430 Lara Espirito Santo - Source the cream, not the butter: fixing food waste through regen sourcing

Lara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next).

Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ingredient quietly becomes four: butter, buttermilk, then whey and cheese once you split the buttermilk again. That unglamorous bit of dairy chemistry is the mechanic behind Lara’s central claim: you don’t get to zero food waste by managing waste better. You get there by going further back up the supply chain than most kitchens ever bother to look, and only then does the creativity actually start.

In this episode, recorded in Lisbon, we get into how watching the birds disappear from her father’s 20,000-hectare farm pushed her toward activism and then back into restaurants, why SEM’s food costs ran at 17%, against an industry standard of 25–30%, why she closed it anyway, the case for an EU-wide black market in regeneratively raised organ meat, oyster shells turned into dinner plates, and why she’d spend a hypothetical billion euros de-risking the years it takes a farm to convert.

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Transcript

Koen van Seijen 0:00

You want to fix food waste. Simple. Through extreme regenerative sourcing and lots of creativity in the kitchen. Of course, that's not simple, but it's super doable. Food waste is one of those huge drivers of negative impact of the food industry. Depending on your numbers, up to 30% of all food is wasted before it even hits a plate. Imagine all the seeds, imagine all the emissions, the fossil fuels, the human energy to grow food, which often ends up being burned. But so far I haven't really heard many holistic solutions except let's just waste less food. Until today, I'm probably late to the game and didn't fully grasp when I talked about it with Matt Orlando, the ex-head chef of NOMA last year. But now sitting down with Lara of SEM, the extremely successful zero food waste restaurant in Lisbon, it really hit me. The solution is simple. You can't see zero food waste disconnected from regen sourcing. Literally going to the source of ingredients. Start with the cream and not with the butter, for example. And with a lot of creativity, in the kitchen you can almost get to zero waste, financial sustainability, and most importantly, extremely, extremely tasty menus. So why did she close? Not for financial reasons, but to figure out the next steps, which we discuss in this conversation. We cover everything: food systems change, flavor, chefs, hospitality, farming, sourcing, oysters turned into plates, and the black market for region awful. Enjoy. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Welcome to another episode. Today we're in an amphitheater in the center of Lisbon. So there might be some background noise, might walk at some point. There are definitely airplanes flying over. And we're here with Lara of SEM. How do you pronounce it in Portuguese? SEM?

SPEAKER_03 2:05

Seng, yeah.

Koen van Seijen 2:06

Seng, which is without, right? Without, yeah, yeah. Which we'll get into. One of the most sustainable, zero-waste, we haven't really found a term for it yet. Really? Restaurant. We've talked about this actually at length with Mad Orlando as well. It should be a term for this kind of restaurant, like extreme on the sourcing side, extreme in a good way. Extreme in the restaurant side, and really flavorful. Sustainable is not the term.

SPEAKER_03 2:30

Sustainable is not the term. There's some argument that zero waste also has this kind of pejorative side. So we're still in search of that kind of one-word elevator pitch to describe this cuisine, but I think it's definitely a movement of it's a movement, it's a thing.

Koen van Seijen 2:48

So if you have any suggestions, we're looking, we're open to uh terms. Like language is very important, narratives. I think zero waste doesn't make it appealing. It's how we use everything, great. But it's it is true. Yeah. And we'll get into that. But I want to start with a personal question we always love to ask, and you're a listener of the podcast, how did you end up spending most of your waking hours, and in this case also non-waking hours, and opening a restaurant at this level in general, and at this level absolutely is not for the faint of heart, and it's not for the ones that want to sleep a lot, probably, on food systems change because it's not just I'm interested in hospitality, having giving people an amazing culinary experience. Your goals are much wider. So, how what led you to that?

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Well, actually went in through the agriculture side, let's call it kind of agriculture social side. I'm from Brazil. My father is Portuguese, but I'm from Brazil. To actually spend the first five years of my life in a farm in Paraguay. So my dad used to manage quite large-scale industrial farms in South America, in Brazil and Paraguay, mainly monoculture crops, but also cattle ranching, very similar to US, as in South America's mostly all extensive, right? It's not intensive, but extensive. And I spent my first five years in a farm in Paraguay. And then we moved to Rio, which is where my mum is from and where I was born. But we still spent most of our holidays going back to these farms, wherever my dad was. And that was kind of this really weird dichotomy of kind of spending half my life in a very kind of rural, large-scale agriculture scenario, and then back into kind of this big city. And funnily enough, that kind of pushed me away from agriculture. One of our favourite farms to spend time in was a farm in Tocanchinch, so very kind of dead center of Brazil, between the Amazon and the Pantanal. And this farm was 20,000 hectares, just so we understand the scale.

Koen van Seijen 4:43

And that's small.

SPEAKER_03 4:44

This South America is not even that impressive, right? And it was an irrigated rice farm with cattle. And my early years there, I have this kind of super vivid memory of this really privileged childhood of being in a semi-safari where we'd drive around and we'd see anything from three meters, five meter pythons, alligators everywhere, every kind of bird that you could imagine on the rice fields, anteaters, all of these wild animals very present and just driving around. And I remember the last time I went, which was when I was about 14-15, and you couldn't see a single bird. It was ridiculous in a time frame of my kind of childhood to adolescence. I saw that degradation happen really fast. And that kind of all pushed me very kind of away. I went into a more social side. I ended up doing my I went abroad for my studies. I studied politics and then international development and kept on working in Brazil, in in social and environmental projects in Brazil. And then was very unhappy always, and decided that I wanted to do something with food, which had always been my passion. And that's when the shift happened. But I at that moment thought I'd be giving something up in terms of my big kind of mission pursuits of very kind of large-scale systems change in thinking and activism.

Koen van Seijen 6:09

So interesting because many would argue, and now for sure you would as well. The biggest system probably to change is the food system. For sure. And but why you were so unhappy in systems change in general? You were like, okay, I'm going to be.

SPEAKER_03 6:21

I wasn't happy in office life.

Koen van Seijen 6:22

I want to be involved in food, and then I quote unquote give up some of my potential impact, even though later on you found out that's not the case. But how how was it? Exactly. Why was that narrative so strong?

SPEAKER_03 6:34

I think it's a very kind of I I as a kind of almost a classist narrative that I went from doing something with my brain to do something with my hands. And that was the system that I was brought in up in. And obviously at the time I didn't realize that that was kind of very much a consequential thinking of that system. And obviously, as soon as I started working with food, I understood. And I understood that actually was the means to all of the systems change and the activism that I wanted to achieve and kind of always felt lost without the how when that was my how. I always had the why.

Koen van Seijen 7:07

And when you said immediately understood this was the system, was it a moment? Was that like when you're trying to figure out sourcing?

SPEAKER_03 7:15

Like what was the Yeah, in cooking school and just seeing the sheer amount of waste happening in school, and this was one cooking school in London, and suddenly understanding like just the vast amount of the same things being ordered, and everything started coming back to the monocultures, and it's like understanding like where this was, what was fueling that system. And yeah, and then that very much became very prevalent. I went to my first job was actually in a hotel restaurant, and that was a massive eye-opener for a for someone who just kind of walked into kitchens and just the volume, just the sheer volume, and and the sourcing and the marketing around the greenwashing around the marketing, which was obviously very prevalent as well. We had situations of people walk like marketing hotel marketing director walking in and showing a picture of these carrots in the soil and stuff. And I knew where everything came from. You just walk in the walk-in fridge, and these carrots haven't been in the soil for a very long time. But it sounds good, right? And that's kind of very much what fuels the hospitality industry is this kind of unregulated ability to just say what you want about how what you do with very little backing of what you actually do. So that was my first kind of frustration of okay, we're here, cooking and retrods have this huge power in terms of sourcing, in terms of storytelling, in terms of capillarity to just the amount of people that they reach. And we're hashtag sustainable, but what are we actually doing? And there's no vehicles, no organizations, no very few that can uh certify or regulate. I'm not even sure if that's what we want, but there's no verif it's not verifiable, right?

Koen van Seijen 8:59

And how did that not turn you super cynical? Like you're in a hotel, restaurant. I've worked not, I mean, I've worked mostly on the cleaning side, and let's say the amount of waste in certain buffet places I've been is I was the one like scraping the plates in into the bin, which is a very humbling experience in the food space. But it can also make you very cynical in that sense, like you saw the issues, but you also saw potential solutions. Were there places you said there were no organizations there, no, it's very it's it's a lot of love, but did you were able to find in London places where you're like, oh, this gives me hope?

SPEAKER_03 9:34

Yes, and that was Silo. It was Doug's restaurant, which was for people that are not in the scene.

