The food industry is not lagging when it comes to innovating its products. With the pandemic exposing more unmet needs, healthy, sustainable solutions have become the forefront, especially for food start-ups. Today’s guest is Sarah Sha, Director of Strategy for KITCHENTOWN and works together with Good Food Makers, a global accelerator of start-ups with transformative ideas. She joins host Elliot Begoun to discuss the programs they have for food start-ups with fresh, innovative ideas needing financial support as well as a community where they can thrive. Sarah also talks about the futures thinking process and ways to approach problems and develop actionable outcomes.
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Funding The Future Of Food Start-Ups With Sarah Sha
I am in our place down in Phoenix, Arizona as a proud new grandfather of two, which is both exciting and also forcing me to face the brutal fact that I have aged rapidly, which is staggering and shocking to me because I don’t feel near and nearly old enough nor responsible enough to be a grandfather but I am.
Before I start and introduce my guest, just a founder shout out. I want to talk a little bit about a brand that is doing some cool things that brand is Tia Lupita Hot Sauce. If you haven’t checked out Tia Lupita Foods, which started Hector, started with his Tia Lupita’s Hot Sauce and now has evolved into incredible grain-free tortillas, nopales made from cactus and a great line of cactus tortilla chips.
It’s a brand that’s bringing the amalgamation of heritage and culture as well and intermingling it with good for you and great ingredients and flavor. Check them out at TiaLupitaFoods.com. Check out Hector. He is very active in our community and the natural product space. He and Amy are overall great people. We are going to talk about a lot of things. We are going to be talking about the Good Food Makers Program and KitchenTown. Let me introduce our guest, Sarah. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell everyone about you and KitchenTown, and the Good Food Makers Program?
Thanks, Elliot. My name is Sarah Sha. I am the Director of Strategy at KitchenTown. It is a food startup incubator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We do a lot of things. I love the name KitchenTown because it evokes an image of a bustling town, where a lot of things are happening related to food. That’s how it has felt there. We have a product development lab where we are working with startups and some larger food companies doing new product development.
We have large commercial kitchen space for an end-scale up production facility where we have about 25 or 30 different companies who are producing food at any given time. The side of the company that I run and have been in charge of since I started is the work we do in innovation, consulting services and strategy work with bigger food companies with some food investment funds.
We are this whole ecosystem or platform around supporting early-stage food companies with either infrastructure or expertise, and then also connecting them, in some cases, with larger food company partners and we will get into that with the Good Food Makers Accelerator Program, sometimes with potential investors or others who could help build and launch them on their way.
I have known Rusty for years, love him to death and what’s going on with KitchenTown. I want to spend some time talking about KitchenTown in specifics, as well as the accelerator program but I also want to take a few moments to let our readers learn more about you because you have a cool background. Why don’t you share your background?
I was working at the Institute for the Future, which is a nonprofit research group that does long-term futures work strategy, scenario writing and forecasting. I was leading our Food Futures Lab there. In that capacity, I was bringing all of these tools around foresight and long-term, future thinking methodologies and applying them to the food and agriculture industry, where I’m sure, as a lot of us know, sometimes we suffer from some short-termism.
A lot of the goal there was to give people skills and tools for how to think about the future more systematically and thoughtfully, how to challenge our assumptions about the way that the food industry currently works and give ourselves that creative imagination space that futures thinking allows for. It is an amazing space for inventing new things, challenging the status quo, doing all the things that so many of the food startups and entrepreneurs that I’m now getting to work with are second nature to them.
That was the evolution from working with thinking about the future doing long-term, 10- to 20-year scenario projects with big CPG companies, big agriculture or technology companies. Much of that work was based on looking at what we call early signals of change so the small local innovations that could have the potential to scale and disrupt the status quo in some way. I’m very familiar with the concept of distinguishing signal from noise. A lot of futures thinking work is figuring out what are signals that we should be paying attention to.
