Episode 145: Julia Collins, Founder and CEO of Planet FWD
Today's guest is Julia Collins, Founder and CEO of Planet FWD.
Planet FWD is using the power of food the help tackle climate change. They created Moonshot, a brand of climate-friendly snacks made from regenerative ingredients. They also develop software that provides other food brands with regenerative resources to make climate-friendly products.
Julia has always been involved in the plant-based and composting movements, but her career transition didn't become a reality until she had her son in 2017. Realizing the only way to leave her son a liveable planet was to start working in climate, Julia founded Planet FWD. The company launched in December 2020. Before Planet FWD, Julia co-founded Zume (formerly Zume Pizza). Zume is a technology-enabled food company whose mission is to make healthy food fast and accessible to everyone.
I was excited for this episode as the MCJ fund is one of the first investors in Planet FWD. Julia takes me through her journey leading up to founding Planet FWD and her passion for working in climate. She explains Planet FWD's mission, what they hope to accomplish, and what is coming next for the company. We also talk about the regenerative food movement and how to spark change in the agriculture industry. Julia is a fantastic guest for those interested in decarbonizing the food and agriculture industry.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded February 1st, 2021.
In Today's episode we cover:
Planet FWD's mission, its products, and how the company started
Julia's path to Planet FWD and how she got hooked on climate
How the Moonshot snacks actually decarbonize
What are the best ingredients for decarbonizing, and how do you choose ingredients
Motivations for farms to adopt regenerative practices
How Julia landed on a snack brand as well as a software platform
How the software and ingredients library enable other brands to change their practices
The timeline of Planet FWD and its progress to date
Where other brands are at in terms of educating themselves on climate-friendly products
Barriers and gaps that are preventing the adoption of climate solutions for brands
The similarities and differences between other carbon accounting software and Planet FWD's software
How public policy and government mandates fit into the climate-friendly food movement
Barriers for farms adopting regenerative practices
Where social justice and farming intersect in terms of indigenous land
What Julia thinks can bring the most change to the agriculture industry
The future of Planet FWD
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone. Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey, or MCJ as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education but there were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screened for determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying and a collaborative spirit beyond that. The more diversity, the better.
There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of [00:01:00] nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click to become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Julia Collins, founder and CEO of Planet FWD, whose mission is helping to reverse global warming through soil. Planet FWD is building the world's first totally climate friendly snack brand called Moonshot Snacks which recently launched in 2020. They're also building a regenerative ingredient library to provide other food brands, the resources that they need to build climate-friendly products.
We cover a lot of ground in this episode, including Julia's history, what first led her to become passionate about this area, her most recent role as the co-founder of Zume Pizza, and we also talk about the Planet FWD origin story, what first turned her on to the idea, her starting point, how it evolved from the initial ideation to when she broke ground and officially established the company. We also talked about Planet FWD's mission, their progress to date, what's coming next, and some of the things that would help give more [inaudible 00:02:59] [00:03:00] to the regenerative food movement as well as why it matters. Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Collins: Hey, it's nice to be with you, Jason. How you doing?
Jason Jacobs: Okay. It's crazy COVID times still and not leaving the house very often, but if being stir-crazy is the biggest thing that we're worried about, then I realized how fortunate that we are.
Julia Collins: Oh, that makes a lot of sense to me. And at the same time, I'm really excited to go back outside again. It's been a long haul.
Jason Jacobs: Has the company has been operating virtually? I would imagine you can't operate fully virtual.
Julia Collins: We are largely virtual. Obviously our manufacturing happens in real life, but our team is distributed and we spend most of our time together. Like all of us are right now on Slack and on Zoom and on Hangouts and we're making it work.
Jason Jacobs: Well. I'm so excited to have you on the show and I'm tempted just to jump in and catch up like old friends here, especially since we do know each other, and I'm a very [00:04:00] proud investor in the company. But since many people listening are not as familiar or maybe even familiar at all, we should probably take things from the top. What is Planet FWD?
Julia Collins: Yeah. So Planet FWD is a company on a mission to use the power of food to help tackle climate change with 25 to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions coming from our food system, definitely see a huge opportunity to just re-imagine the way food is grown, distributed and consumed. And we hope that by just galvanizing the collective eating power of the nine billion people that are going to be living on the planet very shortly, we can actually really address climate change through our daily food choices.