Koen van Seijen 9:40

I'm not in the scene, but I just want to pretend. What is Silo? Who's done?

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Silo, Silo is Douglas McMaster's restaurant. It was the first really pioneer restaurant in terms of being zero waste, and that's zero food waste, zero materials waste, which literally means people there's no bin where stuff goes into. But also includes in within this nomenclature of zero waste, within this narrative of zero waste, this which makes which is what makes not having a bin possible, is having a really short supply chain. And when you have that really short supply chain, you're actually talking straight to farmers and producers and the ones doing working with nature. So the kind of working with non-industrial in a non-industrial system would be what makes zero waste possible. And Doug had been in Brighton.

Koen van Seijen 10:35

Do you remember when you met, heard about it?

SPEAKER_03 10:37

I met Doug at Food on the Edge one year. We I introduced myself, we met outside the pub having Guinness at Food on the Edge, which is an amazing conference. For me, one of the most important food conferences. And he was at the time moving silo from Brighton to London, and I asked if I could come work for him. And working with Doug is obviously incredibly inspiring just because he is such an amazing human being and has this extraordinary way of looking at the world and somehow being able to take very metaphysical things and put them into practice, but also to see that system work. And it does work. It's it requires a lot of creativity, a lot of effort, but it does work. And it was our first experience being exposed to a truly zero waste restaurant working with regenerative agriculture. And then that yeah.

Koen van Seijen 11:35

Because that's no, it's interesting. You mentioned before as well, it's almost like the zero waste is a goal and it's very achievable, and almost by definition, you're saying you need to go deep on sourcing and fermentation, and like their techniques, there's flavor. It doesn't necessarily have to be amazing flavor. I think that of course you have to, otherwise people don't come back. But that's not, but the sourcing is fundamental and working straight with producers is a non-negotiable, you cannot have the wholesaler coming with their truck.

SPEAKER_03 12:05

Yes, and it's very simple. To be zero waste, you need the primary product. You know, it kind of implies that you are making everything in-house or working with partners that are making everything in-house. Because a simple example, butter. All restaurants use butter. But if you can source the cream, you actually have four products from the butter. You have the cream, which you then split and you have butter and buttermilk. If you split the buttermilk again, you have whey and cheese. So then you have suddenly four products within just sourcing this one primary product. And when you buy butter, this becomes all of these tertiary, sorry, secondary and tertiary ingredients, they become by-products, right? We call them byproducts, they just disappear into an industrial process. So that short supply chain, and it's the same with bread, you can talk about, but that's really what implies being zero waste. It's not using ingredients which are not good enough or which are left over. It's literally just treating the ingredient as a whole, and that implies that primary product. And for having that primary product, you need that relationship with the farmer.

Koen van Seijen 13:47

Which is yeah, nobody thinks about the other products. Like I think Dan Barber likes to say, the whole rotation. Like you buy that one, whatever type of grain, ancient, not ancient, etc. But it is grown in a rotation. Butter implies cream, cream implies whey, implies cheese, buttermilk, etc. etc. And unless you take that whole picture, there's not necessarily waste, it's gonna go somewhere else in the system, but for sure, lower quality or lower, lower paid, not value to the extent it can, and it can end up in an ingredient for whatever culture-processed cookie it ends up being.

SPEAKER_03 14:20

I think it gets devalued. And that devaluation process for me is the problem, right? Because this is something that Matt says. We shouldn't call them byproducts, they're just products. But we're removing the value from them. We're saying that the buttermilk has less value than the butter. But actually at the restaurant, what we did was we didn't we sourced the cream, we would make butter, and anywhere that we needed to use milk, instead of using milk, we use buttermilk. So we're not having any loss of value from that primary product that you would consider that when you split, let's say, a liter of cream, you get 40% butter, maximum 50%, but usually 40%.

Koen van Seijen 15:00

You can imagine what happens. Language is important here, just like conventional alternative ag. Absolutely. Language is very and so you went into silo, you were that at the move in that sense.

SPEAKER_03 15:10

Yes, so we were there. I was there from the very beginning of Silo London in the opening team, and then George eventually joined, and we worked until COVID. And when COVID hit, we came to Portugal kind of thinking we were gonna be here for a couple of weeks, a month latest.

Koen van Seijen 15:27

Many people can recognize that wherever you ended up in COVID. We all thought it was a weekend.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

Our things were in storage for for a long time because we just thought we were gonna go back to the world.

Koen van Seijen 15:36

George is your partner.

SPEAKER_03 15:36

Yeah, George is my partner in life and in in our projects, our life projects as well. And he's the executive chef of SEM. And yeah.

Koen van Seijen 15:45

So you were here on yeah, hospitality was closed, obviously in London. You you could access, I mean, George is from New Zealand, New Zealand was a bit far, Brazil as well, Portugal.

SPEAKER_03 15:55

Portugal was just seemed like an easy option. There were my family was here, we had where to stay, we could ride ride the storm out here. That was a little bit the plan. And then things kind of evolved, and we ended up staying here. I mean, COVID was what it was, the pandemic was what it was, and we ended up staying here all the way through summer, and we did this, it was actually very interesting and one of the biggest kind of pivots for our decision to stay and not to go back to silo and to London. We did this stint at the beach here, and it was very just a very simple kind of takeover of this tiny little spot adjacent to a restaurant where we could do very limited food, but we had a chance to do something different. And our offer was not, it wasn't something conceptual or creative, it was just natural food. We our deal with them was we have creative freedom and we can use we can source our own food. So we found a tiny little holistic farm 10 minutes down the road from the beach, and she was farming organically for years. She had inherited the land from her grandfather, was kind of working on creating something really integrative and holistic, and we started so she we get all the projects from her and from a local butcher in town. And it was just natural beach food, and that did really well. Portugal was open during COVID. We had lots of customers and it was very popular, not with the locals. We had a little bit of resistance with the locals who wanted their croquettes and their hot dogs and their industrialized food because that's the typical kind of food offer on the beach in Portugal.

Koen van Seijen 17:29

Maybe what the place was doing before you took over.

SPEAKER_03 17:32

Absolutely, like kind of unwrapped tuna sandwiches, little pies that sit on the windowsill all day, kind of thing. And there was a kind of a real backlash from that. And at that point we started questioning like maybe there is a reason, a bigger reason to stay, maybe there is like uh maybe this is really needed here, and obviously no one was doing it, but there was a lot of offer. We know that this on the sourcing side, on the regenerative agriculture side, Portugal is uh, I'd say, a case study of pioneer projects. There's so many farms and and people really leading the way with how they're doing farming, and but there were no outlets for that.

Koen van Seijen 18:13

Either you sell directly, because there are a lot of farms here, we'll be visiting quite a few we have done in the past, and but not let's say any creative culinary outlets, transformation processing at the time to to because that's it often stays at no, it it sort of stops at the farm gate. Like it doesn't go beyond that unless you have a super creative farmer that is also a chef, but that's I mean rare to be a great marketer, a chef, great farmer, etc. And or you open a restaurant on, but at the time I don't think that was happening so much yet.

SPEAKER_03 18:44

There's a few, there are a few still a few hotels that do work very closely with with some farms around them and they have their own farms. So there are, there exists, but there wasn't something kind of very conceptual and creative because the zero waste part when it comes into the waste is when you really focus on the creativity because you're having to kind of work with that limitation, and in a very interesting way, that limitation actually frees your mind a lot. You don't go through these kind of very established pathways of this is what you do with carrot peels, you make a stock, it's like very basic, right? When you can throw that carrot peel away, you start thinking of a hundred things that you can do with carrot peels, and you start thinking outside these established paths. So the creativity side kind of fuels that conceptual. We can't really define SEM's cuisine because it is very creative. So it's not attached to regional. Of course, we use all of our projects apart from six items weren't Portuguese. So we were more local than a lot of local restaurants, but we didn't have that traditional cultural heritage attached to it. So yeah, and that that showed us an opportunity, and SEM came from zero to existing very quickly, a very an independent project, and by June 21 we were open and running.

Koen van Seijen 20:04

And why I mean for sure it the creativity is fundamental there, but at the beach you were not zero waste, you were natural food, you were trying for sure, but mainly focusing on the sourcing of the ingredients when you decide okay, we're gonna do something of the silo style in in Lisbon, it has to be all the way, otherwise why bother?

