Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

You can learn more about Borealis Foods on their website at https://www.borealisfoods.com. If you’d like to try (or donate to your local food bank) Chef Woo ramen, it’s available on Amazon at https://amzn.to/438vDwG.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4).
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5).
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dr. Reza Soltanzadeh is a visionary leader and the driving force behind Borealis Foods, where he serves as co-founder and CEO. An M.D. by training, his journey began as a young doctor, where he witnessed severe malnourishment in remote villages of India, igniting his passion for affordable, nutritious food. Dr. Soltanzadeh holds over 28 years of experience in food sciences and mass production and leads the company behind Chef Woo, an instant plant-based, protein-rich, organic ramen. Reza has led numerous international ventures whose focus has been on ESG (Environmental, social, and governance) compliance.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
Can your business’s innovations solve global humanitarian crises? For today’s guest, Dr. Reza Soltanzade, that’s the whole point of his company. He founded Borealis Foods specifically to reduce malnutrition worldwide, an idea rooted in his early years working with Doctors Without Borders, all modern businesses need innovation to survive. Borealis Foods uses innovation to help people survive. In this episode, you’ll learn how they can innovate so well. You can learn how to innovate with the Innovative Leadership Institute too. It’s right there in our name, we teach and coach with the mindsets that help you bring innovation to your organization. Learn more@innovativeleadership.com

Maureen 1:00
This is Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Dr. Reza Soltanzadeh, co-founder and CEO of Borealis Foods. We’ll be talking about leadership in food science and affordable nutrition solutions. I am really excited to hear more about Borealis Foods and your journey. Reza, share with us a little bit about how Borealis is leading the way in food science innovation.

Speaker 2 1:35
Thank you, Maureen. And it’s a pleasure to be here with you today. So, Borealis is a food technology company at its heart, and our focus is to develop nutritious meals and food that is affordable, and that’s the key to what we do. We believe that there is a sense of urgency to this. We are a group of dedicated professionals and food scientists who started this, and now we have a large group of people who are so dedicated to this. It’s very much a problem that science should be solving, so that’s what Bury Alice does.

Maureen 2:02
Tell us about your origin story. How did you get here?

Speaker 2 2:06
Well, start a long time ago. So, when I finished medical school, 2728 I joined an organization called Medicine San Frontier, or Doctors Without Borders, and that was a huge, huge experience for me, and was a new life. And I worked in villages of India for a while, and you know, after medical school, when you’re shocked with poverty and malnutrition at the same time, it stays with you. As a young doctor, the whole concept of not being able to treat patients well enough, because of the fact that they could not help themselves, you know, the immune systems are weak, and they could not really build a muscle to be strong enough to survive strong medications. It was to me, as a young doctor, it was devastating. And years have passed, and I spent over the past 25 years very much focused on food and trying to be a part of a solution wherein affordable food, to me, I think, should be a priority for humanity. And that’s a big deal. I think what we saw during the pandemic, we all experienced it, that when pandemics happen, there are no borders. It doesn’t really matter where you live, you know what happened anywhere around the world. The mutation that happened, it was in New York and San Francisco in 10 days, and we saw it. Unless we help ourselves, and when I saw ourselves, I mean everywhere, everywhere, and everyone, we will open to solve it. So that’s how it started. And I have been a missionary, I have been talking and getting involved and leading companies that are in food manufacturing, trying to convince them that sort of affordable food should always be a priority, sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t win, and again, business has got its own rules and got its own sort of dynamics, I guess, and as a doctor, when you’re younger, you believe that you can truly make a change, and instead of when you’re a bit older, you understand that it’s a bit more difficult than one would think. Borealis journey was about seven eight years ago, as food science, this whole new category of food technology started. You know, as I was attending conferences and having meetings with thought leaders and businesses that were trying to figure out how to advance food science. I was absolutely fascinated by it. I was deeply into it, and by 2016 2017 I was convinced that food science would be the ecosystem that would essentially find a solution to affordable food, but what I realized was that food technology companies are very much science centric, so you have these truly very good scientists that are experimenting and sort of innovating fascinating science that even for me as a food scientist, when I listen and when I watch and when I see what has been achieved, it’s mind boggling. The problem to me, it was that we were not solving for problems that had an urgency to it, which is malnutrition today, and we were solving problems of the next probably five decades, unless food costs less than, I don’t know, 50 cents to make. Globally, you’re not affordable in making a $95 steak. Fascinating science out of plants, you know, it’s great to. Make these things, and I’m for it as a scientist, but I do not believe that that’s going to find a way to people’s homes anytime soon. 2023 a billion people, by UN statistics, had malnutrition. A billion people around the planet, Feeding America gives numbers, as in 44 million people last year went to food banks. So, malnutrition is a big deal, and is everywhere. Is not a problem only in the emerging world, is a problem right here at home, and in large cities, small cities everywhere. So, I could not find food companies that I had relationships with to have this as a priority, you know. Priority was science, science, science. Science decided that I’m going to build a company doing this, and Borealis, with my business partner, Bartel Miel, we talked quite a bit, hours and hours of discussions, which were mostly philosophical, as in, could this work, does this make sense, could we build a company that is food and science driven, but the focus is actually affordability, and we decided to do it, and Borealis Foods was founded in 2019

