As an entrepreneur, are you making an impact in the world? Kimberlie Le knew that she wanted to build something that could leave a legacy to the world at a young age. Both her parents are entrepreneurs, and she grew up aiming to change people’s lives for the better. In this episode, she shares how everyone can embrace and love delicious, flavorful, and nutritious plant-based foods. Through her years in the food industry, she found that some more flavors and textures can be found in plants, and some provide more nutrients than meat. She aims to make positive changes in the global food system as co-founder and CEO of Prime Roots. 

—

Listen to the podcast here

A Healthy And Nutritious Meat For All With Kimberlie Le

I’m excited. We are going to be talking to Kimberlie, and I’m going to let her do the introductions. Before I do, a couple of things to shout out. We will be announcing a lot more coming up on TIG. Exciting initiatives are an Advisory Collective, which is a unique way to try to bring brands and entrepreneurs closer to advisors and also create a path for advisors. Specifically, advisors who are women or minorities who want an opportunity to grow into that type of role and find themselves onboard. More to come on that.

On July 1st, 2022, we will officially be launching the Tardigrade Ventures, a fund earmarked for our TIG Brands community at early-stage smart earmarked investments. More of that but two exciting initiatives that we have in place. Everyone knows the drill. Opportunity to ask lots of questions. I’m going to kick it over to Kimberlie and let her introduce herself and her brand. We get to spend some time together at Expo West. I’ve got to sample her products as a whole food plant-based vegan. It’s one of the few analogs that I can chow down on and do. Kimberly, share and tell us a little bit about you, the brand, and your journey.

Thanks for having me here. My name is Kim. I’m the Cofounder and CEO of Prime Roots. I am a daughter of a chef and a meat eater and lover. We are a team of 30. The vast majority of us are also meat eaters and lovers. What we are creating is a whole line of koji meats that are made for us, so people who eat meat that wants to eat less meat. The products are vegan and vegetarian friendly as well. What we do is make koji meats. “What is koji meat?” You are probably asking.

You better tell what koji meat is.

Koji is a Japanese fungi. It’s used traditionally in the process of making miso and soy sauce. It’s responsible for creating these umami-rich condiments that we know and love. Instead of growing the koji on soybeans, we grow the koji in liquid fermentation, similar to beer brewing. We are able to grow koji and these long fibers that are the same shape and size as animal muscle fiber. How I came about the idea and thought about it was I was at UC Berkeley studying microbiology. I’m obsessed with things that you can’t see.

I have a long history in the culinary world, so I learned about the problem of animal agriculture, and how heavy and intensive it is on our planet. I wanted to find a better solution while most people out there are using plant-based and ultra-processed plant proteins that go through hexane extraction and extrusion. Also, these products, to me as a meat-eater, didn’t taste good and tasted plant-like or mushy in texture. I wanted to make something better for myself and people like me.

We are meat eater-centric with a perspective of trying to reimagine how we can make better cuts of meat so that people of all different types of eaters can come together to enjoy something that tastes good, that has high integrity, and is also a high-quality product. The koji is a whole food protein. It’s not processed the way that traditional plant-based proteins are. You are still eating the whole fiber. It’s high in protein and has fiber. We are able to balance the fat and the salt content and truly make a better kind of meat, which is our tagline. That’s me and Prime Roots in a nutshell.

I will tell you some direct experiences sitting at a table with true omnivores. We were eating the product and everyone enjoyed it. That’s the beauty of it. It wasn’t just me going, “This is a cool proximate.” It was good food. A couple of things that jump up. First of all, you are taking on deli meat. Why that space?

Where we are applying koji is at the deli counter, behind the glass in bulk format. If you go to a local grocery and get the product sliced by the pound, it’s not prepackaged, and there are a lot of other deli meat options out there. We’ve gone out there, this experiential part of the grocery store so that people can interact with the food and interact with people who proudly serve and take in products that are high quality, taste good, and have those conversations.

Also, personal motivation. I grew up going to the deli as a kid. I finally remember being 3 or 4 walking into a Safeway and getting free slices of Black Forest ham and that would be the routine every single week. Everybody knew me and knew that I wanted a slice of Black Forest ham. My favorite product that we make is our Black Forest ham because it’s reminiscent of my childhood. We are able to make the deli meats without a lot of the bad stuff in deli meats.