So Planet FWD we make snacks and we make software. On the snack side of the business, we created a brand called Moonshot, which is the US market's first explicitly climate-friendly snack brand. And the idea here is to really get consumers [00:05:00] excited about the power that they have to take action. And on the software side of the business, we're building a tool that makes it easy for other brands to create their own climate-friendly products by connecting them to the kind of data and information that they need to make better sourcing decisions.
Jason Jacobs: And how did the company come about? And maybe I should ask even a question before that which is, what made you start caring about climate change and when did that happen?
Julia Collins: I've always cared a lot about the environment, I've always felt really connected to the planet, and I'd been someone who was kind of like early in the plant-based movement and early in the composting movement. But when I had my son in 2017, I think I went from being concerned about climate change to absolutely obsessed with dedicating my life to doing everything that I could to tackle it. And it was just something about the experience of being responsible for [00:06:00] another human that made me think what's the best way to really be a good parent and I thought, well, I oughta try to leave this child at a planet that's in better shape than the one that I inherited.
And when I saw what was happening with climate change I realized that, that wouldn't be possible unless we all got to work. So I just started to imagine decent, like how I could pull the threads through from some of my prior work, some of my prior projects in the food space to try to really create something that would be a scalable solution to addressing the climate crisis. I thought that I ought to start with food
Jason Jacobs: So when you first had that feeling, what were you doing at the time professionally? Were you still doing pizza?
Julia Collins: Yeah, I was still at Zume Pizza which had pivoted into Zume. We had done some really interesting work in just re-imagining how food could be manufactured and delivered to the customer. We had done some really interesting work with making packaging more sustainable by using molded fiber technology. And so there were all these places where I'd begun to just re-imagine how the food system worked. And then I decided to step away from my role at Zume to be [00:07:00] much more narrowly focused on climate change, and that's really the timing of Planet FWD coming about.
Jason Jacobs: And tell me about that journey. So you had a child and you were deeply concerned about climate. You were in a place that maybe touched on it, but wasn't working on it as directly as you aspire to, but what did that journey look like? What did that process look like? And to the extent that there were iterations or bumps along the way between having that moment and actually finding the thing that you were going to anchor on, what did that look like?
Julia Collins: When I tell this story from the 2021 reality that I'm in looking backward, it all seems to make perfect sense, [laughs] and be really well-knitted together and organized. But I think the reality Jason is, at the time I just thought about taking the next best step. Like what was the next best step? And [00:08:00] for me, somebody who's super passionate about food and food systems and who has quite an entrepreneurial bug, starting a company seems like the next best step. And then I thought, okay, this is good. I've got some traction. I have an idea of the problem that I want to solve, how will I solve it?
And then I thought, well, I'm at home with this little child and I'm snacking a lot and so is he, and so is my partner, what would a world look like where every snack that we consumed actually could draw down carbon? And I started to learn about regenerative agriculture and the power of this approach to farming to help rebalance natural carbon cycles, and in some cases, even sequester atmospheric carbon. And I got really excited about the idea of creating a climate friendly or regenerative brand, which is what I did next.
Jason Jacobs: And help me and help listeners connect the dots between the snack brand that's on the grocery shelves, or you might order direct to consumer from an online e-commerce site and [00:09:00] drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. What happens in between-
Julia Collins: [Laughs]
Jason Jacobs: ... the cracker hitting my mouth and the carbon getting drawn down from the atmosphere?
Julia Collins: The place where we were really radical in the development of Moonshot was the degree of transparency that we had into our supply chain. So like really obsessing about and taking time to investigate every component of the product, where it came from, who grew it, how it was being grown, the outcomes of those farm level practices, and we became like maniacs really just scouring the earth for the very best ingredients that we could find.
For example, we found this family farm in Skagit Valley, Washington owned for four generations by the Headland family run now by Dave and Serena and their kids, and Dave and Serena were using five of these magical regenerative practices that help to sequester carbon in the soil, improve biodiversity, [00:10:00] improve water infiltration, improve nutrient density in their crops and we thought this was fascinating. What if we could actually directly contract with these farmers so that we could be sure Moonshot's the brand we created?