Many of the signals now within the food industry are in the form of food startups. That was my evolution to working at KitchenTown, wanting to work more directly with a lot of those companies who were taking on these new business models and ingredients, rising to meet new consumer demands and challenging the way that we have done things in the past.
As a host’s prerogative here, I want to make sure that we reserve a little bit of time to explore that further on this episode and, specifically, talking a bit about founders get very trapped in the transactional and the now. They are super innovative, visionary and creative to start their businesses. They start, their heads are continually forced to look down at their feet, run the business and make the next milestones and all of that. That same visionary future-looking, future-forward thinker and creator are almost suppressed.
I will give you the question now so you can let it percolate as we explore the curiousness to what advice you would give founders to keep that part of their mindset, effort top of mind and center to their efforts while still being mired in the transaction. Let’s jump into though the Good Food Makers Accelerator Program. Let’s talk a little bit about your partnership there, what it represents and what the opportunity is. Let’s get it out there because it’s a fantastic opportunity for brands. I will let you take the floor and share.
Blu1877 is the Barilla company’s venture arm. They were founded to promote more open innovation within Barilla, with them being the biggest pasta company in the world. We partnered up with Barilla and the Blu1877 team to launch the Good Food Makers Accelerator with the two-fold goal. First is like many corporate accelerators, it’s a chance to connect early-stage companies who have some specific needs with a large corporation that has a lot of resources, expertise and hopefully, find some areas of mutual interest where they both can benefit. The startup can take advantage of or learn from the experience of the corporate. The corporate can learn about how to do more agile innovation, prototype things quickly and get a little bit closer to some of the consumers who they might be interested.
There’s that goal of mutual collaboration, findings areas of mutual interest and working on a project around it. The Good Food Makers Program, in particular, what I like about it is that it’s structured around very concrete eight-week-long pilot projects. Every year, Barilla will come forward with a set of challenges that they are interested in addressing through the program.
If you look over the last 3 or 4 cohorts, you can see they are not just challenging that Barilla is facing. They are large industry-wide issues like regenerative agriculture, supply-chain traceability transparency, better for you kids snacking, big topics that they want to respond to or advance within their company in some way but also, want to support startups who are working on those issues.
We will put out a call for applicants. If you go to GoodFoodMakers.net, that’s where you can find all the information and the link to apply. The goal of it is to identify a specific pilot project that could be completed in eight weeks. That’s a pretty short amount of time. It’s enough time to test something out and get some results that are beneficial for both parties to learn from. The goal is definitely to promote longer-term partnerships. There’s a very strong precedent that almost every company that has gone through the program in the past has continued in some form in a relationship with Barilla.
What are you looking for in a brand? Let’s talk about those questions but also, how does a brand self-assess if they are potentially a good fit for this program?
We are typically looking for fairly early-stage companies but ones that do have a product on the market already. We want to be able to prototype or pilot something. We want some existing product or if it’s a tech company, some of the challenges are more tech or digital platform-related. We need some products out there with some existing users. Otherwise, it’s about finding a good match for the specific challenge areas that are put forward each year.
We can get into what those challenge areas are but I guess one other thing we will note is that we found that if it’s single founders of super small companies, sometimes they have a harder time with it because it’s smaller. It’s eight weeks of intensive work and if you are mired in the transactions of day-to-day, it can be hard to also take on an accelerator on top of that. We were looking for maybe 3 to 5 people on the team at a minimum with some product out on the market, and then some demonstrated interest, skill or expertise around 1 of the 4 challenge areas.
What are those four challenge areas?
The first one this year is around the circular economy. Barilla has three side streams that they are looking for creative solutions to upcycle. There’s pasta re-grind. You can imagine when pasta is made, there are lots of little bits of pasta that come off of the production line and it gets ground up into a powder. They have hundreds of thousands of tons of pasta re-grind that they are looking for creative uses for and then also, from their other bakery brands.
Food Start-Up: Many of the signals right now within the food industry are in the form of food start-ups.
