Ep. 256 – [Singapore] Challenges in Food Tech with Jolene Lum, Client Development Manager at NURASCA


Today I’m interviewing Jolene Lum, client development, for Asia Sustainable Foods newly named NURASA. They are a wholly owned company of Temasek Holdings, for those who don’t know, Temasek is one of the most well-known private holdings company that is known for its moonshot investing and is directly owned by the government of Singapore.

Jolene is an entrepreneur at heart, extremely passionate all things sustainability, very eloquent, and can explain things really easily. I really enjoyed our discussion discussing some of the interesting challenges going on with the current food tech space in Singapore.

Jolene also has great insight on the farmer side of the food industry.

Singapore imports about 90% of their food and the food they do produce, most of what they grow is vegetables. Her first business was to connect these farmers to consumers for higher quality produce. I find her empathy with the farmers really enjoyable.

We do this in a WeWork in downtown Singapore

Links

Funan WeWork
Temasek Bloomberg
Vow Foods
JUST/ GOOD Meat
Singapore 30 by 30
Consignment Model – Pay a premium to list and also a Mimimum Order Quantity
Mycelium
Insect Farming
TAM
Thailand
Love Handle
Jolene Lum

What’s up with Adam

So I finally made it with Japan and as someone who’s always been a fan of Japanese media, I love it. The food has a craftsman-type quality, the city feels respected by its citizens, and the customer service is the best I ever had. I went to an izakaya restaurant and had the waiter congratulate me for eating there. They also walk you to the door after you eat and wave and bow to you when you leave.

I also was able to meet with the fun people at SigmaXYZ, a consulting firm that is really trying to bring food tech to Japan. They actually were the organizers for Michael Wolf’s Smart Kitchen Summit which I presented online a month ago. It was soo interesting learning about Japan from a business perspective.

But yea, Japan is great! I’m trying to crawl all across the country before meeting a high school friend in Okinawa. Then off to Taiwan.

Ok, so let’s talk about some current news.

JBS, one of the largest meat producers in the world is shutting down its plant-based meat brand Planterra’s United States Operation while continuing its growth in Europe and Brazil.

Of course, add this to the pile of plant-based meat being a bad business. Lots of reactionary pundits from both the for and against are already posting a ton of articles about it.

Let’s try and dive a little bit deeper on this.

In general, when meat companies like Tyson, Maple Leaf, and all the others started to show interest in alternative meats, they found it to be a growth opportunity due to this fear of missing out mentality thanks to the success of Beyond Meat and Impossible. This was in about 2018 when there was a proliferation of new funding for alternative meat projects and alt protein was a hot new thing. In general, neither of these companies ever thought that these new products would save the lives of animals or will save the world. If they ever said that, congrats you’ve been greenwashed.

Just like most people during a hype phase of innovation, people wanted in for new financial growth. It’s not the fault of these huge meat packers, but also the variety of entrepreneurs who’ve entered the space to strike gold.

The biggest issue with big corporate line extensions without proper passionate leadership, is that most launches are half-assed whether through the product end or the marketing end. If you’ve tried Maple Leaf Lightlife or OZO, Planterra which is JBS’ brand, (side note, don’t you see how confusing the naming is for this? What the hell were they thinking?) The innovation is pretty basic, nothing super unique, and also doesn’t taste as good as even Beyond or Impossible. What’s worse is that bad leadership will blame external factors rather than the fact that their product just sucks. In a corporate setting, having a true, charismatic and passionate leader who has permission to do whatever it takes makes products generally succeed. I recall when working with Perdue at Better Meat Co, we had a champion, Eric Christianson (who left Perdue is doing better things, which tells you even he had some issues with the corporate structure over there)

The interesting thing that people seem to overlook is that JBS is only closing their USA operations but Europe and Brazil are still showing signs of growth. Two reasons for this. One, this was most likely a P and L decision where it just didn’t seem financially viable to continue. And due to the slowdown in growth versus spend, it probably makes sense to shut down the USA business. And two, competition. Beyond and Impossible, though slowed, are still the market leaders and undifferentiated players are getting crushed. OZO wasn’t that good and the ugly orange gradient package didn’t help. I’ve heard tons of stories of brands that do really well in their home country getting crushed by the competition in the United States just because I believe we truly do innovate at a different level.

But I also think that people who are pro-alt-protein shouldn’t live in disillusionment. Yes, plant-based meat is not as good as meat, and the more and more I learn about how other cultures view meat and alternative proteins, it’s shocking to realize, meat is cheap, abundant, and tastes really good. There aren’t very compelling reasons that someone should switch to eating alternative proteins.

This is something we skirt around in Jolene’s interview, and I think it’s important to bring some realities to a nascent industry. I can’t wait for some old dude in leadership or marketing to tell everyone we just need to plant-based meats taste better. As a technologist, technology is hard, it takes time.

But we’re getting there. The whole world seems to be working to create something special.

End of Show

This is the end of the show.

So I think something Jolene and I really connected in the pre-interview is founding a company and going back to working for corporate industry. I’ve talked to a few people like this and I feel that sometimes it’s a source of initial shame to do this. To be fair, I felt a lot of shame leaving Better Meat Co for a corporate structure.

I think as founders, we believe that our startup is our life and if things go wrong, for example, if you leave or your startup fails, then your whole reputation as an entrepreneur is ruined. Something you’ve put so much energy in, had so much control over, you don’t have anymore. What do people think when that happens? To be fair? As long as you’ve never harmed someone, people don’t care.

I dunno, I remember in college if I didn’t get like an A or a B in a class, I thought it was the end of the world and that I could never go to graduate school or something and we can always get stuck in this mindset but if you twist and realize, maybe I just don’t like what I’m learning and I don’t need an academic system to tell me I’m smart to try new things.

I’ve always found that those who are in entrepreneurship and really worked hard in it have soft skills that accel in almost any field such as their proactive passion, understanding of what can be done with the resources that you have, and most importantly, the ability to make decisions for the sake of getting the job done.

But I will say, once you’ve tasted successful entrepreneurship, and go back to corporate life, there’s always a nagging feeling that you can truly go back to starting something on your own.

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