IFPA Takes on Tech

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Welcome to PMA Takes On Tech. The podcast that explores the problems, solutions, people, and ideas that are shaping the future of the produce industry. I'm your host, Vonnie Estes, vice president of technology for the Produce Marketing Association and I've spent years in the Ag-tech sector. So I can attest, it's hard to navigate this ever-changing world in developing and adopting new solutions to industry problems. Thanks for joining us and for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. My goal of the podcast is to outline a problem in the produce industry and then discuss several possible solutions that can be deployed today.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
This week's podcast is being sponsored by Paine Schwartz Partners, a global leader in sustainable food chain investing. Paine Schwartz Partners is a private equity firm with a demonstrated 20-plus-year track record of investments across the food and agribusiness value chain. The firm leverages a thesis-driven approach and operational expertise to enhance value across its portfolio, please visit www.paineschwartz.com to find out more about the firm and its activities.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Today we talk with Paul Lightfoot. Paul is the founder and current president of BrightFarms, a hydroponic leafy greens producer in the US with five farms in 2,500 retail stores. I talk to Paul about his journey with BrightFarms over the last 10 years and the strengths he sees with indoor growing around supply chain and water. Paul has also started a newsletter called Negative Food and is on a mission to look at how we can grow food and create brands based on regenerative farming practices that draw carbon from the atmosphere.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Paul believes if we eat food that draws down carbon on a net basis, our food system will be a lever to reverse climate change. He believes consumers can make this happen by choosing foods with negative carbon footprints market forces will guide farmers and food companies toward regenerative practices. Paul is optimistic that the next five years will bring a wave of carbon-negative foods to the market. And by feeding ourselves with such foods will make the world a better place and save it for future generations. We cover climate change, carbon-negative foods, a challenge to organic crop systems and oysters.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great to talk to you, Paul, there are a number of topics that I want to discuss with you today. Let's start with the great success of BrightFarms and then move into other topics you are speaking about frequently these days, like carbon. Most of our listeners know BrightFarms, It's a hydroponic leafy greens company in the US. You are in over 2,500 stores, which is pretty amazing. I just read that recently and maybe it's gone up, but that's a great number and you have four soon-to-be-five farms. So you were the founder of BrightFarms over 10 years ago. What was your vision when you started BrightFarms?

Paul Lightfoot:
Yeah. Well, I love the question because it's fun to think about that. The idea for BrightFarms was one that I effectively made up from scratch, but it was based on identifying a problem in the marketplace that I thought could be solved. And that's the answer to your question, right? The vision was to go after a supply chain and the incumbent salad supply chain, which is all based out on the West Coast, I thought was vulnerable to disruption. It was vulnerable largely in terms of having a product that was made worse by its supply chain. But I also thought that industry was going to face some headwinds with respect to water, food safety, vulnerability to weather as is the climate change.

Paul Lightfoot:
And so the vision was to really replace a long and complex supply chain that caused problems, sort of suboptimal outcomes for the product and replace that long and complex supply chain with one that was short and simple in a way that was better for the product and would be better for consumers and for customers. It was that simple and then that vision, I'd say it has largely been realized, as you probably know we're not the only player in the space anymore.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
No.

Paul Lightfoot:
We do have more than 2,500 stores and we actually have five farms that are open. So we're even a little ahead of the data that you're looking at, but there's been billions that have flown into the space just over the last two or three years. And every major food retailer in the US has a local indoor program or is working feverously to get one. So then they're not behind anymore. And I would say that it's a really big category. I don't mean the indoor part, the whole thing, but the indoor, local slice of it is still very small.

Paul Lightfoot:
It's probably less than $150 million, but it's really where all the growth is and BrightFarms is the leader in this niche. So we feel like the thesis has been validated by the response in the marketplace. We feel like the growth is amazing right now, but we feel like there's just a ton of work to be done. So there's so much market share to be captured over the next several years that we've got our blinders on executing as fast as we can.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's amazing. And people weren't talking about this 10 years ago, all this, all the disruption, and especially since we've seen, in the last year or so, people weren't thinking about, "Oh, we're not going to have enough water." or "Oh, what if there's a supply disruption?" So it's pretty amazing that, I mean, you were, obviously, but I don't think consumers were thinking that way.