Most people don’t need to be educated on the fact that deli meats are full of preservatives, nitrates, hormones, antibiotics, and lots of salt. There’s not much priming that needs to happen in the category, so it truly is better from the get-go. I love that because it’s a lot easier than replacing a steak or chicken breasts, which is emotional. As a meat-eater, I would make a simple deli swap much easier than replacing my steak. I don’t eat much steak, but if I’m going to have a steak, I don’t necessarily want a vegan one.

Steak or chicken is a true center of the plate where deli meat is always combined with each other accouterments. Most people inherently understand what under that glass is not ideal for what goes in. The other question I wanted to ask is, going back to starting at Berkeley and now having a team of 30. Could you even conceive of that when you first started thinking, “I want to explore koji. It sounds like something I could do. Cool,” to, “Holy shit, I’ve got 30 people on the team, and I’m running a true startup with a lot of people watching me.”

I’m such a builder and thinking about what’s next. Part of that journey is surrounding myself with an amazing team and people who can help to build. We are all mission-driven. Most of us are meat-eaters but we are all motivated to do better for the planet and to do better for people. We are a tight-knit team. My vision from day one has been to become a large meat player, not necessarily thinking about, “We are going to be a burger company or a baking company.”

We have always known that koji can build so much. We are starting with a deli but my goal as an entrepreneur, which is why I have fallen in love with tardigrades, is to build something that outlasts myself. I say this all the time to my team and prospective investors. It is about building something that has a ton of value monetarily. More importantly, why I do this every day and I’m excited to put in the long hours and this is my entire life is because of the impact we make with every pound of meat that we sell is large.

In 2021, we did a life cycle assessment with a third party that came in to look at our process end to end and quantify what the impact we were making is relative to meat. We know that we are so much better, 90% to 99% better on water use, land use, and energy usage, then we save 9 kilograms of CO2e per pound sold. We are doing our part. My generation feels a great duty to leverage our skills and our time to do better.

It has to be something that when you take two seconds to slow down and think about got to feel good and proud. When did you wake up and go, “I am an entrepreneur?” Did you always see yourself as entrepreneurial or was that something you suddenly had the recognition of like, “I’m a builder and I’m an entrepreneur?”

I caught the entrepreneurial bug from my parents. My parents are both entrepreneurs. They are both former CEOs, so I grew up in this environment. I have always known that I wanted to do something by myself and build something. They are leaving a legacy and it’s not necessarily tied to my name or anything. I don’t have a big ego. I don’t care about the recognition. A lot of people will say, “You are going to be rich.” I don’t care about that. I truly care about the impact that I make with my time.

I used to be a professional snowboarder. We traveled the world snowboarding and wanted to go to the Olympics. We jump off cliffs and do crazy stuff. I always knew we would say, “YOLO, You Only Live Once.” Something switched when I was in school and internalized it, I was like, “I only live once, so I need to apply myself fully and make the most of my time, and then the time I have left on this planet.” The mantra I live by is YOLO.

If you were to compare the two in terms of which one did you see more fraught with risk, being a professional snowboarder or being an entrepreneur?

Being an entrepreneur is probably way riskier. They are both risky in different ways but entrepreneurship is hard. It doesn’t matter how you slice it.

Is that pun intended?

No. Entrepreneurship is hard. There are a lot of “overnight successes” and people will talk about how great everything is. It doesn’t matter how great everything seems on the outside. It is difficult to grow something from the ground up. It is also special. It’s an experience that builds a ton of character and teaches you a lot about the world. I was starting my PhD and dropped out of school. I say this all the time to my cofounder, “I feel like we have five PhDs in the five years that we have been building this company,” because every year that company evolves, and every year, we learn so much about something specific. It has been a great journey.

