Fork The System

Fork The System Episode 7: Katy Bluett

• Sherry Shu • Episode 7

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Welcome to Fork The System — a podcast spotlighting the innovators, researchers, and advocacy leaders reimagining how we feed the world.

Our seventh guest is Katy Bluett. Katy has a long and impressive history of working in New Zealand’s foodtech innovation space. She’s the Executive Director of Future Food Aotearoa, a founders collective to accelerate the growth and impact of foodtech businesses. She’s also the Founder of Appetite for Change, a consultancy for innovative food companies.

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Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14yIlFXcZ-DlFv9PwHUwjGFiFSEWxjaszfffS4g2YPQc/edit?usp=sharing

Substack Recap:  https://open.substack.com/pub/forkthesystem/p/a-recap-of-fork-the-system-episode-e1b?r=5s965p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Katy:

And I kind of liken it to this saying, it gets used all the time, but “a rising tide floats all boats”, you know, like there's a lot of general stuff that can be shared amongst founders because many have never done this before, right? And so why make it harder than it is? That kind of circle of trust that we've grown amongst our founders is the kind of magic behind the group, to be able to be vulnerable and share what you're doing, and you know it won't go outside of the group. 


[Music fades in]


Sherry:

Welcome back to Fork The System, a podcast spotlighting the innovators, researchers, and advocacy leaders reimagining how we feed the world. I'm your host, Sherry Shu, exploring how we can build food systems that are sustainable, ethical, and free from animal suffering. 


In this episode, we talk about founder collectives and the important role they play in tackling common entrepreneurial challenges, as well as the upcoming trends and technologies Katy has learned about from her years of experience in New Zealand food and beverage. I struggle a few times to pronounce Aotearoa, the Māori or indigenous name for New Zealand—still not sure if I'm 100% perfect on that—but I learn a lot, and I think you will too. With that being said, let's dive right into the episode.


Sherry:

So today, I’m here with Katy Bluett. Katy has a long and impressive history of working in New Zealand’s foodtech innovation space. She’s the Executive Director of Future Food Aotearoa, a founders collective to accelerate the growth and impact of foodtech businesses. She’s the Founder of Appetite for Change, a consultancy for innovative food companies. Katy, it’s great to have you on the podcast!


Katy:

Thank you, Sherry. It's lovely to be here, keen to talk about all things future food. 


Sherry:

All things future food. That's what this podcast is about. That's what I'm hoping to learn more about today. So just to kick us off, what inspired your passion for future food and for food and beverage innovation? What got you into the space?


Katy:

 It's funny because when I was at school, I liked both the arts and the sciences, and that's kind of carried through my career as well. So I've ended up in and around innovation, and I really enjoy the problem-solving and creativity that comes along with it, along with the strong commercial discipline you need for food and beverage to be successful. 


But in the beginning, it wasn't intentional to work in food and beverage. In fact, my first graduate role was in the R&D team of a power electronics company. But living in New Zealand, you could say it was almost inevitable that I would end up working in food and beverage. 80% of our export earnings come from the export of food and fibre. So it's kind of everywhere. 


A fun fact around New Zealand is that we are the largest exporter of dairy products in the world. So we're not the largest producer, but we're definitely the largest exporter. And I think personally, I've been really fortunate to work across the industry from ops to R&D to sales to leadership and in government roles. And that's given me quite a wide view of the sector, which I use now in the roles that you spoke about earlier. 


Sherry:

Do you have a favourite past role that you've done? Because I know you're currently doing a lot of things, but of those jobs, do you have like a favourite one that comes to mind? 


Katy:

Oh my goodness, I've enjoyed all of them really. But I was like the innovation manager for New Zealand's largest ice cream company. And everybody was like, “oh, can I try your new ice cream?” And equally, a lot of the guys I was friends with were like, ooh, when I was working in innovation and beer and wine, like, “oh, what's coming”? So I think some of the food products were more exciting to other people than they were to me. But hey. 