Paul Lightfoot:
And, you know I didn't make this up on a whim. I did a lot of research, right. I sort of developed an analytical thesis. People were talking about the problems. I mean, you can go back 10 years ago in California had plenty of people talking about the water problems as an example. It wasn't being talked about in a system-wide way, in a way that it would impact the category. And of course, that's where the opportunity for a company like BrightFarms was born, right. Thinking about problems in an innovative way is often how you get innovation. But to agree with you strongly when I brought the idea home to my wife, who's still my wife. She said, "No, I don't approve that." Well, I mean, we overcame that, not without... I spent some political capital on it. There was a lot of people saying, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. No, it's really true. So how do you see the rise of indoor salads and how the indoor salad industry will win in the long run?

Paul Lightfoot:
Well, the rise is it's again because of the product, right and it generally is, right. You need to have several factors, but if you don't have a product, that's a better experience for the customers in this case, retailers or consumers, it's not going to work. So the easiest way to think about it is that the local indoor salads are five to seven days fresher than the long-distance field salads. And it's a two-week category. So a week fresher is just an enormous amount of difference. That's why there's this rise and the improvement of the product can be seen in certain metrics that are amazingly powerful in almost all retailers that we've gotten into their category sales have risen materially, right. So, same amount of shelf space, but the dollar sales of packaged salads goes up when we enter the category, right.

Paul Lightfoot:
And for a retailer, that's catnip, right. That's really where the action is because they want to increase their sales without increasing their costs or cutting out of the products. So I think that's going to continue in the long run and really over the long run it's the idea of sustainability that will be the reason that indoor salads eventually goes the same way that indoor tomatoes went, right. And if any of your listeners don't know if you go back 25 or 30 years ago, just about every fresh supermarket tomato was grown in the field somewhere, often in places like California and Florida. And today, the vast majority of supermarket fresh tomatoes are grown indoors, we have every reason to see the same thing is happening now with salads and a large part of that will be because of the product, of course, but it's also just to be sustainability in general.

Paul Lightfoot:
And I don't mean sustainability like big companies talk about their strategies. I literally mean the definition of sustainability is can something continue indefinitely. And if your business model is based on the aquifers beneath Salinas Valley, it's the definition of not sustainable, right. Every year, more water is taken out than is recharged through snow melt or rain, or any of the ways. And they're digging deeper wells, the ground is subsiding in some cases, the salt water is intruding into the aquifers. If our government doesn't regulate that, if our commercial markets don't regulate that mother nature surely will cause in the long run sustainability is not a choice. It's going to be imposed on us. And this is one of the first places on earth that we're seeing it imposed right now, we're watching.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So do you think then, right now it looks like to me is the category is getting bigger, but do you think as there's more indoor, that there's going to be less outdoor because of some of these limitations you're talking about?

Paul Lightfoot:
Well, it's above my pay grade, the answer to that question. I mean, I actually think that humans should eat a lot of salads. So I think the whole category should grow. I do think almost all the growth is coming from indoor to local right now, whether that means that the field-grown stuff will decline. It's actually a very complex question to answer. And I meant that literally it's not something that I'm smart enough or have enough information to answer because a lot of it is like labor base, right? Will people continue to grow in fields, things that require migrant labor in a period in history where you can't get that kind of labor, where other products could be grown in a way that's more mechanized, right. It's easier to automate. I don't know, I don't know how that's going to play out.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. And I think with water, I'm in California and the last couple of weeks, that's all anybody's talking about is we're just going into this huge drought and what is that going to do? Even this year for crops, there's going to be a lot of crops not planted because there's just not going to be water. And the change in our water, we're now going to start getting more of our water from rain and not from snow melt. And we're not really set up to handle that and so I think there's some infrastructure issues as well that's going to cause some of the shift. So what did we learn from COVID that supports the growth and continued success of CEA?