It is important for everyone to know that clearly. It is hard. Even success is hard. You take it to bed every night. It’s the first thing you think about every morning when you get up. You’re always with our two favorite constant companions, fear and doubt, and all of that stuff. For you with a growing staff and all of that, you’ve also found yourself in this role now being a leader and that’s a different role. There’s being a builder and an entrepreneur but then there’s being a leader and making sure everybody is involved in the project. The business sees your vision and feels the same level of commitment and enthusiasm. Let’s dive into that. How has that been for you? How has that lesson been about, “I’ve got to be a leader now, too.”

It’s a nonlinear path, I can tell you that. It’s not like one day you become a leader or that’s the majority of your job. I was looking back. A year ago, I was on the manufacturing floor helping the team produce food and figure stuff out. I used to make the products and develop recipes. They haven’t been on the bench for two years at this point. I haven’t been on the manufacturing floor for a year-plus at this point. It’s natural transitions that happen over time as the team expands and as you get to help.

I have always known that as part of the job. With the seasons and where the lifecycle of the businesses is, I have always embraced the change. If I had not been ready for it and known that it was coming, it would have been much more difficult. I embrace the motions, I call it. When a new hire comes, you get to hand off stuff, which means I get to focus or learn something new.

Hopefully, as we wrap up a fundraising round, I will be able to dedicate my time to being strategic and leading the organization where I want things to be. I’m excited to get there. I’m still a little bit in the weeds and I love it but I’m also excited for the next chapter, which is fully leading and doing strategy and hiring, getting great people on the team, and making sure we have money as an organization, too.

What have you learned about yourself in this journey? It has been a remarkable opportunity for myself to do a little bit of introspection and say, “There are things I didn’t know that I had in me and things that I wish I did.”

I have learned that I need to trust myself more and express my vision. Not more articulately but unwavering from the vision and the conviction that I have. With that being said, I have an amazing team. There are areas and spaces where I will step out of the way. I am much of the opinion and the believer. I follow the philosophy of disagreeing but committing. That is important. There are areas of the business where I have that final say and even if people disagree with me, they still commit.

Likewise, if I have deferred responsibility or given something to somebody, I will do the same. Even as a CEO and a founder, you can have veto power but sometimes you have to let the team fail to learn. Sometimes you have to fail to learn, too. That has been something that has been a learning process. It is painful sometimes when you see that something is going to fail. As long as it’s not catastrophic and the learnings will be greater, then disagree then commit.

What do you know now that you wish you had when you started this journey?

Two things, hire help sooner. I have heard it might be as a female CEO-founder thing. I always would feel bad about asking for help or having other people help and do things with and for me. I would hold onto things for a long time because I didn’t want people to do either “the dirty work” or just didn’t want the help. I would have embraced help much earlier. Our first hire probably next time around would be somebody that would help do all the things that were not my area or zone of geniuses. That’s important and that’s something I definitely would do looking back. That’s the main one, embrace the help.

I hear that more often when I ask that question. It’s one of those terrifying things. You don’t want to spend the money, you don’t want to give up the things, and you feel like, “I can get it through and push myself.” I do see and hear it more frequently from female founders than I do from men but still men as well. It’s not only the reluctance for help but it’s the belief, “I can get this done faster and do it better.”

I always encourage people, especially entrepreneurs in the earlier days, to keep an ongoing list. I still do this myself and this is 30-plus years now. I feel like there are days where I’m drained and so forth to realize there’s a reason and that’s because I’m doing too much of the things that are lower value activities for me, that aren’t me manifesting the best version of myself. I keep that list down when I do those kinds of activities.

I look through that list every once in a while and I start putting plans together. Can I outsource them? Can I find somebody else to do them? Do they need to even be done? That type of thing. Sometimes the honest answer is, “I would love to get this off my plate but I can’t justify the expense now and maybe when we reach this.” At least have a light at the end of the tunnel for some of those things.

Being able to take a step back from the business and not be in the day-to-day is valuable. Every single key strategic change and shift those businesses made for the better has been one, I have been able to take a step back and think and stroll through the aisles of a grocery store. Be inspired and remember why we are doing this and not just grind hard every day.