Sherry:

Makes sense. It depends on everyone's favourite food. So I'm a big ice cream fan. I get super excited. Well, then, your current role now, mainly in Future Food Aotearoa. Could you tell us more about what this organization does and what your role currently looks like in it? 


Katy:

Yeah, Future Food Aotearoa is a founders' collective that was formed in 2021 to accelerate the growth and impact of food tech from New Zealand. And for me, one of my early insights I brought from working at Callaghan Innovation. Callaghan Innovation was the government's agency. And I had the pleasure of working with 400 or so of New Zealand's top innovators in the food and fibre kind of area.


And there was this conversation that kind of came up beyond talking around the R&D and grants that the government could give. And I saw this commonality across founders who were scaling businesses, and they were all having the same kind of problems and all trying to sort it out on their own. 


And so, it was kind of a moment where it would be more effective than me trying to explain everything individually, as what if we brought these founders together and they could share amongst themselves. And it's so much more powerful for peer-to-peer learning than it is on your own, right? And so at the same time, I was kind of kicking this idea around—another local founder, Alex Worker, was working with his peers around something similar. 


So that was kind of the genesis of the idea of us coming together to do Future Food Aotearoa. And I kind of liken it to this saying, it gets used all the time, but “a rising tide floats all boats”, you know, like there's a lot of general stuff that can be shared amongst founders because many have never done this before, right? And so why make it harder than it is? That kind of circle of trust that we've grown amongst our founders is the kind of magic behind the group, to be able to be vulnerable and share what you're doing, and you know it won't go outside of the group. 


Sherry:

What are some of your proudest moments on the journey of running the organization so far?


Katy:

I'm really proud of some of the projects we've worked on. One of them's been working with a bank in New Zealand, which is a little bit unusual, but it was, they've been super supportive. ASB Bank, they're one of the large ones here. We've helped create a new banking product, ASB Access. It's designed for food and fibre entrepreneurs, and so that's been a really collective win out of working together.


One of the other really big ones we've done is understanding that for New Zealand companies to grow, we need to export. And when you're getting into Future Foods, you need scale partners, or who you're going to work with as a customer, who's going to use your special protein, and forming those connections early. And those connections aren't necessarily in New Zealand, so the R&D head offices where they might look at these new products are not here. And so we identified really early that we need to kind of, as a collective, have stronger connections or engagements into these groups. 


And so one of the really interesting things that we did was joined a group called MISTA, which is based in San Francisco. We took a little while to find, where are the food tech centres of excellence around the world, and where would we get the most benefit for the companies. MISTA has some of the world's biggest food companies. It's got Ingredion, AAK, SIG, Danone, really innovative food companies that have come together to form an open innovation hub that's really based around food transformation. And so they also work collectively with startups. So that's been a really exciting development that we've formed a partnership. 


Sherry:

That sounds awesome, yeah. The thing I kind of want to pivot back to that I was thinking about is, you say you work with all these different food startups that are kind of facing the same problems. What do some of those problems actually look like? Is it mainly with financing, mainly with finding good staff, or finding good supply chains, or what kind of areas do those common problems actually exist in? 


Katy:

Yeah, they can be all of those things. I think when we formed five years ago, the world was a totally different place, right? We've had a global pandemic, there's a lot of geopolitical change, and so we saw these big bets through investment in companies like Perfect Days, lots of money going, and now it's completely flipped to, it's a very quiet global investment scene at the moment. 


But no, some of it is capability building, recruiting staff, operating in different markets, and how you're finding working with different contracts, insurance, some really dry stuff, you know, it's important. 


Sherry:

For sure, thanks for sharing. And then you mentioned, you said you joined an organization that was encompassing of a lot of food companies, right? Were a lot of those already established food brands? Or was it more like startups and smaller organizations? And is there like, one or the other that Future Food Aotearoa is trying to serve more? 