There’s a wheat brand and bread crust. For pasta re-grind, wheat bread and bread crust, what are interesting processes, applications or technologies we could do to upcycle those in some valuable way? They sell those into animal feed and they are looking for higher-value uses for them. I think both ethically in terms of keeping it, for human consumption, creating healthy food for people and then also, financially looking for good opportunities for those ingredients.
The second one is around easy meal routines. This one is responding to the 2020’s boom in meal delivery services for people working at home needing a convenient lunch. Also, growing awareness that our food and nutrition impacts our health and immunity. Not just wanting a convenient lunch but wanting a nutritious lunch. Looking for either services or products that could be frozen, ready-to-eat meals that could meet busy eaters where they are and provide that convenient, easy meal routine.
The third challenge is better food delivery. Coming out of the COVID era and the huge boom in more at-home delivery services, the big growth in ghost and virtual kitchens, Barilla, as a pasta company, is very aware that pasta doesn’t travel very well in delivery settings. If you have ever ordered it, it’s probably had a bunch of condensation on the lid and maybe the pasta was not quite the right texture by the time you’ve got it. This is a little more of a technical challenge, looking for ways that we could improve the quality starting with pasta but many applications would apply to a lot of other foods. How do we improve the quality to restaurant-level and quality food when it shows up at your home dinner table?
That could be packaging, logistics and preparations. We are looking at some interesting robotics or automation companies that are looking at preparation techniques in different ways. There is a very wide range of solutions that they are open to there. The final one is around digital nutrition guides. There are all sorts of digital platforms that you can scan a barcode and get a ranking on, put in your personal preferences, your personal health goals or your sustainability goals, and get curated personalized nutrition advice. There are also a lot of perhaps confusion, misinformation and conflicting sources of authority on nutrition and sustainability for food products.
For this one, we are looking for digital platforms that have some ranking or recommendation system and Barilla is wanting to collaborate with them on helping both increase transparency from big food companies. What can they learn about what types of information they need to be making available? What types of things are people looking for? At the same time, what’s the user experience? Where are people going to find information about food? Where are they making shopping decisions? Those are the four. There’s more information about all of those on their website at GoodFoodMakers.net.
What should brands expect to get in terms of support? Tell us what the eight weeks look like. How much bandwidth are we going to have to commit? What do they have access to and how is this beneficial?
It depends on what the pilot projects they decide to work on together would be. Knowing that, what they have access to, is expertise from across a lot of different parts of Barilla from R&D, Nutrition or Marketing. In the past, we have had the program in person. In those cases, some teams were able to use some of Barilla’s pilot production facilities. For CPG companies who participated in the past, there was an opportunity to test out their products.
The Organic Pantry was one of the first participants in the inaugural cohort. She makes flaxseed crackers. It has been a real challenge to figure out how to scale up the production of that. She has been able to work with the Barilla teams on commercializing and scaling that up. We can do some pilots within the production facility there. In 2020, the program was run remotely and in 2021, we are probably going to be remote.
We are keeping an eye on who can be where. We would love to gather everyone to partner together and work on projects in person but if we are remote, what they can expect is a minimum of 1 to 2 hours of meetings with your team every week to check in and make sure what’s happening. Probably 5 to 10 hours of work beyond that on the actual pilot project, depending on what you are doing.
Maybe to give another concrete example. In 2020, one of the challenges around regenerative agriculture was a team that was looking at tracking soil carbon through satellite imagery, a very tech-heavy application, not a CPG product. Barilla was able to take that technology and pilot it in a small part of one of their supply chains, get some learnings from that that would go both ways.
The startup got to learn what kinds of information or what it would be to work with a big reference customer, a big corporate like Barilla. Barilla got to learn the information that they were wondering about, the carbon sequestration or the soil health within certain parts of their supply chain. If you have an existing system that’s already set up, you could think of this as being able to test out a new partner on it and have a close working relationship with a reference customer to get something set up.
What about in terms of what the brand should be prepared to commit to? What should they be willing to do on their end?
