Eco Top Chef: Engaging Middle Schoolers in the Food System

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

I had the pleasure this weekend of attending the Eco Top Chef Marin final competition: the culmination of two months of food and cooking education for groups of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders from seven middle schools across Marin County. The program was executed by Teens Turning Green, a nonprofit of which I’ve served on the board for the past two years. I hadn’t read much about the Eco Top Chef program before coming to the event and I was blown away by what I witnessed. I’ve never been prouder to be involved with an organization as I was on Saturday.

Seven teams of ten middle schoolers spent the past two months learning about healthy food, sustainable ingredients, fair trade, school lunch regulations, and menus. Each school team was partnered with a chef from a sustainably-minded restaurant in Marin (including Sol Hernandez, the owner of one of my all-time favorites—Sol Food—I was star-struck! Full list of the illustrious chefs here). The students and their chefs field-tripped to Whole Foods to study ingredient labels, to the farmers’ market to learn about the benefits of buying locally and organically, to Green Gulch Farm to see farming in action, and finally to the restaurant of their partner chef. The teams applied everything they’d learned at the Eco Top Chef Finale: a cooking competition to create a healthy and delicious lunch for middle school students costing no more than $1.35 per serving, accordant with the federal school lunch reimbursement rate (excluding cost of labor). The students presented their meals to the (awesome) judges and shared how they addressed the challenges of sourcing local and organic, balancing health with kid-friendliness, and meeting tough budget constraints. Judges scored based on a range of criteria including taste, sustainability, and health. First, second, and third place prizes were given out and then the audience had a chance to eat the food.

What struck me most about the event was listening to the kids. Each participant was interviewed on camera before the event and shared what they had learned. Here are my favorites:

  • “I learned how much sugar we normally eat and have eaten a lot less since”
  • “Now I look at ingredients in the grocery store and can tell my mom not to buy it if it has high fructose corn syrup”
  • “I know that GMOs aren’t labeled and they should be”
  • “I understand now how much more money goes to farmers when you buy at the farmers’ market instead of at the store”
  • “At the farmers’ market they showed us how many cups of sugar are in a candy bar. It’s hard to imagine that much sugar could be in something so small but now I know”
  • “The best part for me is seeing it happen here, in a school kitchen. If it can happen today then we now have living proof it will work and we can tell our principal. I know it works because we’re doing it right now”

The students were engaged, passionate, and empowered to change their own eating as well as their schools’ lunch programs from conventional to conscious. This is exactly what Teens Turning Green, and its Executive Director Judi Shils, are so effective at achieving: giving youth a choice, a voice, and a platform. I can’t wait to participate in future Eco Top Chef events. Stay tuned. And congrats to the team from MLK Academy in Marin City! They earned major points for growing many of their ingredients on campus, in addition to presenting a delicious meal.

Photos from the event:

Luna from MLK in Marin City

Ali from Ross Middle School

Judging panel

Pulled pork shoulder tacos

The team from Kent Middle School in Kentfield

The team from Mill Valley Middle School, my alma mater!

The beverage presented by team MVMS

The winning team, from MLK in Marin City, with their trophy

Sample budget and sourcing info from the San Domenico School team, prepared with the help of Sol Hernandez

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Weight of the Nation: what the experts say

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

I haven’t had time to watch this highly-anticipated HBO mini-series yet but I have enjoyed reading the reactions of my favorite bloggers. I’ve listed them all below if you want to check them out. Consensus is that the series brings home the severity of the situation but doesn’t take risks in addressing the systemic and politically sensitive changes that are very much needed. Hoping to watch it myself soon!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Afternoon at Lemnos Labs (2 of 2): Momentum Machines

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

A continuation of my earlier post on the afternoon I spent at Lemnos Labs, a hardware incubator in SOMA.

Momentum Machines

While hanging out at Lemnos, Jeremy and Matt introduced me to Alexandros Vardakostas and Lucas Lincoln, President and CTO, respectively, of Momentum Machines. The company is relatively stealth, and the website reveals little except the basic philosophy: “Momentum Machines Company is about the new industrial revolution. It is about clever applications of technology to free us from unpleasant labor. Our unique and carefully crafted commercial robotic devices are designed to maximize efficiency by minimizing consumer facing businesses’ labor and overhead costs, while providing higher quality, speed, & precision.”