Paul Lightfoot:
Well, I think two main topics, the first is that people's health was a great predictor of whether or not they were vulnerable to severe illness, and by health, I mean in the sense that even before COVID, chronic diseases related to diet are the leading cause of death United States, right. And sadly, these are avoidable deaths, right. We don't need to have chronic diseases related to our diet. That's a relatively modern invention if I could use that word for something so tragic. And what we learned is that people that were subject to chronic diseases related to diet, like the diabetes and obesity, would dramatically more vulnerable to severe illness and fatalities of COVID. So that's the first thing we learned, right. People should replace the sugar-sweetened and ultra-processed foods that Americans eat with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Paul Lightfoot:
And there'll be less vulnerable to the next experience we have that's like COVID, if God forbid we have another one. And the second one, which I think is probably more what you meant when asked the question, is that we learned that having long and complex supply chains doesn't serve us well in times of volatility and disruption, right. And before I started BrightFarms, I ran a company that automated the distribution centers of retailers. And in many ways, the job was very efficiently getting goods made in the far east to consumers in America and by efficiently, I mean at low cost, right. And when I started, that has about 30 years old, I did it for almost 10 years. I felt great about efficiency. I like efficiency as a thing on its own, but over time I started feeling less excited about a global, hyper-efficient supply chain.

Paul Lightfoot:
And that's why you see me thinking about local supply chains. And then all those feelings became intensified during the pandemic, where you saw that a global problem like COVID prevented materials and people from moving around the earth efficiently. We're still, of course, suffering with chip manufacturing shortages, there's not enough cars because of chips and things like that. I do think that we're realizing as a society, that you want to have enough slack in your supply chains, that when there's disruptions, you won't have people go without things that they need, like chips, like food, not the chips that are food, but semi-conductors or whatever. In particular, having a decentralized system of intense food production facilities like what BrightFarms does, I do think is in the interest of society. And I feel proud to be working on that during this period.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. So lastly, since this is a tech podcast, what technology advancement has helped make BrightFarms successful, and what areas or new technology do you need more of?

Paul Lightfoot:
Well, I'll start from early, to now, to future in the answer. The first thing for us was controlling the climate, right. And I think people sort of gloss over that, but it's important and it's not that easy to do. So we have high-tech, computer-controlled greenhouse facilities that deliver the experience to the plants that they need to survive and to thrive. And that's where it starts and we can't ever lose sight of that, right. Especially as the climate changes, whereas we operate in more places with different climates, that continues to have to evolve. But the second is things like camera scanning and machine learning and artificial intelligence, we've got a proprietary platform that we call BrightOS that really pulls all the data from thousands of sensors in lots of different systems.

Paul Lightfoot:
And not just in the environment for growing plants, it's also the noise that comes from our supply chain that comes from the demand from our retailer partners. And it synthesizes it all together in a way where we can operate as resource-efficiently and as cost-efficiently as possible in a way to make us a more effective company. We're a company that has always made it clear to ourselves that we're not growing fancy food for fancy people on the coast. We want to grow mainstream premium salads that Americans can afford. We're selling at Walmart and Ahold Delhaize, not just at your neighborhood inner city, fancy specialty food retailer. And so we want to be able to operate as cost-effective, as soon as we can. And I do think by the way that the data shows we are the most cost-competitive of the indoor salad producers.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah.

Paul Lightfoot:
So that's sort of now, by the way, but as I think about what's in the future, it's definitely automation. We find ourselves already highly automated and I should say at BrightFarms and we grow the way we do, which is horizontally, largely because it enables the high degree of automation without $100 million robots, right. Growing vertically hasn't really figured that out yet. They're either spending a lot on labor or they're doing insane amounts of almost primary science to automate something that's not easy to automate, but we find ourselves now, I founded BrightFarms in 2011, we find ourselves now in a much more challenging labor environment than I think I had ever imagined.

