Adam Yee talks about... (Part 2)

Everyone talks about innovation in food. Few acknowledge how messy, costly, and glacial the adoption actually is.

My name is Adam Yee. I'm a serial entrepreneur, food scientist, I guess some people call me a podcaster and AI expert nowadays. I don't know if I like those titles, but mainly what I do is help food businesses with their food problems.

That includes either helping them with their ideas, starting a new company, solving a technical issue in food science, or even a project like AI. I've been getting lot of inquiries on those. Sometimes I deal with FDA problems, sometimes I substitute as a co-founder in an operation.

I'll be frank, plant-based meats have not gone well. Another company I worked for was Motif FoodWorks, which raised $300 million. It was a great job, by the way. I really liked working there, but it was frothy times. And with frothy times, there's a lot of issues that you can kind of see in the cracks. People get kind of silly with money. They make bad decisions and then when things go really bad, things go really bad.

Right now, there's been a huge pendulum shift to more animal products. A lot of the inquiries I get are animal products and sometimes they are way out there. Organ meat for instance and a lot are using tallow.

I was never someone who was like super mission-oriented in veganism or anything like that. I was just really into the technology, which I still am and I'm still working on lot of projects. But in general, we have totally shifted to a company that cares more about protein, that cares more about natural ingredients. And we don't believe that the plant-based meat analogs like Beyond Meat / Impossible are natural and we believe animal products are natural.

Chicken is growing tremendously. When people want to replace their beef consumption because it's either too expensive or they have some ethical feelings behind it, they actually switch to just chicken.

We use a questionnaire to filter people out so I can understand: One, can they explain their story? Two, can they explain their problem? And three, can they explain their value proposition?

I have a pretty good system that people find really useful. You can just use your home kitchen to make a product. What we first do is mold your idea. I call this product sculpting, which is I do a little bit of research. I understand market competitors, I understand the ingredients, and also the nutritionals that you look for. A food scientist will do things differently than you know home chef.

I also focus a lot more on leveraging relationships. I connect them with my suppliers and manufacturers. This is not a transactional game. It's a relationship game. These these people have jobs like you, they are experts in what they do.

If you're not a good client or if you don't have relationship with these guys, they will drop you. They won't care about you unless they do care about you.

There's been a few conversations I've had with people with AI. But I will say, honestly, I talked to them for an hour and then a month later they shut down. This has happened more than once, which tells me just how difficult this industry is.

Onboarding technology is generally just very hard. Especially in food, which gets longer because they don't have the resources compared to like a tech company. You just don't have the margins to really care about implementing the software.

A lot of these people are not food companies that are making these softwares. They are IT companies or software developers who believe that this is a market. Generally, I've seen that not to work very well. The adoption is just too much and food companies just don't think it's worth it.

It is honestly a lot of things I'm looking into more so. Spoiler, I just got accepted to grad school to North Carolina studying the adoption of AI. It's something I've seen to be a very big opportunity. That's why I'm in North Carolina right now to figure out all this stuff. It's an opportunity I think that is worth researching. We're not doing a good job right now pushing the technology for people to adopt. There's just a lot of friction. I have my own thoughts about how to adopt it, but I just need to do the research.

All technologies suffer through the Gartner Hype Cycle, which is basically a huge peak of interest, a trough of disillusionment, which means there's a huge drop-down into negative territory. They call it disillusionment, despair, whatever. And then as it slowly rises up, it's adopted. So the x and y is ill-defined. But generally the shape is always the same.

And you see this everywhere. Self-driving cars is one example. Everyone was super excited about it ten years ago. Then it kind of disappeared off the face of the earth. But people are still working on it. And then eventually now we have Waymos literally driving you up and down from San Jose to San Francisco. You can argue the dot-com bubble is the same thing. 3D printing is also something that has gone through this.

Basically science always lies beyond the hype. Always. So you're never gonna have science catch up to a hype situation. And this is arguably the same thing that's going to happen to AI. There have been many call-outs of it being in a bubble right now, and we don't know when it's going to pop.

The technology is so fundamental that even if it does pop, it just might take two to five years to actually develop fundamental research to actually follow the exact same trend. Sometimes, a lot of the AI companies are taking a giant hammer or a sledgehammer and trying to figure out a solution. I don't think that's the right answer.

I think food scientists care more about the product than the CPG founder. Honestly, in a CPG business, the product is a very small component. It's actually more about distribution and honestly, the abuse you get from a distribution system.

Making a product has now become easier than ever. You can literally go to a factory and negotiate with them to make this product. But the harder part is, how do you manage the distribution? How do you manage the velocities and all that? And that is essentially a harder game.

Really, the biggest innovations come from the ingredients. When someone finds a unique way to use an ingredient, that's where the innovation comes in. When you think about a CPG company or a product, every ingredient in that product actually has a whole industry behind it and a whole lot of innovation. Protein, for instance. It's a huge industry with a lot of science behind it.

Say, for example, I'll make a soy protein. How do you extract it? Okay, you extract the protein. How do we concentrate it? How do we put into a shake? How do we put into a bar? Those are all really complicated science things a lot of CPG companies don't care about.

Basically, we don't care about the planet anymore. After the pandemic, there's been a shift of selfishness. And I think for good reason, right? If you see everyone dying, you're going to be scared of death. And so why would you care about someone else if you are worried about your own death? That's why immortality is trending or living longitude. I call it immortality because of a Brian Johnson.

You also have the same sentiment from a policy angle, which is we're going to cut ESG initiatives. We just had Bill Gates say he's not going to care about climate change. He's going to care more about disease.

This could shift at any time. And things are shifting faster and faster. But right now, sentiment says sustainability is not on everyone's mind. If anything, it's the least on everyone's mind.

Adam Yee is a food scientist, serial entrepreneur, and podcaster. From 4 a.m. shifts in a granola bar factory to founding venture-backed startups like Better Meat Co. and Sobo Foods, he now leads Umai Works and helps turn big food ideas into real products.