For every bumps of Moonshot crackers that we sell, that we could connect consumers with this family on this actual farm. And then when we looked at the data on that farm, we could see that for decades they were capturing carbon in their soil. And we knew that because we could look at the data around their soil organic matter and their soil carbon improvement over time. So that's the relationship between sort of supply chain transparency, practices of farming, and the ability to turn our food system into a carbon sink.
Jason Jacobs: And when you say, you mentioned before the best ingredients, what makes an ingredient the best ingredient as it relates to being a carbon sink?
Julia Collins: From the perspective of a [00:11:00] climate-friendly ingredient, we're looking for a couple of things. First, a really good ingredient is one that you can identify, meaning that you have full transparency. As you know, there's so many components of our food system that are opaque and often brands because of the way that they source through contract manufacturers or through brokers or through distributors, they don't actually know where geographically an ingredient comes from down to the actual farm. So a good ingredient is one that has total transparency, so you know where it was grown and who grew it.
One of the other great things from a climate action perspective is that there are ways that we can grow these ingredients that help to restore the natural carbon cycle or in some cases sequester atmospheric carbon. So when we see that ingredient's grown, for example, without the use of nitrogen-based inputs, as you know, Jason, nitrogen dioxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It's one of the most harmful greenhouse [00:12:00] gases.
So when we see the ingredient's being grown without the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers or other inputs, that's a really good sign. When we see that an ingredient's grown with the use of cover crops or minimal tillage, or in a way that improves biodiversity, those are other good signs that there's regeneration happening, or that there's an approach to farming that's happening that's more climate-friendly. And so those are some of the things that we're looking for. We're also looking to shorten supply chains, because a lot of times the most carbon intense element of bringing a product to market is actually transporting the ingredients. So shorter supply chains are also one of the things that we're hoping to promote with our brand.
Jason Jacobs: And you mentioned, I think it's the Headland family farm as an example of a farm that is doing things right. What motivates them to the extent that, you know, to do those things, and I guess one of the reasons I asked that question is I want to understand what might motivate more farms to put in place similar practices.
Julia Collins: When you talk to [00:13:00] Dave and Serena, they're absolutely obsessed with this idea that it's their duty to pass this farm on to the next generation just the same way that the farm was passed to them. And what that means is that they have to focus on the health of the farm beginning with the health of their soil. And so managing farms for soil health, that's the trend that we really hope will take off like wildfire. Right now we know that about 5% of US food [inaudible 00:13:25] plant is currently being managed for soil health, and that's a small number but it's growing quickly. But from the perspective of our farmers, it really is their desire to manage the health of their soil so that they can pass on a healthy farm ecosystem to future generations.
Jason Jacobs: So it sounds like when you were thinking about the climate challenge you identified that the practices that take place on the farm were a big lever to bring about change as it relates to decarbonizing the food and [00:14:00] agriculture sector. So how did you get from that to where you ended up with the food brand and the underlying software platform?
Julia Collins: The first thing is I knew that I wanted to create a climate-friendly food brand, but I was actually totally agnostic as to what kind of food I would make first. It didn't actually matter to me, Jason, whether I created a chip or a cracker or a cookie, that wasn't where my mind was at. I was more focused on finding out from farmers, what was the highest and the best use of their land and what they wanted to grow in order to maximize their soil health. So when you talk to Dave and Serena, you learn that growing weed in a rotation was really beneficial to their farm ecosystem and help them to capture more carbon in their soil.
So we thought, great, you want to grow more wheat, we'll make something out of wheat. And as we think about more products for the Moonshot brand, that's absolutely how we're thinking about what comes [00:15:00] next. We want to find out what's the highest and the best use of a given piece of land from a climate change perspective or from a carbon capture perspective and work with those kinds of ingredients. But I will tell you that it was very, very difficult and time-consuming as one small brand to get all of the data and the information that we needed to actually make sure that our product was climate-friendly.