Paul Lightfoot:
And it didn't just start because Trump had bad immigration policies. It started well before that it was exacerbated in the Trump administration. And now it's gotten much worse because of COVID. It would be naive to think that it will revert next year to what it was seven years ago. So we're prepared for a really long haul where labor is difficult to come by and we're making massive investments in automation right now in areas that we didn't necessarily know we were going to try to automate so that we can overcome those challenges and continue to be showing up on shelves for our retailers and doing it with high quality and the surety of supply.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So let's shift gears a little bit here and talk about some of the things that you've been talking about and you've been making a lot of noise lately. I love it with some different thinking through your newsletter called Negative Foods and articles. I've read about you and speaking that you've done. And one of the things, that, a quote in your newsletter was, "I have a voice and a platform to encourage and support and shine a spotlight on startups bringing carbon-negative foods to market and so I'm exercising that voice and leveraging that platform." So how did you get here and why is this important to you and how is this an evolution of where you are in your career and your life and your beliefs?

Paul Lightfoot:
Yeah, it probably seems less abrupt to me than it does. And I say that because I didn't start BrightFarms just because I needed to find a new way to get paid, right. I had a pretty good career before this, but I wanted to be in the sustainable food industry and that was because my personal passion was there, right. I spent my 30s feeding myself and my family in a very progressive way and my career felt a little bit old school, right. And I started thinking to myself, I wish my career was in this area, that I had this personal passion. And so when I started BrightFarms, I think before I hired a single person, I knew what our mission was going to be, which was to improve the health of Americans and the health of the planet.

Paul Lightfoot:
And so I think BrightFarms has that baked into its DNA because that's what I had baked into my DNA. And I'm proud that BrightFarms still flies that flag without me holding the flag very often. And in many ways, that's what this next part is about as well, right. So it doesn't feel that abrupt to me because it's an evolution of the same sort of principles. And then as I thought about celebrating food brands that had supply chains that reversed climate change, I actually think about what I've done, right. BrightFarms at its heart is a company with an innovative sustainable supply chain that is a start-up branded food company, right. And that turns out to be a somewhat unique set of experiences, and I guess I should say skills as well of skills, is something that you've done and you can help other people with.

Paul Lightfoot:
And so when I started thinking about how will the food industry change? And this is something I thought about for several years before I started talking about it out loud, it was clear to me that foods with regenerative agricultural practices that are carbon negative or carbon neutral footprints were going to be a part of the solution for how society reverse climate change. And I just realized that my experiences would be more relevant to it than most because BrightFarms had a more sustainable, innovative supply chain change, BrightFarms was a branded food company that went to market through retail. And so I just decided I would shine a spotlight on people early in their careers, perhaps building startups that had supply chains that would help reverse climate change with regenerative practices. And it felt pretty natural to me to think about it like that.

Paul Lightfoot:
Now, of course, the other piece of this is that climate change went from being something that environmentalists talked about 10 years ago, but the President didn't, right. And world leaders around the world did not to the degree they do now. And more important than anything, there are no longer large, thoughtful companies that aren't talking about it and talking about it as being an important priority and not just operating companies, but the world's biggest investors, the endowments, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and foundations. It's very hard to find any now that doesn't feel like these sort of ESG principles are at the heart of their success in the future and not just because of their values, but because they believed that not being long on reversing climate change is going to be a bad financial strategy. And so the rise of all of that sentiment in the world, particularly the commercial world, helped me recognize that this was the right time for something like this.

Paul Lightfoot:
Although I'll admit that it's the right time when I think about how the investors think about it and often, how the entrepreneurs think about it. It's very early for how consumers think about it. A lot of consumers still don't really understand what regenerative agriculture is, and they don't necessarily understand how their food choices are going to make climate change better or worse. Although I would argue that food choices are about the only set of choices individuals can make that make a difference right now because you're not easily changing the carbon footprint of steel, and glass, and concrete. You're easily changing the footprint of transportation and energy. That has to be done in a more systemic or government basis. But your food choices could make a difference and almost right away.

