that item somewhere. Might go to a landfill. Might be ended up at the ocean. It might be out in the world. But the problem with this is twofold. One, the materials that we’re casting aside have more value to give to the economy. We could charge something for it which is important because we need to give that material as many chances that it can to generate value for us. Thus growing our supply chains, our businesses, and our economies.

The second part of this, the second problem is that we are running out of materials on the planet. There may be some skeptics out there saying, “No, that’s not true.” Go and do an internet search. We have less than 50 years of mineable gold left in the planet. Gold is really important for a lot of what we do as a society. We need to shift our relationship that we have with materials and resources like metals, plastics, wood, heat, water, etcetera. So, interestingly enough actually this all kind of happened if we take a short little history lesson, 1924. Right as Henry Ford was coining the term mass production. There is a clandestine business meeting in a side street in Geneva, Christmas eve. The problem is that this product their business owners who are on the same product. It wasn’t making them enough money. It was lasting too long and people weren’t buying enough of it. All these companies were going to go out of business. That product maybe surprisingly, is the light bulb. And GE was in that room. Basically what happened was we said, “You know what, let’s cap the life” That’s almost half the life span of this light bulb so that people need to use it more. Better fuel sales and we can stay in business. This is a significant meeting because it’s the first known meeting of what’s called planned obsolescence or how do we plan trash into the economy.

John: Right.

Deborah: The big decision for all of us, of course, is that what point does it become trash? We optimize around that. So very, very interesting. We’ve just spent so much this time basically the entire nineteen[?] hundreds perfecting this model. Now for the two reasons I mentioned and with the amount of disruption we’ve seen in our Supply Chains in the last year, we’re reminded of just how long these Supply Chains are. Items are going thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. It means silly items like pears and little plastic containers go 18,000 miles to reach an American consumer. Your iPhone went around the Moon and back. It’s just getting out of hand in terms of how much we’re shipping around the world. Meanwhile, Global Logistics contributes 15% of the emissions put out into the world every year. You’ll see these pieces start to come together. It gives us a chance to make more money. Employ people for less money and also to save the planet which is pretty great that we can do both at the same time.

John: Right. With the focus now everyone’s hearing about ESG. The Circular Economy fit in what is being discussed on a macro basis as good ESG behavior. Corporations and governmental entities having now to report on their ESG behavior. Are you right on time with this concept and the merging of Supply Chain Network Behavior, Circular Economy, and now this new macro trend of making everybody be transparent about their ESG behavior?

Deborah: I sure hope so. I think this idea of circularity is not a goal in itself. I think it can be a strategy for supply chains.

John: Okay.

Deborah: We have to report. We need to be more transparent and report on these ESG metrics. But I argue that supply chains will continue to add value in 3 ways to organizations, time, cost, and quality.

John: Okay.

Deborah: Yes, we’ll need to support these efforts around decarbonization etcetera. But our job then is to make sure we can continue to provide time cost quality while also doing these other commitments. I find as we apply circularity as a strategy for supply chains, we can be very successful here. For example, if you were to take a total landed cost of a section of your Supply Chain. Something that’s being shipped really far away.

John: Right.

Deborah: Imagine what might happen if you decentralize that production and put miniature warehouses or manufacturing facilities closer to point to views. This isn’t so crazy. Unilever just launched what they called a nanofactory. The entire food production line inside a 40-foot container. They can plop it down close to point of views. Now, this cuts dramatically a lot of that negative impact supply chains put out into the world. We’re only producing what’s needed. We’re producing up closer to point of views. We can pull less on the resources that we need. In this way, we can save money. Maybe innovate a bit with local market tastes and then also go faster because you don’t have to go all the way around the world a few times and contribute to your ESG commitments.

John: As you see, then a result will be great transparent behavior that is reportable up into the ESG reporting requirements. But that’s just a great outcome of good Supply Chain Management.

Deborah: That’s right. Yep.

John: I got it.

Deborah: I think the way we do Supply Chain will start to shift, right? So you have to really shift into let’s make one good system so that the right decision to make is the only decision to make. Right now, we’ve got a lot of degrees of freedom. There’s some standards we need to set as an industry. I think there’s a couple of ways they can go after that together.

John: For our listeners and viewers who are just joining us. We’ve got Deborah Dull. She’s the founder of the Circular Supply Chain Network. To find Deborah there, you can go to circularsupplychain.network, and also she’s a principal at General Electric. Deborah, talk a little bit about how wide has the reach become for the Circular Supply Chain Network? How many countries and people and organizations and how many countries have now joined on and are now informing and cross-pollinating information at the Circular Supply Chain Network?

Deborah: Thanks, John. I’m really excited to share our story. We are new. Just about six months old and we always surprised ourselves. We’ll have a weekly Round Table discussion. We move the time around so that it can be inclusive to different time zones around the world. We always have two, three, four, sometimes, five continents represented. We may only be one or two countries per continent. It may be one person joining from India late at night, but we get credit for that continent that represented. It’s a really fun part of coming together in this type of a virtual space. That there’s no barrier to entry here. There’s internet, that’s one barrier but we don’t charge anything. People can come together and find that actually, they all speak the same language because we’re supply chain professionals. We can start in the same place. We’ve got a few dozen countries. We are focused on individuals. I’m asked a couple of times a week about partnerships between organizations and we’re still coming up with our perspective on that. This is really meant to be for individual humans to get together. Like I said earlier in our discussion, we’re finding a dramatic shift away from this idea that everybody is their company logo. We all have such good ideas. We need to be able to share. That’s calling it in a pre-competitive space.

How do we make it possible for us to come together? But I am so delighted by the response we’re getting. We have gotten some pretty impressive big, big brand names to reached out. We’ve done some really cool convenings. We’ve also worked with very small, you know, Independent Consultants who say, “Hey, I want to build a business on this. Can you help me do that?” Our intent is everything we build as a public good. We don’t really have time to fuss around with who can access what the words putting it all out into the world. Hoping to catch the attention of some great thinkers who can unlock the puzzle that is shifting to a Circular Economy.

John: Let me understand this if I’m a senior consultant, a new entrepreneur, or a top executive at a publicly traded company, or a government executive trying to figure out how to run my Supply Chain Network better for the benefit of the public servant see what I’m doing. All of those people can join your network, the Circular Supply Chain Network.

Deborah: Absolutely right. Yep. In the next couple of months we- So every week we have a discussion. We usually spoke like someone externally who comes in and shares their story. We can show, “Look, this isn’t a scary weird academic concept that is happening today.” We talked through. Okay, what does or doesn’t apply? What are the questions we have? Something we’re going to switch to in a few is almost doing like a miniature problem-solving session where we’re going to get a really hard problem to solve from our speaker. We spend about half an hour doing quick in breakout sessions. What’s possible for us to start solving together? We see a huge desire to start problem-solving. The community is starting to get to a place where we all grasp the basics. Now let’s start to apply them into real-world situations. We’ll see how it goes. We’re going to give it a go and see where it goes.

John: Well, that’s a great idea. You’re basically taking your professor’s idea from thanksgiving and just applying it all in phases. I love it.

Deborah: That’s right.

John: Come on. In terms of where people are now, we talked a little bit about my first exposure to Supply Chain Network Behavior with Circular Economy was from Jim Gowen, who was a good friend over the last 10 years over for Verizon. Where he told me, he was Chief Sustainability Officer and also Supply Chain Officer. He was merging his knowledge to benefit, of course, the great brand Verizon. Is this going to be a trend that you foresee, Deborah, in the future Supply Chain Officers and companies also getting heavily involved with the sustainability departments at the companies as well?

Deborah: Absolutely. We’re seeing this more and more I see on LinkedIn Chief Supply Chain Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer. It’s coming together in the same space. Given the importance of Supply Chain and operationalizing any sustainability goals that you have, many companies are realizing that having those rules separate is just not feasible. A couple of years ago, as I started to attend Global Circular Economy events that could be can go in person. I would go find these Sustainability Executives and I’d ask, “Hey, what is your Supply Chain think about all of these Circular Economy concepts?” They would kind of cock their head at me and say, “My who?” Why would I ask them? I was just flabbergasted because I thought yes there’s design change we need to do. Yes, there’s business model change. There’s material science change but who is going to actually do any of the buying, the moving, the storing, bringing it back refurbishment. Who’s going to do all of that work? It still seems that we have this idea. There’s a magic tribe of elves in the back of the target that filled our items. That this idea that there’s a real Supply Chain out there is still sort of flabbergasting to people.

John:: Right. Deborah, you’ve got two huge positions, being the founder of the Circular Supply Chain Network and also a principal at GE. You’re a young person with a long time in front of you. What’s your goals in the months and years ahead at both organization? Share with our listeners and our viewers a little bit some of your more immediate goals but also long-term goals in both seats that you sit in.

Deborah: Perfect. Look, if you are in Supply Chain, even if you’re not, there’s a time in the year that the Supply Chain folks get surprised by sales. The conversation goes something like this, “Hey, good news. We sold a hundred thousand units.” And the Supply Chain goes, “Wow, we have 20,000 units.” Now we’re in a scramble mode, it might happen at holiday. It’s whenever you are peak season is. I predict we will have a similar discussion the next few years. It’s not going to be very long from now and we have a chance to get ahead of this. You should not be surprised by this. This is not new. It’s going through the Gartner Hype Cycle. There is a lot of discussion around circularity 5, 6 six years ago. We’re coming back out of this. You know the hype cycle goes up and it comes down and it goes back up again and that the topic is starting to catch up. I see publications all the time saying Circular Supply Chains are the future. They don’t know call them that anymore. I think 5 or 10 years from now, it’ll just be called Supply Chain. But all of our colleagues who do reverse logistics, which isn’t a huge Department usually. It’s only a couple folks. They are going to become our superheroes. All of the work we do that we don’t really talk about like harvesting metal from electronics. It’s kind of talked about these become our major platforms in the pillars for the economy going forward.

So my goal for both organizations is quite similar. We need more tools inside the Supply Chain to be successful. Success might be time and cost. It might be decarbonization. It might be all of our commitments and goals at a corporate level, but we’re starting to kind of run out of options to go faster and be cheaper pre-pandemic. I lived in Seattle, we ordered printer ink from Amazon Prime Now and I had it in 20 minutes. I don’t know if we need anything that fast. So we’re almost out. Right? How do we serve our organizations better? I think this gives us a brand new toolset. Like I said, we’ve got a big, big amount of work to do to clean up the planet, not just sustainably but regeneratively. We’ve pushed the planet a bit too far. If we just keep going the way we are now, we’re actually still going to run out of food and it’s not going to really end well for us. But we still have a chance to fix it. If someone large like GE can both inside. It’s one of the largest supply chains in the world. In their own operations, even takes one or two percent change and start to share that story externally, the impacts that can be made really are pretty tremendous.

John: We’ll all be online. The Circular Supply Chain Network and for our listeners again to want to find it, please go to circularsupplychain.network to find Deborah and everyone else. The great work you’re doing there, will it always be online, or do you foresee post-pandemic when science wins this very tragic period of world history that they’ll be an in-person annual event or semi-annual event or something like that?

Deborah: When we talk about this as a team and we’re torn. But the value of being in person is undeniable.

John: Right.

Deborah: However, our hallmark values are to create an inclusive space that doesn’t have barriers to entry. We know fewer women get sent to these annual events. We know frontier markets are not represented. Either they can’t get funding or they can’t get Visa sponsorship. I think it’s tragic. We’re only using one percent of one percent of the world’s thinkers. To solve this problem, we need to leverage everyone. We go back and forth. We wonder around the world. Can we piggyback on other large supply chain conferences? And might look like CSCMP, it might look like APICS, ASCM now, or SAPICS in South Africa speak in Cape Town every year now. It’s gone virtual. But can we piggyback on some of the other ones and leverage that time together to ideate? But ultimately, I see this staying as a single network that’s global and inclusive and available and accessible around the world. That no matter if you’re an executive and we have several joined, or if you’re still in school in your trying to figure out if this is what you want to do for the next 10 or 15 years that you’re able to connect and find each other. It’s the topic we talked about a lot and one that I think will continue to challenge ourselves on.

John: Wonderful. I love to leave our listeners and our viewers with actionable items. If they want to join your network after listening to your great vision, important vision. How do they go about joining? How easy is it to become a member?

Deborah: Super easy on our very homefront home page. You click the button that says join the network. You can click another button that says join with LinkedIn and you’re done. With that, you get to join what’s called our Members’ Circle. A play on words here on Circular Economy and this is the spacer. We really amplify the message of those in our community. We have humble but growing resource days for people to learn more about the concept of the Circular Supply Chain. Every single Thursday, like I said, we get together and we hang out together. You’ll see our calendar there. You’re welcome to join. We have pre-reads for every event. You can come in with a little bit of information and then we post the replays. You can go and check out our replays. You have several dozen by now and will continue to build this out. If you yourself have ideas or case studies, we have a program called the Co-Thinkers Program. Where you’re able to develop and contribute and put your ideas in your content as a resource for the entire network to consume.