SPEAKER_03 20:28

Yeah, well that we it actually goes a little bit deeper than that. We needed to establish, and this is comes from my very maybe systems thinking project manager side, but I needed very clear aims because we know from working in this industry, there are no silver bullets, there's no kind of easy answer. And when you have to make so many decisions, operational decisions, I needed something that we could fall back on every time that could guide us. So at that moment of building the business plan and the why of SEM, this was like, what is what would what do we see as the biggest problem here and in terms within our reach within this industry, and that was food waste. Because I think when you look at food waste, not as just the direct output of waste management, when you look at it through the entire food chain and all of the inputs that happen for everything from the amount of land energy inputs, considering that most of these inputs are synthetic and chemical and fossil fuel bases. Fossil fuels, packaging, social conditions, for them to food that is never going to be eaten anyway. So that for us, and when you look at Project Drawdown, for example, you can order their lists of actions, and the first thing that comes up is food waste.

Koen van Seijen 21:49

Because there is it's never, and I just realize I realize it now, which is I'm late to the party, and biggest bumps, it never gets connected, or never, sorry, very rarely gets connected to the sourcing food system, agriculture system. It's much more when I hear food waste, I'm like, ah yeah, we should reduce food waste and stop. In terms of emissions, probably is one of the biggest levers we have, plus all the other things. And you're very elegantly, and now I'm seeing that, connect that if you go zero, zero food waste, you actually enable food systems change.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

Well, exactly. And I think like the thing with zero with food waste is it's the kind of great excuse for industrial agriculture. It's a kind of it's what enables this whole system because we don't actually have a production problem.

Koen van Seijen 22:38

Remember hunger created the cup and created a lot of this, at least in Europe, and let's say insurance and the same definition or the same push in the US created a lot of the overproduction, and then we find creative ways to put corn, which creates corn, uh high fruit of corn syrup, and all kinds of other which is overproduction. And it's the butter mountains and the milk issues and etc. etc. And it's not what a landscape can actually produce or what you can actually turn into food.

SPEAKER_03 23:23

And when you look at it on the other side, you have 28% of arable land in the world being used for food that is never gonna be eaten.

Koen van Seijen 23:33

Not even the weight that goes to something, but actually the weight that goes away. It doesn't go anywhere. Just compost.

SPEAKER_03 23:39

So we're talking about a system that's supposedly based on efficiency, and how can you call a system efficient when a quarter of it gets you put to absolutely no use, and that no use is actually gonna cost you because you have to manage that waste.

Koen van Seijen 23:53

You mentioned actually our food costs were significantly less percentage-wise. I don't know here, but do you pay for getting rid of organic waste?

SPEAKER_03 24:03

We did. It's because we couldn't close the loop entirely, in the sense that SEM worked directly with farmers, we treated produce in their entirety, what wasn't served immediately was preserved and served in future menus. And that only thing that was, let's put, discarded was organic waste. So food that had no nutrition or flavor left. Things like as much as we used like crayfish. I'm not gonna ask my customers to eat the crayfish shells. There's so we after we extracted all the flavor from those shells, that organic matter had to go somewhere.

Koen van Seijen 24:37

The shells of muscles, etc. There's their limits to what you can.

SPEAKER_03 24:41

In a beautiful cycle, that would go back to a farmer. We couldn't have that mainly because of logistics, because of that transport back to the farm was complicated and health and safety, etc. So we paid a company that did a large-scale anaerobic fermentation or composting of organic matter. We paid 500 euros a month for that. That was super expensive. Because the the Lisbon government actually offers, but they they burn. Yeah.

Koen van Seijen 25:08

They're just mostly full of water and thus very efficient. Not very efficient. Exactly. And so, but your food costs, like your procurement costs, were significantly lower than average in restaurants. And and not even considering the waste. That's interesting. So you buy less, basically.

SPEAKER_03 25:24

Well, you so there's a the there was one kind of key difference. We operated mainly as a tasting menu, which gives you flexibility. Gives us, well, the first thing it gives us is portion control. Because we were a small restaurant and thankfully busy most nights, so we could actually project how much food we were going to be preparing every night. We didn't have excess waste because I didn't need to guess if someone was ordering the steak, ordering the pasta, or ordering the chicken. We knew every person was going to eat a certain things, yeah. Yeah. The second thing that the tasting menu gives you is the flexibility to change, which was what truly allowed us to stay committed without compromising to the sourcing side because we were very rigorous on our procurement side. We have an evaluation framework for there's a whole kind of due diligence process that we went through with each farmer, which doesn't involve necessarily certifications, and we can talk about that if you want. But there was a whole due diligence kind of process of establishing that partnership and then evaluating that partnership on a regular basis. But the way that we managed to stay committed to using only these farms was through that flexibility. So when something ran out, we changed the menu without having to justify either too much cost analysis or too much on the demand side, on the customer side, because we had a tasting menu. But we did obviously the average food cost over two and a half years was 17%. So that was on the last one, seven percent, which is below the industry standard ranges between 25 and 30, with hotels much obviously much larger than that, but for restaurants, for independent restaurants, be around that.

Koen van Seijen 27:06

Which, I mean, simply from the basic economics, it's significantly less. It's not like people are like, we were on stage the other day, and somebody commented on cost, and you were actually like, no, cost is not a reason not to do this. And and this how were people gonna accept the higher costs than that?

SPEAKER_03 27:22

And this is considering that we have we made no exceptions on the sourcing side, so everything we use was organic.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:29

We were paying premium for certain products, very how do you say seemingly cheap products like sunflower oil or refined oil. Ours, because it was organic, was you compare something you buy at the supermarket for one euro, we were paying 17, I think 17.5 before taxes, which is extremely high. Obviously, we weren't frying everything, we were obviously limiting what we were doing. But it's just to show that we weren't buying certain prime product some certain organic products compensating with non-organic on the other side, absolutely everything we used was organic. So the cost actually, it was the portion control, so we didn't have any excess food, and then the kind of time-lapse of the zero waste thinking, because when you're not serving something immediately, you're serving it in the future. So you're you're you can help me in the economic terms here, but we're making the future cost present, right? So if I have something that I take the skins off and the seeds, I turn those into specific products, which then when I'm creating a dish in the future, they'll make up maybe up to 20-30% of that dish in terms of flavor. Maybe they're not the the main ingredient on the plate, but I've already paid for that three months ago. And that's something that usually you would have thrown away anyway.

Koen van Seijen 28:49

Anyway, and you would probably have to fill that plate the 20% has to come from somewhere and it's not gonna be for free, and is probably not gonna be as flavorful because it's guessing that there's some fermentation or some process involved in those months to add a lot of bacteria that work for free for you.

SPEAKER_03 29:06

Yeah, exactly. So that's when we use time to our advantage in terms of create up, well, increasing the intrinsic value of those things that are traditionally discarded. And it very I'll give the simplest example in the world of in terms of fermentation. If you want to do a dish that is a tomato without skin, you you peel the skin, you ferment it for three days. There's a very simple kind of laxic fermentation, you dry it, you turn into a powder. You suddenly have something which adds so much flavor in a di in terms of kind of layers and depth, without being a prime ingredient, without being anything, but can transform a dish and is actually something that would be discarded. So that was the kind of because you'd have to buy that flavor. And the spices or something, or yeah.

Koen van Seijen 29:52

And to ask the very basic, stupid question, time-wise, you meant the creativity as well, but because like how is that on the team and how is it on the kitchen to not discard the skin but actually having to fermentate it? And it's very simple, but it's very simple, ten times very simple, it's still complex.

SPEAKER_03 30:11

Yeah, and also that was probably the most simple that we would do. We would actually do much more complex ingredients uh projects, we would always aim to create complexity through these parts that traditionally are discarded. So that would take time. I think that's the biggest lesson that we learned in terms of the model that we created here, because it's very specific to we had a very limited space. We had a very small kitchen.

Koen van Seijen 30:35

And when you have a team that has to constantly cook, because you not like we were at Baldillo where there's the processing, the fermentation kitchen, like Chris has his. So it goes to other people as well, but there it has their space outside where all the products come in, the wine is stored, there's a proper the space is I'm very proud that we've managed to prove that the model works without space.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

I think a lot of the a lot of the I wouldn't say excuse, but a lot of the kind of limited thinking of people that want to do this is I can't, I'm in an urban setting, I don't think that's an issue, or I have a very small space. We got very creative with our space as well. And but that did take a toll on the team because they have to you have to constantly cook, whether you're cooking for now or for the future, whether it's fermentation or preservation, you're still cooking to keep to transform that into a product. We became very efficient about how we did that. We had like staple things that were just they're like our perennials, but they're just done all year round. And they're just con constant things that we have, like egg whites is just a classic one. We would turn that into a garum. We had bread miso, which was made with excess bread, and we'd put that into the butter, so we'd have bread with bread butter. It was always been the cycle of the bread, it became a very kind of same thing. And then there was the seasonal things, if we have something for only a couple of weeks, and we'd keep uh the skins and the seeds to do something with that, and we'd have shorter stock of that product. But we became very good at kind of these systems, and then we had the catch-all kind of, which was the treacle, which is something from silo, it's not our invention. The treacle is basically instead of a stock, it's actually like a molasses of all the vegetable trim. So anything that wasn't big enough quantity or good enough to be a product on its own went into this treacle, which then we would age and glaze meats with. So it had this kind of sticky, savory consistency to it. So this is the always the idea, right? You're always creating flavor, which is why being delicious is so important. Because this is the driver in the end, you need to be creating flavor, you need to be unlocking new ways of bringing these things to the surface.