The other addition to that and I want to get your perspective on this, is that the founders of a business are its most important asset. We talked about everything else. Going back to that manifestation, you and your cofounder showing up every day and manifesting the best version of yourself is the best way to help Prime Roots, the business, and the brand grow. Sometimes that’s hard to do. What are some of the things that you have learned that you need to do to nourish yourself, self-care, and make sure that you are showing up? Do you still suck at it at this stage or a little bit of both?

I say a little bit of both. I’ve gotten better. It takes hard work to build a business. I don’t subscribe to the four-hour workweek or any of these outsource stuff. We build food businesses and it is difficult. We need to put in the hours. I remember years ago, I would sleep underneath my desk at work. I would take a call from the ER. It’s bad things that I probably wouldn’t do today. Now I have some time off on the weekends and it’s still difficult. I try to cook once in a while because I love food and that’s what makes me happy. I have a long list of things that I would love to do if I had time but I don’t have time. I will get better. I have taken a few weekends. That has been a good start, too.

When was the last time you went snowboarding?

Months ago, it has been a while but the snow has been non-existent.

I will give you the snow excuse. A few months is a better answer than I thought I was going to get from you.

I try to take weekend trips and stuff like that. As the business grows, it will get a little bit easier as well.

I’m going to call a little bit of bullshit on that for everyone reading because I hear that all the time. When the business grows a little bit, I will let a little more people in. Everyone reading, I’m going to preach for a second, everyone needs to take the time to do this. The psychology of it sometimes is, “I’m being selfish or I’m spending time away from the business that can’t be spent away from the business,” and so forth.

I promise you can think about where your best ideas have happened when those moments of clarity occur. It’s not when you are sitting at your desk, crunching through your emails, and spreadsheets or talking to your teammates. It is usually when you are cooking, on the snow, or a walk, chilling out or doing whatever. It’s because you are giving your mind that time to open. It’s imperative to do it.

Plus, the only way your team gets better as you build a team is to give them the autonomy of you not being there and giving them that space. I’m not just saying that to Kim, I’m saying that to everybody reading, it’s important, especially as founders and CEOs of businesses, that what got you there were your innovative thought processes. What got you there was your passion and your different take on problem-solving. If you don’t give yourself those serendipitous moments for those things to happen again and again, then you are robbing the business of some of its magic. Off my soapbox.

That’s an important message. It is difficult to do but once you start, it isn’t too bad or once you take a step back, you are like, “The world didn’t fall down.”

I fully admit that I still struggle sometimes to practice what I preach. I have been doing this for a long time. I’m in my mid-50s. I’m still learning how to be better at letting go. As we are doing this show, I’m coming back from having one of our teammates, Jenny, and her kids with us for a week of spring break. We did a good job of disconnecting from work.

Some of it was completely non-work-related, fun out there exploring steam, letting them experience some of the cool things around Northern California like Yosemite and so forth. Some of it was these moments of, “This is a cool idea because we are walking in the woods and talking.” It’s important and a good memory. Do it.

Switching gears because I know the questions have come in a lot have been around fundraising and you have been on that journey now for quite a while. You raised a fair amount of money pre-revenue and you have done all of those kinds of things. Share some of the things that you have learned, the good, the bad, and the ugly around raising funds in this crazy time in this crazy industry.

Racing money like building a business is hard. I get a lot of people asking me this because we have raised a fair amount of money. We have needed all the money because we spent about three years doing basic research and understanding koji and through being an R&D organization instantly. We needed the capital upfront. Anyone who can leverage a small like friends and family or Angel around to be able to kickstart your business and bootstrap things, I would do that. Money always comes with strings. There is no free lunch except on that primary route if you come by to visit us. It’s tough when to take money because there’s pressure to grow and scale fast.

Even with the amount of money we have raised, we have always optimized for finding the best partners, first and foremost, before thinking about the capital. We have been in a privileged position. We have turned away more capital than we have raised at every single round that we have raised. We have been able to be choosy and picky with who we bring on. Who you bring on makes a bigger difference than how much you raise because a bad board member can take your morale and the company’s morale, and generally, it’s not good for the business.

I want to come back to morale because that’s a question here in the Q&A. I don’t want you to put yourself in a position where you are talking about any investors you said no to. In general, what are you looking for as an investor? How do you know when they are the right kind of partner? How do you know when they are not?