So, more than welcome to come. We get almost daily e-mails of folks who want to join. There’s a volunteer or is it co thinker and it’s been a really, really fun experience. So we’re nice. We’re happy, we’re excited to laugh a lot. These are fun meetings. We mostly just relish in the joy that we’re all Supply Chain professionals totally nerding out on this.

John: That’s awesome. You know Deborah, you’re always invited back on this show because you’re making truly great important impacts both in the seat that you sit in at GE as a principal. Also, of course, with the Circular Supply Chain Network. To find Deborah and everyone else who’s doing great work switching our society from a Linear Economy to a Circular Economy, please go to www.circularsupplychain.network. Deborah Dull, you’re making the world a better place. For that, we’re so grateful. Thank you for joining us today on The Impact Podcast.

Deborah: Thank you, John.

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.

John Shegerian: 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.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and today we’re so happy and excited to have on with us my good friend of many years, David Thompson, who is the head of Corporate Environmental at Panasonic and David, you’ve been on Green is Good before, but I welcome you back now that we’re on Sirius XM, and I’m just thrilled to have you on. DAVID THOMPSON: John, thank you very much. I congratulate you on the new show and I want to recognize the friendship that we’ve had over the years and all the good work we’ve done together in the area of promoting Green is Good and electronic product recycling in particular.

John Shegerian: Thank you. You’re the leader in that and we’re just happy to support Panasonic and the great brands that you’ve put together at MRM so we’re just thrilled. You know Dave, you have a long history at Panasonic. You’ve done so much great work and before we get into talking about some of the most recent initiatives you’re working on, can you share your journey a little bit at Panasonic and all the things you’ve touched and worked on over the years?

David Thompson: Sure, thank you. I’m not sure it’ll be all that interesting to people that’ll be listening in the audience but I started in Panasonic in 1984. I have a Japanese Studies background and I was one of the first American or foreign non Japanese nationals to be selected as a management trainee, spent two years working with Panasonic in Japan as an assistant to a managing director member of the board. It was a very, very interesting experience and I thought I had before me the opening of a wonderful business career and then lo and behold, a state in the United States, Minnesota, passed a rechargeable battery collection law and this individual said, ‘Why don’t you, Dave, take a look at this and try to figure out what we should do?’ so I came back to the United States and started investigating these take back laws that were being passed with respect to rechargeable batteries and then recommended that we create a joint venture company with other battery manufacturers to collect and recycle rechargeable batteries and lo and behold, we created the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation, I think, in 1993 and then I took a temporary leave from Panasonic and headed that up to get it started. It has been fairly successful. It’s still around. We’re still collecting and recycling rechargeable batteries across the country in Canada in a substantial way. After I came back from Panasonic, I was asked to head up our Corporate Environmental Department and began working on e-waste in about 1995. We began collecting voluntarily in 1999. States began to look into this and pass laws to increase collection, level the playing field, and then in 2007, Panasonic joined together with Sharp and Toshiba and created a company called The Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company. It’s a mouthful but we call it MRM for short and we’re in the process of trying to work with other manufacturers, we’ve dealt with about 30 manufacturers, and create a national recycling program for electronic products so it has been a long and interesting journey for me in the environmental field but I have to confess that it was one that I never anticipated taking and it’s been I guess a quirk of fate, if you will, that got me involved in it but it’s been quite rewarding.

John Shegerian: Well, for our listeners who don’t know, David has not only been involved with it but he’s been the leader of it and I learn more from Dave Thompson than anybody else. I met him, literally, as one of my first friends when I got in this industry in early 2005 and I’ve learned more from David and all the great work that he does at Panasonic and he’s been leading this whole e-waste effort across the United States, if not the world, and he’s considered the leader of it here in America so we’re so thankful for that, David, for all the great work in sustainability and good environmental stewardship when it comes to the important issue of electronic waste recycling. I thank you again but today is about Panasonic and all the other great initiatives that you guys do. You do so much there and recently, I’ve been reading some press releases and stuff about the educational element of what you’re doing with regards to the next generation, the students, and can you share some of the environmental educational activities and how it interrelates with students and what you’ve recently initiated?

David: Thank you, John, for the opportunity. I appreciate it very, very much. We have a corporate goal of making educational materials and opportunities available to students around the world. We’d like to reach out to about 500,000 students in the United States and we’ve undertaken two things: One is, I will call it the Eco Effects Video Sweepstakes and the second is a partnership with a gaming app developer named Green$treet Commons and with respect to the Eco Effect Video, let me just back up a little bit. Kids are the next generation. We feel it’s very, very important- I’m sure everyone recognizes this- to educate, invest in the next generation because they’re going to really determine how sustainable our future is, I think, and what they decide will depend on the type of education they receive and we’re very committed to that and so what we’ve done is we have a program called Kid Witness News. We started it in 1989 and we provide video production equipment to elementary and middle school children around the country. Since the program’s inception, about 139,000 kids have participated and every year, we ask them to make a series of five minute videos on certain themes and we started asking them to make environmentally themed videos about a couple of years ago. Then every year, we judge those and have a big awards ceremony, bring them to New York City, give them a tour of the town, take them out for dinner, and then acknowledge those schools that have made the best videos and present them with prizes or other incentives to keep them going. This past year, in addition to the five minute videos, we went out and asked the kids to make a short public service announcement type of video, 30 seconds to a minute, and we got those back. We looked at them and I’ll tell you, there’s some amazing talent out there and it’s reflected in these videos, how cute they are, how clever they are, and how informative they are but we chose what we thought was the best five and we created a website and it’s called EcoEffectsVideos.com and we’re asking really anyone to come, visit the website, to sign in and register, answer a couple of simple questions (for example: Do you know where to go to recycle e-waste? Do you have an Energy Star product in your home? That type of very simple question, just three of them) and then once they’re registered, we ask them to watch the videos and choose their favorite and if they do that, they will then be automatically enrolled in a sweepstakes opportunity to win some pretty significant prizes. The first prize is a smart Viera 55 inch Panasonic class GT50 series full high definition 3D plasma television. It’s a great prize. The second prize is a high end Lumix G5 16 megapixel compact camera system and then we have 25 third prizes, which are DJ style headphones.

John Shegerian: What are the age groups? For our listeners out there who have children and for the young kids out there that are listening, what is the age range for these students that you want to get to participate?

David: That’s a great follow-up question, John. Thank you. What we’re trying to do is anyone is welcome to come watch the videos and vote on them and help us rank them but if you are a student 13 to 21 years old, you will be registered in this sweepstakes and be given an opportunity to win and then we also have a tell a friend feature so the students can vote every day and choose their favorite and get an additional sweepstakes entry and then we also have a tell a friend function, where they can tell friends and if they do that, they also are given additional sweepstakes entries but what we’re trying to do is get kids to watch these really clever, creative, informative videos, learn a little bit more about some of the environmental issues that we face and what they can do to help and then help us choose the best one and once we’ve done that, we intend to go back and acknowledge the school, the Kid Witness News school, that made that video and recognize them again.

John Shegerian: That’s awesome. What a great program.

David: I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to watch the videos but they are truly, I thought, creative and informative. The kids did a great job. I hope people will recognize them by watching the videos.

John Shegerian: How long is this next contest open for? When does it close?

David: It closes May the 19th so it’s coming up quickly and you know, if it looks like it’s a viable way to provide educational materials to kids and people about our environment, we intend to run it again in 2013.

John Shegerian: Hold on one second, David. For our listeners out there, I’m so happy you’ve joined us today. We’ve got David Thompson. He’s the Corporate Environmental Director of Panasonic and he’s talking about the new initiatives that Panasonic has taken on, environmental educational initiatives with regards to students and he’s talking about this specific one, EcoEffectsVideos.com. It’s an amazing contest. It’s for students 13 to 21. Get involved now. It closes out in May and this is going to be just really great. Get your kids involved, get your students involved, and spread the word. I just wanted to get that out, David. Go on. I’m sorry. I interrupted you.

David: Thank you so much. That’s exactly what we’d like to do. We’d love to see the kids watch the videos and hopefully they learn something and we learn something about how to better educate the next generation.

John Shegerian: That’s great. You’re doing it from the ground up. You’re getting their voices able to be heard. I love it. I think it’s so important. What’s the next one you’re working on? What’s the other thing I’ve been reading about, this Green$treet Commons? David, share with our listeners about that please.

David: Yes, I’d love to. It’s a fantastic gaming opportunity that attempts to marry up, if you will, ecological education with economic education and the idea is that we can be both ecologically smart and economically smart at the same time. We want to promote that concept and we’ve teamed up with an organization called Green$treet Commons and launched an Apple based game called Schmutz Happens. I don’t know how much people will understand what Schmutz is but if you’re from New York, you know, I think, or if you have a Jewish background but it’s an old Yiddish word that essentially means dirt and it’s not the kind of dirt you find in your backyard, unless that dirt is on your clothes or on your glasses or something and causing a problem so it means stuff that shouldn’t be where it is or out of the ordinary, kind of needs to be cleaned up and the idea is that we have the game. It’s a wonderful little game. The Creative Director was Tom Hester, who did Shrek. I’m sure your audience would recognize it, beautifully done, cute as heck characters, well integrate, really educational, I think, but Schmutz is this character and he’s a blobby, slobby, purplish character who goes around messing up stuff, your yard, your garden, your house. Then the idea is that kids, who we all want to learn about economics and finance and chores and being better kids and citizens, they then are kind of tasked with going around and cleaning up stuff after Schmutz. Schmutz is a metaphor for stuff that needs to be rectified, cleaned up, and how we all have to try to work together to do that. What the kids do is they focus on cleaning up Schmutz, whether it’s in the garden or the yard or the house, but they also, in the context of the game, are attempting to rescue and provide for endangered animals so they create a budget and if they clean up the Schmutz in the garden, the Schmutz in the yard or the house or whatever, they can earn virtual dollars, I suppose, to apply to rescuing their endangered species animal and they can purchase shelter for that animal, for example. They purchase food. They can purchase playthings for the animal and kind of earn money and then apply it to rescuing this animal and taking care of it. They can even receive email postcards from the animal during the course of the game. We’re sponsoring this with Green$treet Commons and we just want to get the word out, let people know that there’s a free gaming download app available to their children. It’s really more targeted at younger children, I think, and then hopefully get them to play it and learn a little bit about household budgets, finances, and then cleaning up around them in their home and environment and creating a better environment for themselves and their families.

John Shegerian: When did you launch this?

David: This came out March the 29th. It’s out there. It’s available from Apple iTunes Store to download and it’s also available through our website here, GreenStreetCommons.com. We’ve teamed up with Neale Godfrey, who is the Chairperson of Green$treet Commons, and she is an amazing individual, award-winning New York Times Bestselling Author for Children’s Financial Education. She’s got 26 books to her credit and she has taken up a leadership role in developing educational materials and activities focused on children’s ecology and economics.

John Shegerian: Got it. I’m on the site now. It’s a wonderful site, this Green$treet, and for our listeners out there that want to get their children involved and interested in how to get rid of Schmutz, it’s GreenStreetCommons.com. It’s a beautiful website and Schmutz is cute with the green eyes and everything, come on.

David: It’s an amazing little character. I’ve come to like him.

John Shegerian: I like him already. I think he’s really likeable so Dave, these are two great initiatives you’re doing, the Eco Effects and the Green$treet Commons. I really love it. We have only about three minutes left and I want to make sure you hit upon some important initiatives that you’re working on in terms of your corporate environmental stuff with regards to recycling or anything else you want to talk about that are important. I know there’s so much you’re doing and so much that you touch so why don’t you share in the last couple of minutes some of the other things that you’re doing over at Panasonic right now?

David: Thank you, John. We’re also working very hard to develop a collection infrastructure for electronic products and make sure that they’re collected. We want to work with reliable recyclers, which is the organization that you manage, and then get these products collected and recycled properly and we now have a network around the country of about 1,800 collection sites where people can take old electronic products and we will ensure that they’re recycled properly so we work very hard at that and we have information on our website, Panasonic.net/eco. We have a website called MRMRecycling.com and while it’s not written here on some of the paperwork that we’ve shared, there’s also a website called GreenerGadgets.org where people can go and get information on proper electronic recycling so I do want to try and encourage people to before they throw away an electronic product, to look at the different websites and make sure that they’re turned in for proper recycling and we, on our end, will work with reliable recycling organizations, such as the one that you manage, Electronic Recyclers International, to make sure that they’re recycled properly.