Before the eight-week pilot project starts, there will be a two-week period where the company and the team at Barilla will figure out what exactly that pilot project is. From what we have seen, the ones who make the best participants are those who come in with a pretty clear idea of some experiment that they want to do or some creative suggestion for how Barilla might address this challenge.
We have this list of possible solutions we may include on the website. If you have an idea for something other than that list of possible solutions we have come up with, that’s super exciting for us to hear. We love seeing that initiative or clarity on what you would want to do together. You should commit to having a clear idea about why you want to work specifically with Barilla on this challenge.
I will say some of the weaker applications we have seen so far are clearly much more general and looking for broader connections or mentorship. Those who can identify themselves in the specific challenges look for specific ways that they would dig in and collaborate with the team on it. Know that it’s going to be a very collaborative and open process back and forth with the team at Barilla to get inputs from them and work on co-developing a project together. I will also mention there is a $10,000 grant that is available for use during the pilot project.
We are looking for companies who are excited to use that money on executing a pilot project that would result in mutually beneficial learnings for both sides, not just taking the money to help with their own marketing or some other part of their own business growth. It is centered around the project but the terms for participation are quite friendly for startups. It doesn’t take any equity for participation. It’s an equity-free grant for using the pilot and then it often leads to a much longer-term collaboration with these companies.
A question that came in was around the potential of longer-term capital equity investment. What does that look like since it is being done in conjunction with their venture arm?
Blu has made a couple of investments in companies that have gone through the Good Food Makers Program. Planetarians was one of the first ones who came through in that way, upcycled and now an alternative protein company. ReGrained is another who they have made some investment and so there is some precedent for that. They have a mandate around or an interest in making investments that align with their interests.
No guarantee of investment but potential. More so, the opportunity to have collaborative time with a broader team of experts to create something cool.
It’s scaling up. If it’s a tech platform or tech product, being able to scale that up in a big way. If it’s a CPG or an actual food product, tapping into expertise. I’m thinking of some of the things we have seen applicants so far saying they would want help with but it’s things like shelf life, packaging, nutrition or any of these basic parts of formulating or developing a new food product.
Barilla has so much expertise and resources to put towards that smaller companies don’t always have. You can think of it as one of those startups from the past had said, “We don’t have the luxury of having a full-time nutritionist on staff, a full-time marketing person and all these other roles.” During that eight weeks, it was a chance to tap into those roles within Barilla, be able to learn from them and get some value from that relationship.
Before we switch over to more broadly talking about KitchenTown and the ecosystem, what is your elevator pitch why a brand should consider the Good Food Makers Accelerator? Why should they go to the website and apply?
Food Start-Up: The benefit for a start-up versus a much larger company is that you’re just still much closer to that core drive and motivation.
They should go apply because it’s a unique opportunity to collaborate one-on-one with our very dedicated team from Barilla, who is genuinely interested in pushing some of these ideas forward. It’s so much more customized, tailored around this specific project and the expertise of your company. There isn’t a formal program that you are going through in the accelerator like others. We are here to get outcomes, test things out and try things. If you feel excited about getting to work and seeing some results, it’s an amazing opportunity to do that.
For those in the TIG Brands community, I encourage you all to explore and apply for it if it makes sense. Let us know if you do and we will be interested to watch them afar what happens. Switching gears to KitchenTown, I have been a fan of KitchenTown since it started. In fact, the first time I was there, it was completely unrelated to the business. I was there on a retreat with a Stanford School group and we were there for a dinner that Rusty held and had some of the entrepreneurs. One of the speakers was Dan Kurzrock at ReGrained. I have known Dan for years.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s one of the coolest places on the planet. I’m not saying that because Sarah gave me $5. I’m saying that if you are in San Mateo back in pre-COVID days and now if you want to walk into space, feel entrepreneurship at its best. Remind yourself about how cool this business is, go into the café, order a cup of coffee, grab a piece of bread, face the glass wall, look into the kitchen and just enjoy the view. What’s going on there are a lot more than just the commercial kitchen itself. Take a little bit of time and explain all that KitchenTown offers and does.