Koen van Seijen 32:47

People come once, maybe twice if it doesn't taste good, probably only once, because oh, it's I've heard about this place, blah blah blah. But for people to come back and tell their friends it has to taste amazing, otherwise.

SPEAKER_03 32:59

Yeah, and then then it's also disservice to the cause, I think, because you get the oh, they're doing something good, but you know, and then actually. Exactly.

Koen van Seijen 33:10

Classic, and now we're gonna get emails for sure, vegetarian restaurants, etc., and more sustainable on doing air quotes that nobody sees, are not the most tasting, or you're not full necessarily, or you're not, and there's some exceptions, and but it I mean it has to be functional, and functional is a horrible word, but it has to be filling, nutritional, amazing flavor because we taste with our nose and mouth and eyes. And so there's no and there, and it's absolutely possible. Like it's also because otherwise we get into this narrative, and we have that often in the financial world as well. Ah, it's sustainable, so it's less returns in this case, and like sustainable, also it's less flavor, which is very dangerous if we go in that direction. Because it's great for a few pioneers, but it's never gonna scale to whoever sits around us here.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Absolutely.

Koen van Seijen 33:52

Unless it tastes amazing, it has to taste better then. Like it has to be an explosion and because the proof of the pudding is in the ether.

SPEAKER_03 34:00

For sure. And I think that's like the in the end, SEM was the narrative was present. We tried very much not to do it during the dinner experience. It would happen naturally because there would be questions about the food and the menu, and obviously we did kind of talk about it quite openly on the website and in our own kind of platforms, but we tried to keep the experience about the food because that's how we convince people.

Koen van Seijen 34:26

Because you have people, right? You I remember you saying something about somebody that didn't know, it wasn't there because of the mission.

SPEAKER_03 34:32

That was our dream. When we had people that had they'd even been brought in by a friend or they walked in off the street and they had no idea what we did in the background or how far we went, and they loved it. And then they through the dinner or towards the end would kind of grasp on to what we did and be like, oh wow. And that's the best because it was those people and then obviously super conservative people that kind of got dragged in by their kids or something, skepticals that had probably been to places where didn't taste so good and they got convinced, and that that's really empowering because I think that's SEM had this narrative, but we do very truly believe that it's an operating model. I used to hate when people say ah, the concept of your restaurant. It's not a concept. The concept is the food that eventually goes on the plate, which is this kind of contemporary creative, innovative fermentation-led flavours food. Hard to, again, should have one word for it, but but the what we did was operational. Like the zero waste part was operational, the procurement side is operational. And then and we did go as the model evolved, which was I think that's when we kind of these different examples of restaurants that are happening throughout the world that are very committed to how this works, they tend kind of adapting to their own landscapes and to their own environments. And I think the SEM model evolved very fast into other things that became fundamental to it. The main one being we didn't we stopped working with fish from the sea, for example. That that was an issue that came from the procurement side. We we had six months in, developed all these amazing partnerships with farmers, all on a very kind of first-hand direct contact basis. We'd been to these farms many times. And with the fish, we still had suddenly four or five degrees of separation. Which the small or big boats that come in and then they sell to the auctions on the dock and the markets, who then then sell to a distributor, who then sell to restaurants. And I noticed because we did all this research on what fish was sustainable or in good stocks in the coast of Portugal, line caught, and it would come. So if we want this fish from the coast, line caught. And it would come with a hook in the mouth. And then one day it didn't. And I was like, okay, whatever. And then the second day it didn't, and the third day, and then I actually had to look in the invoice and it was there. Open waters, international waters, and medium-sized trawler boats. I was like, okay, well, I that's I can't, that's not what I ordered. But obviously, because hospitality has been designed with this consistency flaw, we must have consistency. I don't blame the distributors that were selling me that.

Koen van Seijen 37:11

But they clearly didn't understand you as a customer. No.

SPEAKER_03 37:13

And then at that point we were like, okay, let's take a breath here because we're not managing to get around this problem. We can't get a direct contact with the fishermen, so let's take a breath. And I started doing the research for river fish and started understanding the problem of river fish in Portugal. A lot of invasive species, very little access to urban markets, but existing in excess and in really good quality because Portuguese rivers have been cleaned up and the quality of the water is actually really good. More low-impact fishing methods. So we were like, okay.

Koen van Seijen 37:46

And an invasive species.

SPEAKER_03 37:47

And then invasive species. So we were like, okay, let's start using river fish. And that became a non-negotiable. Again, we set that limitation, and suddenly all these amazing things started coming from it. Our suppliers, we had this direct contact with him. Many times he would arrive after the restaurant opened when his driver would turn up playing drum and bass at level 80, and he was probably in his mid-70s himself, and just a character, and he'd walk in the restaurant and say, guys, the fish is here. And it was all very artisanal in a way. But when it was too hot and the fish went deep, Pedro would call me and say, I have no fish this week because they're too deep. And that's what we wanted. That was the kind of ability to react to the needs of an ecosystem that I needed, you know, and then I had to deal with, okay, so what are we gonna do instead? But I needed that reliability and and accountability on the supplier side.

Koen van Seijen 38:44

How do you eat the landscape at the time or through the times and the seasons, which means sometimes it's not?

SPEAKER_03 38:51

Yeah, and I think that this is there's a a perceived rigidity to the hospitality industry, which is not true. It's an industry based on creativity, but it's been made rigid by this we have this expectation to provide consistency always. So it has to be the same dish, whether it's March or June, which is only a few months apart, but it's huge.

Koen van Seijen 39:15

Is that a rigidity or a narrative that we imagine comes from the customer, the client, the guest?

SPEAKER_03 39:22

I think or we put it on ourselves. I think it's both. I think it comes from there is a in certain cultures more and more, but there is an expectation of uniformity and standardization, and we want that same dish no matter what. But there's also the industry itself, which is guided by these standards of quality, whether it is by Michelin guides or whatever it is, which expect and demand that consistency. And that's just in this model where we're we're working with nature, it just it's just not possible.

Koen van Seijen 39:54

We have consistency means worse sourcing almost by definition.

SPEAKER_03 39:59

Absolutely.

Koen van Seijen 40:00

Unless you're next to a tropical forest where the whole seasons are the same and you've just really lucky, and that's another sourcing, but if it's just in it's inconsistent with good sourcing.

SPEAKER_03 40:10

And more and more, not only just for seasonal criteria, but also for like climatic conditions. Like we had all these floods in the beginning of the year, and a lot of our farms lost a lot. Lost a lot of vegetables, and we have to respond to that. And if they tell us, like, oh yeah, I had a hail storm last night and I've had to harvest all the cabbage, we should be able to respond to that as well. So there's offers and there, but there's needs, and when you're in an industry that, in my view, is based around creativity, that should be your tool to offer instead of the consistency of supply, you find quality, you find consistency of quality, of creativity. So it's it should be to be an actor in this system, it should be that flexible.

Koen van Seijen 41:00

And you're saying, and maybe not for all guests, but the amount of guests absolutely fine with that. You were full all the time. Doesn't mean that you were relatively small, doesn't mean you can go 10x and still be full. Like there will be, we were talking about it on stage, there will be a limit somewhere where you start educating more. You have mostly people that were completely on board with STEM already before walking in. But there is a lot more flexibility with guests as well, as long as it tastes amazing, as long as it makes sense, then we'll reach the point. Like with renewable energy, we thought it was 20%, it's probably 60-70 before a system really starts to struggle and we need storage or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

And I think that's one of those kind of misconceptions that the hospitality industry, and we are also guilty of thinking like that, where the tasting menu came as a solution for that, where like, okay, it doesn't matter, we're not gonna give even giving people choice. And like you said, by the especially a couple of years in, people who came to Sam came because it was Sam. I'd say 90% knew more or less what we were doing. But I think the when we've had experiments in the restaurant of having choice of having a menu a la carte, we've been surprised by the fact that we can adapt. And so today we have chicken, tomorrow we have guinea fowl, and people are fine.