Katy:

It's definitely the smaller end of town. So they are entrepreneurs and founders of companies. Some of our founders [are] in cellular agriculture, precision fermentation, molecular farming, plant-based proteins, and some functional ingredients. So there's a real spread of companies. And so that's quite nice is that not a huge amount are competing directly with each other. But I guess they're all providing nutrition solutions. So there is that commonality. 


Sherry:

Of the Future Food businesses you've seen succeeding in New Zealand or beyond, are there any key commonalities of how they've approached building their businesses, exporting and supplying and marketing? Like what are some key commonalities behind their success? 


Katy:

There's two different kinds of companies, CPG (consumer packaged goods) or the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) consumer products companies. And then you've got deep tech, pure food tech companies that are tackling quite ambitious, long-term food transformation challenges. And so there is quite different conversations going on. Where we're seeing success for some of the CPG companies is where they're bringing in more nutrition or more tech into their offerings. 


I think one of the really successful things we've [done] as a collective—there's an annual conference, Future Food Tech in San Francisco each year in March. And so we, as a collective came together of the food tech companies to have a stand in the conference there that highlighted the strength of all the companies together. 


So it was a New Zealand stand. We were there. And the nice thing was that each founder was able to, whoever they met, kind of hand it on to the next person. And so it's super inclusive. But it also, I think, helps punch a little bit above our weight in terms of creating a presence. If each of those companies had gone on their own, they wouldn't have had the kind of attention that working together delivered. 


Sherry:

Yeah, that makes sense. Naturally, business is very competitive in nature. The trust you mentioned is so important, right? To not see the other food company as their competitor that they can't share experience with, they can't collaborate with, but changing that to be like, ultimately, we are serving the same goals, even if it's slightly different markets, and we are able to help each other get better, help each other reach more people. 


Katy:

The reality is [that] each company is at a different stage in their kind of growth cycle. So, interested companies or investors understand that. And so you're going to be right for the right person. And so there's less competition than what you would imagine. 


Sherry:

Yeah, for sure. Especially like earlier-stage versus medium-stage, probably needing different resources, attracting different customers, financiers, etc. Just diving a bit now into, I guess, the broader food tech space. What do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities currently? And do you see any big systemic political-level changes that are needed to accelerate this space further? 


Katy:

Oh, goodness, very big question there, Sherry. I think in New Zealand, we talk about scale in terms of global supply. So now with food tech, we're talking about, perhaps things like regional biomanufacturing ecosystems, smaller footprints, and being more resilient. And that's very different to how we looked at the food system before. 


So from an entrepreneurial perspective, big ambitions like food systems change, which are multifaceted with many stakeholders—these are tough to take on. And I think more public support or funding for startups tackling these challenges would be hugely beneficial. 


When we were looking at future foods a couple of years ago, there was a real emphasis on the environment. And that was kind of why people were doing it. And I think the why is changing a little bit. And food security has come out a lot stronger in conversations now. You're seeing, particularly post-COVID and with the geopolitical stuff, issues that are happening around the world, countries like Singapore, and Saudi Arabia, and these kind of centers really gearing up to address food security with food technology. 


Sherry:

Do you have any examples of that? I'm actually quite curious, is there a specific product or startup or organization that's specifically tackling food security? 


Katy:

I think there's lots. Singapore came out, and it's been around for a little while, [with] their 30 by 30 policy. Because it's an island state with 5 million people on it, right? It's the same population as New Zealand and a tiny wee kind of city state. So they don't make food, basically. And so they have an ambitious goal to produce 30% of their food by 2030. And so they've put a lot of different incentives in place to attract entrepreneurs to come and work in Singapore and develop. 


So they were the country that was first to change their regulatory settings to allow cellular meat to be sold. And so you couldn't eat your product if you made cellular food in New Zealand, because of our food regs, you had to fly to Singapore to be able to eat the stuff you're making in the lab. So I think some of those have been really, really interesting. 