Momentum Machines team at work

So how does this relate to food? The food preparation industry is one that is ripe with “unpleasant labor.” And Momentum is initially targeting one specific food-related task which occurs all over the world: hamburger assembly. They’ve built a robotic machine which can assemble hamburgers rapidly, consistently, and with a great degree of customization.

An intriguing question the founding team has regards consumer reaction. How will customers feel about a robot assembling their burgers? What role does their product play given the foodie/handmade/locally-crafted zeitgeist that’s intoxicated the Bay Area and other parts of the world? Is there an inherent contradiction? I actually feel pretty strongly that the answer is no. Here’s why:

The product will dramatically reduce labor costs, giving smaller burger joints a chance to be cost-competitive if they choose to source organic and grass-fed beef and organic condiments. The machine also enables restaurants to use whole ingredients without dramatically increasing costs. For example, a meat grinder is an easy add-on which would enable users to bypass the frozen additive-laden patties that are so ubiquitous in favor of actual 100% beef from a single animal. We talked about making the machine physically transparent so that customers can actually see the whole foods get ground, chopped and assembled into their meal (just how everyone loves watching In-N-Out employees make french fries out of real potatoes…) If the goal of the foodie movement to connect customers to their food, I see a ton of alignment.

While it’s unclear at this point if the company will adopt the sustainable ingredient angle that I’d love to see, there’s no denying this product will enable restaurateurs to pursue quality at a competitive price point. Imagine the implications of an organic hamburger chain serving marginalized consumers at a competitive price in communities that previously only had a McDonald’s? While a burger is still a burger, a burger made from all-natural whole ingredients is a vast improvement over the heavily-processed fast food product that contains, on average, meat from “a thousand or more cattle from as many as five different countries,” according to Eric Schlosser.

Although consumer reaction is important, the main focus of the Momentum team is identifying their target market. Alex, Momentum’s President, explains, “determining our target market is our main problem right now and we’re excited to implement a true tech startup’s take on the QSR industry. A lot of industries were disrupted by tech startups and we hope to be an example of that.” I’m excited to hear more from this innovative team.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Afternoon at Lemnos Labs (1 of 2): Blossom Coffee

Posted on March 5, 2012 by

I had the privilege of spending last Friday afternoon at Lemnos Labs, a hardware incubator in SOMA. Lemnos is pretty new and still small: the first class of startups, set to graduate this June, comprises four companies. But it is attracting attention due to its unique focus on hardware, especially given the success hardware startups are currently experiencing. And, most exciting to me, two of the four companies are focused on food: Blossom Coffee and Momentum Machines.

Blossom Coffee

I spent about an hour and a half with Jeremy Kuempel and Matt Walliser, President and Chief Engineer, respectively, of Blossom Coffee. From their website, “Blossom seeks to provide coffee professionals with unparalleled control over the variables that affect the extraction of flavor from coffee.” Jeremy walked me through the path that brought him to Blossom and to working on coffee in the first place. As an undergrad at MIT, he drank a ton of coffee. He started investigating how brewing affects the flavor of coffee and came up with a simple yet novel framework: if you put temperature of brewing on a vertical axis and the duration of steeping on a horizontal access, the intersection of these two variables on a graph plays a huge role in the flavor profile and acidity resulting from a given bean. With over 800 identified flavor elements contained in a coffee bean, brewing variables can dramatically enhance the expression of its natural flavors.

With a background in engineering and human-machine interaction (MIT), user interface design (Tesla Motors) and product design (Apple), Jeremy decided to build a machine to empower baristas, and, in the future, consumers in their homes, to brew the most flavorful coffee possible. The machine is called Cafe1 (see sketch), and, with Matt leading technical development, Blossom is 6 weeks away from a working prototype. Jeremy also has some really exciting ideas regarding human interaction with the process and the role of internet connectivity.