Paul Lightfoot:
And I should also say that food is unique in that it can be a lever to make the climate worse or better, but it's also unique in that we always make choices about it all the time. You can reduce your airplane travel. You can turn down the thermostat in your house in the winter in the Northeast, but you're probably still going to have to eat the same amount of meals next week as you did eight years.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. So talk a little bit about what it means for food brands to have a carbon-negative footprint, and maybe give us some examples of some that you've highlighted. What does that mean?

Paul Lightfoot:
Oh, sure. So this is a topic I think, you know I get excited about and it's inherently exciting. So carbon negative literally means you sequester more carbon than you admit, right. You draw down from the atmosphere more carbon or carbon equivalents than you released in the atmosphere. And so what that means is that if you find foods that have carbon-negative footprints when you eat those foods, the atmosphere has a little bit less carbon in it than when you started and there's some terrific examples that I'd love to give. Here's an example of a category that people maybe don't think about that often, but it seems as if oysters are a product that pull carbon from the atmosphere when they're growing and when you eat the meat of the oyster, the animal protein of the oyster, a lot of that carbon remains in the shell and it's essentially permanently sequestered.

Paul Lightfoot:
It can go into building materials, you can throw it back into the ocean essentially becomes a shell that'll a long time. And if we had as many oysters, New York Harbor, I think had half of the world's oysters, when Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson in 1609, we've harvested a billion oysters around New York City since then. And now there's only a tiny slice of what was once there if we brought back the number of oysters, which, by the way, makes the water cleaner, provides jobs, there's almost nothing bad about that. It doesn't require feeding there's no feed that goes into it. There's no fresh water that's consumed. You're actually just going to end up with less carbon in the atmosphere than you had before. And if you think about what else could be like that, right?

Paul Lightfoot:
You know, you could grow wheat in a regenerative fashion. And I won't try to define what regenerative agriculture on this call is, but some of the practices include refraining from tilling the soil, using cover crops all year round. When possible, using fertilizer from animals instead of from chemical processes like the Haber-Bosch system. And there's a handful of those practices as well. But when it's done in a thoughtful way, and it's rotated in a thoughtful plan, it has been proven by lots of research and by practical applications that crops like corn, soy, and wheat can be grown in a way that sequesters more carbon soil than is released by the lifecycle of the product. And then you could find yourself choosing regenerative bread brands where you're eating bread that is regenerative. There is a Scotland based beer company called BrewDog that uses solar for a lot of its energy.

Paul Lightfoot:
It built a giant forest and its facility. And right now, because of that forest, it's drawing twice the carbon from the atmosphere, then it releases in its manufacturing process. So every beer that you drink, Vonnie, from BrewDog, is sequestering a little bit of carbon. So if you really care about climate change, they'll drink as many of those tonight as you can. And I've probably talked about belCampo meats on the West Coast. We're not far from you near Mount Shasta, they raised their cows in a way that it's pastured on land that's used in a way that it's also regenerative, right. So I'm going to probably feed my kids hamburgers tonight that's from that farm. And again, it's a little bit better for the carbon atmosphere than before it existed.

Paul Lightfoot:
I'm probably the only one in this newsletter that's making a list of these things for people and the newsletter is relatively new, but a couple of years into it maybe the newsletter will have an index of like here's products you should think about shopping if you want to be part of the lever to reverse climate change. And what I really hope is that consumers will start to recognize that they need to be choosing foods based on the carbon footprints and when that happens, I think you're going to see a virtuous cycle of more consumer demand that begets more and more products that have these footprints.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So this ties into two questions I had. One is around scalability, and a lot of these brands are great local businesses, and we love them. We love to have them. We love to support them. Can they scale to a level that is going to make a difference around carbon? And then secondly, where is the consumer and how do we bring the consumer into this conversation so that these brands and some of the bigger brands can actually do these practices and make a difference?

Paul Lightfoot:
Yeah. So and I do like to make a point that I'm a capitalist, right? I'm a staunch environmentalist, but I'm not a socialist and I'm not someone that thinks that we need to shut down the food economy to save ourselves. I actually, and I wrote a newsletter about big food that suggested that big food is a big part of the problem, but they might be part of the solution and that upset some people, right. That think that the small holder producers are the future and I don't have anything that's small to producers and I have lots of them in my pantry right now. But if we're going to, for example, replace all the trucks from food distributors, it's going to be easier to do it with the four giant food distributors.