So the challenge for companies in a long roundabout way was, how do you get funding to do deep tech, food tech? Because I think a lot of the investors still have an expectation that the returns will be similar to software or, you know, the scalability will be there. And what we've learned is, it's a much longer period to get there. And so the challenge for startups is having that momentum and finding those investors that'll keep growing. 


Sherry:

Is there also now—I'm seeing increasing focus on things like nutrition and protein increasing in popularity. So like, is it also those other things, that people want specific things in their food, want nutrients, vitamins, meeting their fitness goals, also incorporated into the types of food they're buying? 


Katy:

Definitely, I think. And when I think about the future for New Zealand, I see us being very nutritionally focused, building off our dairy and our meat backgrounds, so traditional foods, but we've had a lot of R&D, kind of reimagining that capability around future foods. 


I might be going off track a little bit here. But when I think about AI, and I know everybody's talking about AI, and I was going to say a technology that's really shaping the food industry. I mean, it has to be AI at the moment. And there have been kind of pioneering companies, such as Neuritas and NotCo, who have been using AI in their products and their offerings. 


But it was interesting when I was in the US earlier this year, and I was talking to a founder, and he was focused on gut microbiome. So if you could go into your gut microbiome, and look at triggers in your stomach as to what's going to be effective and give you better health, whatever it is you're looking for, and then understand what molecules or foods will support that health outcome that you're looking for, and then go back and develop your food. 


It's quite a really different way than here's my kiwifruit, it's really healthy, what is it going to do to the body? I'm imagining a future where it is that the food system is more geared towards personalized nutrition or health outcomes, depending on what life stage you're at, and then works its way back to the land and what we've grown. 


And I think that's, it's almost like with my engineering background, reverse engineering something, right? So starting at the end point and working backwards, because one of my real interests is around business model innovation, and I can imagine, you touched on it, Sherry, this whole kind of area around nutrition will change dramatically. 


And I think we can't leave this conversation without bringing up things like GLP-1, and these kind of medicines or treatments that people are taking that suppress appetite, which are now being used more as lifestyle products, changing the way that food is being developed. So it's a whole different range of food products that are designed around different health outcomes. 


Sherry:

Just to make sure, GLP-1 is the thing in Ozempic, right? 


Katy:

It is the thing in Ozempic, and I should be able to say exactly what it means, and so I kind of skipped around it, but it's funny because in the big kind of food conferences I've been to overseas, it's a huge topic, but the medicine as such has only just arrived in New Zealand, so it's, it still hasn't had the impact it has. 


There was a stat, it was around 10-15% of the U.S. population has either tried it or is on it, so— 


Sherry:

Wow, that's a lot more than [I thought], okay. 


Katy:

Yeah, and so it's, and that's only people that are on it, and if it's a adult in the house who's buying for the family, then the kind of impact of the food that that household's getting is different. And so people that are on those drugs are looking for more nutrient-dense products, so suddenly the way you design products changes. 


Sherry:

Super interesting. I just want to pivot a bit back to the technology you mentioned, and specifically AI, and how that'll influence the future of food. Could you elaborate a bit on, how do you see AI playing a role? Is it just in detecting gut microbiome changes? Is it in the actual R&D process? And then are there any other emerging technologies that you're seeing that are really exciting, that are really going to transform the food system? 


Katy:

Yeah, I think AI can be used anywhere, up and down the value chain, right? But one of the areas I've seen it being used at was real-time sentiment being detected for designing new concepts. 


Say we were going to do a new banana muffin, whatever it is, and we want to understand, is the marketplace ready for it? There's now kind of whole avatars that have been built by big food companies, that are very granular around your target market, and you can talk to them, and they can tell you what they think of your idea. 