I’m going to take you on a tour. We have several buildings on the same block. We are taking over our little part of San Mateo there. You can’t come in for a coffee and a slice of bread anymore. However, you can absolutely come in for lunch. Maybe I will start there. I should invite everyone to come by for lunch. We have a pop-up restaurant running from a company called Mezli that is building out a fully automated robotic restaurant that makes healthy grain bowls that they serve for $4.99 to $6.99.
It’s honestly one of the main reasons I go to work because I’m excited to eat lunch when I get there. We have a warehouse space across the street where the Mezli guys, who are a team of robotics engineers who graduated from Stanford, have their shipping container and working on building their robotic restaurant across the street. Our culinary director, who’s joined on to work with their team, has been doing the culinary concepts and testing out the bowls that they are going to be serving out of the robotic restaurant.
We have been serving lunch out of the café, which the full café shut down as it formerly was during COVID but this is one of the new ways that it’s being brought back to life through pop-up restaurants like this. We are operating pop-ups not just for Mezli, who’s in residence there but for others who are wanting to do a little bit more informal consumer testing. We are working with a plant-based egg company, who we did a breakfast sandwich pop-up for them.
The way that it worked was we have an email list of a couple of thousand locals, who like Elliot, still love to come into the café. We get emails about once a week asking if the café is open again but we will shoot out an email to that list of people and say, “We are doing this pop-up. Come get a free breakfast sandwich, a free bowl of ramen or whatever it is that we might be testing out in exchange for filling out a survey.” That’s a way to get some consumer feedback and directing a more authentic way than you might get from a very formal tasting panel where everyone is sitting down in front of an iPad and doing things like that.
There’s the first window where you can walk up to the KitchenTown space and get some food. Behind that, there’s this big glass wall. You can see into the production facility. That’s where we have about 25 or 30 different companies who are using that for their production space, scale-up work. There are a ton of different amazing bakers and bakeries who use this space. There are a lot of plant-based and alternative protein companies. We can get into that. That’s a big area that the whole industry is very excited about now. We have a lot of super interesting companies who are working in that space. Some of them are there.
Next door, we have our product development lab, where we have a team with a few food scientists who are working with some overlap. Sometimes some companies come to the product development lab. We will help come up with a new product and then we will take that into production in the facility next door. Sometimes there will be a company in the facility who has an idea for a line extension or they want to do some new product development, they will go next door and get to work on that with Isha and our product development team. That’s one of the benefits of having it all in one place and having us know about what you are working on.
We do some product development work with bigger companies, too. Think of it as skunkworks projects if they want to try out the resources. If they are trying to launch new things and they want to try out the resources that would be available to startups, they might use us to do that as well. Both the product development and production space, and then it all comes together also in the work that we do to help companies commercialize and/or just be ready to commercialize.
We are doing the product development with a longer-term scale-up or commercialization in mind. We don’t want you to get to the end of it and have a delicious product and then realize it won’t work at a co-manufacturer. We are thinking through that whole process from the start of what the process engineering will look once you are ready to scale up but on the front end, how do you nail the products, to begin with?
In the production facility for a young brand looking and thinking about doing, they share a facility like that, typically how long and to what size does the typical company stay there?
I would say the average company sticks around for about a year. From my time there, that’s what it seems like that’s about the right length. Honestly, from our perspective, it’s good news when they are ready to graduate. It means that they have scaled up and can move on, move to their own co-packer or open up their own factory but it really depends.
If you are a frozen food company, maybe you stay a little bit less because we don’t have quite as much freezer space available at that time or some of it is just dependent on what we have available at the time. As far as I know, we have not yet had to turn anyone away. We are pretty full. We are at capacity but there’s always someone about to leave and someone new coming in. It’s a pretty fluid space, we try to make it flexible and make it work for people to get in when they need to.
