The Future Of Food, How To Create Universal Abundant Health with Edenworks Founder Jason Green

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart. Today I am blessed and grateful to be joined by a fellow New Yorker from Brooklyn, New York. We have Jason Green on the line and you are the founder of edenworks, which is an aquaponics producer collective. You have a lot of thoughts about how the future of vertical farming will happen. We want to dive into all that. But if you're first joining the show for the very first time, the key message here at Make More Marbles is that we don't need to compete to get what we want. We can always collaborate and win more as a function of that collaboration. Jason, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. And so you're in Bushwick, all right, and you're in one of the most tightly packed populous cities in western culture. Right. Obviously China and India have something to show us, but how do you see aquaponics, vertical farming and the things that you're working on, shifting the landscape by which everybody looks at a city like redefines what a city is.

The most important thing to think about is cities right now are really just hubs of consumption. And it is our thesis that over the coming years, with technology, that cities are going to become self sustaining ecosystems. And for fresh food, this is extraordinarily apparent. 95% of American leafy greens come from California. They spend a week on a truck, they end up in New York. New York itself is about a 48 hour food supply. Thinking globally, if you were to guess what the entire world's food supply is. So if we were to stop growing food today, how much food there is.

Oh geez, I think we'd be dead in a week. You kidding me? The riots alone would get us.

So it's about 60 days. Oh, 60 days, but that's not that long. And so the way that we look at the future of agriculture and the future of cities is that new types of infrastructure are emerging that will provide fresh food where, where individuals need to consume it, and that these will be based on resilient technologies because as we know, the climate is changing. And so the future to us is very exciting. And ultimately it's going to be one where we have more fresh food. More delicious food, more nutritious food available to us. We, what a farm looks like, what a city looks like is going to change fundamentally.

I like that. And so for me, Jason, I picture a world where everybody can now have the food that they need, right? Food, energy, water and shelter. Those are the big ones, right. And what do you feel is, you know, I assume. I don't want to, you know, talk for you, but I assume that you have a similar kind of goal in mind, right, where we have sustainable, fresh food for everybody at some point in the future. What do you think the biggest hurdles are? Do you agree with that statement? And what do you think the biggest hurdles are to getting there?

I think the world has done a very good job at growing more calories. There are more calories available per person than at any time in human history. What we haven't done a really good job of is making fresh food available. And. And from a nutrition perspective, produce today has about 100 times less nutrition than it did between 10 and 100 times less nutrition than it did 100 years ago. And so I think that's gonna change drastically. The quality of our food is going to improve. The availability of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and sustainable protein is going to change drastically through technologies like indoor agriculture, like cultured protein. There's some of the key changes that.

We'Re seeing, and that's wonderful. One of the things that always kind of gets me is how people are assuming that it's going to be the same model, right? They're kind of taking this linear view on the future. What do you think the most disruptive thing is going to be that really shifts or what do you kind of see coming that's really going to shift this in a big way for people? From a place where we have a ton of calories and a ton of processed food. And yeah, there's MREs. We could technically live forever, but as far as fresh food, we'll bring it home for people.

I think that's indoor agriculture. So indoor agriculture is the idea that within a controlled environment. Early days of indoor agriculture were greenhouses, that you create some type of climate controlled space, the right environment for plants to grow in, and that within that space you can grow all sorts of available. So the way that we build farms is we use a technology called aquaponics. Aquaponics is an ecosystem of fish. We grow the fish out, the fish becomes sustainable protein. We break down the waste from the fish into fertilizer using the natural plant microbiome. So all of the bacteria that you'd find in soil. And then we actually grow edible plants using that organic fertilizer stream. And so with this solution, we grow clean protein, we grow fresh produce, and we do this in Brooklyn. And we have our produce on the shelf within 24 hours at the Whole Foods. That is a mile and a half away from our farm. And so with our approach, we're cutting out the week that product would spend on a truck coming from as far away as California and Arizona. And we're growing fresh produce in the neighborhoods where people are eating it. I think that is the single biggest change to the food supply chain. Building farms where they haven't existed in a really long time and creating healthy ecosystems, but ones that, that can just run in perpetuity.

So it kind of, it draws parallels between 3D printing as well and manufacturing. Right now, Right now the model is, you know, everybody, you have this mass production model where everybody produces in China and sends it to America and we buy it and consume it. Where now we can move to this mass customization model where everybody can print on demand what they need. And now you're eliminating shipping and you're eliminating a lot of the kind of inefficiencies that currently exist in the model. So similarly, you can kind of take, you know, factory farming at the hands of the powerful fuel elite and then give every individual the opportunity to grow their own sustainable protein and vegetables in the comfort of their own home. Is that kind of what we're getting to?