John Shegerian: I’m not going to let you go without saying again, another congratulations, another award. Panasonic won its third consecutive Energy Star Award and I just want to say that’s, again, another win for Panasonic, all the great work that you guys do.

David: Thank you. Energy Star is a significant environmental program and logo in itself. I would encourage people, when they’re purchasing products, to look for the Energy Star logo because it does represent significant energy savings and as we all know, energy savings equals reduced greenhouse gas emissions so just through our efforts in the past year in selling Energy Star Certified products, our contribution to greenhouse gas emission reduction has been about 35 million tons across the world.

John Shegerian: That’s amazing, and Dave Thompson, we’re going to have you back again on Green is Good. You’ve been an amazing guest as always. For our listeners out there, go to EcoEffectsVideos.com or GreenStreetCommons.com. Dave Thompson, you are a great friend and a visionary environmental evangelist and leader, and truly living proof that green is good.

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 is 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 this is a very special edition of the Impact Podcast today because we’re so lucky to have with us today from Portugal, Christian Kroll. He’s the founder and CEO of Ecosia. Welcome to the Impact Podcast Christian.

Christian Kroll: Thank you very much for having me.

John: You know Christian, I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about 1500 or so interviews over the last fourteen years. I don’t think we’ve ever been so lucky enough to have a guest from Portugal. Tell us a little bit about Portugal. Is it a beautiful and wonderful country like everybody says it is?

Christian: Yeah, I personally really love it. I’m spending the lockdown here in Portugal instead of Berlin, where I’m usually based. And yeah, I almost don’t dare to say it, but I’m having a good time here during lockdown because we are lucky to have a bigger house somewhere in nature and that’s more pleasant than the apartment in Berlin.

John: Lucid! That’s a great thing. You figured out a way to get through this tragic pandemic period by having a nice situation. No one wants anyone to wake up unhappy and not in a nice environment. It sounds like it’s beautiful there. Are the beaches and the food amazing over there?

Christian: Yeah, that’s all great. Even restaurants are open again, I mean in Berlin still, everything is closed so we’re benefiting from…[crosstalk]really really good situation here.

John: Good.

Christian: But I’m also aware that many people have been affected really really negatively.

John: Yeah. That’s something to always keep in mind, you know Christian, what you’ve created here, Ecosia, and for our listeners and viewers who want to go on your website, during this podcast I’m on your website, It’s just amazing, and the impact you’re making and the relevance of what you’re doing is huge. We’re going to get into that in a little bit and for our listeners who want to go on the website, It’s www.ecosia.org. Christian, tell us a little bit about your life, your background, leading up to the founding of this wonderful website, and the great mission that you’re on.

Christian: Yeah, so I was born, I think 36 years ago? [laughs]In the former GDR, the east of Germany. I spent my youth in a small town called Wittenberg, which is also the hometown of Martin Luther, who is the reformer of the Catholic Church in Germany.

And so, that was 500 years ago. Since then, not much has happened in my hometown, but still, it’s a nice place. And yeah, basically, I went to school there and then studied business administration, and also finished my studies but I always had the feeling that I wanted to do something a little bit different than just a normal career. So, I wanted to have a little bit of a positive impact but I didn’t know what this could mean.

After my studies, I decided to travel around the world and take a year off. It was even one and a half years, and half a year of that, I spent in Nepal, one of the economically poorest countries of the world, and they’re really…So, I always knew that there were countries where people earn less money and have a lower quality of life. But knowing that and living that for a while, are two different things. For me, that was the point where I decided, “Okay, I can’t… I have this.” I’m lucky that I was born in a country like Germany, we have all these opportunities. There are so many people who don’t have the same opportunities.

So, because I was just lucky, I didn’t do anything about it. I saw my obligation to give back. To help those people who don’t have the same opportunities. And I firmly believe that every child, no matter where it’s born in the world, should have the same opportunities, more or less. And we’re still very, very far away from that. So I wanted to dedicate my life to achieve that.

What I did then because I was already doing university, I was working a little bit on internet projects, what I did then in Nepal, I started the first project where I wanted to help people in Nepal earn a little bit of money for development projects in Nepal that didn’t work out. So, then I continued traveling, I spent almost one year in Latin America, and there, I observed the massive destruction of our ecosystems, of our planet, exploitation of people, and I also found out about climate change. So, there was also a massive wake-up moment for me.

And I realized that one of the best things you can do if you want to help people, let’s say nature, the soil biodiversity. But I also want to solve climate change. One of the best things you can do is either plant trees or protect trees. I got excited about trees and that was basically…

So, I read everything I could find about trees and forests and figured how important they are to solving climate change. But also how great they are at solving many of the problems that we have. So, water scarcity, food, not enough availability of good nutrition, so, all of that and many other things, income for people in low-income countries. So, all that can be solved through tree planting. And so, I decided that I want to plant a lot of trees to have a positive impact on the planet.

John: Right.

Christian: Because of my background in technology or in building websites, I then decided to start a search engine that is focused on tree planting.

John: Now, okay. So you wanted to start now, how old were you then? How old were you when this epiphany happened?

Christian: I think that was at the age of 23 or something like that.

John: Okay. So, were you already a computer engineer or software engineer? Did you know how to build search engines or this was just right here, and now you had to put it together like all other entrepreneurs?

Christian: Yeah. So, I learned basic programming but am not very good at it. But I was good enough to understand what the developers are doing. But then I just hired a few people in Nepal. Salaries were quite low, so I could afford that without having external funding. And then also just a few friends helped me to build this up.

But it was a lot of my time also, I was just dedicated to figuring out what the code is doing, how it can be improved at least, in the early days. Luckily, after a few years and when the project was up and running, I could hand over this task to people who are more qualified. So, I hope nobody will ever find the code that I wrote because I think it’s probably quite embarrassing. But in the early days, I had to do many of the things just by myself.

John: How long did it take to launch your first version of Ecosia?

Christian: I think this was… because I already built various projects before that were kind of search-related. So, I think it only took us a few months in the end. Maybe half a year to get everything up and running but there was a rather rudimentary version of it. Today’s version of Ecosia is much, much better, and really can compare to the other search engines out there. Yeah, but in the early days, it was rather slow, It often broke, the results were not that great. But fortunately, there were enough people to use it that we kind of could still build on that very early version.

John: Tell me if I’ve got this right. You’ve gone on since then and Ecosia has become the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine that’s planted over a hundred and twenty million trees in over thirty countries.

Christian: Yeah, that’s… I mean, when you say those numbers, [crosstalk] It sounds massive. Yeah, we’re proud of that, I mean, in the end, it’s the users who are planting those trees. Those trees were only the tool basically that made it happen. We have 15 million users. Most of them in Europe, but also quite a lot of people in the United States and also many other countries. Yeah, all those people care about climate, they care about people, they care about our diversity. And if you’re one of those people then switching the search engine to have a positive impact on the world is one of the easiest things that you can do. And this is how we’ve gained all these users. It feels good with every search you come here, you’re contributing to tree planting.

John: Incredible. What you’ve done! How many…? I want to ask you so many questions, but let’s go back to… I mean, you’re sitting in Portugal, you seem like the most gentle and humble person I could ever meet. How many people are working with you? Do you have a hundred people? Is it just you and five other people? How many people are working with you to keep this, now amazing machine going?

Christian: I think we are… So, I haven’t met them for a while because we’ve been on lockdown for a long time and we added more people since then. But I think we’re roughly a hundred people now. Most of them are based in Berlin, but we also have people in many, many, other locations.

John: Let’s go over this then. So, people can just go on your website, which I’m on right now, which is a beautiful website, Ecosia.org and they could use that as their search engine, and the more they use it, the more credits are built for trees to be planted instead of net carbon, bad things happening. It’s not even net neutral, It’s carbon negative, huh?

Christian: Yeah, So that the soil my goal was never to be neutral because when I learned about climate change, I realized that being just carbon neutral, isn’t enough. Ecosia works like any other search engine. You type in your search terms, sometimes you see ads right next to the search results and if you click on one of those advertisements, then we earn money. The big difference though is that we don’t use this money to pay dividends to shareholders. There’s nothing wrong with that but we don’t do that.

We basically, after just deducting our own costs, all of the profits go to tree planting projects, and we have over thirty projects now across the entire planet, planting a tree every second. Thanks to this income that we’re generating from the searches. And yeah, also from the user’s perspective, I think it’s cool because I’m personally doing probably thousands of searches every day that adds up to thousands of searches every year.

John: Right.

Christian: We calculated that each search absorbs around one kilogram of CO2 from the atmosphere. Thanks to tree planting, which means that adds up to a few tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. And considering that, I mean, the average German has a footprint of 11 tons. I think the United States has a bit more CO2 per year and just by switching your search engine, you can remove a significant share of that and it’s so easy to do. So, that’s why I think so many people start using us.

John: And it’s just basically the advertising field. So, there’s no net difference to the user except that they’re doing something good for the planet while they’re using their internet browser.

Christian: Yes. There’s even an additional benefit that many people forget when they’re using us because we’re focusing so much on trees, but we’re focusing on privacy as well. So, you get that part on the top that we are tracking much much much less information than all the big ones, the big competitors. And yeah, that… [crosstalk]

John: And that’s by the way! And Christian, I don’t want to… that’s a very very big point with GDPR coming to the EU in 2018 and now all around the world, privacy and data protection, and data privacy, and protecting people’s rights and privacy is a big deal. So, you’re saying your search engine is even kinder to the users in terms of its tracking much less information than the other search engines.

Christian: Yes.

John: That’s incredible. I’ve read a lot about you preparing for today’s episode and one of the things I love that you discussed, but I want you to share with our listeners and our viewers Christian is, you’re shifting the mindset from sustainability to regeneration. Can you share a little bit about what you mean to our listeners when you talk about that?

Christian: Yes. So for me, sustainability is nice, I mean, we have to get to a level where we at least don’t further increase the amount of carbon that we have in the atmosphere, but it’s not enough. So, we could have switched to a sustainable economy, maybe in the 80s or 90s when this was still possible. But now, we’re at the moment where we’ve already put too much CO2 into the atmosphere, and just reducing our footprint won’t be enough.

We need to think differently, and think way beyond that and that’s what we’re doing. For example, if you’re searching with Ecosia, you’re not only sustainable, you’re massively positive when it comes to your climate impact. You’re removing a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. And this is, I think this kind of business model or this kind of mindset is super important for the next few decades because it’s not going to be enough if just everybody slowly reduces their footprint, we really have, and that’s also I think boring.

If you just… if the maximum you can do is not have a negative impact, that to me, sounds super boring. I would want to have a massive positive impact and this also creates a lot of new opportunities. And once we kind of remove this imaginary threshold of 100% renewable or carbon-neutral, then a lot of new things become possible. For example, we are like many internet companies, we run a lot of servers and these servers run on renewable energy, but we decided not to stop at 100% renewable energy.

There’s no reason why you should stop at 100% renewable energy? We are at I think 200, 300% now, so, we’re just adding more capacity and there’s no reason why… I don’t know. The other big tech companies could do the same, and they could have a massive positive impact, and I think this is what will be necessary for the next decades. We can’t just… I think all of the chief sustainability officers of big companies should rename that title and call themselves chief regeneration officers because we can’t afford to be so slow. We have to think way beyond that.

And it’s also if you start taking that mindset you suddenly also really, you can maybe reshape the business model. Why should your company only have, let’s say, no negative impact on the planet? You could have a massive positive impact. And so, for me, this word regeneration, that is the word of the 21st century. So far, we’ve lived in a world we destroyed. The previous theme was destruction.

Now, we go through this very brief face of sustainability, but right after that, we have to go into the mode of regeneration until we reach a point where we actually, can potentially have long-term sustainability If the plan is functioning and can provide for everyone, not only every human but also the ecosystems are all working. And yeah, I think this will have to last many, many decades now. We have to regenerate for many decades.

John: Christian, you’re a very young man. You’ve already done huge things to make a positive impact and make the world a better place but the numbers that you just shared if you’ve already planted a hundred twenty-five million trees, I’m on your website right now and it’s really fun because it shows how many trees, you’re… the searches have provided for and these… you’re saying only fifteen million users and I don’t say that lightly. I don’t mean only as a bad terminology but I use only as, “Wait for a second!” There are hundreds of millions of users around the world. So, imagine if Christian keeps up his mission for years to come and two years from now or three years from now, there’s a hundred million users, you’re going to plant billions of trees around the world over time. Is this not what is going to happen with Ecosia?

Christian: Well, I hope because we need one trillion trees so that’s a thousand billion trees in the next two or three decades.

John: Yeah.