For those reading, it’s an amazingly well-thought-out space. There’s an incredible amount of equipment and access to things that don’t exist in other places. The thing that I have always enjoyed and find invigorating around KitchenTown is the ecosystem itself. It’s very collaborative. Everyone is rowing the boat together because you are elbow-to-elbow in the production facility, back in the warehouse or with other brands. Talk about some of the programming and ways that you bring that together.
It’s coming back to life again post-COVID, too. We had our first in-person maker up for the first time since the pandemic started and that was so wonderful to have people in this space. Brands brought a bunch of samples of their foods. We are eating delicious plant-based chicken nuggets from Nowadays. We were drinking some cocktails made with a shrub from this woman with a new company called Pickles Plus that’s doing it there.
There’s an awesome biotech company working on honey without the bees. They didn’t have samples yet, but the energy in the room is huge. All of a sudden, the biotech honey company is talking with the chicken nugget company and they are figuring out like, “We could do a honey mustard sauce together.” There are fun opportunities for more casual collisions and bouncing ideas off of each other.
We are hoping to continue hosting more of those opportunities for people to get together and hang out. We also have a Slack channel where all the makers are and sometimes someone will post like, “Looking for this equipment. Does anyone know where we can get it?” People can respond, help each other out and share resources. We advise each other in that forum. In the facility, day-to-day people are around and it’s an awesome chance to look over and ask what someone is up to.
There is a pretty cool alumni group. There are a lot of people that have started their businesses there, gone on to build bigger businesses, still hang around the ecosystem and are there to help brands. If anyone reading wants to learn more about KitchenTown, maybe take a virtual tour or maybe come down for one, how would they best reach out to you?
They can reach out to me directly. It’s [email protected]. I would be happy to set up a tour or come by for a visit. Come eat a robotic restaurant lunch bowl, we can look around and tell you what we are up to.
How do you blend the transactional with the future-looking? How do you stay focused in the now and getting the stuff done that needs to get done as entrepreneur day-to-day and yet still be looking far enough afield to be the innovator, the creator and the disruptor that you were to start your business? What have you learned in your time about that? What words of wisdom can you impart to the audience?
Maybe the good news is, as you said, you were an innovator, visionary and long-term thinker to start the business. That probably wasn’t too far in your past. Hopefully, you can take a second to tap into remembering what that felt like, the mode that you were in when you were thinking much bigger and trying to come up with that big world-changing mission statement about what your company was doing. The benefit for you versus a larger company is that you are still much closer to that core drive and motivation.
Food Start-Up: “How might we?” is also a great way to continue pushing what you’re working on.
I have worked with a lot of big companies who also were mired in the day-to-day execution of things but they have been able to spin out a whole innovation team that can focus on looking at that long-term future and doing strategic planning. The idea is if you have others who are focused on the long-term, then they can help inform the whole company strategy and that can pull everyone along towards making sure new product development is moving in that direction or you are still tracking on some of those bigger themes, or trends that you are interested in following.
You, as a startup founder, probably don’t have your own innovation team who’s out there looking at what’s next for the company but a lot of the advice will probably be similar for those working in big corporate innovation and those working on the ground doing their own thing. Honestly, the first part of it is to keep yourself feeling inspired and informed about what is changing and what’s happening.
I will go back to that idea of signals of change. This was a big thing that we taught. One of the things we did at the Institute for the Future was taught these futures thinking classes. We had a foresight studio. It was a three-day crash course in how to do futures thinking and we’ve got a wide mix of people in there. Some were in corporate strategy or innovation roles. Some were individual entrepreneurs.
One of the basic skills that we teach in that is about how to scan for signals of change and how to get used to noticing signals in your environment, whether that’s new companies or new scientific research that’s coming out or new technology on the horizon and constantly thinking about like, “If this thing were to scale, how would that affect me, my business and the bigger food industry?”
It’s this constant process of identifying a small thing on the horizon, and then going through that mental exercise of drawing out all the different consequences of what could happen both the good and the bad. What are some of the unforeseen consequences that introducing some new technology might have and how can we stay ahead of making sure that we are on top of that?