Maureen 5:57
so five years focus on malnutrition and affordability, because I don’t know what the number of people are living on an income of below $1 a day, but it’s still significant, right.

Speaker 2 6:10
Well, globally, a billion people have protein malnutrition. 820 million people, or 10% of the world population, goes to bed hungry. In the US, that number is about 44 million to 48 million people are protein malnourished, and why this is an issue, and why it is an issue for all of us, is that having weak immune systems in humanity would allow for pandemics to continuously happen. It creates an environment where for doctors and for health practitioners will be difficult to treat. We were lucky this time that we got the vaccines in time, and we were able to sort of manage this pandemic, but if we had not managed the pandemic, it would have been a lot different than what happened. So, I think that what is happening right now, if you just, just in our lifetime, just the past 10 years, we all are experiencing this rapid rise in prices of nutritious food. When I say nutritious, I mean high-quality protein, I mean enough fiber, I mean enough of unsaturated fat and good calories, and all this in combination to be affordable by an average family with kids, and that’s truly the challenge, you know. So today, even at the fast food restaurants around us, just look at the menus. Could you actually get a good solid meal for a family at a price that is truly affordable? Can we go to the supermarket and do this? So, at Borealis, you know, what we did was we got together with a bunch of food scientists and we said, can we make 20 grams of protein in a meal that was complete protein with all essential amino acids, and could we make it so that it is sold for less than, let’s say, $2 Could we do this as a meal? And the first product that we made, it would cost us about $14 to get it done. We thought this is a non-start, we just can’t do this. It was combination of food science of excellence in manufacturing, procurement, understanding how the world of food works, how retailers work, how food service functions, what happens in our school system, in the food, so we started studying the whole environment of where we have to play today. Borealis Foods, we make ramen noodles that have 20 grams of protein, and they’re sold at stores around the country for well below $2 and we have developed meals that would be available to the World Food Program for less than 70 cents and 80 cents with 20 grams of protein. I tell you,

Maureen 8:32
protein and noodles, I think of starch and noodles. So, what are the noodles made from? Because I come from the world of college students living on ramen noodles, at that point they weren’t protein filled,

Speaker 2 8:44
and that’s another interesting thing. So, as we’re looking at proteins, generally people look at protein as in, okay, let’s go and find a burger or steak or fish or chicken, and that’s the main source of protein, but in reality, humanity, 1000s of years, you know, one of the main sources of food that we’ve had has been bread, of course, and the protein in bread from the gluten was the protein, except the protein was not complete, so it did not have all the cigar amino acids, and hence we combined, and we had food by mixing a set of different food ingredients to make meals, and we thought to be affordable, we thought we could not do it with burgers, we could not do it with steaks, we could not do it, even we had a technology to bring protein together, but we were not able to get protein to be affordable when it was in the format of a steak or a burger, things like that. So we started experimenting with dough, and we thought, could we get dough to become high protein? Yeah, a lot of biochemists, lot of scientists came together studying molecular structures of dough and how doughs formed and all those scientific stuff that I’m not going to bore you with, and we thought we might be up to something here, and so what we did was we started experimenting with different grains and legumes to actually make a dough that would behave like a dough, but it was high protein, and that’s our patent, that’s our IP, and that’s what is the foundation of the Borealis science. So we developed the first high protein dough that behaves like a dough, and that’s already very difficult for those of us who make pizzas at home. We know that unless dough is soft and elastic, it is pretty much useless. Once the dough becomes a rock, then you can’t do much with it, right? So, for us, it was, you know, make it high protein, make it soft, and make it nice, and make it in a way that, you know, do things with it. So, once we developed this, we had a choice of should we make pasta or should we make pizza dough or should we make cookies or and we chose ramen noodles because we have global aspirations we think that the problem has to be solved globally and ramen noodles was the most consumed food on the planet 7 billion people consumed ramen we’d have to introduce a new sales type of food to anyone and the fact that we realized early on that it wasn’t only the formulation that would make it affordable, it was scaling from manufacturing perspective to be able to scale it, and so we developed the first high protein ramen, and the point was to get the experience to be a ramen, because all of us, when we’re in college, we had ramen, anywhere you go on the planet, you will see some kind of a noodle dish, it might not be ramen, but it’s a noodle dish, you know. So we focus very much on the palatability, experience, taste, flavor. We had, you know, Gordon Ramsay join us and bring his mind into this to make it even tastier, and to get the experience, you know. Well, and a lot of professionals who joined to make this happen. It wasn’t just basically food science again. The solution wasn’t just food science. The solution was a combination of food scientists, culinary scientists, chefs, you know, manufacturing experts. All of us came together, and the passion, the passion that was, was we must do our best to make it afford, you know. And that’s what is Borealis. The

