Head of Global Marketing of Eat JUST, Inc., (Eat JUST and GOOD Meat), Tom Rossmeissl, joins Elysabeth Alfano on The Plantbased Business Hour to discuss branding in a flexitarian and increasingly competitive world.
Specifically, they discuss,
- How Tom is working to keep JUST Eggs fresh with all the competition in the plant-based eggs space,
- How is Eat JUST inc. marketing across categories (chicken v. eggs) and across tech (plant-based v. cultivated),
- Tom’s thoughts on communicating plant-based eggs from mung bean and cultivated chicken from cells to the consumer,
- Tom’s considerations for competition in the general landscape,
- Sales post the 2020 Covid sales spike. Is this sustainable in plant-based?
- Predictions and new products/advancements.
Here is a short clip and transcript from their conversation. Podcast is here.
Elysabeth: What have been some of the hurdles you have overcome for communicating eggs made out of mung bean and chicken without the chicken to the consumer?
Tom Rossmeissl: Yeah, I mean we could spend a whole hour talking about just that. This is a completely new technology so we’re having to figure out the right way to educate consumers because it’s never existed before. We’ve seen little news articles here and there, but in terms of explaining how you make meat without killing an animal, there’s a lot of complexity that goes into that and we’re learning a lot. We’re getting better at it, but there will be a ton of marketing and a ton of education into explaining how to do that.
The mission behind the company and behind the brand is a line, but you’re right, there’s different reasons to buy among the different brands. I think there will be some nuances in terms of the audience. I think there will be a lot of overlap, too, but I think there are certainly some consumers who, as amazing as plant-based meats are, maybe they’re just not there yet. Or they’re not willing to give up animal-based meat yet, but they ethically know they want to do something better. Cultivated provides sort of an option for them. In some ways, it’s the value proposition that it’s the best of both worlds, right?
You have the benefits in terms of sustainability that you’re getting from plant-based, and you get the benefits of taste that you’re seeing from animal based. As we scale that we can solve both problems with one technology. So ,it’s quite exciting.
Elysabeth: It’s really exciting. At first, I used to think of cultivated meat as the death of animal agriculture and I now see it as the natural progression of animal agriculture. So, animal agriculture: incredibly wasteful. From a business perspective, it’s an awful equation.
Obviously, we’ve got health, the planet, and animals, but let’s just stay with business for a second. It’s wasteful for land, it’s wasteful for water, and it requires so much deforestation. It’s just a completely inefficient system for getting calories to a growing population which is going to be almost ten billion by 2050 and we’re not getting more land and we’re not getting more water. So, you’re going to have to do something better and more efficient with that equation and cultivated meat is just the next progression of making animal agriculture actually function well. What Eat Just, Inc. is doing is incredibly exciting.