I’m recalling a comment that someone made when I was teaching one of those foresight studio classes once, which was they went through learning about how to scan for signals, what a signal was and started a practice. There are so many different food innovation newsletters and technology sources. There’s no shortage of inspiring new information. It can certainly be a challenge to make time to absorb it in but this person commented that they felt like they used to need to go to a conference to get inspired. They would go hear keynote speakers or meet other people.
All of a sudden, signal scanning was a way to self-inspire. You could do it right from your own desk, right at home and it was a way to keep yourself feeling energized, excited and curious about what else is possible. That’s the other thing. It’s like you probably founded your business asking a lot of how might we questions? That’s from the design thinking world, too. How might we, is also a great way to continue pushing what you are working on.
Everything is changing so fast. It’s this constant cycle of having a vision of what could be possible, coming up with some insight about what that means for you, taking some action, implement it but definitely a cyclical process. Once you take action, you need to observe the results of it and keep engaging with it. Maybe that’s another mistake that people often make, which is like, “We are going to do a futures thinking project so now we are going to go off and think about the future. We will figure it out, come back and do what we are doing.” I would encourage people to think of it as a much more cyclical and ongoing thing.
For futures thinking and specifically signal scanning, any resources, books, podcasts or something that you can point to anyone who might be interested in learning more on how to develop that or hone that skill?
The Institute for the Future launched a free course on Coursera. That was a condensed version of that three-day training I was talking about. They are still doing the three-day training, probably still virtually if you want to go deep on a lot of different future thinking methodologies. I would say the easiest path is to check out the futures thinking specialization on Coursera.
There are some great, very simple explainer videos on the process, the theory behind it and some examples of it. You also join up with a community of other people who are doing it so maybe that’s another thing I would add, which is don’t do any of this in isolation. The food industry has so many creative, visionary, energetic and excited minds working together.
One of the great things about futures thinking is that chance to come together and create a shared long-term perspective of where you are heading. It only gets stronger when there are more diverse ideas in the mix. Partner up or create a little crew of people who are signal scanning together from different parts of the world and industry.
I find it amazing to have weekly conversations with our food scientist because she’s paying attention to and knows about different things I’m noticing and can teach me about new advances, inclusion technology or ways that the actual technical side of things is changing. There are so many places that we can be seeking information. Find a community and the Coursera group is great for that because it’s people from all over the world. When you start it, you get put in a cohort with some other people and it becomes a fun way to make some more future-thinking friends in other parts of the world, too.
I will add a few things. First of all, just like anything else, you have to build rigor and discipline around this and it’s very easy to get swept away in the now and the transactional. I would encourage everybody to block out time in their schedule for that. I do it. I call it WOB, Work On Business, instead of work in it. That’s when I might read articles, watch a taped webinar, maybe some collaboration conversations and may just be some time to write, and think differently about the business.
If you don’t build in the time to do it, you will get swept away in the transactional. It’s human nature because we assuage our worry, discomfort and quietness in activity. We will fill all of that void with an activity unless we are purposeful outside. I think the other is the community and leveraging that community of collaborators that we talk about all the time.
I have a couple of resources. When you block out that time on your calendar, then where do you go? There’s no shortage of them. I’m sure others in the community could share others with me. I would love to learn about it but the basics I check regularly are the Food+Tech Connect newsletter, the have a great round-up of news from across all different parts of the industry.
I’m not a big Clubhouse person yet. I’m still getting used to it but I know Food+Tech Connect and AgFunder have started a good Clubhouse, where they do weekly conversations that dive into the top news headlines of the week. They also do publish that as a podcast. That’s how I have been engaging with that content but those have been a couple of the sources that I like the most.
Food+Tech Connect is great. Daniel and the team do a great job there. Looking outside this industry has helped too, in looking at others to think differently. There are some great books out there and if anyone wants to shoot me an email, I’m happy to share some that I like. It’s important as an entrepreneur, you have the responsibility of constantly challenging your thinking.