The other side of getting investors to put money in you is that it is worse than marriage from the perspective of you cannot get divorced. It’s a long-term commitment. If you don’t like the people you are working with, if you can’t see yourself respecting this person or being friends with this person, not being friends with them, if you don’t like them, that is probably a good sign that it’s not going to be a good fit.

I treated a lot of job interviews trying to find someone to bring onto your team. They have to share the same values as you. They have to believe in where you are going. It’s not just money for money’s sake. As much as investors are interviewing you and trying to see if it’s a good investment, we do a ton of interviewing the investors as well.

Understanding who they are, what their motivations are, their fund and how they were, where the money comes from, and what the motivations are. First and foremost, the person who prospectively may join your board or may call you a lot and you may lean on, do you even want to be affiliated or associated with this person? It’s a big thing, too.

To put it more bluntly, you have stood no asshole rule and that’s fine. That’s the way it should be. It’s terrifying sometimes to say no to money because you are always worried that it is the last money you are going to see but it’s rarely the last money. Going back to your first couple of pitches to this round now and how you communicate, what have you learned along the way about talking to investors and helping them understand why Prime Roots is the place they should be investing?

It has been an interesting round. It’s a growth round for us. It’s a little bit different than a lot of the earlier rounds. In the past, it has been solely on vision and in some product and traction but this round it is about where we are going. Having a full conviction in where we are going and understanding through and through the strategy and how the business operates and will operate at scale has been the most important thing.

We have taken a lot of time to know everything from putting together materials. Making sure all of our ducks are in a row has been tremendously helpful. We made sure that we hit all the milestones and knew what we were asking for. We made sure we had everything in line. Let’s help this race be not necessarily smoother but less about convincing someone that they need to give money to me per se.

It’s like a person that has been more about the engine that I felt and that we are able to and we will be able to scale quickly with the funds that we will be getting. The vision, team, and where we are going are important but it’s more of a puzzle piece than just a singular, “I have a dream and please give me money.”

What was that first pitch like to non-friends and family when it was just like, “I have this dream.” It’s because you didn’t have the clarity around the deli. What was that like and how did you sell that dream? How did you make it so compelling?

It was knowing the end state. I have always wanted to build a company that outlasts myself. I have always known that I wanted to build something after this koji platform that could make all different types of protein. It started with the end in mind to make the impact that we need to make as a business for the planet, we need to be big. We also need to grow sustainably.

Having that end in mind and not necessarily saying, “I’m going to start with this and that,” and being upfront with our early investors and saying, “We are going to figure it out. We are scientists. We are entrepreneurs. We are going to iterate. We are going to test. We are going to be methodical about it, who’s going to be based on data and what’s needed and off our feelings.” Knowing what you don’t know is helpful because if you go out and sell a crazy pie, the high sky dream, people can see through it. We are realistic and on Earth and that helped us a lot in the beginning.

You are remarkably low key unassuming but also come across as extremely confident in yourself and the business. Have there been times when you felt like you were struggling with Impostor syndrome? Are there times when that doubt, the chorus of it was so loud that it was almost overwhelming? Did you always believe clearly in this division and what you are capable of doing with coaching and as a builder?

I wish I had a good Impostor syndrome story but given my upbringing and seeing my parents go through the motions, I have always been like this. I have always been the bossy kid. I have always been the leader in a group. This is my personality. Sometimes I walk in a random direction and people follow me because they are like, “You seem like you know what you are doing. I have no idea where I’m going.” It’s just me.

I wish more of us would allow ourselves to do that but we saddle ourselves a bit too much with our self-narrative and that limits us. We have only met a few times but that’s what strikes me about you. You are confident, not overconfident. You believe strongly in what you are doing but you are doing it in a low-key way. I love that analogy because it’s probably true for the business from the get-go.

You are just walking. You know where you are going and believe you are going in the right direction but you don’t know and people are following you, and that’s cool. Jenny asked a question to circle back to a couple of other topics. What’s your approach to maintaining healthy morale or teen culture and so forth? It’s because culture now for a team of 30 and growing got to be an important thing to be focused on building. How are you doing that?