I sort of, Jason, at the time that I was dreaming of Moonshot, I kind of naively thought that there must be some database that I could go to, to find out for any given ingredient, who was growing it, what kind of practices were being used, maybe the outcomes of those practices, I had sort of thought maybe there must be some multi attribute database tracking these things. Only there wasn't. And so on a sort of first party basis, I started to obsessively capture all this information for Moonshot.
And then I realized sitting with a friend, actually at one of my old friends from Zume Pizza, I [00:16:00] thought this is getting a little bit unwieldy, managing all this data. Can you write a little software around this? And then we sort of looked at each other and realized that probably anybody who wanted to create a more sustainable or more climate-friendly brand needed access to the same kind of data that I was creating for Moonshot. So rather than just create it for myself, I decided to create it for everyone, and that's the idea for how the Planet FWD software was born.
Jason Jacobs: Now, typically when these types of software platforms emerge, they might get some pilot customers and find some forward-thinking food brands to work with. But, I mean, there might be plenty of counter-examples to what I'm about to say, but it seems like it is a rare occurrence when a company says that not only are we going to build a brand to experiment with and make sure that we're eating our own dog food, if you will, but we actually want this brand to be a strong brand on its own. What made you decide that, that two pronged path was the right one, and did you worry at [00:17:00] all along the way that it would bifurcate the company and spread yourself too thin?
Julia Collins: So two things there. The first is, it's really a privilege to be alive during this very narrow window of time that we have available, really this decade when it's still possible to make the most important changes to all facets of our society to take action on climate change. Is I sometimes think about what a pity it would be to be born a decade too late. So it is a huge privilege and also a huge responsibility to be alive and to be healthy and to be in a position to actually work on this problem right now. So when I look at myself in the mirror every morning, the thing that I asked myself is, are you doing everything you possibly can today to tackle climate change? Because that's what your mission is, that's what you've promised yourself and your family.
So from the perspective of Planet FWD, we saw this really unique opportunity to build products in two areas that were complimentary. As we get more and more customers excited about [00:18:00] climate friendly eating or sustainable living through the Moonshot Snack brand, we're also creating this wonderful upwelling that will help other brands to become more interested in re-imagining their own supply chains and products to be more climate-friendly. So creating more consumer demand for sustainable and climate-friendly products through Moonshot really helps us on the software side as we help to get more brands excited about doing their part on climate change.
So that's the first thing is just really understanding the magnitude of the problem that we're trying to solve, the limited amount of time that we have to get it done and the commitment that we have to doing everything that we can. But then there's the more tactical thing, which is how do you run a snacks and software company? How do you make sure that people just [laughs]-
Jason Jacobs: Normally, you have a software company that provides snacks to the people that are writing the software, but you don't actually build a separate company out of it.
Julia Collins: [Laughs]
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs]
Julia Collins: The only thing that I can tell you there is that I think all of us founders in the climate tech space right [00:19:00] now have a little bit of an unfair advantage in terms of hiring. There's so many incredibly talented people who like you and I have had, and your listeners I think who have had that like moment of awakening that the time is really now to tackle climate change. And so we've been able to just attract really talented people to both sides of the business. So the way that we're able to effectively run companies with two really distinct products is to just really focus on talent and hire great people. And we also have amazing investors who understand the complimentary nature of these two businesses, the fact that they reinforce each other. And so that's been a huge asset to me as well.
Jason Jacobs: And can you talk a little bit about the theory of change in terms of the things that you're doing with the food brand and with the software to enable other food brands and then how that actually manifests in terms of the practices changing on the farms themselves?
Julia Collins: So we believe that by creating a product like these, Moonshot crackers that are first of all delicious, [00:20:00] second of all, branded in a really delightful way, that we give ourselves permission through the taste, through the flavor, through the delight, to engage consumers in this idea that they have power and responsibility to take action on climate change. It's like this very simple thing, which is put a snack in someone's mouth, let them enjoy it and then start a conversation with them. So the theory of change is by igniting the power of individual consumers and then collecting all of that power together, we can actually create a climate-friendly food movement. You might even think of it as moonshot being the first entrant and creating a new category of food called climate-friendly food.
And so if we did that in the same way that folks got excited about keto and the Whole30, if folks got excited about climate friendly eating, you could imagine that that would create a groundswell, which would create all of this consumer demand, which we could then funnel back to growers to [00:21:00] say, "Listen, at the end of this value chain, there's a consumer on the other side who actually is hungry to engage with growers that are using these kinds of practices that are beneficial for the climate movement."