Koen van Seijen 42:15

And is that something Sam closed now? Not for financial reasons, just to be clear. To take a bit of a breath and some other life in the family, and because it was very small and very demanding on the team. And so what's next in that sense? For a location where SEM is now or was now because it closed 10 days ago, it's very fresh.

SPEAKER_03 42:34

Like you said, it wasn't for financial reasons, it was more personal and life kind of changing reasons, more of a decision of mine and George's to want to be in a less urban setting now that the family is growing. So we're still kind of on the we have ideas of what's next. And it's partly kind of thinking how do you expand on these foundations that Sam not even not only was built on but evolved into these kind of pillars that became very part of our operating model. So everything from working with invasive species and understanding that that's how you take the waste out of a direct closed loop system, you start looking at what's an excess in the environment, what is basically resource that is untapped, then also looking at things like what are the kind of specific species that have very important roles in their ecosystems. Like we're increasing the amount of bivalves that we were using by the end just as ecosystem recovery.

Koen van Seijen 43:34

We're eating beavers at some point. No, the keista, let's eat the keystone one day. But we were but it's going there very strategic almost.

SPEAKER_03 43:42

And supporting the people that are doing that. So even things like wild foods, which is something that tends to be like a foraging is chef's a chef's dream, chef's hobbies and stuff. But actually, there's a very powerful argument around using wild food. First, these can be kind of they're either invasive or they're endemic, right? But so there's a reason for using both. But also for that space to remain wild, it needs it needs to be protected in a way. And you are using food from uncultivated land. So you're removing the pressure of increasing agricultural production, but also bringing through your storytelling, through the prominence of the menu, things that that might be being forgotten when we talk about indigenous knowledge and indigenous culture, and that's like where the food output is. It's called an Iberian cloud berry. It's a berry that is from a bush that grows only on the dunes of the Iberian Peninsula. It's very specific to Portugal and Spain on the coastline. It's an ecosystem recovery plant. So it's the first one that would grow back after a fire, let's say. And the berries themselves are being studied now. They've got like huge superfood, huge number of antioxidants, all this kind of amazing nutritional value. But every time that someone beach a hotel is built by the beach, these disappear by the millions. The people who used to eat them are dying out and their knowledge is not recorded. But they taste delicious, silly beautiful, all these advantages. And if it's not chefs putting things like that on the menus, how do we know not to protect them? So if we're not using flavor to get people catch on to that, or flavor or nutrition in this case, like food is medicine, right? There's real value here for you who maybe you don't care anything about biodiversity loss or environmental degradation, but you care about your health and you care about how something tastes. If it's not these key actors in the food system to kind of give them protagonism, who will, you know?

Koen van Seijen 45:52

And is that something you'll be looking at more?

SPEAKER_03 45:55

Sorry, I went on a tangent there. From the future.

Koen van Seijen 45:58

I mean, from the future and wild foods and foraging. What are ideas if it's shareable, obviously?

SPEAKER_03 46:04

I think there's lots that we uh that we'd like to.

Koen van Seijen 46:06

Bigger kitchen, I think.

SPEAKER_03 46:07

Big bigger kitchen. More more horizontal thinking. SEM was very much in its own little loop and operational circle when I think there's the example of, for example, NOLA, which is a restaurant with very similar values and philosophies in in Finland, and they're also zero waste, but work in a different way, operationally different from us. They ferment very little, for example. They preserve a lot, but they ferment very little. And they work more horizontally. They work with other actors where they they're limited by where they are in terms of just the production capability of Finland. So they will take they will take byproducts from other actors in the food system and turn them into products. And I think there's something really valuable there about kind of how that knowledge spreads through an industry and which is inevitable. And I think that's something that I would like to do is kind of think more horizontally where you have maybe this is you don't have just a single restaurant, but you have different outputs within within a within hospitality. Yeah, and and that that are really kind of critical, they can create critical thinking. So the another example is the Baldillo Baldega, where they have this kind of extra, then it's not an in-house production facility and they can actually scale the things that they're producing. I think there's also And they're coming out with products, they're coming out with products, which then can be used in their own restaurants or actually sold to other restaurants, B2B, B2C as well. I think there's something in the educational side, and that goes not only from in terms of how do how do you harness the younger chefs that are coming into the industry now who are already thinking like this. Because we had, we I put myself in the millennials, we we had this kind of arc, right, of learning where you go through these life experiences, you learn something a certain way, you then you unlearn it, and then you get involved in it, and it's such a long kind of learning arc, whereas these young kids coming into cooking now, a lot of them already feel think this, already are.

Koen van Seijen 48:22

Yeah, because it was gonna be a question: how is it for chefs joining you? Because it's such a different, or for sure, at some point you also being sought after just as you wanted to join Doug. I want to be part of that. Yeah, and but it requires, specifically in the kitchen, a lot of creativity and a lot of flexibility, almost like regen-focused farmers, like it's a completely different mindset. In the same thing, you're on a farm, you're you have your tractors depending on what you have, but uh the the but the operating system is fundamentally different. Yeah. And do you see that spreading? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Because if that doesn't spread, it's great.

SPEAKER_03 48:56

But you open another restaurant, maybe two, and then but I think that the demand in terms of people coming in came from two different sides. One was the kind of mission-driven company, which obviously was very attractive for people who are already kind of in this mindset. And the and we found that so many people during an interview process, without even knowing how deep we went, would say, I want to be part of something that matters, I want to do something more.

Koen van Seijen 49:25

Oh, so they wanted you more. Yeah, some young generation on a school trip.

SPEAKER_03 49:29

That's the target. And the other was the creativity. Chefs who maybe were not that involved or already kind of thinking in the kind of more environmental impact way, but they were just simply attracted by that final output. But there's something new being done at TEM. And that was that's very much due to George's creativity, kind of leading the team. He is a very, very probably the most creative person that I know. And we had a lot of a lot of our guests were industry. A lot of we had a lot of chefs coming in through the door because we had that. They are doing something different with food. And the fact that it had this environmental impact behind it was kind of secondary.

Koen van Seijen 50:10

Yeah, which is absolutely fine and good. Because if you lead with that, you might have the like again the narrative also it's gonna taste not as it could, or should, etc. Because you don't use it. Yeah. And so is that spreading? Are there a lot of uh alumni or group around?

SPEAKER_03 50:28

Or is it starting to I hope that I think I think once you start.

Koen van Seijen 50:32

Let's say how the Copenhagen scene, we're not saying no anymore, started to change because the people stayed there and then moved and then in their own spin, but still the Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:40

I mean, I think the the let's call it the movement of restaurants doing this to this level of compromise is still very incipient and still very young.

Koen van Seijen 50:49

Could probably make a list of five to ten. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:52

But they but there are more and more than there were five years ago.

Koen van Seijen 50:56

So why now? What is the why because fermentation has been around forever, creativity has been there, sourcing, these farmers have sort of been there.

SPEAKER_03 51:05

There is I think there is a change in the consumer side. There's definitely more demand from the consumer, and we know that from just the co-optic of sustainable and regenerative as labels, but I think there is more demand on the consumer side with the younger generations, and this move towards conscious consumerism. I also think that there is the just the blueprint, like the fact that silo did it, and we wouldn't have been maybe capable of starting with so much commitment and so much of a model already established if we hadn't been at silo before and seen that it worked, and saying, okay, we already know maybe 50% of how to start, and then obviously we have to adapt to where we are and to our conditions.

Koen van Seijen 51:47

Yeah, but it's possible. Like it's not until it was possible before, probably all the ingredients, puzzle pieces were there, but nobody put them together at that level, and suddenly it's possible because somebody did it, and suddenly there's Essa, there's uh Pablo and Exactly, and now you have case studies, you have people who are very open, it's not it's not a competitive sector of the industry.

SPEAKER_03 52:11

We are all very connected, very aware that uh one one bottleneck of mine might have been easily solved by someone else. So we actually talk to each other a lot. We pick up the phone, we call Matterlando, we called Albert, we called Nola, and Nola, we called Doug as a very kind of present person in our lives. We talked to Pablo a lot. When when we were in Mexico, we were talking about all these the difficulties and everything from nomenclature to operational stuff and what we did that worked, and so it's a very zero, it's a very positive sum community. So that and I think there's also we've seen initiatives like what Matt is doing with the cooking school in Copenhagen. There is a a push of knowledge sharing and and case studies and learning curves.

Koen van Seijen 53:01

So it's becoming a movement.

SPEAKER_03 53:03

It's becoming a movement, and and there's no gatekeeping because also that that just becomes very interesting.