It’s important. We had our struggles. A lot of my founder friends told me when we were earlier, “When you get to twenty people, everything breaks.” I never understood that and then we got there and everything broke. The reason is when you are 2 people, 3 people sitting in a room building from the start, everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone is doing everything together basically. Everyone is taking out the trash. Everyone is working on this. Everyone knows.

Even up until 10, 15 people, you can still sit in a room together. People may have their specific functions but you can still know what’s going on. At twenty people, you can’t fit in a conference room anymore. You need to reimagine how you communicate. You need to think about how you have that one-to-one connection with people. There have been people now that I haven’t even been part of the hiring process.

How do you maintain that culture and those values? We always go back to our values as an organization. How do you make sure everyone shares those values? Paired with top of that, having rituals for the team has been nice. Every single Friday, we have lunch with the entire team and somebody gets to pick the food. We are always trying new different cuisines. The last one I had was Afro-Brazilian food. Today’s lunch is Friday’s Japanese food. It’s a great way of bonding around food, which is what we are all here to do, build a food company and have time to spend with the team.

I never booked anything over it. I had something booked over and we moved the lunch. It’s making it a point to have that ritual because I’m busy the rest of the week. We also do things like lawless Wednesdays that we do every few weeks. Do something fun that feeds into the wellness, whether it’s mental wellness or otherwise physical wellness, and then we do happy hours as a team as well.

We have historically made lots of food together and bonded around food and got to know each other outside of what we all do as well. People are interesting. I wouldn’t say we are a family but we are nice people who are building something together. It’s a great crew that we have and I’m thankful for my team. I would trust them with my life.

In a way you are, that’s cool and it sounds like a place everyone likes to show up every day. That’s challenging in today’s time. Culture is probably more so. If I were to randomly walk into Prime Roots and bump into one of your team and say, “What’s Kim like?” How are they going to describe you?

It’s funny you asked this because I asked some of my team, “Am I the same all across the board?” Across email, I use a lot of exclamation points and happy faces. I’m a happy and optimistic person. I’m like, “Am I like this across all scenarios?” My cofounder switches well between doing press stuff, no internal needs, a completely different person. I was like, “Am I the same?” “I don’t know. I am curious.” I asked people and they were like, “No, you are the same. Even if you are on a podcast and if you are writing an email, it’s just Kim.” I thought that was funny. I’m exactly like this with my family as well.

That authenticity makes a big difference because you don’t have to worry about it. Let me ask that too. How was the relationship between you guys as cofounders evolved as the business has grown? How has that worked to stay good and strong?

We have been building for over five years. It has been quite a while. What helped early on is having clear lanes. Even when we were both on the bench together developing the products, we both knew what we would defer to the other person for. I would be like, “Josh, you can take over all the chemistry and the analytics and anything related to the fermentation.” Josh would defer to me for anything food or culinary-related.

As the business has grown, Joshua oversees our entire R&D team and I firmly do not. We started as technical cofounders but I’m not involved in the day-to-day there. Clear lines are drawn from day one. Deciding who gets what role and who does what function and mapping that out early was one of the best things that we did. I know there can be a lot of tension and friction.

We both share the disagreement but commit to philosophy. If there’s an important decision that we both need to make and we don’t see eye to eye, I get the final say as CEO and we fully commit. That is, not just from a cofounder perspective but on a team level, tremendously important. It’s not just committed and doing it, it’s committing and doing it the way you would do anything else.

How have you learned some of this stuff? Has it all been intuitive and trial and error or did you spend some effort and time educating yourself as an entrepreneur, as a CEO or as a leader?

I hoard business books and self-help books like there’s no tomorrow but I haven’t read many of them. All of this comes from my mom, honestly. She’s one of my biggest inspirations and every time I talk to her, I am inspired and I learn something new. She helps me see around the corner. She’s like, “That’s not going to work out,” and I go and make the mistake. I’m like, “Mom, how did you know?” She does the debrief with me and says stuff like, “You need to make sure you have people that support you that even if they don’t agree with you will commit to what you want to do. That’s why it failed,” and stuff like that. Having that support network is useful. I tried to pay it forward and talk to founders who are in earlier stages and help out wherever I can.