Maureen 11:40
other piece that I haven’t heard, but I’m assuming you’re also accounting for, so you’ve got the food science to create the product, so innovation and product, and then the chefs to make it taste good, then you’ve got the manufacturing operation, then you’ve got a distribution, so you’ve got supply chain, and then you have marketing, so that customers around the world will choose this. Also, I’m assuming you’ve got a distribution system through food aid, or

Speaker 2 12:10
exactly all the things that you said. The way I look at building our organization is instead of set for a normal food tech company that innovation starts, that a scientist comes and says, I think I can invent a thing, and then you look for a home for it, you know. At Walmart, we did it the other way around. We did it as in there’s malnutrition, and this magnetism is a huge problem that I did not see people trying to solve. It, you know, when you look at the work for program, you will realize very soon that there’s nothing innovative in what Wolfer program does. Nothing innovative, I mean, all the food that they do is 50 years old. I mean, the technology and peanuts are a source of protein. This is ridiculous. In 2023 and on and on and on, right? You go to a food bank and you see what is available to them, and you’ll realize very soon that there’s no technology at all as a part of all its programs, and mostly because technology is so expensive. So we first found the reason why we should actually be helping and finding a solution, finding a product, and then we brought scientists who were told from day one that is not a question of what fun things you can create, can you guys get 20 grams of protein in a meal that would cost x amount to manufacture, food scientist very soon will tell you that well, I don’t know how it’s going to cost to feed 200 million people, but I’m telling you that based on Google search, if I add these ingredients, I will give you 20 years of protein, but I don’t know how it’s going to cost. This is how a scientist talks, and then when we sit down and put it together and they say that hey, this is not going to work out. So it was a combination of first finding the market, the demand for it, right. So, and the way I look at it is 44 million people went to food banks in 2023 in the US. There are 44 million people who would need protein, so that’s how I look at it. They can afford it, so I got to find a way for them to pay for it, whether they can pay for it, or USDA pays for it, or some donors pay for it, or someone’s going to pay for this, but we know for a fact that 44 million people actually need protein. When you go to the welfare program, or to Feeding America, or to World Central Kitchen, or any of these large organizations, you will soon realize in the first 20 minutes that you talk to any of their executives that there are hundreds of millions of people across different parts of the world that need protein, so we defined the problem first, and then we had the formulation done, and very soon we realized that it would take American manufacturing excellence to get the price down.

Maureen 14:34
Reza, you were talking about the problem you’ve solved first being the food science piece, now you move to manufacturing, and you’ve got to manufacture this for the cost that’s possible. So, operational excellence balanced with innovation. Can you talk a little bit about that manufacturing excellence?

Speaker 2 14:53
It’s quite interesting that, as scientists, I was not aware before this whole thing started that two. Get food to become affordable, it needs scale, and when we say scale, we mean scale at a global level. And what we decided to do was, we did research to see what part of the food category is they truly have advanced manufacturing know-how, and we realized that was the snack manufacturing, very low margins, high volume, high speed manufacturing, and managers and professionals who run our country’s snack world have done this for the past 100 years, and they have truly achieved excellence. So we went to them, and we said, “Okay, this is the story, this is what we need to do. It took us a long time. It took us three years to master this, but we mastered it. I mean, we are able to today produce 1800 meals a minute. That’s a lot of food. The reason why it takes 1800 meals a minute to have a factory make food is because if you don’t have the scale, you don’t have automation. If you don’t have automation, then you will not have the price point that you need, and when you go to the retail world, retail world is complicated, it’s highly mechanical, and it’s not like you can change it, you can’t go to any of these large retailers and say, hey, just make an exception for me, it’s a highly, highly mechanical supply chain, we realized what was the price point? How we had to get this on a shelf off a Walmart off one of these large retailers, and so we reverse engineered this into a price point, and then we brought these professionals to actually build a factory, and that’s how we did it.

Maureen 16:33
Do you have factories? You mentioned the US. Do you have factories around the world, or do you manufacture in the US and ship?

