It's a little bit like water going down a hill.

You've got to, you know which direction you're headed, but you've got to follow the path and see sort of where it leads.

Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Freytag.

Today we continue our podcast series with Seth Goldman, Startup CPG's Entrepreneur in Residence, who is joining us

once a month to talk hot topics in CPG. This episode is all about innovation. You may know Seth

as the co-founder of Honest Tea, an author of Mission in a Bottle, and Seth is now the co-founder

and CEO of Eat the Change, co-founder of Plant Burger, and chair

of the board for Beyond Meat. Listen in as Seth covers two approaches to innovation and food,

how to balance taste and consumer feedback when innovating, tips for research and development

on a small budget, and more. Hi, Seth. Welcome back to the show. How are you today? Good to be with you, Jesse.

Awesome. Well, today we're going to talk all things, research and development, innovation. And so I'd love

if you could start us off just telling us about the development of your initial products at

Eat the Change and your thoughts on taste and being a climate-friendly brand.

Just kind of give us an overview. I'd love it. Sure, sure. And let's take some big steps back to

help answer that question. The first one is just, you know, why do we need to do this? What's the

reason? And so, you know, that really goes down to what motivates you to do it. And so for me, there's just really pressing dire issues that compel me to take an interest in this and be committed to this.

And it's around, you know, what's happening to our environment about the fact that it is so out of balance.

Our food system is so out of balance.

And there's so many different ways to do that.

But obviously, mostly for me relating to climate change, and we can get a dig deep on that if we want.

But I actually am putting out a blog about the same topic, and so we can probably link to that when this podcast comes out.

But the other thing that's really compelling is that our health, the health of our population is so dire as well, you know, that despite the wealth and knowledge

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