Christian: It takes a lot of effort to plant those trees and also quite a lot of money. But yeah, if we had 100% of the search market, then we could definitely plant hundreds of billions of trees actually and make a massive impact on the world’s climate and ecosystems. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t aim for that. I mean, currently, we have, with our fifteen million users, we have not even 1% market share globally.

John: Wow!

Christian: Yeah, so there’s a lot of potentials still.

John: So, there’s a lot of opportunities for your growth is over 99%, which is just amazing.

Christian: Yeah.

John: What you’re going to do to effect change in the world, effectuate change, where you and your colleagues and of course you’re great platform you’ve built, is just incredible, I mean, it’s just amazing. And you’re saying right now, the majority of users are in Europe. So, the goal is, let’s get North America involved, let’s get Asia involved, let’s get other continents to know about the Christian Kroll story, the Ecosia story, and get using this great platform.

Christian: Yeah, and so definitely, I mean, there are… 99% of the population isn’t using us yet.[crosstalk]There’s still a lot of long ways to go, yeah.

John: That’s great. Hey, you know, you also did something very interesting that I want you to share, because we have so many entrepreneurs that watch your show, and for those who just joined us, or you just tuned in, we’ve got Christian Kroll with us. This is a really special human being. He’s the founder and CEO of Ecosia. You can find Ecosia at www.ecosia.org. Christian, you did something in 2018, you turned Ecosia into a steward-owned company. What do you mean by that? What does that even mean? And what kind of changes is that effectuate of how you run the company and how you manage the company?

Christian: Yeah. So that was, I mean, I think a very big step and a big decision for myself. It meant that I gave up the right to ever sell the company or ever take any profits out of the company, I mean, Ecosia is now worth potentially hundreds of millions, I don’t know, a lot of money. But for me, it was never the objective to make a lot of money for myself but just to plant the maximum amount of trees. So, we made this lively binding and irreversible commitment.

The idea is to make sure that the purpose of the company can never be changed. This was never about making “Christian rich”, but this was about getting as many trees planted as possible. And I think this kind of commitment, it makes the whole story just perfect. Before that, if you could sell something like Ecosia, then it’s just there’s something wrong, something for me is missing there.

John: Well, it’s a remarkable story but I don’t want to get into any specifics or business, but this is your full-time job, right? You know, talking about Ecosia and continuing to build it, right Christian? So, you’re allowed, you and your colleagues are allowed to draw salaries. You just can’t overly enrich yourselves, and you know, buy a big yacht, and everyone’s on the big yacht, running the platform from a big yacht and stuff like that. Is that sort of the…[crosstalk]

Christian: Yeah, exactly.

John: Okay.

Christian: So, that’s the idea. An enormous salary is totally fine and I also, of course, have to live like I pay my rent. So, I think that’s[crosstalk]fine.

John: Right.

Christian: But the idea really is that also if, let’s say something happens to me and I can’t continue leading a company, or I want to stop working for Ecosia for some reason; I just want to retire. Then somebody has to take over who is already part of the company, who is aligned with our mission, and not the only kind of brings a lot of money to buy the company but can push forward the mission.

So for me, that’s changing, completely changing, basically the model of a company where not the shareholders are owners of the company, but the team, the employees, maybe the users even own the company, and they’re participating in this organization because they want to make our mission happen. And they’re a lot of companies who say similar things, but then in the end, if the shareholders disagree, they still have all the power, and we wanted to make sure that this can’t happen. That basically, the purpose of the company can never be just sold off. And that’s why we took that step.

John: As an entrepreneur myself and also with so many listeners and viewers as entrepreneurs, where did you even learn that paradigm, and what gave you that epiphany? It’s fascinating and I respect it so much and it’s remarkable because you’re a unique human being Christian. But where do you even… who came up with that paradigm? Or where did you replicate it from?

Christian: I think I observe this kind of transformation that I described earlier that I was… there was a brand that I liked, especially a lot of organic food brands in Germany. They had really strong Ad deals in the beginning and then they got… At some point, they got sold to one of the big food corporations. And then suddenly small subtle changes started happening and it just wasn’t that nice anymore. And I really… As a customer, I felt like my trust basically was abused and is now just used for making a profit, and I just didn’t want this to happen to my company.

And then I actually… when we started investigating, I found out that there’s even a growing network of entrepreneurs in Berlin, and also in Germany, and also in Europe. We call this the Purpose Movement. So, they’re quite a few other companies like a sustainable condom brand for example or an online shopping site for green products that are doing the same model. And I realized, I just really resonate with the values of those people, and it’s much more fun to work with them.

And yeah, we now have quite a few companies that follow the same model. There’s something like maybe a bubble or a kind of a movement starting in, I think with Berlin as the epicenter but a lot of companies are doing similar things at the moment. And I personally find this interesting because I think many of the problems that we have at the moment are to some extent caused by putting too much emphasis on profit maximization and too much emphasis on shareholder value.

And if this gets too much emphasis, then I don’t know. The climate, biodiversity, and people suddenly become less important. And for me, this may be what we are doing is a little bit extreme, but it’s at least another alternative on the other side of the spectrum. Where the purpose and the whole environment of the company are much more important than making a profit. Of course, we have to be profitable otherwise we couldn’t survive as a business, but it’s not about profit maximization, it’s about really achieving our purpose.

And I think a lot of… especially young people, who are looking for a job are looking for such a kind of company. I also see a lot of entrepreneurs who realize, either immediately for them, it’s… especially younger people, also realized. I don’t want to become rich, I want to have a decent income but it’s not about earning millions and buying a big yacht. That’s not important to me. So, I realized that there’s a new generation at least, in my bubble. [crosstalk]I feel there’s a new generation.

John: You’re right. I agree with you. There’s a new… you represent, I mean, my children are at your age and I think your generation is a generation that’s going to come and take what was the beginning of the sustainability revolution and make it an evolution around the world and make the world a better place. I think your generation is just already doing such a great job and you’re a great representative of that. Each search removes about how much CO2 from the air? Each search, just so we have a little bit of a barometer.

Christian: Around 1 kilogram of CO2.

John: One kilogram. That’s wonderful. You know, as an entrepreneur Christian, what do you think? It took you this long to get fifteen million users. How long do you think it will take for you to go from fifteen, would you like to say fifty or a hundred? What are your thoughts right now?

Christian: Yeah, I generally don’t make projections but we’ve seen massive growth waves. For example, whenever something really bad happens to a forest, people start looking for, “How can I help?”

John: Really?

Christian: So if they have vast wildfires or if the Amazon is getting cut down and the media start talking about it, then we have kind of huge waves installed and we had years where we grew more or even months where we grew more than 50 or 100%. And if this happens again, then we might quickly be at fifty million users. Also, the beauty of exponential growth is that… yeah, I mean, every time you double, you just now… we add 15 million more.

John: That’s just wonderful. That’s just wonderful. Well, Christian, you’re always invited back on this podcast, and to spread the word, and for all listeners and viewers out there, please go to his Christian’s great website, www.ecosia.org, download it to be your server, and your search platform. Now you should go to make the world a better place, but as Christian said, it also is great for your own privacy. Christian Kroll, you are making a big impact. You are making the world a better place. I’m so grateful for your mission and your vision. God bless you. Keep doing your great work and I hope we get to meet one day in the future together.

Christian: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: 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.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have on with us today again, back for his second visit, John Paul DeJoria. Welcome to Green is Good, John Paul.

John Paul DeJoria: John, thank you so much and you are right, John. Green is definitely good.

John: Well, you are one of the people, really one of the few people, who really kicked off and launched and continue to drive the green revolution and we talked about Patrón last time you were on. You just won a big award. Talk a little bit about the award you just won.

John Paul DeJoria: Sure. There’s an organization. It’s called Green Business Site and the Green Business Award was an award that’s given out to individuals or companies that promote green and they did that because of John Paul Selects, which is a website that, in order to get on it, you have to be sustainable. You cannot use slave labor and you have to give back in one way or another and the site promotes also all the various things that you can do — this is very interesting — all the things you could do to be green and make more money being green and why green is extremely profitable so we’re very, very pleased through our John Paul Selects to be able to receive that award and it was the award of the year for helping out entrepreneurs that are green be sustainable and have a voice, have a place to present their products, have somebody that sells their product or represents it, whether it’s over the internet or whether it’s through actual stores or chain groups, help them promote their businesses. It’s kind of a revolutionary thing so we’re so proud to receive that. I might want to mention to you, John, too and to your listeners that we found that being green is great but there are times that you could even be greater. Can I give you an example?

John: Yeah, absolutely.

John Paul DeJoria: John, about four years ago, we went through this, let’s call it an economic challenge. I said even though we’re pretty green there over at John Paul Mitchell systems or Paul Mitchell warehouses, let’s go in there to our big offices and our big warehouses and can we get any greener? Especially with power since we’re all going through a little bit of an energy, shall we say, rise in prices and let’s try and reduce the use. Anyways, long story short, they went in there and we’re pretty green to start with. Within three months, they found ways to lower our energy bill by another 25%. That’s enormous. Now because of doing things like this, not only could we reduce our energy bill and, of course, reduce whatever carbon is used on the planet here to make it more carbon neutral, but it allows us as a company never to cut back on any of our fringe benefits. During these last four years, a lot of people cut back on fringe benefits for their staff. We didn’t cut back on anything, including profit sharing, but going green and things of this nature really help out. They definitely help out and people should know that it doesn’t really cost more to go green. If you really look at it, in most cases, you can end up saving money.

John: That’s so interesting. You know, most people think it costs more to go green but you’re making the point that actually, it brings more value back to the company so the investment actually has a huge ROI.

John Paul DeJoria: Oh, John, that’s correct. Little things that came up, I was amazed. In our rooms, whether it’s bathrooms or certain rooms, there’s an automatic switch that detects you when you’re in there. When you leave, the lights automatically go off. Well, that was part of the tremendous savings that we went through. A whole bunch of little things added up to be one big thing.

John: You know, John Paul, everyone knows you for Paul Mitchell and again, I’m going to throw it out there, PaulMitchell.com, but also, a lot of people don’t know and the last time you were on the show, we talked about it. You also own Patrón and that was a very sustainable company from the beginning and as you pointed out earlier about John Paul Selects and the Green Business Bureau award that you won. I want people to go to that site too. It’s JPSelects.com. Let’s go and just talk about these three platforms. Sustainable practices at your company. So let’s just, for instance, talk about Patrón for a second and what makes that a green company.

John Paul DeJoria: You bet. We started out green in 1989. The gentleman that co-founded the company with me and I made sure that our bottles of Patrón were made out of recycled glass. It helps clean up the streets of Guadalajara and other parts of Mexico. At the same time, it’s just good to recycle, as we all know. Well, it was such a great idea, as the company grew and grew, and today it’s the number one ultra premium tequila in the world, we said why change our values? Let’s stay the same way so at Patrón, every bottle of Patrón is made with recycled glass and we do about 25-plus million bottles a year. In addition to that, we’ve put in programs and practices. At our facility down in Mexico where we make the Patrón, we put in units, and it cost us several million dollars to clean distill it. When you’re done making it, people sometimes just dump it straight into the ground and it pollutes the water tables so we put equipment in and spent a lot of money doing it to clean the water so good- distillage, I should say, that comes out when you’re making tequila- so well that we can reuse some of the water in our gardens down there and then what is completely left, we use as fertilizer — it’s that clean — as fertilizer to grow the new agave plants. It really works out so going green not only helped the land out. It made us feel good. Now, do we have to do this, John? Absolutely not. It’s not required but we did it because it was the thing to do and hopefully, be an example to all the other tequila companies. You’d do the same. You don’t have to do it but hey, it helps the land, it helps out the people, and you know, it’s good.

John: Got it, and on JP Selects, as you pointed out earlier, you’re carrying all sustainable products on it. I’m on the site right now and it’s all products that you selected that are the world’s choice in sustainability.

John Paul DeJoria: Correct. On John Paul Selects, it has to be something in our product that is sustainable and our feeling there was that if we started out with a website that if you get on it, especially for all the things we do for you on that, to get on that website, if something in your product must be sustainable, and you give back, whether financially, you or your company with your time to make the world a better place to live, other companies will see well, wow, if they’re doing it successfully, maybe we should do the same thing. Maybe we should be a little bit sustainable. We’ve had some pretty good size companies wanting to go on our site, very good size companies, and we turned them down because they weren’t sustainable or they weren’t really giving back so it’s a combination of things to make the world a better place to live in. A lot of us in the ’60s that thought we would change things had no money and no influence and sometimes, people would say, ‘They’ll never get anywhere,’ but today, we are now getting into positions of influence and we have a little bit of money so we can change the planet for future generations and we’ve been doing it.