Speaker 2 16:40
Right now, we do everything out of South Carolina, but we expect that based on the demand that we’re seeing and how people are getting more and more excited, and more than retail, what’s exciting for us is humanitarian food program, they’re getting excited because now suddenly there’s a solution to this, so we will see what happens over the next one or two years, but yes, I believe that we would be building manufacturing infrastructure around the world.

Maureen 17:03
When we started, for our listeners, we were talking about the continent of Africa, and some of the food challenges there. It seems that having production closer to the humanitarian need at some point will significantly benefit the availability of that food.

Speaker 2 17:20
That is absolutely true, and that seems to be what makes sense in the next couple of decades, as in, instead of making food in one or two locations, instead of in the Western world, instead of getting on a ship and shipping it, it doesn’t make sense anymore, and more than this, to what we believe is going to be the solution, this is an American solution, because our source of protein, our source of flour, source of everything is US-made, is in the US for a US sort of environment. It would be impossible to do the same thing in Africa and expect the same results. So we believe that we would go locally and we would use local sources of legumes and grains, and we would use our science, the science of isolation, the science of concentration, the science of all those things, but we believe at Borealis that the solutions for source of ingredients needs to be local. Africa, as a continent, if you go north and south, you will see that there are grains that actually have enough protein in them that with our science we could potentially come up with meals at a high protein. The same thing works in India. The same thing would work in other sub-emerging worlds. So, I think that the science and the concept of producing and mass producing affordable, nutritious meals is the core of the business, but the actual ingredients would differ depending where you are.

Maureen 18:39
It seems that that also addresses food security and climate change to a degree. When you’re manufacturing locally rather than shipping, you’re not putting emissions in the world from the shipping process, and that using local food will also be more sustainable for each region in which you’re working.

Speaker 2 18:59
This is true, and here in the US, we are seeing changes in ingredients, for example, moisture levels in ingredients, because we’re seeing drought in different parts of our country. When we go to, let’s say, when we study what’s happening in India, Africa, or other regions, we have food leaders who tell me that they expect mass migration because of lack of water, you’re saying that many of these farmers are not able to get enough water to farm what they were farming, and obviously it’s very difficult for the world to manage mass migration. You cannot have cities move, so getting food there, we are studying to see, okay, if there are grains, so we might not be able to grow wheat for a flour mill where there’s no water, but there may be stronger grains available locally with less water, and then we would have to use our know-how to figure out how to make a dough out of it, and how do you make that dough turn into a meal that would keep the experience. We view food technology as the enabler for. Finding a solution for global food security, we are on that path, and we talk to everyone and anyone who’s willing to listen to us, that the solution is in food science, not in finding donors, is finding a way to make it more affordable.

Maureen 20:11
Let’s shift, since we’re a leadership podcast, to your leadership strategies. You started as a physician, moved into the space of food science, and yet you’re leading a global enterprise. What’s that leadership journey been like for you? Because you’ve been very successful, and it doesn’t sound like you’re a Harvard MBA.

Speaker 2 20:32
As far as building an organization the way we have built it, I believe that there’s magic in human ingenuity, and then there is logic, and I think that these two can coexist, but with logic and with rationale that comes out of science of management, science of accounting, science of finance, and science of economy. What you have is a group of people who are conservative who will not be able to take risks because of the fact that the science of economy, accounting, finance is to essentially mitigate and to manage risk to have magic happen. Human beings, when they get together and solve problems that maybe on day one they seem impossible. So, the way I have done it is that I’ve tried to surround myself with a lot of intelligent people who are brave enough to make mistakes, but they are people who are willing to think out of the box and sort of say yes. Today we do not know it, but I think that we can figure this out. This we can figure this out is a phrase that at Borealis we use it all the time. We get into a lab and this fails, the emulsification fails, the noodles fail, the dough failed, all the things that fail. It might be a result of several months of R and D, but still people come and say, “We’ll figure this out, we’ll figure this out. I think that magic is the sense of how we have done it. One

Maureen 21:54
of the things we talk about in the Leadership Institute is leaders having the mind of the scientist, and you just brilliantly describe that idea that we live in a world in which we don’t have answers to a lot of the complexities we face, and yet helping people truly shift to we’ll figure it out. Lots of people say that, but it sounds like you created that magic, and that’s hard to do in a science lab where we’ll figure it out, doesn’t necessarily match with the financial projections.