I’m going to make my adult children listen to this podcast and say, “See, mom and dad still have some good advice you can listen to.”

The best advice. Even if they haven’t walked in your shoes, parents are the wisest.

What should I have asked you about? What do you want to share? There are founders of all shapes and sizes at all points of their journey here from those who are just starting to think about doing something crazy like this to those that have built businesses similar in size to yours. The ecosystem that also reads this are the investors, the retailers, and so forth. What are some of the things that you feel the ecosystem should know?

The big thing that I have been thinking about a lot is the whole industry. The food business is so much about food but it’s also a people business at the end of the day. I don’t think people realize or remember that much. Treating people kindly is undervalued. I don’t know why that needs to go and needs to be said but that is something important. With that, we think about a lot of Prime Roots because what we are doing is going against the grain in many ways. We go up against what’s conventionally done in this stuff. We go against the grain. What does it mean to be meat?

We don’t have many people in our corner. As a team, we are 30-ish people, 29 of whom eat meat, and it is not us against them. People assume that we are vegan. I hate the what-about-ism that exists in the industry where it’s like, “This is good but what about making it without gluten?” I’m sure many people have gotten that. Do what you do. We are trying to do our best. We are trying to do better. There are other people out there trying to do better and we support anyone who is trying to do better.

A lot of people assume that we hate all things meat and all meat companies. If you are a regenerative agriculture company, I will champion you. We as primary school champion you. We stand for a better kind of meat and that’s what we are making but if you are doing better and doing regenerative agriculture to make a more sustainable kind of meat, we support you. We are not saying that all animals shouldn’t exist. The what-about-ism in the industry gets to me.

I will add to that, tribalism as well. I eat a whole food plant-based diet. I’m a vegan but I’m also a realist and know that not everybody is going to be willing to eat as I do. I do so for personal reasons, health reasons, and everything else. I’m like you. Anybody who’s trying to do good, and make iterative changes, brings consciousness to those decisions. I’m going to celebrate and support them and I agree. Kindness is undervalued. The other thing I will add to it and it’s something that I know enough about you that it’s a big part of who you are too is humor. It is being able to laugh at all of this.

One of our core values at Prime Roots is to be better, not the best. It always raises a lot of eyebrows. We have some because what is best to an individual is different than what someone else deems to be best. A lot of folks say, “This way of eating or this way of living is the best way of living or eating.” It’s not true for everyone. We say to be better is the best. Be better every day in whatever you make your choices to be, and that’s important to us.

Also always put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes you take two steps back but then you come back stronger. That was something that’s important for us and as an industry, we need to do better. Champion change instead of being stuck in old ways. Sometimes we have a ton of people who are like, “Shouldn’t plants taste as plants and meat should taste like meat?” I’m like, “That’s one way of looking at it and plants are plants and meat is meat, and we are doing something in the middle. Don’t yuck it.”

Listening to that, the thing that came to mind is that best as a destination and better as a journey because it’s continuous. Once we arrive here, we are done, or better is a commitment to constantly taking that next step. I’m definitely of that ilk, too.

That’s a new quote I’m going to use.

Thank you so much for doing this with me. I appreciate it. I love what you are doing. I do also find you a uniquely approachable and low-key, which is amazing for all the success that you have had. I’m cruising over to Berkeley, so I will let you know for sure.

We are excited to show how the sausage is made. It’s something that’s different from us in a lot of meat companies in general.

I will take you up on that.

Thank you, Elliot. It is nice chatting.

Likewise. Thanks, everyone. Have a great time. We will see you next time.

Important Links

• Prime Roots

About Kimberlie Le

Hi! I’m a scientist-entrepreneur-foodie and life-long learner determined to make positive changes in our global food system. I’ve been working in management within the food industry (retail, food service, investing) for over ten years and am determined to bring delicious, sustainable, and nutritious foods to the masses and increase accessibility and equity in our food system.

Want to join me in my mission and be a part of my community of thousands of foodies and chefs? Join me: https://www.primeroots.com/pages/community

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! tigbrands.com/tig-talks/