On the brand side of things, 50% of the growth in CPG for the last five years has come from brands where sustainability is part of their brand promise. And we believe that climate action is really the next wave of sustainability. So when we talk to brands more and more of them are interested. I think 86% of the brands that we surveyed were interested in improving [00:22:00] the sustainability or climate friendliness of their products and they just needed to know how. So when consumers are excited about climate-friendly eating and brands are excited about making climate-friendly products, that's the kind of market demand that we think will create value for farmers who should be rewarded for the kinds of carbon capturing practices that they're using at the farm level.
Jason Jacobs: And on the snack brand side with Moonshot, there's different ways I could see that going. You could expand into other Moonshot offerings, maybe some of the other offerings that you mentioned in wheat or even beyond, you could have a portfolio of brands that you're building yourselves Mini P&G, or you could really just focus on the software and enabling a thousand flowers to bloom through other brands, big and small across categories, et cetera, or maybe the answer is all the above or too early to know, but how do you think about that and where that balance will be over time?
Julia Collins: We really want, as you mentioned earlier on in the pod for Moonshot to be a business that can stand on its own for it to have the underlying unit economics, for it to have the market penetration, for it to have that just level of consumer love and delight that makes it a healthy standalone business. And we certainly believe that we're on the path to getting there even with our go-to market that we launched in December of 2020. [00:23:00] In the medium term when we talk to brands on the software side of the business, they're so much more willing to engage with us at Planet FWD because we understand what it's like to be a brand.
So even if you think about Moonshot as a sales enablement strategy on the platform side of things or the software side of things, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. So in the medium term, we definitely see the businesses living together in harmony, but we don't know what the future holds. I don't know at the 10 year mark whether or not Planet FWD will continue to own both businesses underneath itself, but we certainly see for the near term in the medium term a lot of really good overlap between operating the two businesses. At least that's been the experience so far.
Jason Jacobs: And can you just talk a bit about the timeline of when you got going with the company, and you mentioned that you launched the Moonshot Snacks in December, which I knew, and also just a bit on where you are today and progress to date on both sides of the business?
Julia Collins: Yeah, absolutely. So, as I mentioned to you [00:24:00] earlier, the first idea for the company really was to create a climate-friendly snack brand and to try to build a new category of food called climate-friendly eating. And so in terms of the sequencing, we really did work on the Moonshot brand first. We began in earnest working on the company January of 2020. In 2019, we did a lot of customer discovery, some fundraising, but 2020, we really hit the ground running. And between January and December, we were able to completely build and launch the Moonshot business, meaning that we went from a whiteboard to product online in less than a year despite all of the disruptions that we saw during the first and second phases of the pandemic.
And then in September of 2020, we started to really sort of deepen our understanding of what needed to happen at the supplier level in order for us to connect brands to climate-friendly suppliers. And so that's when we brought on board our head of product and started to get into some engineering sprints on the [00:25:00] software side of the business. Where we are now is that Moonshot's available direct to consumer and through some online retail partners in the Bay Area with zero grocery on the East Coast with bubble goods. And then on the software side of the business, we're kicking off a pilot phase with seven brands where we're giving them some sustainable sourcing as a service, and also something that we're calling our carbon assessment tool, so helping brands to understand at the product level the overall greenhouse gas impact of their products. It would look, Jason, something like a nutritional fact panel for carbon and carbon equivalents.
Jason Jacobs: And in general as you look at the brands landscape, where do you see ... I mean, it's hard to speak generally when every brand is its own beast, but where are they generally in terms of their education about this area, about their passion for this area and about their confidence to move forward with a climate-friendly line or a climate-friendly company?
Julia Collins: When we talk to brands, they tell us that they want to know how to [00:26:00] best improve the sustainability of their products, and their reason for doing this as often so that they can better serve their customers, especially if they're sustainably marketed brand. But a lot of brand owners also tell us that this is something that they just feel a very personal connection to. So there are fewer brands that tell us right now that they want to launch climate-friendly products. Most brands are looking at it right now through a lens of sustainability. But when we dig a level deeper and we say, okay, what does sustainability mean to you, some notion of a carbon footprint or a carbon impact is certainly part of what's on their mind. And so the tool that we're building addresses both sustainability and carbon impact through a set of features.