Well, I think back to when I began in the food industry, there were still photocopiers, and pencils, and surveys being used, right? And now to imagine that I can talk to John, a 50-year-old middle-aged man in Texas, about what he thinks about, you know, my banana muffin, it's just amazing. And that's drawing from huge data sets, and whether it's Reddit, or Facebook, or all of these other things, that's just touching the surface of what it can do, so I'm really, really kind of intrigued around where that will go. 


And then I guess, biomanufacturing. We've touched the surfaces recently, we've borrowed from the pharmaceutical industry, when we're looking at things like cellular agriculture, and one of the criticisms has always been, it's not cost-effective. How will this ever be cost-effective? They're kind of batch-sized, and the tools have all been designed for high-value pharmaceuticals. 


Sherry:

Right. 


Katy:

Mark Post designed the very first cellular burger, and I think one of the founders of Google funded that project, and it was a $230,000 burger, right? And it was like, how crazy is that? That'll never go anywhere. 


And so we've seen the unit economics really drop over the last 10 years, and we're hitting price parity on that kind of stuff. Biomanufacturing will give us a world of different functional ingredients that could deliver cool flavours, foods, [and] nutritional outcomes. 


Sherry:

Sounds really exciting. I didn't really know that we were actually achieving price parity, I kind of... 


Katy:

Getting closer, getting a lot closer than we were. We had our second cellular agriculture conference in New Zealand, and I hosted one of the panels there earlier this year, and David Kaplan, who's a famous professor from the US, did a great talk on it and said we're getting closer. 


Sherry:

Yeah, that's exciting. That brings so many opportunities for hope of progress in this space. It's no longer true that we're going to be so inhibited by cost. Eventually, maybe it'll be the same price as normal meat. 


Katy:

I think one of the other things is that we were imagining that the companies would come out with a fully cooked kind of steak, as we imagine it. And now we've seen—not a breaking up of the industry, but there are different elements that are being focused on. 


So there's a company in Australia called Nourish, just focused on the lipids and the fats. And now we're seeing kind of a re-imagining, saying, well, if you bought plant-based foods and you put some of the umami kind of flavours that you can get from fats that are missing in plant-based foods, and you combine the two in a hybrid, then you might end up with some really delicious foods. And so we're seeing this much more pragmatic and consumer-focused way of delivering some of these novel foods.


Sherry:

I think it's so interesting to see how many startups in the space are focused on a very specific thing. Actually, just previous episode, I talked to Max Tams, a researcher at Singapore, who's working on vegan heme, heme being the molecule that creates meat's flavour. All the startups are kind of working on one very specific part of the process, it seems like, one very specific product or manufacturing input, and then together can accelerate the value chain or change the manufacturing process with each new thing they're producing. 


Katy:

Heme's been such a controversial ingredient, hasn't it? Because it was the bloodiness that was in Impossible Burgers, and it was quite a big moment to get that regulatory approved in Australia and New Zealand for sale, but yeah. 


Sherry:

I guess, yeah, do you have any final thoughts on the matter? Any final comments before we wrap it up? 


Katy:

One of the things in New Zealand is our future advantage, and our discussion that we've had lies in producing these high-performance ingredients with global relevance, with science backgrounds. And I think we'll start seeing the move “from farm to table”, to from “farm to wellness”. 


And so it's quite an exciting area that we're going to be moving into in terms of future foods. So the more people and the more creative ideas that are in the mix, the better. So it's wonderful to be talking to you in Toronto, I think, and it will take a global village to do this food transformation. So, amazing to be making these connections. 


Thank you for the platform, or just thank you for the time to talk about future foods. 


Sherry:

Yeah, no problem. And thanks for sharing so much more about the New Zealand future food space. I think there's a lot of lessons that Canada, the U.S., can take away from what's happening in New Zealand to make the food system better. 


Sherry:

That's it for this episode of Fork The System. If you have a guest or topic you'd like to hear about, share your ideas using the feedback form linked below. Until next time!


[Music fades out]