Today we’re interviewing Larissa Zimberoff, a food tech reporter and author of the book Technically Food, Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat. She is a freelance journalist who covers the intersection of food, technology, and business. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many others.
I was first connected to Larissa through Phil Saneski and because I wasn’t doing My Food Job Rocks, I directed her to Motif Foodworks. After she visited Motif, I realized how enjoyable it was talking to her and we kept in touch. It’s been about a year (Larissa claims it’s longer) but being in California, I wanted to interview Larissa to not only talk about her book, but also to get a pulse on what’s happening in food tech before I go off over seas.
Larissa’s interview is full of fantastic tips on how to get into writing, finding your niche, and you also learn the ins and outs of what reporters have to go through when getting valuable information on the latest food tech news.
Disclaimer, we talk a lot about companies, names of CEOs, their PR styles, to show the differences in how companies, especially super rich and secret food companies, operate.
Show Notes
Wineries using sonar probes
David Sudaris Spiders
Perfect Day Moofree
Arturo from Clara/Every
Indiebio
Dinner in A Dumpster
David Chang’s new Book
Scrivner
Substack – Technically Food
James Richardson
Paul Shapiro – Clean Meat
Phil Saneski
That’s Fire, That’s Lit
Che fico – Chef David
Upside Food
Impossible Foods
Expo West
Prime Roots
Dominique Crenn
Minh Tsai
@technically.food Tiktok (not linkin this. It messes up your phone if you don’t have the app)
How to find your niche
What social media resonates with you?
What do you love doing? Do That
Where to find it?
Technically Food
What’s Up?
I’ve been exploring Singapore! And I am so fortunate to meet some familiar faces and some new ones! One in particular is a friend from UC Davis. His name is Lim. I didn’t even know he lived in Singapore until he reached out to get dinner. I went, and his whole family treated me to a Hawker meal! Never tried swordfish.
Then a friend from GFI, Valerie Peng treated me to a vegan Chinese meal
Finally, Shen Ming Lee, who I’ve been in contact with for quite a while took me out with a few friends to some delicious vegan Asian food. A place called 8 Treasures.
The dichotomy of cheap street food and modern dining really stuns me about Singapore. You know a lot of my friends said I’d get bored here but I’m already nearing the end of my trip and it’s been pretty great! I’ve been relatively busy interviewing some really interesting people that I can’t wait to launch
So let’s talk about a category that’s not doing so hot recently. No, not plant-based meat, but actually, low-ABV beverages. The seltzers and generally, alcohol that’s not beer, wine, or hard liquor have lost their fizz so to say. In fact, a lot of mainstream publishers have funny titles such as the Atlantic’s Why Hard Seltzer is Gross, and the Wall Streets’ Hard Seltzer Fad Fizzles as Light Beer Makes a Comeback
(more can be found in the article: Fizzled Out
The numbers say that though retail stores sales rose 11-12% in 2021, fell 18% year over year in the 4 weeks ending July 2nd.
Personally, I don’t like the taste of hard seltzer, but I know people who love it.
So what’s going on? Same as every trend, too many copycats, consumer fatigue, and the products are too expensive. I write a bit more about this on an article I posted on the My Food Job Rocks website.
To sum it up, this category is easy to copy, there’s way too much of it, and they’re expensive comparably to cheap beer.
Specifically on startups, who can’t achieve the cheap scale as huge established distributors get the short end of the stick. Not only do flashy, but new brands also need to keep up with the experimentation and marketing dollars, they generally have to sell their products at a higher price point. So they get shafted.
Take this case study about Haus, a…. low-ABV Aperitif? What even is that word?
Anyways, this 3-year-old company raised a $4.5 million dollar seed round, killing it on social media, and you can see they sound like they’re doing well so and right when they were about to raise their series A (about 10 million). Their investor pulled the rug and left them to dry, canceling the deal because of timing.
Haus is now putting themselves on sale, and most likely will be sold for scraps.
The hardest part about startups is that anything can happen to you just because of forces you can’t control. We as entrepreneurs who take venture capital are trained to burn all the money we get for the sake of growth, to get to the next stage. I don’t think this is going to change. Psychologically, it doesn’t make sense in the moment, emotions cloud all judgement and when money is involved, it dials up to 11.
What am I getting at here? There’s no lesson on what Haus should have or should not have done. They were in the right place in the right time when they started, but were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they ended.
End of the Show
I wanted to talk a little bit about PR and articles about you or the things that you create. And to realize that most of it is all noise.
So to keep this in mind, I have a huge ego problem! Might not look like it, but the reason why I do podcasts is to share my voice to the world in the hopes someone will like me and tell me I’m a smart and talented person. When I started Better Meat Co, I was so nervous about my name appearing in the food navigator. My business partner Paul really had to calm me down.
PR articles produce a type of FOMO that’s really hard to escape from. We really don’t know what company is being honest when they share their successes or hide their failures. A bro-type entrepreneur posting on LinkedIn might actually be “crushing it” and the silent entrepreneur might be holding her head in her hands and worrying about next month’s payroll.
I know companies that announce layoffs, and companies that don’t. I know companies who are just making a nice amount of money and those that are truly swimming in debt.
There’s no right strategy to be publicly known. I admire those who don’t seek it, and I admire those that do it well because they have to.
One last piece, the darker side or PR. Hit pieces. I’ve known a couple of entrepreneurs who have gotten some really bad hit pieces on them and they’ve told me some really dark stuff about how it affects them and their self-worth. I’ve also seen them crawl out of it stronger than ever. What I’ve seen is that they have a great support network that authentically knows them and a mission that is so ambitious and so worth pursuing, that it’s just small stuff.