John: Again, in 1989, when you launched Patrón, and did it in recycled bottles, it was way before the green revolution and the sustainability revolution really took off so you’ve been doing it for all the right reasons from the heart from the beginning, which leads me now to something we didn’t talk about last time you were on our show, which you just launched recently, your own philanthropic organization, Grow Appalachia, so talk a little bit about why you’ve launched it and what it’s actually doing.

John Paul DeJoria: You bet. That’s through my Peace, Love, and Happiness Family Foundation and what it is is this: We realized that throughout Appalachian Mountain Area- that’s eastern Kentucky through Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, oh my god, North Carolina, South Carolina, a little bit of Georgia, that whole area going up there, that in those Appalachian Mountains are about 150,000 families that are unemployed on food stamps and substance from our government. They did not want to be there but for example, you take one of these big coal companies, like Messi Coal, that takes a mountaintop off. They do it in these big machines. Well, those big machines, Bobby Kennedy told me, replace 175 jobs so here’s these great people, our people on America. We help everybody throughout the world and at least in our foundation but let’s just settle for those in America so I took Appalachia and what we did was this: We partnered up with Berea College. A fellow named David Cook, who now works with me full time during this project, teamed up with us. I spent all the money. We paid for it ourselves, not just for staff, but for the equipment. For example, there’s a farm of 20 to 30 people. We’ll buy a used tractor but the equipment that’s necessary, the seeds or irrigation, whatever it takes, and the education to grow on your own. Number one was this: The first goal was grow your own vegetables. Feed you and your family and anyone around you that’s destitute and can for the winter. This way, you have food year round. Second was this: Once you’ve done that, grow more the next year. Sell the overage to farmers’ markets and local grocery stores as organically grown local produce and start creating an income and then teach at least two to three families near you how to do what we taught you how to do. I’ll buy their seeds or whatever they need to do that with or maybe share your tools with them and this way, one family could affect two to three more so we got 40 or 50,000 families. They immediately have 150,000 families. Well, we’ve been underway with this now for almost going on three years. Already 10,000 people are eating off their own gardens. An amazing thing happens too, John, is when you eat your own vegetable, you eat them and when your body has that kind of nutrition, it doesn’t say feed me, feed me, feed me, and then you shove whatever you can in your mouth just because you’re hungry because your mouth doesn’t say to you or your stomach doesn’t say I need some broccoli or I need some carrots. It doesn’t tell you. It just says I’m lacking something. Once vegetables are in there, especially the one you grow, or fruits are in there, your body no longer craves this. Automatically their weight goes down. Their energy goes up. It’s just an amazing thing what food does.

John: How big can that grow? That’s a fascinating and fast scaling, 10,000 families, so where do you think that’s going to grow?

John Paul DeJoria: We will definitely in the next five years get most of Appalachia but I’ve already started little programs in other places. Other than, of course, overseas, I started one in Austin, Texas helping start one over there and we’re looking at wherever it’s needed. Why not help families help themselves? This is not charity, John. It’s helping good Americans giving them a chance to help themselves. In fact, some of the new Paul Mitchell ads that are coming are going to talk about we Americans have this opportunity to help other Americans help themselves and again, we do it in Africa through Paul Mitchell, Patrón, and other companies. We do it in Mexico. We do it in Asia. We thought we’d do it here in our country. Our motto is, “Success unshared is failure”.

John: Well, that’s what I was just going to get to. We have three and a half minutes left and I wanted to get to that to put an exclamation point on this segment with you because what does that mean to you and how have you implemented that in your life? Because to me, you’re one of my inspirations, John Paul, and explain success unshared is failure.

John Paul DeJoria: You bet. I come, as you know from my background, from absolutely nothing. Started Paul Mitchell hair care 33 years ago with $700 and lived in my car so I’ve been down there where I’ve had little to nothing and then I’ve been there where I have something. Well, if you have something in life and you’re blessed to have some good things, be it The Good Lord blessing you or call it The Force, whatever you want to call it. I’ll call it The Good Lord for now. You’re blessed. All of a sudden, these things come your way. Yes, you have to work hard for them. They’re not handed it to you but you have this abundance. Well, once you have enough to take care of yourself and your family, I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to do something while we’re alive and living in these bodies on this planet to make the planet a better place to live while you are here for existing generations and future generations. It’s kind of like paying rent for being on the planet earth and paying rent a little bit for all the good stuff that comes your way and if you’re very successful and you’re taking care of your family and you’re not sharing with others, that’s not success. It’s failure. Now, do we do everything? No, we can’t. We get hundred of requests to do things and we can’t do it all but we sure do a lot to try and do the greatest amount for the greatest number of people. It may mean we turn down a lot of individual requests for things but we go more for the groups where we’re already involved, which is little children, battered kids, battered women, neglected people, orphans, feeding a nation in certain areas that just need that. That’s who we go for.

John: Folks who have typically been marginalized in society, you really help them pick themselves up.

John Paul DeJoria: And, we do it on a large scale, not on an individual basis, but the large scale helps many out. For example, we just came back from Kentucky and visited this one home for abused women and children and the biggest thing they loved was the garden we had going for them there. They got to work in the garden every day and whatever they sold out of the garden, they all got to share it among themselves so here these abused people have a little bit of an income too. It makes them feel better.

John: You know, we’re down to the last minute. Can you share back with the young entrepreneurs across the world that listen to this show and want inspiration? Obviously, your success is an inspiration but share back with them some one or two key points about just getting in there and making a business happen for themselves.

John Paul DeJoria: Sure. This is a great idea. I’ll do it really quickly. First of all, when you give the way we give, it makes you feel good. That’s the best thing. It makes you feel good, Two things for new successful entrepreneurs: Number one is this: Be prepared for a lot of rejection. You’re going to get it. Be prepared for a lot of rejection and don’t let it overtake you because you’re prepared for it. Example: You knock on 10 doors. They slam them in your face. On door number 11, be just as enthusiastic as you were on door number one or on door number 300. It’s a matter of keeping that spirit going and if you’re ready for rejection or something went wrong, you know you’re going to overcome it. Don’t give up. Obstacles are going to pop up in your way but there’s a way around them. Remember that. Also, successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do, whether it’s working late, whether it’s never giving up when doors are slammed in your face or people say no. It’s just go, go, go. America still works, John.

John: You know, the world needs more John Paul DeJorias. Go to his website to learn more about what he’s doing, www.paulmitchell.com, PatronSpirits.com, and JPSelects.com. John Paul DeJoria, you are an unparalleled sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.

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. 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. I’m really honored to have with us Rich Diviney. He’s the author of The Attributes – this book here which you see. My audience knows I’m an active reader and I’ve marked it all up. He was kind enough to sign it to me. Rich, welcome to the Impact podcast.

Rich Diviney: Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Before we get talking about your new book, which I really truly enjoyed and got a lot of valuable lessons as a leader of our company, I want you to share a little bit about your backstory. Where you grew up, Rich, and how you even got here to start with.

Rich: Absolutely. Well, I’m a New Englander by birth. I grew up in Connecticut and, you know, growing up at a nice average childhood. My dad [inaudible] he was a private pilot, so he took us flying on the weekends. I have a younger brother, an older sister, but I also have a twin brother. My twin brother and I were so on aviation from early, early ages, and kind of set out to be military pilots. That was kind of our bent [inaudible]. It could have been the Air Force, it could have been the Navy, but the Navy guys landed on ships. So, we’re like, “Okay, there’s nothing harder than that, right?” So, it was Navy pilot the whole way. It was really the 90s. The first Gulf War, I learned about the Navy SEALS. I had no idea what they were. Back then, very few people knew what the Navy SEALS were. I began to read books and research. I was at Purdue University in the ROTC program and ultimately said to myself I didn’t want to be a pilot and wonder if I could be a SEAL. I like the fact that they were kind of in every environment, but especially in the water. I love the water, you know, growing up on the coast in Connecticut. I just love that idea of making that hostile place your safe haven, you know? So, I decided to go for it. Fortunately, I got selected, and fortunately, I made it through training. So, you know, I became a SEAL. I went through at ’96 and went through almost 21 years. I retired at the tail end of 2016 and of course, very kinetic time frame. I was deployed quite a bit to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. I’ve got to run training for one of our specialized commands which I learned a lot. That’s really where the impetus of The Attributes idea kind of urgent. Then, since retirement, I have been working in the Leadership Optimal Performance Space and got to write this book. So, here I am with you today.

John: First of all, I want to start with something that I’ve only learned as an adult. First, I want to say, Rich, thank you so much for your service to this great country.

Rich: Well, thank you. I thank you for the appreciation. Appreciation is not lost on me or anybody who serves because it’s nice to be appreciated. So, thank you.

John: What I feel Rich, and this is just my own humble opinion, we don’t thank people like you and other veterans enough. Somehow along the way, there’s a gap in America where we forget our veterans once they return. Some of them don’t return as whole as you did. That’s an ongoing reason why I continue my way of honoring great people like you as having other members of your fraternity on this show to promote the important lessons that you learn in your life – the entire journey, not just serving to protect the freedom of this great country. I just want to say thank you again and thank you for your service. I never want to forget to say that. I try to make that a practice. Also for our listeners and our viewers out there, to find Rich, you could go to theattributes.com. theattributes.com. That’s where he has his practice, his consulting practice, and you can learn more about Rich and all of the work that he’s doing – including his new book, which we’re going to talk about today: The Attributes. So, you have your consulting practice. You retire, so to speak, from your service in the end of ’16. Beginning of ’17, you start your practice of leadership consulting and teaching. What made you put it all into a book like this, though? What was your epiphany, your ‘aha’ moment that, “I got to get this down and get this into this book?”

Rich: You know, John, ultimately, I am very fascinated, in fact, passionate about human performance and really, what I would call elemental human performance. What causes us to do the things we do, and in that, what causes success, what causes failure. I think because of the background in the SEAL Teams, you are… I mean, just from the start gate and BUDS – Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training, you’re thrown into deep challenge and stress on [inaudible] some of the toughest training in the world. So, we always hear this kind of mantra. It’s only when things get tough that the real us comes out, right? Well, I’m kind of fascinated what the real us is because I think the real us is always there. It’s always showing up; understanding can kind of explain our behavior. Ultimately, getting down to the elemental us involves those innate qualities, those attributes that we show up to the game with because those drive our behaviors in those times. Well, all the time but certainly in times of stress, challenge, uncertainty. I had done some of this work when I was running SEAL training. I thought I kind of brought it out. I said, “This is going to be dusted off and kind of ubiquitous.” We can talk about it in terms that everybody understands because it explains human behavior, not just SEAL behavior. So, that was really the idea.

John: Got it! You know, I would typically end with this question but I want to start with this because I want our listeners to understand how deep you really go in your new book. I’ve read one of your fraternity brother members books, Jocko Willink’s books. There’s a lot to take away from his great writings as well, but “discipline equals freedom,” if you want to boil it down. So, Rich, if I was to ask you to boil down The Attributes, what do you want our listeners, our viewers, our readers from this podcast take away when they buy your book and they read it like I did. What is the big take away you want them to come away with?

Rich: Well, I mean, if I were to boil it down and just piggyback off of Jocko’s statement that I love, “discipline equals freedom,” it would be, “Do I have discipline? What is my engine, right?” So, human performance, our performance has to do with how we show up. Honestly, we’re all human – we know that. But we’re all like automobiles. Some of us are Jeeps, some of us Ferraris, some of us are SUVs. There’s no judgment there because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do, and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do. But the key to understanding and improving ourselves is to lift that hood and figure out what engine we’re showing up with because you maybe a Jeep that’s trying to run on a Ferrari track. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that either, but knowing that is going to help you in performing-

John: In your journey.

Rich: Yes, on the journey, right? So, again, I’m really interested in helping people start to introspect in a way that allows them to explore their edges and explore their potential. I think the book will allow you to do that.

John: Oh, it does. Like I shared with you off the air before we started, I have this company and I get to be the leader of this company. I got so much out of your book. There’s so much to learn there. You can continue to self-learn about yourself even at fifty eight years old. I’m going to throw some words by you that I took out of the book because I always write notes before I do these interviews. I wrote down some key words that I want you to share your thoughts on that you covered in the book. The importance of grit.

Rich: Yes. Grit is not just one thing. Grit is the ability to power through to kind of breakthrough and keep going. Largely, it’s concerned with the kind of those small pushes or the shorter pushes. Grit is not an attribute. It’s made up of few attributes that are blended and catalyzed in a way that allows us to push through. So, if we have a predominance of those grit attributes, we find ourselves more easily able to, or more smoothly able to, or more often because it’s never easy, but more often able to power through, persevere, adapt, and actually step into our fears, which is courage.

John: So, we’re all dealt a bad hand of this tragedy of COVID-19.