True to the “visionary” stereotype of entrepreneurs, Jeremy sees big things for the future of coffee. The rapidly spreading trend of pour-over brewing is beginning to bring high-end coffee to the mainstream. In 5-10 years, Jeremy expects “coffee to be like wine. Everyone smells wine before drinking it, even if they don’t know what to smell for. And you would rarely drink wine out of a plastic cup. Instead it’s savored and revered. There’s no reason coffee can’t head in the same direction.”

Jeremy succeeded in getting me pretty excited about what he’s doing. After spending a few weeks in Guatemala studying coffee last year, I’ve seen first-hand the opportunity for smallholder coffee growers to improve their lives when the quality of their product is recognized and celebrated. By creating a tool for enhancing the flavor of high-quality beans, Blossom can play a pivotal role in the advancement and democratization of a massive global commodity trade.

Stay tuned for news of a launch party in the near future! And a follow-up post on the second company I learned about: Momentum Machines.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Weekly digest: Sunday, February 26

Posted on February 26, 2012 by

Favorites from February:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Nest Collective: Innovation in Consumer Packaged Goods

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Neil Grimmer, the Co-Founder and CEO of The Nest Collective: “the next generation consumer packaged goods company.” Neil spoke at the GSB this afternoon and I was also lucky enough to spend 30 minutes one-on-one with him. Both interactions left me incredibly excited about Nest itself and inspired about innovation opportunities in food.

On The Nest Collective
Let’s start with Nest. From their website, “the Nest Collective is a company of mission-driven consumer products brands focused on nourishing babies, toddlers, and kids with healthy, organic foods from the highchair to the lunchbox.” Over the past five years they’ve built two brands: Plum Organics and Revolution Foods. Going forward, they’ll be rolling all their products under the Plum brand.

Plum spouted pouch packaging

Besides their impressive integrity around ingredients (organic, non-GMO, minimally processed…), what stands out to me about Nest is their focus on and track record in innovation. Five years ago, they looked at baby food, saw a commoditized and stagnant category, and used human-centered design to create a meaningful, inspirational and fun customer experience that is 1) healthy for consumers (babies and kids) and 2) good for the environment. They pioneered the spouted pouch that has single-handedly revolutionized baby food packaging with an improved user experience and a strikingly smaller ecological footprint (compared with glass jars, their pouches use 1/9 the fossil fuels and have less than 1/14 the landfill impact), throwing a “retirement party for the glass jar.” Their focus on human-centered design (i.e., design based on the needs and experiences of the user) permeates the company. Their products and marketing are fresh and fun and meet the needs of “modern parents.” I love this campaign, called “Babies for Yum.”

Babies for Yum

Nest has experienced amazing growth, proving that this trend (i.e., parent demand for healthy baby/kid food) will continue. They’ve served over 30M organic baby meals to date, and they’ve experienced a CAGR of ~400% in revenue from 2008 to 2011, with ~$38M in revenue in 2011. Their growth and the competitive pressures they’re placing on their baby food peers have the potential to create huge impact on the health of the next generation. In an earlier post I described how influencing tastes and metabolism at an early age through healthy baby food can create lasting impact on a child’s health. To me, the Nest Collective exemplifies the innovative, impactful, responsible and mission-driven company ideal.

Plus I love their unpretentious, un-“granola” approach to marketing organics (see below). No need to confine a product this awesome to the Whole Foods elite.

On Innovation in CPG
Neil also provided some really interesting advice to me and my classmates about how to think about disrupting the packaged food world. There are over 30,000 products in the infamous middle aisles of a given grocery store (those aisles that are packed with packaged foods, i.e., not the produce, dairy, meat or seafood sections). He advised us to ask, for each of those products, are the incumbents providing solutions that are healthy, sustainable, and enjoyable? Probably not. There is tremendous opportunity to do to another category what Nest has done to baby/kid food.