Speaker 2 22:25
We tell our team that expect our CFO to huff and puff, expect it. This is his job, he will huff and puff, but is your job to create magic? Is your job to figure this out? And it’s not only in the lab, it’s also in marketing, is also in sales, is also in distribution, all of it, because all of it is hard. Is not that there’s credit given to only a part of the organization. I mean, my job is to be in all these meetings and allow the magic to happen, and I think the magic happens when you allow them to be brave and allow them to make mistakes. What we see is that human beings together they create things that even surprise themselves. I’ve got groups of people who have done things that today they think they were crazy to even start it, including me. I mean, starting Borealis, it was a crazy journey. I mean, this should not have happened. We were listed last week on Nasdaq. Are you kidding me with this? So, it’s just that you know, when you look back, it takes crazy people to make things happen. I guess

Maureen 23:25
you mentioned Nasdaq, which means you’ve done an IPO. Tell us about that journey you’ve taken on going from physician Doctors Without Borders, building a food science company, manufacturing, now going public. That’s a whole nother set of skills, and managing a public company both gives you money and takes away some freedom.

Speaker 2 23:47
Yes, when we decided to do this was because we very soon realized that from building essentially a company that would innovate and be a niche market player that you would be selling, I don’t know, a few million dollars, or let’s say $100 million sort of revenue niche exclusive product to what could essentially fuel the future of humanitarian food programs that opened up a whole new world to us. I was on a panel at Stanford, and an Ambassador Earther and Cousin, who was the moderator, she used to run the Wolfram program for over eight years. She’s truly a thought leader. We started discussing these things and how food programs the world need help, and that help will be in the form of innovation of food science. And before that, I truly, when we started Borealis, was to find a solution in the retail world. That’s how we started.

Speaker 3 24:47
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Speaker 4 25:02
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Speaker 5 25:34
Welcome back to, uh, yeah, that’s a pepper thing. First up, we’ve got Harrison wrapping his Dr Pepper in a tiny quilt, so it feels at home. Oh, how tender. That’s a pepper thing. And over to Becca, who’s whispering affirmations to her can.

Speaker 6 25:48
You’re sweet, you’re unique, you’re the best thing I ever poured over ice.

Speaker 5 25:51
She swears it makes it taste better. It’s not a science thing, but it’s a pepper thing. Why do they all do it? All for that sweet, delicious, truly one of a kind taste of Dr Pepper. It’s a pepper thing,

Speaker 2 26:03
but then suddenly a world opened to us that was unlimited in size, seems like it’s growing unfortunately in double digits. I mean, we had mass migration, we had deficiency of protein that was just going global, and post-pandemic things had gone all crazy with the price of food and inflation in everything else, so that’s when we thought, okay, there is no way that we can afford this. There’s no way that we could raise capital from private equity and VCs, and this is a scale that would require a whole new types of investors and a global approach to this, and we decided to go public on NASDAQ, and we find NASDAQ where people like us feel at home, you know, these are people who are innovators, a little bit crazy, and they think that, hey, if there are people around the world who would like to be part of the journey, they should be able to come and join us. So that’s why we decided to go public to have access to capital and to allow like-minded people to join us, because you know, when you’re a private company, you have access to your own rolodex and possible rolodex of people around you, and that’s quite limited when you’re in the US, and you’re doing this, but we now realize how we think there are people around the world who think this way, there are investment houses who think this way, and there are more and more high net worth individuals and family offices who are choosing to invest in companies that make a difference truly have a noble mission. So that was the reason why we went public, and we chose Nasdaq, and we just started, so it’s all happening in real time. I guess

Maureen 27:31
it’s really exciting. So now let’s build on that. Now that you have the capital and sustainability, how do you impact the food industry in the future, and one of the things that’s on my mind is this idea of mass migration, where the locations people inhabit 10 and 20 and 50 years forward will look different than the cities of today.

Speaker 2 27:54
In the world of food, we are a small company in the context that we are innovators, and we are a company that would be catalysts, I believe, for larger companies to start thinking that maybe they should also get their businesses at least have part of the business think this way. When you study large multinationals, have a business to run, hundreds of 1000s of jobs are at stake. This is a very complex global network of supply chain that is making the world go round, so it’s not like they could do things the way a startup does, and I don’t think anybody expects it. But what I believe that is going to happen is that there will be these discussions at R and D meetings at large multinationals. There will be these sorts of discussions to be had at the board levels of these large companies, and I know today they’re talking about it, as in, how to become more affordable, how to take out sugar, why do we need to have saturated fat in this, can we get our protein level higher and cheaper, and they have the financial means, they have the know-how, and it’s just that they need to have the will and to want to do this, so I think if Borealis, if we can be a catalyst to some of these changes, it would be great for us, and we will do our best as much as possible, as quickly as possible, to sort of have an impact as much as we can. It

Maureen 29:13
sounds like impact is both direct, the things you do in Borealis, and then indirect in how you impact the food industry, and also then the pressure that comes back on the food industry, either from consumers like me, who say, of course, I want to eat healthy, and I want as much as possible a climate-neutral kind of food that still tastes good, and from humanitarian organizations, the pressure back to we have to have affordable food, because people are starving. So it seems like the offer you’re making to the food industry can loop back and create a virtuous loop in several different angles.