Rich: Yes.

John: Sticking to the theme of grit, let’s talk about one of its sisters or brothers – resilience. How does resilience fit into your definition of grit? How can we be more resilient to make it through a bad hand of cards?

Rich: Yes. Well, I mean, part of grit means you’re going to have to work your butt off to power through. In that process, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be dirty, it’s going to be somewhat destructive and tiring. So, part of grit, part of the ability to do that over and over again, it means we have to be resilient. We have to be able to bounce back. Resilience is the ability to get knocked off baseline and get back to baseline. Its recovery, but it’s recovery in the full extent. Because if we’re unable to recover all the way back to our baseline, then what happens is we generate a delta there. So, if we are at zero, we get knocked down to negative ten. If we’re only able to come back to negative five, well, guess what? The next time we get hit with something, our start point is negative five, which means we’re going to slowly fall into entropy. So, to be able to consistently be gritty, involves this idea of resilience, which is the ability to bounce back.

John: Well, I love this. One of your subchapter titles said, “Get knocked down seven times, get up eight.”

Rich: Yes. An old saying that I pulled. In fact, the chapter titles were one of the most fun parts of the book, actually, writing those things. So, it’s awesome.

John: Right. Empathy. The importance of empathy, Rich, talk about what you view as the importance of empathy.

Rich: So, empathy, I have it fall under the leadership attributes. Again, leadership, holistically… We can flight being in-charge of being a leader. They’re not the same thing. One is a noun and one is a verb.

John: Right.

Rich: Leadership is a behavior. It’s been my experience, but I really truly believe this with my fullest extent of my being is you don’t get to call yourself a leader. You don’t get to self-designate, okay? It’s like calling yourself a good looking or funny, alright? You don’t get to decide that. Other people decide whether or not they choose you as a leader. You can be in-charge, sure. Positionally, you can be in-charge. It’s only when other people decide that you’re a leader, that you’re someone they want to follow, that they look up to you that you become a leader in their eyes. That is based on behaviors. These behaviors, the elemental behaviors are empathy, accountability, decisiveness, selflessness, and authenticity. Empathy is one of those first ones because empathy is more than just sympathy. It’s not ‘I know how you feel,’ it’s ‘I feel how you feel. Can I step into the shoes of another human being and assume and feel what they’re feeling?’ As soon as you do that for another human being, they immediately feel cared about. If someone feels caring, if someone feels cared about, they’re going to immediately start to form this bond of trust and love and feel and start to look to you as a leader. So, as leaders, as people in-charge who want to be leaders, we need to always understand this idea that we have to try to feel how those people in our span of care feel. Sometimes, it’s easier said than done. But oftentimes, someone can just simply remember their own pathway and remember how they felt. So, one of those important leadership jobs is parenting. I’m a parent of teenagers. So, as often as possible, I try to ask myself how did I feel. When I’m in a spat with my teenager, I ask, “Okay. How did I feel at that age? How did I feel when I was sixteen?” Because I didn’t know as much as I know now. That empathy helps. When I can approach my teens that way, they feel heard, they feel cared for. It increases bonds and we can do the same thing as leaders.

John: For our listeners and viewers out there, we’ve got Rich Diviney with us today. He’s the author of The Attributes. You can find The Attributes on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, audible.com, and all other great book stores where you find great books. You could also find Rich on theattributes.com, theattributes.com. You could contact Rich and hire him for consultancy purposes and other things as well. You know, you talk about leadership, Rich. During this covid-19 period, The Last Dance was put out on cable television on Michael Jordan’s final year with the Bulls.

Rich: Yes.

John: At the end of the eighth episode, it was the only time during the whole series he got emotional. He said at the end, “Winning has a price and leadership has a price.” Since you’re a leadership expert and you just were talking about one of the elements – empathy, part of the onion that you peel back in this great book: The Attributes on leadership, empathy is one part. As you said, there’s other parts as well – accountability and many others you have in your book, which are so important to think about when you’re assessing yourself and trying to evolve as a leader. What does that mean to you, though, leadership has a price?

Rich: Yes. I used to tell my junior officers that to understand the job of leadership, you had to accept what I would call the irony of leadership. That is, if you do your job correctly, you work yourself out of a job because you create an environment of people who can operate without you, who do better than you, who surpass you, right? The job as a leader is to build those people in your span of care so they become leaders, they become better than you. I think that’s the price of leadership because you’re conceding your own obsolescence, right? Now, there’s certainly a price because you’re doing that, but there’s also a reward because you get to do that.

John: Right.

Rich: When you help people grow and when people come back to you and say, “Hey, I loved working with you, and under you, and for you because you helped me become the person I am today.” Man, that is a hugely powerful gift, you know! But ultimately, if you’re going to do your job as a leader the correct way, you’re going to grow people and grow a team that can outpace you eventually. That, for me, is probably the price of leadership.

John: You know, Rich, what I love about your book is that you also make some great points in terms of tools for us when we’re assessing other people’s leadership abilities, or those who are thinking about following. One of your subchapters in the book was about ‘beware of the fearless leader.’ What do you mean by that?

Rich: Yes, so that was a chapter on courage, which is an attribute. That’s one of the grit attributes. In the chapter, I go into the Neurology of courage and how we can kind of step into It. Ultimately, though, when we’re talking about leadership… Let’s talk about courage and fear. Courage is literally the ability to step into our fear, that’s what courage is. It’s a specific switch in our brain that when we decide to fight, right? Which is the fight-or-flight. When we decide to step into our fear, that switch gets kicked, right? We get a dopamine. So, it’s the ability to fight., But fear exists for a purpose, okay? Fear manifests itself in human beings because it’s telling us there is risk here. Pay attention, there’s risk. So, I’ve always disliked the term fearless. One of my officers when I was a junior officer told me, “Beware of the fearless leader. He will likely get you killed,” because the fearless person or the fearless leader is not assessing risk. That’s the bulldog approach where you’re just running into things without thinking. You don’t want that. You want to be able to effectively assess risk so that you may responsibly step into it. But if you have someone who is not fearful, beware.

John: I so agree with you. I just love that you actually put it down and actually explain, as you said, the neurology, and the information behind that because most people don’t realize that. They think leaders are just born leaders and they just walk into a situation and that’s just them, but there’s so much preparation that has to go into. You know, they talk about Tom Brady before the last Super Bowl. Gisele and his children moved out of the house. So, for twelve days, he can literally with zero distractions, prepare. This guy already has five or six Super Bowls before this. So, to me, the preparation issue and that’s because he didn’t want to go into the Super Bowl in lose. So, there’s a fear of not living up to being Tom Brady. That goes for everybody and whatever. So, I just love that chapter. You also disavow us of some other terminology that I saw that I really was fascinated by. Historically, when someone’s called a narcissist, it’s sort of a bad thing, but you said in your book, you had a whole analysis of there is the upside and a downside to narcissism. It’s not all downside. Can you share a little bit about what you meant by that?

Rich: Yes. A narcissist likely has the disorder which is I codified personality disorder. That’s a bad thing because it’s destructive. The DSM-5, which is kind of the psychology Bible will outline the nine criteria. They’re sentences that if you have five or more, you technically have this disorder. I looked at that. I read it. I said, “Okay, I don’t have five,” but there’s elements of each one that seem familiar to me. I had to ask myself, “Okay. When I was a twenty two year old kid wanting to be a Navy SEAL, why was that?” Okay, sure, I was a patriot. Sure, I love my country. Ultimately, I wanted to be a badass. I wanted to see if I could do something that very few people could do and stand out. So, narcissism is the desire to stand out, be recognized, be adored, feel special. Every human being, at some point in their life, wants to stand out, be adored, feel special. There’s nothing wrong with that. By the way, this is biologically founded, right? Because when we’re infants, being paid attention to by our parents, we’re getting bursts of three chemicals. We’re getting bursts of dopamine, which is a feel-good chemical. “This feels good. Keep going.” Serotonin, which kind of this feeling of safety and bonding. Oxytocin, which is known as the trust hormone. You’re getting all three of those pumped into your system when you’re getting paid attention to as an infant. Well, that doesn’t change when we’re adults. It still feels good to get those chemicals. So, the idea is sometimes, those audacious goals that we set have a little bit of foundation in some narcissism. “I want to do something different. I want to stand out. I want to feel special.” We shouldn’t feel bad about that. We should embrace it. Now, the warning label, this fall comes with is that too much narcissism, obviously, is a bad thing, and sometimes, it’s invisible to see in ourselves. It’s like a vampire staring in the mirror. It’s hard to see in ourselves. Which means, the antidote to this is to surround ourselves with trusted, loving people who are our grounding wires, who keep us reined in, and do tell us the truth. Tell us when we’re getting out a little bit ahead of our skis, telling us when we’re getting a big head, and keeping us in the fold. not the number one. You can spot a narcissist very easily. Look at the people they surround themselves with because true full-blown narcissists will surround themselves with sycophants. Those sycophants will count their whole job will be to make sure this person is feeling like the person, right – the number one people. When those people leave, those tribes are usually very temporary because it’s very hard to stay in that position of constant sycophantness – whatever you call it. So, people will exit that. As soon as they do, you use that person of exit is now an enemy because that person is no longer uplifting that narcissist. So, they’re easier spot on the outside but just make sure you surround yourself with people who tell you the truth, and you trust and love.

John: Those around yourself, as you say, with sycophants, which is just a little bit more fancy terminology than just a bunch of ‘yes people.’

Rich: That’s right, that’s right.

John: You have a great chapter on the art of vigilance. Can you explain what you mean by the art of vigilance?

Rich: Yes, that goes to the mental acuity attributes, the first one being situation awareness. Situation awareness is really how our brain and nervous system take in information. All that [inaudible] comes through our nervous system and into our brain. We have eleven million bits of information coming into our systems at every second, through all five of our senses. Our conscious mind, our frontal lobe can only process about 2,500 or so, which means we’re doing a massive amount of deselection constantly, which I can do. Right now, things are going on that we’re not noticing until I say, “Well, you’re not noticing the bottoms of your feet in your shoes,” until I just said that. So, we’re doing a massive amount of deselection. Situation awareness is one’s ability to take in the maximum amount of information and notice things. That speaks to vigilance. Some people are more vigilant, more situation-aware than other people. I’m someone who has naturally had a heightened sense of situation awareness. Now, obviously, my career amplified that, but I walk around a city street and I notice things. I notice faces. I notice hands. I noticed dark alleys. I notice vehicles. There are other people who walk down the same street and are in la-la land. They don’t notice anything. Again, there’s no judgment. That’s just how you show up. We can practice our own situation awareness by understanding that it is vigilance and actively paying better attention. This means taking off our headphones, putting down our phones, and start noticing the world around us. It helps. It helps if you can be vigilant and notice more things. There’s a downside to hyper-vigilance, right? This is where a lot of PTSD stems from, in terms of service members coming back. Because when you’re overseas in a combat zone, you’re always on key. You’re always paying attention to everything. You get used to that. So, if you come home and you’re unable to dampen that and turn that off, everything is like… It’s almost like you’re hyper. It’s like Clark Kent as a kid, right? All the stuff is coming in too much. So, the ability to dampen that once in a while is actually a good thing, but I think it’s always good to notice. Notice things around you.

John: Rich, as a leader, we’ve all gotten accustomed to the term ‘dream team.’ As a leader, you are always trying to put together. You want to be Bill Belichick. You want to be Phil Jackson. You want to be Nick Saban. You want to put together the dream team. Same thing goes in business. Again, in your book, as you peel back your definition of the dream team, you said there’s a dream team paradox. For our listeners and viewers, can you explain what you mean in your book? Again, for our listeners out there, it’s called The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. The Attributes. What do you mean by the dream team paradox?

Rich: Well, Nick Saban would probably tell you Phil Jackson or Bill Belichick will all probably say the same thing which is if you build a team based solely on skills, the best players, it’s probably not going to work out very well. There was a behavioral and systems analyst, psychologist… I can’t remember his actual title. I referenced him in the book. His name was Russell Ackoff. He’s deceased now. He used to say, “If you took the best parts of every best vehicle out there, right? So, maybe the BMW has the best steering system. The Jaguars, the best engine. Jeep has the best transmission. Whatever that is. Take all the best parts from all the best vehicles, match them together. Would you have the best vehicle on the planet? The answer is no. You won’t even have a car because they wouldn’t fit. The parts wouldn’t fit together.” He used to say a system is never the sum of its parts. A system is always the product of their interaction. The same goes for teams. Teams need to be created, not only on skills but also on attributes. Attributes, those innate qualities, are actually what affect and enable our performance and our ability to handle dynamic, uncertain, unpredictable environments. Well, guess what human relationship is. It’s dynamic. It’s uncertain. It’s unpredictable, right? So, it’s our attributes that actually enable us to actually cooperate and get along. It’s things like humility. It’s things like empathy. It’s things like accountability. All those things that are working towards us, being able to work with other people in a team. So, the mistake most people because skills are so visible, right? We can see them, we can measure them, we can test them. It’s very hard to measure someone’s empathy, or measure someone’s accountability, or measure someone’s of that… When you’re putting together a dream team, if you want a team that actually is able to perform and function when things go south and sideways, you need to put it together based on things more than just skills. You need to look at these attributes.