Jason Jacobs: If you had to bet, when you look at the climate-friendly brands of the future, do you think more of those are going to be existing established players who evolve or new players that come up?
Julia Collins: I think it's gotta be everybody. I just think that the way that the brands get there is a little bit different depending on the category and depending on the size. [00:27:00] Almost every new brand in the natural and organic food space has some sort of sustainable supply chain or sustainable product creation as part of their brand ethos. It's hard to find a brand that doesn't try to address either their packaging or their ingredients in some way that makes them more sustainable. But then we also see huge CPG companies and huge food manufacturers, even the Unilevers of the world, saying that they're committed to carbon labeling their products or de-carbonizing their supply chains. I know I'm probably a bit bullish on this category given my connection to it, but I think Jason, across the board, we're going to see brands trying to become more sustainable and climate-friendly in the next decade. I just hope we can get there fast enough.
Jason Jacobs: And when you look at the blind spots or capability gaps or visibility gaps or the different holes that might be stunting the brand's ability to actually fulfill this promise, even if they aspire to, [00:28:00] and then you look at your own blind spots and gaps and ability to fulfill the promise for all these brands, if they want to work with you, are there key pieces that are missing from the equation? And if so, what are they?
Julia Collins: The first is that brands often struggle to know what to ask for. When we think about terms like sustainability or climate friendliness, these are really broad terms and often brands struggle to figure out what are the exact metrics that we need to track, what does best in class look like from the standpoint of sustainability or climate impact? And so Planet FWD has a very clear point of view based on research, based on collaboration, based on being absolutely obsessed with this space about what should be measured, and so we go ahead and set those metrics. If a brand wants to go deeper on a given metric, of course, we can go deeper with them, but we give them at least a framework that helps them to know, what should I be asking for when it comes to sustainability?
[00:29:00] The second thing Jason is it's incredibly time-consuming as a brand, even if you're a large brand to have the resources and to have the know-how to, for every single ingredient, get perfect transparency at the ingredient level and also screen for all of the metrics. And so that's why Planet FWD pre-screens ingredients, pre-screens materials, pre-screens suppliers, and then surfaces that information to brands who just may not have the hours in the day to investigate and screen all of the metrics that they want at the level that's possible.
Jason Jacobs: And are there commonalities so far in terms of the brands that are expressing interest in some of the early pilots that you're doing in terms of what's motivating them to take action now?
Julia Collins: What's really interesting is many brands say that their customers aren't necessarily asking them to take action on climate change. That was maybe an unpleasant surprise for me when I started this business. I sort of hoped that all [00:30:00] customers were already demanding this, and it turns out that they aren't necessarily. But what brands tell us is that their customers are asking about sustainability and that their employees are often asking about climate action as well. They also see an overall corporate climate that is mandating that they make it clear where they stand and they see big companies like Unilever and Danone and General Mills taking action or making commitments, and they don't want to be left behind.
Jason Jacobs: Increasingly, there's this category, I don't know if it's called like a climate operating system or carbon accounting software, but there're these platforms that are helping companies to better understand their footprints, to improve their footprints and to whether it's offset or negative emissions is or credits to kind of make up the difference in purchase their way to their net zero commitments. Is there any overlap between the type of measurement that you're doing and those companies, are they good partners for you [00:31:00] or are they just completely playing a different sport?
Julia Collins: No, I think there's a lot of overlap between sort of LCA models, tools and consultants in this space and some of these other carbon accounting frameworks. What we want to do for food brands is make it very clear that the product or the menu item level, what the carbon impact is for a given product or menu item, and brands often need that level of specificity at the product level as opposed to at the company level. So we definitely see overlap in the method of collection. One of the ways that we can collaborate with these other tools is to streamline just the number of things that a brand has to evaluate.
So for example, it can be very costly and time-consuming for brands to have to fill out multiple surveys or multiple questionnaires for multiple platforms, and so what Planet FWD does either through API integrations or just through understanding what's being asked, we try to streamline that process so a brand can have the experience of sort of answering once and [00:32:00] using many times.