Koen van Seijen 53:09

And switching a bit gears towards, let's say, the investor, the financial side of things, you for sure had a lot of people with wealth, either their own or other people's wealth, crap coming through the restaurant. What is the main thing you want them to remember? And prefer had an amazing evening, amazing dishes, for sure, amazing talks, but then the next day at their desk, what is the seat you want to plant in the mind of people specifically in the financial sector?

SPEAKER_03 53:38

I think it's the this is scalable. This is an operational model. And this is the what I think is the next phase of testing for this movement is and I see it working in just for example, Baldillo. We were talking about this the other day. Usually the few restaurants that are now present in this movement tend to have a lot of fermentation-driven cuisines. Baldillo is driven by cultural heritage. So for the people who think that this is a concept and you have to cook a certain way, I would like it to stay that actually it's operational and you can have it doesn't impact your authorship.

Koen van Seijen 54:19

It's a lens. It's a lens.

SPEAKER_03 54:21

You can have your your own.

Koen van Seijen 54:23

Which you need to have in Mexico, let's be honest. Like they brought silo to Mexico City and it didn't really work.

SPEAKER_03 54:28

No, it was only one. Yeah. Yeah. When they understood that they needed that that authorship and that cultural heritage. And I think that and the very you can have the same concept with you want to do a regional cuisine or Italian food, or you want to do something which is more fast in the sense of like canteen. Can it be done in a couple of things?

SPEAKER_01 54:50

Can it be done at an on a screens level, for instance? 50 restaurants, exactly 40, but still.

SPEAKER_03 54:56

But I would argue that yes, because the hardest thing about doing this at home is that you don't have volume or scale.

Koen van Seijen 55:03

When you have scale, you're saying it's easier.

SPEAKER_03 55:06

It's easier. Because for us, imagine you're going to do it's like some people ask me, so how do you how do you do how do you do zero waste at home? Well, if you have three slices of bread, there's maybe you can dry it and you can do these very simple products, but we can do eight kilos of red miso at once, but suddenly becomes a product, which I can either sell or I can use throughout a certain length of time. And when you have more than one venue, one more than one output, you can distribute that accordingly. Or you can sell product from one to the other, you can and more than one moment as well.

Koen van Seijen 55:40

Not levels because it's the wrong word, but different, like from lunch to dinner to breakfast to different kind of styles of cooking, suddenly a different, let's say, levels of refinement, you you can start spreading. So eight kilos, something, eighty kilos a whole different thing. And so you're actually arguing this is easier.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

It's easier at scale in my view. If you have the infrastructure, if you build the infrastructure around it, so you know, if you have a central processing unit like Baldillo has, if you have these different outlets that can be diverse in their concepts, a bakery, a fine dining restaurant, a pub, I believe very much that it is operational at scale. And I think that even in terms of the more commercial in the sense of attractive to a lot of people you can make the food, the more impact you will have. Of course. Again, and putting that back into the focus of it is an operating model.

Koen van Seijen 56:33

Which is almost very a nice comparison to where we are with regenerative forms of agriculture. If it's a no-brainer financially, and it is in many cases not everywhere, where we're there, there are many different contexts, but in many places it is. It becomes a no-brainer for farmers to adopt, with of course the right support, the right off take. There's none of this is easy. But it will scale and spread regardless of if you care about biodiversity or soil health, etc. And so there, because then the restaurants or then the hotels will do the same, and then it becomes an operating, like, oh you why are you not operating in zero waste or near zero waste? Because it just makes more sense on all levels, and that's a very exciting potential.

SPEAKER_03 57:15

Yeah, we see, for example, there's this company called Winnow. Very interesting use of tech and zero waste is the scales, which have a camera, and it's super kind of adapted to identify quickly. You do a lot of work in the background, but then every time you put something in the bin, it takes a picture, identifies, links it to your food cost, and by the end of the month, it's just like outputs of reports of how much you could have saved. They're targeted for cruise ships and hotels, and they've done very well in terms of growth in the last few years. And we have it. And people ask us, if you're zero waste, why do you have that? Well, because I want to understand, and we did a lot, they they were really cool with us because they understood that this was a case study, and we changed the categories in the back because ours weren't excess or peels, or we used all of that. But we wanted to understand what was going in that compost bin. And we in the end realized, for example, we were using lots of oysters. Initially, we the oysters would go back to the estuary because obviously they help with maintaining oyster, oysters need shells, right, to grow. But we couldn't, in the end, for health and safety, you couldn't go back in the same van. So we were putting them in the compost. And in the end, it was like about 30% of my weight per week was in these oyster shells. So we were working with a local materials lab that was experimenting using shells as plates. So we suddenly could identify potential revenue sources. So if you're looking at it through a kind of zoomed-out view of there's so many different tangents that this is in the let's call it a regenerative food economy could go. Oh, because then you're looking at, okay, I can take these oyster shells and actually turn it into plates and sell it over there. Doug was doing this with the glass box, crushing the glass bottles and doing it into plates. So there's all of these potential revenue that can work or not, but experiments that you could, when you have that larger system working at us at scale.

Koen van Seijen 59:18

And most people don't see it until you put a camera on top of it and an AI system to recognize it, and a report at the end of the month saying 30% of your weight, which is a lot, is oysters compared to what it is in the menu. Yeah. Or shelves in general. And then suddenly, okay, what are we going to do? Creatively, it's circular economy thinking and acting.

SPEAKER_03 59:35

And again, it creating intrinsic value for something that is costing you because you're buying that oyster per weight. So you're paying for the oyster shell and you're throwing it away.

Koen van Seijen 59:44

And it's not the weight of the oysters.

SPEAKER_03 59:46

Well, it's definitely not the weight of the oyster.

Koen van Seijen 59:48

It's another interesting business model.

SPEAKER_03 59:49

Yeah, there's a I mean and it's it's such an it's such an untapped resource, but it is still so But it's much easier at scale.

Koen van Seijen 59:58

So do you understand? I think that it's easier for three restaurants, five restaurants, the amount of oysters where I mean it starts to become plates, become it starts becoming interesting financially.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

Yeah. Obviously, you have the initial kind of testing period and uh turning it into a viable product, etc. etc. You know this more than me. But I think uh there are some proven just side streams uses that and and when you look at it in terms of creativity, it's it can be endless. We can talk megalomaniacally here about a completely regenerative food economy where we've got all of these never-ending outputs to yeah, and creating value and reducing impact and which is a perfect bridge to what would you do with a billion euros? So you knew it was coming. I knew it was coming.

Koen van Seijen 1:00:44

So I mean again, I I always have to I always have to uh place a caveat here. Obviously, I don't think anybody should have that kind of concentrated wealth and dust power. And let's say it happens overnight. You checked your phone this morning and and the bank, you called the bank because you got a heart attack just to make sure they didn't make a mistake. And but you have to put it to work. What would you do?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:04

Well, I had a lot of time to think about this because this is why I'm a listener to the podcast and I had time because I knew this question was coming. And I think there's there's a few areas that I would focus on, but mainly with one kind of connecting thing throughout all of them, which is obviously I look at all of this through a food side, right? Food is in this kind of very Which we often forget in the agriculture space.

Koen van Seijen 1:01:26

I'm sorry, most people are listening not obviously because I've been ramp ranting about food for but it's interesting how those that's what we say investing in regenerative agriculture and food or food and agriculture. I kept because the first few years we didn't really, and people are like, ah, region ag. Like, yeah, that's a very narrow lens of what we need to. And maybe the change comes in the food system first and then cools. I don't know. Anyway, sorry, John Dra.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:49

It's more that food is that with in the world that we live in today, in the sense of if you're not involved in farming in any way, food is your most intimate and direct connection to nature, right? And people don't realize that very kind of simple assumption that what you're putting in your body and what you're buying, how that defines this huge amount of what how the world is used.

Koen van Seijen 1:02:18

So and your landscape and your buying. I mean it's such a yeah. Okay, so you were threat would be your lens is food, obviously.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:26

But then I think when I think it like the first the hardest part that I think for farmers and maybe what scares them and what creates so much risk is the conversion. And I think of what could that money do, or part of that money could do, to reduce some of that risk in that conversion period, right? So and how do you look at that through the food side? So is that when because I am not a huge supporter of labels, and this is a kind of obviously a loaded comment, there's loads of sides and angles to it, but is there some an instant an instance where the labels become interesting? I remember once we went in New Zealand, we were in a little organic food shop, and I bought almond butter, and it was their own brand almond butter, and it was underneath the title there was supporting farms in conversion. And so this is actually really interesting because obviously a lot of people don't know, and there's this kind of simple I just become organic. We know it takes so much time, we know how volatile those years are, how there's no guarantee of price because you don't have that label yet. So and there's no future markets. Exactly. So that conversion period is I think puts a lot of people off or creates a lot of risk for the people who do convert. So how can food become or how the food product side become more interesting? Uh farm farms and conversion label would be a very interesting investment.