John: Got it. You end the book with a whole section called values and these all wonderful words that make up values. Can you talk your list of values? Why do you add that into the end of the book and what do those values mean to you? What do you want them to mean to the reader of your book?

Rich: Well, I added the value stuff because I’ve done a lot of work in the leadership space with values. Ultimately, values drive behavior. What we value is actually underneath and how we behave can point to what we value. So, what I recognized was that understanding our values actually begins to help us understand some of our attributes, not all of them but some of them. So, just understanding and going through a values exercise can start to point to some of those attributes that you have more of or less of. I think it’s important because again when we’re looking for those elemental things that ultimately drive our behavior, we want to understand who we are and why we do what we do. We need to understand our behavior. Well, to understand our behavior, we need to look under the hood. Under the hood are things like attributes and values. That’s why I added the values things because it started to point a little bit towards those attributes.

John: I love it! For our listeners and our readers out there, your book, The Attributes, if you want to be the best that you can be, I highly recommend reading this book. 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. Rich Diviney, this is a great book. To also find Rich or to buy the book on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com. You could also buy it on his website theattributes.com. You can find Rich there. You can hire him as your consultant or speaker. Rich, thank you for sharing your knowledge and your book today with us on the Impact podcast. Thank you for your dedicated service to this great country and for protecting our freedom. God bless your continued success and continued support. We always welcome you back to the Impact anytime you want to come back on.

Rich: Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to us keeping in touch.

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

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 is 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: Hi. This is John Shegerian. I never could have imagined when we started “The Green is Good” radio show back in 2006, that It would grow into a big podcast called “The Green is Good Podcast”. And now, we’ve evolved that podcast to the impact podcast which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. But we did look back recently at some of our “Timeless Green is Good” interviews and decided to share some of them with you now. So enjoy, one of our great “Green is Good” episodes from our archives. And next week, I’ll be back with a fresh and new episode of the impact podcast. Thanks again for listening, I’m grateful to all of you. This is John Shegerian.

Announcer: Welcome to “Green is Good”. Raising awareness of each individual’s impact on the environment and helping to create a more beautiful, and sustainable world. Now, here’s John Shegerian, chairman and CEO of Electronics Recyclers International, and Mike Grady.

John: Hey, welcome to today’s show of “Green is Good”. Mike, it’s so great to see you.

Mike Leijnse: John. It is good to see you. I look forward to doing this show with you each and every weekend what do we’ve got going on, today?

John: Well, you know, let’s tie it into our lives a little bit. You know, thank you for coming today, Mike. I know you’re not feeling your best today.

Mike: Well, you know, I’ve been, it’s been better at, you know, there’s something going around some kind of bug and with the heat and everything. Boy, you just want to stay cool and get better.

John: Okay and you know, we all have, you know, whatever our mom or our grandma used to give us to make us feel better.

Mike: Right.

John: Some people’s waters, orange juice, chicken soup, what’s your choice of beverage or drink that, you know, you prescribed to when you’re sick?

Mike: Well and see, I believe it or not, I’ll use Pedialyte.

John: Oh.

Mike: Do that. Do water, do Gatorade. But I like, when I start feeling better, I like to, I like to drink tea actually.

John: Tea.

Mike: Yeah.

John: I think. Well, that’s great because today, we’re talking about tea.

Mike: Tea?

John: Tea.

Mike: Okay?

John: You know, today is a tea story and it’s one of the great brands that both you and I grew up with and most of our listeners grew up with Lipton tea.

Mike: Okay, I was gonna guess because when I think of tea they’re very first. I think they’re so, they have captured the market at least in everybody’s mind the first if you were to play a game show,

John: Right

Mike: And okay.

John: Right

Mike: We’re playing password.

John: Right.

Mike: Tea, what would you say?

John: Lipton?

Mike: There you go.

John: Tissue?

Mike: Kleenex.

John: There you go. So it’s…

Mike: It’s branded

John: It’s an iconic brand. And so, you know, with the Advent of the organic and sustainability movement, have you tried or started to enjoy other than what we grew up with, which is pretty much straightforward black tea?

Mike: Right?

John: Any of the other flavors that are out there?

Mike: Yeah, actually I have. I really like some of the teas that they make because when I drink tea a lot except if I’m getting over being sick.

John: Right?

Mike: What I like is in the summertime. Nothing beats ice tea.

John: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. And I like their green teas a lot.

John: Right?

Mike: The iced tea mixes with the raspberry is a real favorite.

John: Yeah. And I’m with you. I’ve started trying the different teas and they’re really delicious. So today, we have and this is a first for our show.

Mike: Okay?

John: It’s going International today.

Mike: Really?

John: We have our guest whose name is Michiel Leijnse. I hope I’m pronouncing it right but we’re actually getting him on the phone and he’s going to be speaking to us from Paris, France.

Mike: Wow. What kind of a time difference if we got there?

John: I think it’s about nine hours or so.

Mike: Well and we better not keep on Michiel waiting.

John: Right? So let’s get the global brand development manager, for Lipton, my collisions on the phone make sure we’re saying his name right and he’s going to share with our listeners today. The story of Lipton tea and the sustainability movement in the Green Revolution.

Hey, today we’re honored to have, from Paris, we have Michiel Leijnse. Michiel, am I saying your last name right? Or you please say it.

Mike: You’re getting pretty close Michiel Leijnse.

John: Okay. And I’m going to just start-stop with Michiel, Michiel, and he’s the global brand development manager for Lipton. And it’s such an honor to have him with us. First of all, is the first time our show has ever done an interview internationally. That’s number one, but more than that, you’ve been with Unilever since 1995. And your, the global brand manager for Lipton. But before we get to that, I want to ask you about your past, because your past is even, something that our listeners would love to hear about. You used to be with Ben and Jerry’s, the famous Ben & Jerry’s ice cream out of Vermont, which is known for their sustainable practices and other things and tell us what you did there and how you ended up here, and then we’ll start talking more about tea after you tell us a little bit about ice cream.

Mike: Okay. Sounds good, John. No, Ben and Jerry’s need us, spend some time there, Ben & Jerry’s great company to work for is based in Vermont in South Burlington. And yes, you’re right. Ben and Jerry’s is very well known for its, you know, it’s for 30 years. It’s been taken a, you know, a proactive stance on sustainability, you know, having a social Mission.

And I guess when I came to Lipton, I was specifically recruited to bring that kind of thinking to Lipton because Ben & Jerry’s, has really been leading the way and I, you know, I’ve been privileged to firsthand experience that. And the folks at Lipton said, look, you know, we want some of that thinking we want that for Lipton and the best way to do that, of course, is to invite some money in who’s been working on Ben and Jerry’s.

John: God, so that was, that was before really being green was cool. I mean they Lipton had the foresight to go grab you from them. What was one of very few companies in the United States that were already into sustainability and the fair trade movement, they grabbed you early and started you working on this early then? Is that is that correct?

Mike: Well, you know the real thing is that Lipton started working on this. You know about 15 years ago.

John: Wow.

Mike: Because we have our own tea as estates in Kenya and in Tanzania and those are states. Have been run on a sustainable basis. We’ve been practicing sustainable agriculture there for more than 15 years.

John: Wow. So that was early, early…

Mike: And the lion certification which you know you and I going to talk about that is just logical next step.

John: Got you. Okay, so tell us about Lipton is a brand like Mike and I. We were talking, you know before we brought you on the line here. We were talking about how we grew up with Lipton. It’s an iconic brand in the world. It’s so well known. How, you know, tell us about how big the brand really is.

Mike: Well, we are basically present in almost every single market that mean that last count it was more than 150 countries around the world. So, practically everywhere. And, you know, you’re probably familiar in the US we’ve got the tea bags for hot tea, and we’ve got ready to drink iced tea. And we’ve got powder tea sticks, there we’ve got many different products in many markets.

John: In terms of, and I don’t want to give away any secrets or have you give away any secrets. But in terms of bigness, in terms of sales, how big are the Lipton sales.

Mike: Well, we’ve got about ten percent of the global markets in sales so more than 3 billion euros to say more than, you know, close to four and a half-billion dollars.

John: And then what’s your next, you know, so you’re the biggest tea brand in the whole world.

Mike: That’s right.

John: And you’re the head of that. You’re the boss.

Mike: I don’t claim to manage it all by myself.

John: Okay, you’re the one guy in charge of making sure that we get the “I love it”. So wait a second now. So now, 150 countries and four and a half billion approximately so tell us then, 15 years ago or so, Lipton starts getting into the sustainability movement, they go and get you, you know, from Ben & Jerry’s. So what’s the commitment to sustainability? How did it start and show us and explain to our listeners? The evolution of Lipton’s sustainability commitment.

Mike: Okay. Well, so 15 years ago, like I said, we had our own estates we were practicing sustainable agriculture and building a lot of experience, but at the same time, you know, our own estates supply about 10% of RT globally. So, we were doing some really great stuff at our own estates, but we never really talked about it because, you know, it was sort of like a pilot. That was an experiment and it didn’t apply to all the tea we sell and buy local, you know, across the world because we also buy from about half a million farms, third-party suppliers.

And so about 3 years ago, 2006. We basically, we got together with a group of people, marketing and supply chain. We said, right. You know, we’ve been doing all this work, we’ve been doing it behind the scenes. What can we do next? How can we make this bigger? Because we don’t want to just be able to say positive things about her own Estates. We want to be able to say good things and give guarantees to our consumers about all the five hundred thousand farms that we supply tea from. And at the same time, we want to be able to talk about the good work that we’re doing to our consumers because obviously, this is an activity that costs money. And, you know, we’re a company, at least, spend money on some on something, we need to get something out of it. And as a brand, if you can talk about it, you consumers, that means that suddenly, it becomes an asset and something that is interesting. So what we decided in, at the end of 2006 and we went public in 2007, is that we would start working with an independent certification, the certifier the Rainforest Alliance, and that we wanted to buy all our tea from sustainable farms.

But we made two very practical commitments because, you know, 10% of the world’s tea, that is a lot of tea. So we said, first of all, by 2010 will have, you know, all our Lipton, yellow label in Western Europe for men, first-line certified farms. And by 2010, also, most of the tea bags to be selling in the US will be from Rainforest Alliance certified estates. By 2015, All Lipton tea bags globally will be from Rainforest Alliance certified estates. And, you know, that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of tea. It’s a lot of farms to be certified but that is really our commitment.

John: And why did you choose Rainforest Alliance as opposed to other certification groups? Why did you choose them? And what makes them stick out and what makes them the best of breed in the certification process?

Mike: Well, I wouldn’t say that the best in certification, there’s a number of goods schemes out there. There’s a part from enforcing lines, there’s fair trade.

John: Okay.

Mike: There’s a scheme called UTZ certified who are mostly working in coffee but also branching out the other crops and I think all these schemes are good and they’re all independently verified, they’re credible but they’re all slightly different because they come from a different philosophy or to take a different approach. And so depending on the problem that you’re trying to solve, you might choose to work with a different partner. Now, for example, at Ben & Jerry’s, when I was there, we Ben and Jerry’s, chose to work with fair trade, great for Ben & Jerry’s, great for the issues that they were trying to tackle.

For Lipton, we decided that rainforest Alliance was the best possible partner and that’s for a number of reasons. First of all, you know, as I said, we had our own program for 15 years and we really looked at, you know, sustainable agriculture at farm management on the people side of a farm at the planetside, the environmental side and the financial side of running a farm. And the rainforest line system is very much, a holistic in the same way, so it looks at sustainable farm management.

So it was very good fit with their own experience so that we were able to continue in the work we’d already done. Also what’s very important for us, Rainforest Alliance works with small producers as well as with large estates to give you an idea. Our own estate in Kenya employs about 16,000 people. So that is not a small producer that’s the biggest you stayed in the country. At the same time, we source from about 400,000 smallholders in Kenya that have perhaps one or two acres and you can imagine, it’s very different working with smallholders are working with, you know, a large company where you source your tea from.

John: And, and okay. So you chose the Rainforest Alliance and, you know, and we’re going to be going to a commercial break in about a minute here. But so your biggest, most of your tea comes from Kenya.