The reason I wanted to come back to this topic is the fact that the biggest risk is transactional and there are a couple of risks. The first is that you build your growth hypothesis. You build your business around a product and a set of ideas that you are either solving a problem that exists in the market or an unmet need. While your head is down, pursuing either the solution to that problem or filling that unmet need, consumers are extraordinarily fickle and that need may no longer be unmet or even a need and that problem may no longer be a problem.
There may be a bigger one or a slice of wider space to move towards or go after. If you are not looking up and staying close to those signals and being aware of that, you could be grinding out something that is limiting your own opportunity. It’s key. It’s also, for most entrepreneurs, what feeds, excites and helps them. You need that excitement, that self-reinforcement, to persevere and be resilient enough to overcome all the shit that’s going to come your way in trying to scale a business. That’s hugely important. What other advice and things you would want to share or leave with the audience?
We can talk about Rusty. He is great. He wasn’t in the food industry before he launched KitchenTown and he saw an unmet need and there still are a lot of unmet needs. That’s evolving and part of what we are in the process of doing. It’s continuing to figure out what are those unmet needs for founders. If the audience has feedback, ideas or things that they feel that they could benefit from having help with, we are very open to that. We have evolved a lot. We started as more of the commercial kitchen and production space. We are doing so much more on the product development side and corporate partnerships.
Barilla is just one but we do work with some others. We work with one big food investment fund based out of Japan to do some innovation scouting and help them identify promising early-stage companies. We are looking for other ways to be involved and to make sure we are serving the makers, founders, and community in the most effective way.
Food Start-Up: One of the great things about future thinking is that chance to come together and create a shared long-term perspective of where you’re heading.
We don’t want to double up. There are a lot of different service providers out there and people who are doing a lot to help. We have a unique set of offerings that all fall together in one place but that’s one thing I have enjoyed about working with Rusty so far. We continue to try to think like a startup ourselves, stay agile and open to change, bringing on new services or developing expertise as need it to keep evolving with the industry.
Here’s the last question. What’s one book, one show, other than the AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect you have already referenced and one other information resource that you would recommend to every founder?
There is going to be a recency bias here but I did finish reading, We Are the Weather, the Jonathan Safran power book on food and climate. I will put a plug for that because that is such an important thing for anyone who’s doing anything related to food to be very conscious of the power that they have to impact our climate situation.
I feel optimistic about the role of the food industry and climate action but it’s going to take some very concerted and dedicated effort. I have been so impressed with Green Queen, the Hong Kong-based news site. I learn about things from Green Queen frequently. They are very good at staying on top of industry news, especially in plant-based and alternative proteins. They are a good source for knowing what’s happening in the world.
Thanks so much for doing this. To everyone reading, I just encourage you to reach out to Sarah with any questions. I appreciate you taking the time and being with us. Thanks, everybody. We will see you soon on the next episode. Take care.
Thanks, Elliot. Thanks, everyone.
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About Sarah Sha
Sarah Sha works with companies to create a more resilient, equitable, and humane food system. As Director of Strategy at KitchenTown she is a trusted advisor to food companies seeking to understand the quickly changing innovation landscape. For the last eight years, she co-led the Food Futures Lab at the Institute for the Future where she worked with partners to promote creative imagination of future possibilities in order to combat short-termism in the food system.
She’s a mixed-methods qualitative researcher who translates complex findings into clear insights that help drive action and inform strategy. She’s a frequent public speaker who loves telling inspiring stories about the future. She’s a dynamic workshop facilitator who gets even the most skeptical corporate executives curiously challenging their assumptions about what’s possible. She’s a visual and experience designer who makes provocative artifacts from the future. She’s an energetic team leader with almost a decade of experience cultivating networks and partnerships within the global food innovation ecosystem. Her writing and interviews have been featured in the The Washington Post, National Geographic, Vice, NPR, and more. Sarah got her start working in restaurants, studied permaculture design, and she’s always looking for new ways to cook vegetables.
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