EP #400 - Pascal Bieri: Catching Up with Planted’s Incredible Growth Journey
May 8, 2024
auto_awesome
Pascal Bieri, Co-founder of Planted, discusses tackling the food industry, ensuring quality suppliers, high shelf life, markets expansion, and small pivots. From destroying land for livestock to greenhouse gas emissions.
Planted focuses on natural ingredients to create high-quality plant-based products, prioritizing sustainability and taste.
Planted's success lies in adaptability to diverse markets, collaborating with local partners to meet regional preferences and navigate cultural nuances.
Deep dives
Pascal Berry's Journey into the Food Industry and the Birth of Planted
Pascal Berry, the co-founder of Planted, shares how his interest in the food industry began during his studies. Starting in the food industry at Me Grow, he encountered challenges that led him to envision a better, more efficient protein source. With a background in the food industry, experiences in the US, and a passion for addressing planetary challenges, the idea for Planted emerged as a solution to the inefficiencies in the protein industry.
Innovative R&D Approach at Planted
At Planted, the focus on natural ingredients and processes sets them apart in the plant-based protein market. With a commitment to using only natural ingredients and processes, they prioritize creating the best products without relying on additives or artificial methods. This approach leads to a clear guiding principle in product development, ensuring that their products are not just natural but also deliver high quality and taste.
Uniqueness in Production and Quality Control at Planted
Planted's approach to in-house R&D and production sets them apart from traditional food companies. By combining R&D, production, marketing, and go-to-market strategies in-house, they maintain a unique control over their processes. Emphasizing quality in sourcing suppliers, ensuring consistency, and leveraging technology for production scalability, Planted demonstrates a commitment to delivering sustainable and high-quality plant-based products.
Adapting to Different Markets and Local Culture
Planted's success lies in its adaptability to diverse markets and local tastes. Understanding the importance of local adaptation in the food industry, they collaborate with partners who understand regional preferences. By leveraging local expertise and adapting products to suit specific markets, such as working with established brands like Flurminichon in France, they successfully navigate cultural nuances and preferences.
Pascal Bieri is the co-founder of Planted, a startup creating healthy plant-based meat alternatives. He holds an MA in Informations-, Media- and Technology Management from the University of St Gallen, and previously worked in companies like SweetWorks Confections and DeepTech Capital AG before starting Planted in 2019. He also co-founded the Green Liberal Party in Lucerne when he was 21, but the slowness of politics soon dissuaded him from getting further involved.
So what’s wrong with livestock farming?
From a cold, technocratic point of view, not taking into account the environment, animal well-being or workers’ rights, current livestock farming practices were great for the meat industry, since they allowed it to achieve a fantastic production ration, super efficient supply chains, pay almost no taxes and deliver very low margins to everyone involved. Meat became cheap and accessible to almost everyone. However, this came at the cost of…
Destroying acres and acres of land to build livestock operations;
Establishing intensive monoculture farming operations which deplete soils of nutrients in order to feed livestock, which requires 25x the amount of those crops than we do to meet their nutritional needs;
Emitting 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is about the same as the amount emitted by the entirety of the transportation system.
Planted makes meat alternatives mainly out of pea protein, which can be grown locally and gives great taste. In 100 g of planted.chicken Nature, for example, there is 23.7 g of protein, which is about the same amount as found in conventional chicken meat. planted.chicken Nature consists of no more than four natural ingredients and a healthy portion of vitamin B12. What scares Pascal in the meat alternative market is not companies trying to produce equally healthy and tasty alternatives, but the companies making unhealthy products that taste terribly, which deter people from ever trying out a vegan product again.