Speaker 2 29:54
It takes a couple of retailers that start carrying you, because when they put you on a shelf. It means that they need to open some space from some incumbent, some very large multinational, to open space for a startup like us. You know, when you’re small, it doesn’t move the dial for them, but at some point someone is getting a call saying that what happened in that market, and that’s just normal course of business. And I think that, based on just laws of the market, they will start innovating, and when you study the food category, and I’ve been a student of this for the past 25 years. When you go to the emerging world, it’s very bad food, because they want it to be cheap, so therefore low quality, and therefore you have issues of malnutrition. The emerging world, you come to the Western world, and you study it, and you see there’s too much sugar, and there is too much fat, not enough protein, and the quality of protein is low. There are problems in the rich world and in the not very rich world today. When you look at Gen Z’s and the Gen vision alphas, and you see what is being taught in schools, when I was 20 years old, and I was in college, I never read the nutritional facts, I didn’t know what, how much protein anything, I never thought about protein, I just had ramen and pizza, and that was it, and I just went and did my exams, and today you have people having conversations on Instagram and TikTok and on Twitter or X, and talking about, hey, did you see that product that has got high protein, so people are buying 20 year olds are buying high protein nutshakes and high protein, and they look at fat and palm oil, and consumers today are different to consumers 20 years ago at the same age, and I think that consumers will ask for this and will force all of us to change as the food industry players.

Maureen 31:36
It looks like you are carried by Amazon, so one of the largest distributors in the world, you’ve got quote space on the shelf, while you may not be at my local grocery store, I could still get access to you pretty much any place in the US, right?

Speaker 2 31:52
Yeah, coast to coast, US, Canada, Mexico, we have been lucky enough, fortunate enough that all the retailers, they have decided to carry product like this, and, and I’m quoting right now, most of them think that there are consumers who are looking for it, and this product didn’t exist, and now it exists. Ramen is consumed on a weekly basis by most of us, I mean, especially the demographics of younger than 4040-five, years of age. You know, when you go to that demographics, I mean, ramen is a part of life, and one thing that’s been interesting for us is that the gatekeepers, who they call them in the category in the industry, buyers, right? So buyers are as human as all of us. When you go and talk to them, there is the angle of them representing a major retailer, whoever they might be, but then there is their human aspect. So when I go for a meeting with them, and I try to talk to them, I tell them, as a friend, this is a high protein noodles, please try it, you should be eating this because of the in the following attributes, and it becomes very, very human, and our success in distribution, our success in the retail world, our success in the work, in the humanitarian food programs has been that human element we all eat and we all really want one of the best for our families. And post Covid, post pandemic, we all have a different sense of humanity. We all understand that malnutrition is going to impact someone in Africa or Asia or anywhere else. It will get to us, so it’s not only the mass migration that people talk about on the news every day. When you watch the news, I think mass migration is a thing, right? It’s highly critical, and whatever, but I think there were enough discussions during the pandemic about weak immune systems and mutation, and this mutation happened in XYZ country, and and now we found the same mutant in the US, and as humanity, we have a new sense of we either solve the problem altogether for the planet, or we will all suffer.

Maureen 33:48
Back to the, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. It’s true in business, it’s true in humanity, as people are dying, and trying to draw the link between, we actually should care that people are dying, right? It’s not just the weak ones get out of our way, so we can be prosperous, but those weak ones are someone’s children or someone’s mother, and they have contributed, and they will contribute should they be allowed to thrive.

Speaker 2 34:14
How many times we all heard during the pandemic that our friend did not leave the house and go anywhere, they were careful with the mask on and vaccinated, and they still got sick, and that mutation could have been a mutation that would have happened in a body of another human being anywhere on the planet who had a weak immune system that could not control the virus the way it should have. The world of pharma is a solution. We, as humanity, survived 10s of 1000s of years because we were stronger than the other animals, because our immune systems were stronger, because of many other reasons like this. So, malnutrition, to me, my view as a doctor, and my view as a food scientist, and now I happen to be at Borealis. Is that malnutrition needs to be at rest. It doesn’t cost that much in relative terms, I mean, in the context of what we’re spending globally on other things. I think malnutrition would be, you know, should be treated. The world of food science would have the solutions to it. The world of manufacturing excellence that in the US we have mastered, we have mastered. I have been a part of this. There are managers who have done miraculous jobs in running high speed manufacturing. There are machine makers and machinists who have automation that can do this. We have what it takes. We just need to all come together and say, is this what we want to solve? Is this the problem that we all want to solve or not? And I think that that we all do

Maureen 35:42
solving a health problem through food before it becomes a health care problem seems wise and significantly more cost effective.

Speaker 2 35:51
Absolutely, changing the rhetoric from fighting hunger to fighting malnutrition seems to be a right way of putting it, so that we all relate to it. Imagine someone was lost during the hiking exercise, and now they were hungry after two weeks. Would you give them sugar? No, you want to give them, and the doctor will first give them protein, because you don’t want the surge in their insulin. You don’t want all those things that would happen with a glycemic index. You would give them protein, for example. So, giving hungry people cheap food that is simple carb, give them sugar, sugar, sugar. You’re not solving a problem, all you’re doing is making them more hungry in about 45 minutes. When I go and talk to humanitarian food programs, is that let’s not fight hunger, let’s fight malnutrition, you know. So, you and came up with the statistics of 820 8 million people go hungry every night global. So, I asked the question, how many people are malnourished globally, not hungry, but malnourished? That number, based on what’s there, is over a billion or 1.2 billion people. That’s more dangerous to me than hunger. Hunger, have empathy for malnutrition, I’m concerned about, and I would like have us starting that whole conversation

Maureen 37:01
that seems like a crucial distinction, so then can you share a specific example of a project or initiative at Borealis that exemplifies your vision for the future of food science, and specifically, how are these projects helping address malnutrition versus hunger,

Speaker 2 37:21
as we watched the conflict, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Middle Eastern conflict, and all these things happening, we reached out to these organizations like World Central Kitchen, Global Empowerment Mission, and all these organizations that are on the front lines. We are a food company in South Carolina, and then there are these fabulous organizations that have created this distribution platforms that go the last mile, which is the hardest. Imagine someone is distributing food in Ukraine, and so we had conversations with them, and we said, “Okay, we can help. We would like to help, and we have the food to help. That was the first time that I think they heard from someone saying that, “Hey, what you would like to do is to give them enough protein, so that you don’t have widespread disease hitting these communities, bombing people, and getting that on the news all the time is news, and is a thing that is happening, but once you have large scale disease, and where suddenly you have people who have no access to clean water are exposed to organisms, and they have a weak immune system. You can’t get worse than this. This is what kills communities. And so we ship 20,000 meals to Global Empowerment Mission, that is on its way to conflict zones. Right, again, we do not know where it goes, because we supply their warehouses in the US, but I think that now the global humanitarian food programs are taking notice. Now they understand that. Oh, so I can pick up food that is high in protein, that has got a year of shelf life, and is less than $1 I can pick it up from a factory here, put it on a ship, and I can have millions of meals shipped in a matter of days, that’s where I say excellence in manufacturing matters, distribution matters, warehousing matters, and attributes of the product matters. You know, all of this combined makes this a possibility. And I think that we’ve just started, and we have many, many humanitarian food leaders taking notice and helping us, and they’re helping us, because to me it seems like they knew what was needed, they just didn’t know how to get it, and now we’re telling them that we are able and willing. I’m thinking of how inspirational this is. How inspirational you are for people like me who would like to be conscious in our shopping. If I buy the brand Borealis does that fund the humanitarian work. The brand is Chef Wu, so this company is Borealis, but the brand we are branded as a chef of Wu Ramen, and for that purpose we are doing a joint effort with Feeding America Today and Sam’s Club. This is launched in April, so this is. A feeding America led campaign called Fight Hunger Spark Change. So, this is a campaign by Feeding America, and it’s going to be at stores nationally at Sam’s Club. And this was our first national campaign that Sam’s Club was kind enough to agree Feeding America is their program, and we were willing, and so that is the first national effort by us getting protein, so there is us and Sam’s Club and Fiddin America together. So we would want to see what happened. You want to see would people go in and pick up these meals, and for everything that they buy, part of the proceeds actually go to Fiddam America, but maybe people will just buy it and go and donate this to the local food bank, or to whoever is hungry, or whatever, you know, spark change, you know, that’s the whole point. I was having conversation with one of the executives at Feeding America, and I was telling them, I said that, you know, what we need to do is to truly spark change and let people understand that by giving good food to the local food bank, empathy is one thing, but you’re helping yourself. This is actually a highly selfish act of wanting the whole country’s immune system to become better. Not having hungry people around the country is not a selfless act, it’s a selfish act, in my opinion, because we are creating environments where there’ll be less disease, there’ll be less of many, many other things. So that’s the conversation, which I’m sure that you’re having here regularly on your show, but we should just think a little bit differently.

Maureen 41:24
I love the thought leadership nature of identifying a problem, and then bringing together all of the disparate resources, from food scientists to chefs to manufacturers to a good CFO to factory automation to working with humanitarian organizations, all of that takes a broad range of tools, and I’m curious, what your leadership team looks like, because this is a complex organization with lots of reinforcing loops, and that doesn’t happen by accident.