In terms of prioritizing among these 30,000 categories, he recommended we as entrepreneurs look for points of consumer reflection. When in a person’s life is he or she taking a moment to reflect on lifestyle choices? At the birth of a baby is a natural answer. So is after an illness. And there are other important moments when consumers reflect on their eating. Think about the products these consumers are buying at pivotal moments and innovate there. As Neil said, when talking about addressing the glass jar baby food status quo, “we believe there is always a better way.”

Thanks Neil for an inspiring morning!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Getting kids to love veggies: Design Interventions in the Stanford dining halls

Posted on February 10, 2012 by
  • Venue: Stanford Dining Halls
  • Target audience: Freshman
  • Theory of change: Love is missing from the freshman dining experience. If you can redesign the dining hall to communicate love via the vegetarian dishes, you will shift consumption away from meat.

For the first post in this series (a bit belated, I know), I want to share my own experience in increasing vegetable consumption. I took a class last year at Stanford’s design school called “Designing for Sustainable Abundance.” Sustainable abundance was defined as the intersection of three things: 1) good for the planet, 2) good for your health, and 3) good for your wallet. The class centered around a project we completed for Matt Rothe, the Sustainable Food Program Manager for Stanford Dining. The project was to redesign the dining halls in order to reduce meat consumption. Shifting consumption from meat to veggies and grains achieves sustainable abundance because the shift is beneficial to the environment, is healthier for students, and saves Stanford Dining money. Our team of four used the d.school design process, pictured below.

The process begins with empathizing: conducting in-depth interviews with users, aka freshmen at Stanford. We camped out at dining halls and asked a wide range of users about their experiences at the dining halls. The goal of these conversations is to understand our users and uncover their unmet needs. You can accomplish this by asking open-ended questions and consistently following up with “why?” We tried to capture the needs of a range of students including extreme users: users that love or hate the dining halls, users that have restricted diets (vegan, halal, gluten-intolerance) and athletes that just need to eat a ton of food. We began picking up on themes, most notably: the food feels mass-produced, it’s impersonal, it looks unappetizing in such large quantities.

For the “define” step of the process, we synthesized what we heard into our design “point of view.” This is a critical step in the design process that clearly and specifically defines the problem we as designers are trying to solve. A good point of view fuels brainstorming and inspires your team to take action. It’s specific, addressable, and paints a clear picture of your users’ unmet needs. The point of view we landed on was:

“Students who feel like no one gives a s**t about their food need to believe care and personal attention have gone into their dining experience because love is missing in the freshman experience and love inspires good choices.”

The next steps are ideating (aka brainstorming) followed by rapid and iterative prototyping. Our team thought up tons of ideas of how to make students feel the love in their dining experience. The idea was that if we could communicate this love via the non-meat items in the dining hall, we could meet the unmet needs of students and shift the balance of eating habits away from meat and towards vegetables and grains.

So what did we prototype? We tried a ton of stuff, including:

  • We made sample, pre-plated meals which anchored students entering the dining hall on what a “balanced meal” looks like and made the food look “fancy” and “special”
  • We individualized non-meat dishes and made them easy to grab
  • And we tried to forge relationships with the people preparing the food by introducing them and calling out their favorite dish, non-meat of course.
  • All the time working hand-in-hand with the dining hall staff, getting them involved in the process and execution of the prototypes, which was a ton of fun.

After many iterations of our prototypes, and loads of interviewing, we put together a package of solutions we called “Meals made with Care” including many of the above elements. The goal was to use our solutions to bridge the gap between the great work the dining hall does and the way students perceive it. We wanted to communicate the love and care that has gone into the meals. And finally we wanted to build this bridge to the vegetables and grains, rather than the meat items.

When we presented our solutions at the end of the quarter, Matt and his team chose a few of the ideas to implement and test, including some of our proposals. A team led the testing of the solutions during spring quarter and found a statistically significant increase in the proportion of non-meat items consumed. Now Stanford Dining has incorporated many of the solutions into the brand new dining hall on campus, the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons.

Overall it was a really enlightening experience and showed me there’s huge potential in exploring non-traditional ways of influencing dietary choices. The class is offered each winter—highly recommend it!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment