Name: The plant-based startup taking on food giants | Challengers by Freethink
Uploaded: 2022-10-11T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
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Factory farming is responsible for about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the biggest challenges that the human population is facing today is: creating food at a scale that does more good for the planet and is affordable, healthy, and delicious for humans.

Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have transformed people's perceptions of plant-based alternatives to meat.

But my fear is that  in trying to solve for one problem, which is protecting animals, they're creating a new problem, which is this sort of Frankenstein, unhealthy, overly-processed product.

AKUA is a sustainable food company on a mission to replace harmful industrial food production with regenerative ocean farming, starting with a healthy seaweed called kelp.

Consumers know these big food companies aren't⏤are not worth trusting and definitely not worth eating, and, so, they're looking for healthier options.

We just need to create food that's clean label, healthy for you, and is non-destructive for the planet, too.

And, yeah, we're not gonna be killing animals in the process.

I just, like, can't stop eating; I'm addicted at this point.

Yeah, when like, you know, you don't really pay yourself money, it's good to eat your free product.

Courtney Boyd Myers is the co-founder and CEO of AKUA.

I wasn't one of those kids that dropped out of college to start a company.

I thought people that went to business school were so boring.

I was a creative writer and poetry major.

And I turned the corner on 30 and suddenly had this realization of my future granddaughter asking me,

"Grammy, what were you doing when the world was burning?"

I looked at the context of climate change and I thought, "Alright, there's a lot of different solutions out here."

But the one that I was personally most drawn to was food.

Food is a major culprit for a lot of the devastation we're seeing to the environment today, and I knew that there was a way to create a food company that could potentially reverse climate change.

Through a friend who was farming seaweed in Connecticut, Courtney learned about the economic and environmental benefits of growing kelp for food.

Unlike anything that you eat or drink today, kelp is a zero-input crop.

It doesn't require dry land, fresh water, fertilizer, or feed to grow abundantly.

And it's growing via photosynthesis, so it's sequestering carbon.

So, I thought, "Ding, ding, ding; this ticks every box in the type of company I wanna start."

But her enthusiasm and lack of experience meant a rough start.

I was so excited, and any person that walked through the door and said, "I wanna work on this with you,"

I said, "You can be a co-founder! You can be a co-founder! You can be a co-founder! You want some equity? Here's some equity; let's go."

Two people have left the company before we even launched, and they left with, like, over 10% equity, which is a lot.

And it's really tough explaining to investors when you've made that kind of mistake.

I had no idea; in fact, if I had known, I probably wouldn't have run so quickly into it.

We raised a small funding round, and that allowed us to launch our first product, kelp jerky.

But if you're going to create a food product, make sure someone knows how to make it.

Our kelp jerky, no one knew how to make it.

We got kicked out of three co-packers in our first year.

AKUA was struggling, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

We realized that kelp jerky probably wasn't gonna be that go-big-or-go-home type product that help scale our mission.

We knew we needed to pivot towards this kelp burger, this symbol of the American food system.

Courtney's co-founder, Matt, had to develop the burger recipe out of his parent's rural Pennsylvania kitchen.

They were forced to mail thousands of samples across the country to gather product feedback.

But their customers were willing to pay to try their new burger.

We definitely had tons of melted kelp burgers show up and⏤or not show up⏤so, it was a mess.

But those 22,000 kelp burgers brought us in over a 100,000 dollars in revenue.

We realized we have to make food products that people know how to make because these manufacturers, they don't like to be innovative.

Our kelp burger, on the other hand, is much easier to make.

The kelp burger will launch to the public with direct-to-consumer sales and placement in select New York restaurants.

Our sales team has a strategy called the Sinatra strategy⏤if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

Our early customers are definitely living on either coast.

And I think we've got a lot of work to do to educate and familiarize the rest of the country around why it's so great to eat seaweed.

My hope for the future would be for every human being to ask questions about what they're eating.

Was it grown in a way that serves both my health and the planet's health, too?

With AKUA, yes, we're creating food products; yes, we're working with farmers.

But we hope more than anything that our products can start to create these subtle mind shifts and that'll translate into other areas of their life, too.

Mind shifts start in the mouth, and if we can move people's stomachs, we can move their minds.