Koen van Seijen 1:03:49

I've seen that in crowd farming you can select for the fruit farmers' inconversion.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:55

Oh yeah?

Koen van Seijen 1:03:55

So inconversion to organic, and I think they select for regenerative now as well. On top of that, like in conversion to regenerative, like you can, which somehow you like to be part of that. I want to help you, I will buy your because I know you're on the way.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:09

And then suddenly you become invested in their story because you you're like in a very kind of I don't know, egotistical part of our altruistic self. You know, like I I was part of this. Yeah, exactly.

Koen van Seijen 1:04:20

Like six oranges really make the difference here, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:23

It's totally different. It does. And if you can use that in a as a strategy, as a marketing strategy, I think it's even better because you're giving people more knowledge of what happens during this period. So I think that would be one of them. I don't know, there's a side of creating vehicles to support these farms, and I think that's an interesting side to it. I would also then looking at my own experience in in the food industry, and I think the lack of infrastructure, and we were talking a lot about this the other day, is also a huge problem of transitioning the movement itself of regenerative in the sense of we have like in Portugal, we have amazing farms, pioneer projects, people doing everything from kind of uh in incipient regenerative to full-scale 600 hectare amazing projects. And there is still a lack of connection between them and what I believe are very important uh key actors in the industry. And the these key actors also say, ah, it's impossible to work with regenerative agriculture because I can't get their food here. Or we have of the six farms that we have that produce incredible meat in their production, two of them we can't use because they don't have their own distribution or slaughterhouses, they go through another butcher and then so I would invest in the infrastructure.

Koen van Seijen 1:05:53

So if slaughtering, you don't get the right organs, right? You were saying before.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:56

Yeah, there's a huge market for a huge market for black market for offal from regenerative animals.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

How did you discover that?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:05

Because we were trying to get them. We were trying to get them through one of the butchers that works with some of the regenerative farms that we kind of have a partnership with. And we're like, oh, can we get the hearts and the livers? And they're like, absolutely no way. We will send these animals to the slaughterhouse and they will come back with completely different organs, like different sizes, different colors.

Koen van Seijen 1:06:28

Which means there's a market or there are people that are recognizing that quality of the animal has been grown differently and are on the back end of these butchers or slaughterhouses buying that stuff. Yeah, which is very and it's not going to dog food, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:42

There's no, I don't know. I don't think that the original.

Koen van Seijen 1:06:44

Which is, I mean, it's a sad story, but it's also very interesting. Anyway, that's a side note.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:48

There's a proof of the demand.

Koen van Seijen 1:06:49

It's a proof of demand for nutrition.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:51

Yeah. So I think I would invest on the infrastructure side, which is not only slaughterhouses, but I think, for example, the logistics side, the distribution. For example, we once talked about one of the farms that we wanted to work with. We tried to get like four or five restaurants together to invest in a refrigeration unit in his farm so that we could deal with not having to use the entire animal and with that we could bypass the so we try to make that work, it didn't, but having these kind of more regional regionalized refrigeration units with distribution lines. I think when you increase the capillarity of these products that exist to a market that is used to convenience, you connect a massive bottle, you unpack a massive bottleneck because it's the I we can't get our food to this hotel, even though we have enough scale to support them. And the hotel is I'm not gonna go out of my MO to send a car to three hours north to pick this up. If you can close that bottleneck, I think it's huge. And I think there's demand for it. You go through to more traditional cultures in France, for example, you will have procurement like companies that will literally source from these small, very unique producers, and they will centralize that into their own companies, and then they sell that to restaurants and they do it at a huge It's a logistics problem and probably a lot of potential there for quote unquote processing again because there will be extra things, there will be stuff, there will be things that with creativity can be turned into a lot of ingredients that are currently going to dog food or somewhere else, or worse. For sure. So I would at that middle ground, I think I would invest in. And then I think I could there's lots that I would love after listening to the podcast, definitely invest in water, would definitely invest in soil microbiome technology. But I would also I think the demand side, because from my own experience, I know that there's a lot of restaurants and hotels and other outputs like schools, hospitals, canteens, there is a change that is definitely needed in these in these like end consumer outlets. And I think there's a will to change, there's a lack of knowledge. There's a lack of knowledge, like so. I would invest, and I don't know how that would work, so I would invest in in training and education, or maybe like we were saying, a school for chefs that want they want to bypass the whole kind of I don't want to do Michelin star techniques first. I want to understand you start with a school in Ireland, for example, Valley Millow School, they have a farm. When you have to spend time in the farm if you want to cook, it's just part of the system. So I would invest in that kind of educational side of the people who are coming into the industry, but then also on the management side of there's like of hotels and schools. George last year was met a guy, he was in a conference in the States, and he met a guy that was the purchaser, the food purchaser for one university, for one like unit of a university in Southern California. And his food budget was $21 million for one, so we're talking about one like building of a university, a large university in Southern California. His budget was $21 million, and he had by his kind of bylaws to spend 11% on organic. And so it's like that is huge. Let's look at all of the universities in America, and I don't even want to know what that number is.

Koen van Seijen 1:10:28

Or the waste is as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:30

So if you can put these, if you can train these people who are decision makers in key volume movers in the food industry, imagine the shift that could happen for the these farmers, right? If you suddenly redirect those 11% are actually being used in re in proper regen farms and not just monoculture organic. Imagine how fast these could be scaled. But then you need to give these decision makers the knowledge, right? You need to give them the very kind of basic regen ag course of like why this is so important? How do you use farms as ecosystem services?

Koen van Seijen 1:11:06

And did he come up to George and say, okay, how do we do zero waste and proper sourcing? Like that uh consultancy.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:12

We tried. There was a lot of demand for it, for sure. There was a lot of demand for it.

Koen van Seijen 1:11:15

Because also if you can reduce like food cost there, must be higher than 17%.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:20

Oh, for example.

Koen van Seijen 1:11:20

And the chefs must be not must, but let's say I can imagine they are eager to be more creative. And it's a very especially univers. I mean, there's a lot of room to play there and to change, or or canteens of companies, especially specifically the ones that are more interested in sustainability. And not go everywhere immediately, but there's such a demand from big tech. For sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:41

I mean, you have to hit your ESG targets in and a canteen that sources properly and can prove that it can source it forward. Because that's the other part of investment. You have to prove and you have to invest in metrics because this helps keep everything accountable. But if you can have companies hitting who are even keen to hit their targets using you could there is a potential there of that it's not being explored.

Koen van Seijen 1:12:06

And as a final question, which usually leads to other final questions, the magic wand. What would you do if you can change we take away the fund, but you can change one thing overnight? What would that be?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:18

I think it would be true cost accounting. I think it would be having the I think this is the toughest subject to talk about with people who are not a hundred percent engaged in this in this world, right? When we move away from the environmentalist kind of region ag and you're talking to just an someone that comes into the restaurant, is helping them understand that organic regenerative is not more expensive. We've externalized all these costs into another bill that we pay through taxes and we pay with our health and with all of these other things that take draw a lot of money from our bank account if we actually manage to cost how much an industrialized food product, the impact and the consequence that it has. If we manage to put that on the price tag, it would make it regenerative agriculture inevitable. It wouldn't, we wouldn't need to have a discussion about whether it's better or not. This is so simple, it's so much cheaper. Everyone thinks that regenerative food is more expensive. It's so much cheaper. We're just not accounting for that cost in the price. We are spreading it over lots of different bills that we pay over our lifetime and with future generations, right? But no one's putting that value on the price tag in the supermarket. And the studies are coming out, and more and more we can prove that it's at least one for one, one for two, depending. The most recent studies are saying that your industrialized intensively grown chicken actually costs twice what it says on the label. So we're getting closer to proving, but then obviously going into making that happen in reality involves forces which are probably taxation or subsidies, beasts, and some of those bills are being picked up already.

Koen van Seijen 1:14:12

The Ayada report on the floods in Valencia is out and what let's say a farming solution could look like or a soil solution could look like. Are you gonna get two price tags? Is it a real one? This is not. Can you choose to do that? Are it gonna be opt-in, opt-out? Is it gonna be certain products first? Specifically, I'm guessing animal protein of intensive KAFA operations are gonna be interesting, like your chicken example. What are the ways to start getting people used to that? We see prices going up very rapidly in any food space in terms of inflation. So that is helping, quote unquote.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:32

Yeah, and I think maybe even now with kind of recent geopolitical events that might accelerate it. It's whether we're gonna be able to connect it. Can we understand that this input fertilizer, nitrogen-dependent system with a lot of fossil fuels based is what's driving this immediate price up? Can we are we going to be able to not be short-sighted with that? So that because I think that would be really powerful.