Jason Jacobs: How important is policy to getting these brands moving, and is it something that you think about at Planet FWD?
Julia Collins: I think the policy lever is something that I'm much more excited about on the supplier side of the equation. Of course, there are some sort of policy frameworks or new legislation that could accelerate the conversation on the brand side. We might, for example, see a future where large retailers had to commit to being carbon neutral by some date, that's possible, but I also get really excited about potential rewriting of the farm bill, potential re-imagining of crop insurance. For example, there's so many ways that the way that crop insurance right now almost penalizes regenerative practices. So I get more excited about what we think is possible on the supplier side through some of the new policy frameworks that we'll see coming out of the current administration.
Jason Jacobs: The disclaimer on the question I'm about to ask you is that I am essentially a city slicker who has lived in or near [00:33:00] urban environments for my entire life and have spent very little to no time on farms. So that's my disclaimer, but this question is that it seems that being a farmer these days is really hard and that the margins are thin, the hours are long, the conditions are increasingly erratic due to changing weather patterns and droughts and extreme heat and other extreme events. And so if I'm a farmer and I'm just struggling to keep my head above water, is there a concern that these practices and embracing them and kind of learning a whole new sport and way of doing things, if you will, will make a hard job even harder?
Julia Collins: Yeah. I think some of the barriers to adoption in terms of regenerative agriculture coming from just the amount of risk that many farmer- farmers experience or perceive, unfortunately [laughs] because of the innovation around the Haber-Bosch process [00:34:00] earlier on, on the century, small molecule nitrogen-based chemistry just became so cheap and so available and so abundant that many farmers and growers chose to implement this as a method for boosting crop yields and improving margins. And unfortunately, that approach to farming just as having the unintended consequences of ruining their soils, and it's becoming harder and harder to extract value from soils that have been depleted because of this over-reliance on nitrogen-based inputs.
And so farmers, many farmers are looking for a better way and realizing that by updating or changing their approach to farming that they can actually improve the health of their soil, which is their lifeblood. And when we talk to farmers, they tell us like, "Julia, and I only have 40 chances of this in my life. If I'm lucky I have 40 seasons to farm. So why in the world would I want to do something to jeopardize any one of those 40 precious chances?" So I believe that there's a movement happening across the country. I see it [00:35:00] happening, I hear it happening, I witnessed it happening where more and more farmers are looking for better ways to manage the health of their soil and therefore their livelihoods.
It's wonderful for all of us that this new approach to farming this time around relies not on nitrogen-based inputs, but actually on a return to some of the kinds of principles that we saw in place when native American peoples were in charge of the agriculture in our country. So I think there's this beautiful relationship between creating better farmer livelihoods and also accelerating an approach to farming, this helps to tackle climate change.
Jason Jacobs: I'm glad you brought that up. That last part, that's kind of a natural lead into my next question which is more around justice, because one thing that's been drilled into my head again and again over the last couple of years as I've tried to get myself up to speed on addressing climate change and decarbonization is that you really can't decouple addressing climate with addressing climate justice, social justice, and if you look at our farming [00:36:00] practices and who owns the land and things like that, I'm no expert, but it seems that much of that land was stolen from people of color, from indigenous people in the earliest days of our nation. And as we think about the future of agriculture, the future of farming, how and where and in what ways does justice factor into the equation?
Julia Collins: It's such a good question. First of all, we have to acknowledge the fact that we are all living on stolen land in the United States. And it's sometimes startling for people to learn that on a global basis, indigenous populations make up just 6% of the global population but they protect 80% of biodiversity. 80% of the biodiversity on the planet it's being protected by 6% of our population. And so one of the best things that we can do is to make sure that we safeguard the sovereignty of the remaining indigenous land, not just because it's the [00:37:00] right thing to do from a justice and equity lens, which should be reason enough, but because it's really the right thing to do from the perspective of preserving our ability to live on our own planet.