Speaker 2 41:59
I’m the youngest in our senior team, which means that everybody else is more experienced than me. Everyone has done more things than me, and they have done it in the real world, you know. They have been a part of really large organizations, and they understand what excellence means. And every single executive who has joined me, Devin joined it because of me as a person, or the money that comes with it, or because it doesn’t, because you’re a startup, but it’s the journey, and as the fact that when you have over 30 experiences in executive today, and I said it’s from experience from people around me, you know, they could get a job anywhere, but this is not a job, they want to go home and think that they were part of change, this was a journey, and we always joke around, you know, when we get a new account or a new sort of a challenge that we have solved, we tell each other in the evenings, you know, yeah, this is another story for our nursing home days, it’s just that I did this as well, and this was fun, so the team is quite senior, quite passionate, and they actually believe in the journey because it’s so human,

Maureen 43:01
I love the idea of strengthening immune systems, stops disease, feeding people, addressing malnutrition also stops someone before they get to a healthcare and sickness status. For the billion people who are malnourished, which is over 10% of the world’s population, there’s a huge value proposition, one in aiding suffering, but also in creating a healthy species that can thrive during climate change, and the challenges we face right now. Do you have beyond people like you, follow you, and support your mission? Is there something that you have as an ask for our listeners

Speaker 2 43:43
thinking less about climate change and political conflicts and things like this being sad stories and end all and thinking a little bit differently as in we were given this planet with certain things on it that’s not gone anywhere so it’s not like there are things from the planet that’s gone somewhere else it’s just they’ve moved. We can figure this out for sure. We can figure out how to feed eight to 10 billion people on the planet, because the elements of it are on the planet. It takes a little bit of scientific focus and getting these experiences that we’ve had as human beings around the planet to sort of make it happen, but I believe that yes, we could make it happen, and I think that, especially for the audience of your show, who are generally thought leaders and people who make things happen, just putting the world’s problems in a, in the, in the right context, as in, how do we prevent, how do we put things in order, you know, mass migration, nobody wants to leave their home, they’re leaving their homes because there was no water, or there was conflict, so if we can find ways of people to stay at home and find ways, scientific ways of having a good life for them, I can assure you they would not leave. Looking at the world a little bit differently would help us all. One

Maureen 44:52
of the conversations we had years ago, but it so stuck with me was Mike Hardy, who ran a piece in. Institute, and he said the one thing people take when they leave their homes as refugees is their house key. They’re leaving with every desire to go home. They’re not refugees trying to invade you, they’re refugees who want nothing more in most cases than to return to their home and have a thriving life. To your point, creating those opportunities seems crucial. On

Speaker 2 45:23
Friday, I was in a meeting, and one of the executives was originally from Rwanda, who works for the UN, and he’s older now. But when he was younger, he was telling me that he was a part of a refugee camp. You know, I was telling him about his noodles, and he said, you know, I wish this was there in the camp, because we were hungry and doesn’t cost that much, they gave us maize or palm oil. What are you gonna do with it? I mean, how are we gonna cook? We’re like kids and children, you know. And he was saying that if we could have means like this available to us, then it would be, you know, less. And so people who are escaping conflicts, they will escape conflicts, but people who are escaping lack of water and lack of food, they do not have to.

Maureen 46:06
On that note, for a more hopeful future. Thank you so much, Reza. How would people follow you and follow Borealis and the brands?

Speaker 2 46:15
Chef Fu Ramen is on Instagram, so they can go on Instagram. Chef Ramen,

Maureen 46:20
thank you. It’s been such a joy to hear about the impact and the inspiration that you bring to the world in a time where it’s easy to feel disenchanted with challenges we see. So, thank you for bringing that spark of inspiration.

Speaker 2 46:38
Thank you, Maureen. Thank you for all you do. And thank you. And this show is a great show.

Maureen 46:41
Thank you, thank you to our listeners. Please continue to like us, follow us, and by Chef Wu Ramen, you

Speaker 3 47:02
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Speaker 4 47:32
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Speaker 5 48:04
Welcome back to, uh, yeah, that’s a pepper thing. First up, we’ve got Harrison wrapping his Dr Pepper in a tiny quilt, so it feels at home. Oh, how tender, that’s a pepper thing. And over to Becca, who’s whispering affirmations to her can.

Speaker 6 48:18
You’re sweet, you’re unique, you’re the best thing I ever poured over ice.

Speaker 5 48:21
She swears it makes it taste better. It’s not a science thing, but it’s a pepper thing. Why do they all do it? All for that sweet, delicious, truly one of a kind taste of Dr Pepper. It’s a pepper thing.