Koen van Seijen 1:15:59

And I think we need to be way more vocal. Again, Ayara pushed it quite hard in Commonland as well, the narrative of farmers that have been farming for soil health and using regenerative forms of agriculture. I'm really trying to use the Ayara narrative here. Regenative forms of agriculture, not regenerative agriculture. Correct me, I'm gonna do it. Are way are suffering way less. Not suffering, this is not easy for anybody, but there's a narrative here that we see farmers protest again, etc. Like these are greatly avoidable things, and which means we can act. And which means we need to get public and private, or specifically like government in that sense, like this is a food security, a resilience piece. It's not even can you still afford it? Is it gonna be on the shelf?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:40

Yeah, which is much more interesting.

Koen van Seijen 1:16:42

You see some big supermarkets, I had some discussions with some very large ones in the US on like procurement people that start to see heat stress on raw milk and on cows in California. What's the price of the tree to provide shade? Which means we have access to milk, which has to be pasteurized, otherwise, we have empty shelves. And that's very interesting, and or very well-managed fields where you can actually access and harvest after a big storm instead of being flooded for three weeks. Can you get in and harvest, or are you blocked from? And that those are more, unfortunately, we had to get to that level to have those conversations. Coming back to one point I wanted to bring up before we close. Coming out of an agricultural family, I know you have a lot of conversations in your family. Uh like your father still visits farms, you bring him to places as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:27

Absolutely.

Koen van Seijen 1:17:28

He doesn't see the scale yet, I think, if I'm correct. That is a thing that also large farmers can do. Where should we bring him? In an ideal world, what should we go on a trip? Where do we go?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:39

He's interesting because he goes, after working in industrial agriculture for many years, in his own kind of very small farm now, he does do everything very holistically and organically. With some caveats in our small tiny garden where we produce food for the house, he does everything organically, but in little monoculture rows. So he's still in that transition. We have an amazing compost system driven by worms, integrated with the animals that graze the everything from the gardens to the farm, natural heating system, it's amazing. So he's had to unlearn at a very high cost for him, I think, throughout his life, how to do things differently. Because that's how he was taught. And if you get taught that 2 plus 2 is 4, I mean someone who's especially your daughter who's younger, you know, and is telling you this is not, it's very a hard process. And I think he has this view, which is still stuck in the I'd say 7080s view of organic being very partisanal and on the fringes, and not looking at regenerative forms of agriculture and what can be done when you have an integrated system and when you're harnessing ecology to your favor, right, at scale. The place that I would love to take him more are farms that can show him that scale. In Portugal, there's a very good example, which is Vivid Farms, Tehame, Monte Silver. I think all of these farms are doing things at scale and very well. I would like him to be challenged there. I think he he feels very if I put him like in a US ranch doing rotational pasture, he would be more, he would understand that more maybe because we don't have that many CAFOs in Brazil, in South America. No, he did rear cattle extensively. So he's not factory farming. He'd be convinced of that easier. But he's used to the free range. So everything in Brazil is free range. Actually, that's inefficient. Well, let's look at concentrated rotations, and I think he would be convinced there. But I think that he he I need to take him away from the backyard market garden vibe, even though that is also way more applicable to his life now because that's what he should be doing at the planting 20 rows of lettuce.

Koen van Seijen 1:20:01

It's interesting to sort of it's almost like what is the Financial Times that I think their magazine is called, How to Spend It in the Weekend.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:10

Yeah, yeah.

Koen van Seijen 1:20:11

And then the weekend one, and then during the week it's only numbers. And that integration of, but I mean, there's a we talked about it before as well, Roots So Deep, a great documentary. I've looked at it really doing showing conventional, not verses, next to, yeah, and their mindsets, and their bills, and their birds, and their insects, and their carbon and methane, and but really in a humane way showing okay, these are trends, very difficult cultural transitions as well. And luckily we have many examples to go to. We can any crop type you can imagine, there is somebody pushing like the absolute edge of the envelope and beyond, and doing it probably financially very successfully.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:48

I think this is what I because there's a certain arrogance of I was gonna call myself youth, but you know, not so much anymore. Not like those on the other side there to make the noise. I am so passionate about what I believe in, and we see we're much more in touch of the studies and these results, and watching the documentaries, and I think there's an arrogance to just think that this transition is easy, and it's not. It requires more work, and but I think it's possible, and just to see his own kind of transition from doing large-scale industrial to suddenly when he had his own land, because he was just a manager, it wasn't his, but when he had his own land, he already instinctively did things differently with a few mistakes here and there.

Koen van Seijen 1:21:32

Herb Young on the show after 38 years of Bayer and Great Episode went as deep as you can imagine in region after, not because he never looked at it before, and then is now one of the great citrus. And he had horrible frost, I think, lately. Regeneratively grown trees didn't suffer at all, and all the other ones definitely did. He retired. He wanted to do something funny, and maybe organic was nice, and then he went on a year-long camp deep dive and came out of it like, oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:01

But that's like my dad's first when I told you the story when you know he used to one of the farms he managed to grew cocoa trees in monoculture and not in agroforestry. And then we went to visit this really beautiful organic agroforestry production on the coast of Bahia, which had been untouched by had surviving trees from 200 years old that were still producing. Maybe not in the amazing yields, but they were still putting fruits out. And I remember my dad saying our trees died after four years because they were completely removed from their environments, and that click moment is huge. There's a reason why nature is not operating alone and all of these kind of consequences that we take for granted in monocultures and synthetic chemical inputs.

Koen van Seijen 1:22:52

And as a wrapper, probably experience that on farm, depending on the context, but the best entry point remains food at a table somewhere. Could be in a big city, it could be in a fermentation kitchen, could be on a park, in an airplane, in a theater, we're sitting in an amphitheater next to a beautiful museum, could be in the restaurant, museum, doesn't matter when you get that.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:14

Because that's that one language, right, that we all share is food. Oh, we say this. It's obviously it's good, it's bad, it's health, it's disease, it's richness or poverty, it's all of these things, but it's necessary. We have this common language with which is flavor and food. So, how can it not be the entry point?

Koen van Seijen 1:23:37

Perfect way to wrap up.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:39

Thank you so much for your time. And uh such a pleasure, such an honor. Thank you so much for having me.

Koen van Seijen 1:23:45

Such an honor for us. It's we don't do enough with chefs, and we should and the food movement and the kitchen side. We are we're starting to fix up slowly.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:54

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Koen van Seijen 1:24:00

So, why is this important? First of all, thank you for listening to the end. Thank you for dealing with airplanes coming over, school children, etc. We picked the park. Of course, a farm would have been better, but in the current circumstances this was just a lot easier. You you probably hear that in the conversation, but I realized finally the connection between food waste and sourcing. Like what ingredients you use, how close do you go to the source? It was a real revelation to me, and you might have heard that. Maybe you uh have arrived to that way earlier than I did, and and if so, please let me know how that has made you change the way you see the role of hospitality in the kitchen in this transition. It really changed me, and I can't see kitchens anymore the same as I saw him before. I'm super curious what it meant to you. I'm very curious, of course, how Sam or Zam uh is gonna my Portuguese is horrible, as you know, how it's gonna evolve and how it's gonna reopen and rebirth in different settings, and how they're gonna think about scale and influence and accessibility and beyond fine dining and all of those fun topics, but that will be for another one and for another time to to explore. For now, I just want to ask you to send feedback, ideas, other people to interview, other restaurants like this. There don't seem to be too many. It really feels like the next wave in uh in hospitality. An enormous amount of creativity, enormous amount of flavor, let's be honest. It has to work, it has to deliver. And to deliver in hospitality, it needs to be facing really good and it has to be doable as well, which of course is a challenge. But it's so hopeful that uh zero waste is even in a tiny kitchen in Lisbon super possible. And uh yeah, it doesn't require any new technologies, it requires different management, different approaches to life, uh, different approaches to hospitality and to sourcing, consistency, creativity, all of those. So let me know what you thought about this episode. As always, the best way to support us is to share episodes, share clips, share things to people, specifically directly to people that could benefit from it, and let us know what you think in the comments through social media, through the website, etc. Thank you so much for listening, and hopefully I'll hear you at the next one. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investinginregenerativeagriculture.com slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app. And tell us what you like the most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.