Paul Lightfoot:
And it is going to be by starting a million regional food distributors that won't have the same access to capital, that may not have consistent sustainability initiatives. So I think that business models that scale, scale. Business smells that don't scale, don't scale. I'm going to be trying my best to identify the ones that do and to celebrate them. I'd actually give you that oyster example. I think that there's a massive market opportunity for oysters around the world. It doesn't take up land. It doesn't pollute anything. It makes the water cleaner, perhaps kelp it's similar. If we could replace some of the soy and processed foods with kelp-based nutrients that's similar to oysters and the way that it grows very little input, it's better for the environment, pretty cost-effective to produce and there's been an enormous amount of research.

Paul Lightfoot:
I would suggest looking at the Rodale Institute or the IPCC report that suggests that a lot of the row crops that are grown in a way that's bad for carbon can be grown in a way that's good for carbon at enormous scale, and the NRCS, the division of the USDA that teaches farmers how to operate well has been teaching this for a long time for decades. It's not some new concept for the NRCS or for the USDA. It's getting farms to adopt it's what's going to be important. Really importantly, we haven't talked about farmers in this conversation and my newsletter is not celebrating farmers. It's celebrating brands, but the brands aren't going to be worth much if they don't have good farmers that are able to succeed. There is a lot of data that suggests that yields would go down when they leave behind their current practices and move to regenerative practices, but that their costs will go down even more.

Paul Lightfoot:
So you'll see less yield, but you'll see higher farm income. And that will be welcomed by farmers, particularly younger farmers. And we need the younger farmers in this country, right? We're sort of aging out or farmers. A lot of today's farms feel like they're on a treadmill of higher yields and lower-income and that turns out not to be sustainable either. And again, I believe that sustainability has a way of imposing itself on systems. So I think that a lot of farms are getting it now that moving to regenerative practices for those sorts of crops is quite doable at scale and when they do it, the yields will go down and their incomes will improve.

Paul Lightfoot:
And I don't want to leave this concept out here that we're going to grow this food, and we're going to starve, right. I made the joke about my business model is based on feeding 10 million people. I also feel like when I hear people say, "We don't have enough food to feed the people." I think that's just so obviously not the case, right. You know, 40% of food is wasted right now.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I asked Paul to talk about his view on organic food and how organics connect and don't connect with regenerative Ag.

Paul Lightfoot:
I'll start by saying that the idea of organic is a great one, right.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah.

Paul Lightfoot:
And my family eats a ton of organic food. So I'll start by saying, I don't want to be a hypocrite. I don't want my kids to hear this and comment online that I'm a liar since our pantry and our refrigerator is full of organic food. So my actions are clear that I do support organic. At the same time, and I'll say this directly, the organic movement has failed to achieve its goals, right. If I think back to what we were trying to get done when this country adopted the organic standard, it was to reduce the use of pesticides. It was to make food healthier. It was to make the environment better when it comes to the agriculture system and we just simply haven't done those things, right.

Paul Lightfoot:
First of all, look at the fact that only 1% of US farmland is organic, right. It's not even material, it's completely de minimis in terms of the impact it's having on US farmland. I think something like 6% of our food is organic, right. So we're importing all of that, maybe it's doing good for the places that we're importing it from, which would be fine. It's just not doing it on a material basis in a way that's changing the American farm system. So, but I would also argue that pesticide use has skyrocketed in the last 10 years, right. I thought we were supposed to get less pesticide use. And then finally, and I will say that I don't think this was well understood, when the USDA adopted the organic standard in 1990, I don't think it was well understood that being organic didn't mean being good for carbon emissions.