When you think about the experience of black farmers in the United States, I could talk to you for another 10 hours just about this as somebody who's the descendant of African slaves and the descendant of people who escaped from slavery to start their own farms, and that's where I'm coming from with some of this. But even if I zoom out a little bit this approach to farming where we hope that as a result of the management of our land we're putting more in than we take away, this is the kind of farming that we really do see in abundance with black farmers. More often than not, black farmers are using practices to manage the health of their soil.
And so again, not just from a justice and equity perspective, but also from a climate action perspective, it really is a good idea to support [00:38:00] black farmers and to make sure that black farmers can hang on to their land. You asked a little bit about policy and where I think policy can play a role in all of this conversation. The Justice for Black Farmers Act I believe is going to be reintroduced into the Congress this year, and I certainly hope so. That's one of the pieces of legislation that can help to move the needle on ensuring that more black farmers are able to hang onto their land.
Jason Jacobs: And when you think about the mission of Planet FWD and you think about the other key stakeholders in the ecosystem, and I can name few but I don't even want to ask a leading question. I'd rather, if you just talk about the ones that are top of mind as you think about the highest impact stakeholders that can bring about this change, maybe just speak to, and you don't have to name all of them, but if there's two or three or four that come to mind and you want to just deliver a message to them and say, I wish you would do X, Y, and Z, who are those stakeholders and what [00:39:00] would you say?
Julia Collins: I wish that I could say to Amazon that you have a duty and you also have the power and the resources to decarbonize your supply chain and to invest in reverse logistics infrastructure to help eliminate single use packaging waste from your ecosystem. And that if you did so first, golly geez, how would that change the world? I want to say to the Biden administration that I'm very encouraged by the focus that you're putting on climate change and the way that you're normalizing climate change language in the population and the appointments that you've made, and that it really is your responsibility and your duty to keep up the work and don't let your foot off the gas. And I think I'd also say to all of the incredible Gen Z years and young people on the planet that I see you beating the drum for climate action and you inspire me and it's part [00:40:00] of the reason why I get up every day to keep doing this work.
Jason Jacobs: Amazing. And if you look at the next 12 months for Planet FWD, what are the key goals as a company, and then speak to listeners for a minute and give them some homework, where do you need help? How can we help you?
Julia Collins: Oh my God. Yeah. So at Planet FWD, we're going to be making snacks and software again this year. On the snack side of the business, we're really excited to get Moonshot into some more grocery channels. Listeners, if you walk into your grocery store and you ask somebody this, "Where are the Moonshot snacks?" That certainly helps me a lot. And if walking into the grocery store feels a little bit risky right now, as I can understand that it does, I'd love for you to just either follow us on Instagram, @moonshotsnacks so we can just engage you a little bit in this idea of climate-friendly living, or maybe even if you really want to treat yourself, go on Moonshot Snacks and order some delicious climate-friendly crackers and give me some feedback, [00:41:00] and I'm easy to find.
And on the software side of the business, the next year is really about making sure that we have a tool that brands absolutely love. We want to be for brands, for food brands, a chief sustainability officer as a service solving all of the needs and all of the pains related to creating more sustainable products by giving brands the best information possible and streamlining the process of connecting with suppliers. So to all of the folks that are listening, if you are a food brand or you have a friend who is a food brand, or there's a food brand that you love that you want to encourage to be more sustainable, please have them reach out to me directly. I'm just julia@planetFWD.com.
Jason Jacobs: Any key roles that you're hiring for?
Julia Collins: We're looking for an awesome software engineer to start this year. If you are somebody who's passionate about climate change, wants to work for a really awesome team and a great full stack engineer, then I'd love to talk to you.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And Julia, [00:42:00] is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have, or any additional parting words for listeners?
Julia Collins: I just really appreciate having the chance to be here today. It's really a joy to get to talk about Moonshot and to talk about what we're doing at Planet FWD, and I feel just really happy and grateful to be connected to this awesome community. So that's all I got.
Jason Jacobs: Well, Julia, thanks so much for coming on the show. I will say I knew a lot of this already, but every time we talk, I learn more and I'm just so proud to be involved with collaborating with you and with Planet FWD and everything that you're building today and trying to build. So thank you for coming on the show and best of luck to you and the team.
Julia Collins: Thanks so much. Appreciate you.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. No, that is .co not .com. [00:43:00] Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter, @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers may be say that, thank you.