Mike: That is right, that actually Kenya is the biggest tea exporter in the world. So…

John: Right,

Mike: They export most of the world’s tea, but actually a lot of our tea also comes from India, from Argentina, specifically, for the US and we source tea for every other country, every other tea producing market in the world, including Indonesia, Vietnam China, you name it.

John: Well Michiel when we come back from the commercial break, we’re going to talk about the consumer experience and where the future of tea is going. And we’re so appreciative that you’ve joined us today. From Paris on “Green is Good.”

Announcer: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to green is good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to green is good and were honored to have Michiel line seen on the phone from Paris, France. Michiel is the global brand manager for Lipton tea, which is gone green and has been green for a long time, but he’s explaining to all the listeners out there. Why green is good with Lipton tea. Michiel?

We were just talking now about where are all the tea comes from and everything, but talk a little bit about our listeners in the consumer experience and, you know, are the consumers aware of Lipton sustainable practices and the Rainforest Alliance certified seal. And what that really means?

Mike: I think so far, you know, they haven’t, they’re not aware of it because we haven’t talked much about it, but that’s going to change or it has already changed and we’ve actually started last year in the number of you European markets where we’ve communicated the extensively about it. You know, advertising, web, PR and now that’s actually that’s coming to the US as well.

And because we want to explain to consumers what it is that we’re doing. We think it’s important that consumers, understand. And of course, you know, let’s be, let’s be fair about it. We also want them to appreciate the work that Lipton is doing so that hopefully, they’ll buy more Lipton tea because that is, of course, an important part of sustainability as well. People Planet Profit.

John: Well, we talked about that a lot. So bright, you talk, while you share with our listeners Michiel, what that means to Lipton in terms of people planet and profit’s and why this, what you’re doing means what that means to their bottom line besides their brand?

Mike: Well for, you mean, our bottom line of what we’re doing and also in terms of people and planet?

John: Oh, everything hit it all, explain how you Lipton’s move, you know, Lipton’s initiatives that you’re running actually hit all three of those of the three Ps.

Mike: Gotcha. So let me give you some practical example.

John: Sure.

Mike: For example, at our tea estate in Kenya, we employ about 16,000 people. Those people are being, they’ve got vibrant, local standards, they’ve got good wages, but very importantly, they also they live on the estate’s because, you know, the estate is quite far from the nearest cities. So we provide housing to our, to our employees, as well, as a family. We make sure of course, there’s clean drinking water. There are schools on the estate that provide education to the kids. There’s a hospital. So basically every employee at Lipton’s tea Farm in Kenya gets free healthcare. Now that’s something I think which the US doesn’t even have yet.

John: No.

Mike: So our employees do have that.

John: Wow.

Mike: So that’s some of the social side.

John: Right.

Mike: On the environmental side.

John: Yeah.

Mike: Kenya has a huge deforestation problem. And, and so, we’ve been planting trees local. You know, indigenous trees on their own estate. We’ve been giving away trees to neighboring communities, to schools, we planted and given away around 700,000 trees. As part of the reforestation program, we have a sanctuary, a Monkey Sanctuary, there’s Wildlife around the estate. We make sure that we keep, area set aside specifically, for wildlife. And so, there’s a whole, you know, number of activities, in terms of protecting the environment, another one I should really mention is that we generate most of our own electricity there, through hydropower so green energy.

John: Wow.

Mike: And then, of course, there’s the financial side, right? Which for us as a company means that, obviously, we hope that consumers understand what it is that we’re doing and that they buy our tea, and that they appreciated, what it is that we’re doing. It’s also important though, for the people for the farmers, The Who Supply us, with their tea because we, by about 90% of our tea from third-party suppliers, and a lot of them, but 405 thousand are small farmers would perhaps one or two acres, they are being trained.

And I was actually in Kenya in March and we’ve been, we’ve been training them in how to farm sustainably, and that’s part of their commitment. You know, they need to become Rainforest Alliance certified as well. I spoke to one of these farmers in Kenya, you know, smallholder that supplies us with the and he’d been part of the training program showed been sharing sustainable agriculture practices and techniques with him. And he was thrilled because he saw his yield.

So the production from his tea field go up by 60 percent versus the year before. And that was thanks to, you know, smarter farming techniques sustainable farming techniques. So not only was he proud that he was looking after the environment near his farm but he also saw a direct financial benefit and I think that’s really important because in the end, you know, that’s the beauty that that’s the profit side of people planet profit.

John: So this was a third-party farmer in Kenya. Now your training and offering the same training to all of your third-party farmers too, right?

Mike: Yes, that’s what we’re trying to do and we do that in partnership with other organizations, but we remake our knowledge and our experience available. We have people whose job it is to specifically, go out and work with our suppliers and make sure that the experience that we’ve built up over the past 15 years that we share them with our suppliers so they can become Rainforest Alliance certified as well.

John: Well, Michiel, you know, I know tonight, you’re sitting in Paris, but you’ve worked in the United States and you travel the world. One thing our listeners like to know is the sustainability movement in the Green Revolution. Can you? Can you educate them a little bit, to the compare and contrast of Europe versus North America versus Asia, which, which continents are really excited about the movement and which continents are yet to adopt, but are going to be coming on board?

Mike: Well, I think, to be fair, I think it’s converging. I think it’s fair to say that, you know, about three years ago, Europe was probably more concerned about these kinds of issues, you know, the fair trade movement was quite strong. Organic picked up in Europe before it started in the US big time, but I think that has changed quite dramatically in the past three years and if you see you know, large companies like Walmart in the US making a move, you know, that you know you’ve reached the Tipping Point same is still true in Europe, I think it’s very much on the agenda. Asia, I guess. In a lot of these Asian countries are still developing. So they have other concerns.

John: Right.

Mike: On their plate as consumers at the same time, I think that’s changing rapidly as well. Because if you see China, where they’ve got huge pollution issues, I think more and more Chinese consumers are getting aware of, you know, how this impacts their personal lives as well if only because they’re confronted with pollution because of the way that you know, businesses operate in a country. So I think those markets are catching up very rapidly. Speaking to somebody, you have just been to Brazil recently and he said, Brazil is really on top of this and that’s something that happened in the last year.

John: Wow. Well you know Michiel. I can’t help but go back to what you said about training that Kenyan farmer in sustainable practices. Now you think of Kenya that too, is a developing Nation. When we talk about countries that are developing, sometimes people can say well you know it’s all well and good for developed nations to reach from the bully pulpit.

If you will about sustainability to countries that are coming up. But when I think back to what you said about that sixty percent yield increase for that farmer by learning sustainable farming techniques. I’m thinking there is a real profit to be made and maybe a better leap ahead for some of these developing countries. If we put the sustainability movement in the forefront.

Mike: Absolutely, you know, there there are real benefits for farmers to switch to better practices and to use better methods and you know, and it does, like I said it she didn’t usually it works both in a financial side as well as an environmental side. So it’s good on both counts.

John: So you know so if what you say is really correct which is exciting to hear that there’s a converging of the movement and the country’s liked Asia and North America are now quickly catching up to what Europe was on two years ago then that’s really your it’s really great to be green right now and it’s good to be green in terms of being a brand development manager for an iconic brand like Lipton.

Mike: Well yes, because consumers are more and more interested in this, you know, and when we, when we talk to Consumers, when we do surveys, we found that, you know, about two-thirds of consumers care about these things. And they would like to be able to buy products from brands and companies that do the right thing. Now, perhaps a not always doing that yet, but they’re, that’s, you know, they’re certain obstacles.

Like, if you can buy, you know, a certified or responsible product in your local shop, then obviously you won’t do that, or if you have to pay a premium, not everybody is willing to do that. The good thing is that you know, what lip the names do is to bring it on our existing range which as you know is very widespread and we’re not going to charge the consumer a premium for it. So we’re making it relatively easy and we really expect consumers to respond very positively to that.

John: So they’re getting a good value. They’re not paying a premium for a high-quality tea that you’re putting out and then also share with our listeners then. What is, where does the money go? What are they helping to support when they buy Lipton tea? That has the rainforest Alliance certified seal, what really happens then?

Mike: Well, it gives them a guarantee about how this tea was produced. And you know, in the end, you could say that every cup of tea is going to be a step towards a better life for the tea farmers for their families

John: Perfect.

Mike: For environment. That is wonderful.

John: And they’re not paying a premium you’re saying, but when they buy Lipton tea, the price is not higher then.

Mike: No. We are not charging consumers, more.

John: That is gorgeous.

Mike: What we’re doing is we’ve committed that’s the only buy tea from the certified farms. So the consumer buying Rainforest Alliance certified Lipton, we buying from those Farms, we are providing in our financial [inaudible] two farms that have demonstrated through, getting the Rainforest Alliance certification that they are really looking after the people as well as the environment.

John: That’s amazing. And so, now the consumers that our listeners want to know, then what’s coming, what’s coming later, this summer and fall and what’s coming in the future for Lipton, what other brands are you rolling out and what are the flavors, are you rolling out that we can all get excited about?

Mike: Well, the first thing that’s coming of the first thing that started in the US is our, some of our green tea products, tea bags. So those are on the market they’re certified what’s coming right now which I think is very important because like I said, we want to explain to consumers. What it is that we’re doing is that we’ve partnered up with National Geographic Global media their National Geographic. I’m sure you’re familiar with.

John: Sure and we’ve created with them or they have created really you know, specific contents about to explain to consumers. What are these what we’re doing? And basically, they came to our tea estate in Kenya. They had full access they videoed, they took photographs, etc. and so there’s a huge there’s a wealth of material available on the National Geographic website. Of course, we also link to that from the Lipton website, there will be on the National Geographic TV channel. That will be attention paid to this. And so that’s ready to help consumers in to explain to consumers what it is that would do. So National Geographic.com/Liptonsustainabilitea and ty little pun with T-E-A not with t-y.

John: Okay.

Mike: If you just Google Lipton the National Geographic consumers can see for themselves and actually make a little trip to a, Rainforest Alliance certified tea estate.

John: Wow. And what other brands are coming out besides the green teas, and later this, let you know right now. What else, what else do you have in the works? That’s that our listeners can get real excited about.

Mike: Well, there’s pure leaf, which is a ready-to-drink bottle tea, which I think it became available in US stores earlier in June. So about a month ago so that’s there and we basically we’ve got the whole range coming you know by 2010. All of Lipton tea bags will be from Rainforest Alliance certified farms and all of our purely ready-to-drink tea as well.

John: And so…

Mike: That’s going to happen pretty soon within the next, you know, year and a half.

John: So, you know, right now where is your biggest market for selling these, and when you dream about what markets you haven’t penetrated enough yet, where is the future for you in terms of getting your Global brand developed even more?

Mike: Well, the US is our biggest market.

John: Okay.

Mike: Number two Market is Japan.

John: Oh.

Mike: And so in both those markets, we are present with Rainforest Alliance, certified tea. Another big market is France which we’ve been working with Rainforest Alliance for about a year. I would really like to go into Russia and Poland which are other important markets for us. And we haven’t started there yet with Rainforest Alliance certified tea, but we will because you know those countries are included in our commitment that all our tea bags will be certified.

John: That is just amazing. And have you been to Russia before, and do you feel that that community and that country would be welcome? Welcome your products, with open arms?

Mike: Lipton is a big brand and it’s growing very rapidly. And like I said, in a lot of these emerging markets that used to be less concerned about the environment and sustainability. I think they’re getting more and more concerned and they’ve seen parties through the economic crisis. What happens when you act irresponsibly and this is a chance to show we can act responsibly.

John: So…

Mike: And if you do something good.

John: Michiel and we have about a minute left and we always like our, our guests to leave our listeners with a couple of green tips. So do you have for both business owners or consumers? You have one or two or three favorite green tips you want to share with our listeners as we say goodbye and goodnight?

Mike: Yeah, I have a really good and a very practical one.

John: Go ahead.

Mike: Dear listeners. Because we all know that, you know, carbon emissions and of course you know, if you make tea there’s carbon emission as well. Now, 80% of those carbon emissions associated with having a cup of tea are created by the consumer brewing, the water. And typically they brew, or they boil too much water. So if you fill-up the kettle, to make a cup of tea, make sure you fill up just the right amount that way your water will boil quicker. You use much less energy and you have a much smaller carbon footprint, and that’s a small difference that everybody can make without second making any sacrifice.

John: And that’s a perfect way to end today and Michiel we are so honored that you joined us from Paris, we’re going to have you come back in a year or so and tell us more what’s happened with Lipton tea and you are just another living great example with your great brand Lipton. “Why green is good.”

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform. Revolutionizing, the talent booking industry with thousands of athletes celebrities entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches custom experiences live streams and much more. For more information on Engage or to book Talent today. Visit letsengage.com