Paul Lightfoot:
And there's just lots of cases now with food being grown that meets the organic standards but isn't doing much for carbon emissions. And in fact, maybe it's a bad actor for carbon emissions. There are regenerative, organic standards out there. They're not adopted by anybody yet, they're not official, I don't think. That sounds like a great idea to me, right. Have both but for now, yeah, I think organic has proven to not meet its goals and it's a shame and if consumers think that, Hey, I'm doing everything I can, I'm eating organic. Like, I'm playing my part here. It's not my fault that we have climate change. They shouldn't feel that way, right. They're going to have to make more choices than just eating organic.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the organic movement started in a really great place with great goals, but I think times have changed. It's like a lot of these rules that were put together decades ago. And I think really looking at incorporating different practices and having slightly different goals and measuring those goals makes a lot of sense. If what people think they're doing is buying more nutrient-dense food, that is better for the planet to grow. That is more sustainable. That's better for the soil that needs to be looked at and re-evaluated.

Paul Lightfoot:
Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think we're likely to see that just because it's organically grown, it's got better nutrient density than we used to have in this country. And this is maybe too much down the rabbit hole, but nutrient density of food is really highly correlated with the carbon footprint of food, right. Or I should say, the lack of carbon footprint of food, right. When you have the biodiversity in the soil, when you've got that microbiome of the soil, it's because there's biodiversity and carbon matter in the soil. That means it's got generally storing carbon. It's good for the carbon footprint of the food, but it also leads to a lot more nutrition in the soil, but it's early days for that. I barely understand that, maybe I don't even understand it that well. I don't think most consumers even would know what we're starting to talk about here.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So you-

Paul Lightfoot:
Wait, but I do think, actually, I'm not pessimistic about the role of consumers here, right. I want to talk about what I think is going to happen, right. I know that consumers care about climate change right now. That's not up for debate, there's been an endless amount of research that's made that clear recently, of both parties in this country and people all over the world. What people don't know is the carbon footprint of their food, but they're starting to ask it. And lots of food companies are starting talking about it, including big food companies, which again I think shows the positive role some big food companies could have in this and I think that consumers are going to pay more for and choose foods with carbon neutral and carbon-negative footprints.

Paul Lightfoot:
And I say that knowing that there's been a lot of market research that says that consumers won't pay more for food, that's better for the environment. So a lot of marketing experts say, "You're being naive, Paul, in thinking that people will pay more for green products because research has shown that they won't." But I disagree when I look at the organic movement, which, as I said, I don't think has made the planet that much better and I don't think it's proven to be healthier. People are buying more organic food, it captures more and more market share and they pay a huge price premium less than it used to be, but it's still huge. They're doing it because they perceive it to be, whether it is not, they perceive it to be better for the health and better for the environment.

Paul Lightfoot:
And that's more important to me than research data that's actual market data, right. So once we can show consumers that food with carbon-neutral and carbon-negative footprint is both better for the health, which it will be because there's more biodiversity in the soil and that it's better for the environment. And it's actually better in lots of ways. It's better for water, it's better for runoff, but particular, it's better for the climate, which is every young person's number one priority right now. People will choose it over foods that don't have carbon-negative or carbon-neutral footprint. And that's going to cause an enormous flight in consumer demand to foods with carbon-negative and carbon-neutral footprints. And that's going to create, I think, one of the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities of our lifetimes, you're going to see food startups that grow fast and achieve success in ways that we probably haven't seen, in my opinion, since the.com boom of the late 90s.

Paul Lightfoot:
And even though it corrected itself, the internet industry didn't go away, as we know, right. And it's going to cause an enormous amount of capital flow in from growth, private equity metric capital firms. And I think a lot of them are going to make a lot of money and good for them. I hope they do. It'll create a virtuous cycle where we see more and more businesses that do these things. And the big food companies will either see the writing on the wall and they'll create their own carbon-negative food brands and I hope they do. And if they don't, they'll acquire the startups and that's fine, too. They'll reward the entrepreneurs and the investors for taking the chances to compete with them.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's it for this episode of PMA Takes On Tech, thanks for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. Be sure to check out all our episodes at pma.com and wherever you get your podcasts, please subscribe and I would love to get any comments or suggestions of what you might want me to take on. For now, stay safe, eat your fruits and vegetables, and we will see you next time.