Well, I think there's actually, there's a better analog for 3D printing in that the attempt was to get 3D printers into individuals homes and they were going to download these files and print everything that they needed. And that, that didn't quite happen. But where you did see 3D printing have a huge disruption was in, was in rapid prototyping. And so for companies like ours, for example, we'll 3D print produce. Small scale production runs also with like a CNC machine of all sorts of parts that we need. So it's been a great industrial solution for rapid prototyping. We see a lot of parallels in indoor agriculture where there are solutions that exist to grow food at home. But ultimately you can't get the economies of scale that you need to really feed yourself or your family without having a substantial amount of space. And at the same time, growing is different than printing plastic parts. It takes a huge amount of expertise. Even with automation, even with intelligent growing systems, it still requires substantial expertise and time. And so the way that we look at it is that this does create a distributed production model where we can be a farmer growing in Brooklyn, but we can also have a farm in Boston, and we can also have a farm in D.C. and if you are a grocery store like Whole Foods, who's a partner of ours, then you can source the same quality, the same price product from the same company in all the different regions that you operate. And so you get the efficiency of having a consolidated supplier, like you're getting out of the conventional supply chain, but with the local freshness and transparency that we can provide.

I like it, Jason. Thank you. I always like to kind of bring it home for people. Like, why? What brought you to being where you are today and having the passion behind this that you do? Can you kind of relate this to a story from childhood or kind of a hero's journey, if you will, of how you became who you are today and why this matters to you and why it's important? Because I know food is obviously at the top of mind for every human being on the planet, right? So where's it coming from? How do we get more of it? How do we sustain ourselves in healthy ways? We go through these different heroes journeys in our own lives, like what food means to us. So why is food so important to you? And why is this the thing that you've decided to go all in on in your life?

I'd say I've always been obsessed with food, even since I was a little kid. I was the rotund kid, eating with both hands, insatiably. I've learned moderation, but I have long enjoyed food, cooking food, growing food, and of course, eating. I by background, I'm a BioEngineer. And before Edenworks, I developed medical technologies, specifically virtual reality systems for brain rehabilitation. So I worked with patients who couldn't walk, not because of a spinal cord injury, but because they had a condition in their brain that didn't allow them to interpret information, sensory information, the right way, or to move, to execute movements of their limbs in the right way. And we would create these immersive environments and train them using virtual reality. This brought me into a particular world of control theory. We looked at the brain as it was a biological black box. You had environmental conditions going in that was what you were seeing and what the ground was like and all that. And then you had output signals in terms of the movements of your lips. This is in the early days of virtual reality, before it was as buzzy as it is today. I ultimately decided that I didn't want to stay in. In academia. I was Doing research at Albert Einstein Med School. And before that I was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research fellow. And I got frustrated with the slow pace of getting innovation out to market in an academic environment. We were working on this really high impact stuff and there was no incentive to actually productize anything. The incentive was only to write the next paper to get the next grant. And I thought that I got into, into medical technology to help people. There were people with these issues and we developed a solution that could help them. And I realized that entrepreneurship was the only way to get high impact solutions out to market quickly. And so when I decided that I was going to leave academia for entrepreneurship, I kind of did a survey of what I thought the, the next really big problem space was going to be. And not that medicine isn't, but food, which had for such a long time been what I would spend my nights and weekends celebrating. That to me was probably the driving question of the 21st century. With growing populations, with climate change. Agriculture is both one of the largest contributors to climate change and at the same time the system that is most vulnerable to its effects. And it was clear to me that how we grow food and what we eat was gonna change drastically over the course of my lifetime. And that presented a huge opportunity. What was particularly fascinating was also the alignment between the innovator and the beneficiary, where you don't have to ask anybody to do anything differently with food. You grow a delicious product, you offer it at an affordable price and people will buy it. And on the back end, as an entrepreneur who's thinking about impact, I get to do all the sustainability, focusing on nutrition, all that kind of stuff on the back end. But I can just ask people to do what they are naturally incented to do, which is buy fairly priced delicious food. And that also addressed this concern that I had in academia where this misalignment between the innovator and the sources of funding, grant funding and the beneficiaries. And I often thought to myself, if only somebody could pay directly for this, they would be able to realize the benefit. And so I made the leap four and a half years ago, left my job at Albert Einstein doing research, and shortly after that co founded edenworks with two extraordinary individuals, Ben and Matt. Matt is our construction manager. He's a craftsman from a family of craftsmen. Ben is a brilliant architect and engineer. And I came in with the biology perspective and with this vision for a new type of infrastructure that would grow food in cities. And I suppose the rest is history in the making.

That's Beautiful. Yeah. And you hit on a couple really great points there. And I just want to kind of dig into each one a little bit more. So you talked about the, you know, if necessity is the mother of invention, then incentive is the mother of execution. Right? Nothing really happens unless there's an incentive to do so. So by transitioning, you know, kind of into entrepreneurship out of academia, you were able to create an incentive by, by which you were able to get people to do things that they would have already done in order to change the world around it. So Elon Musk and Tim Urban have been collaborating on talking to the world about how Elon is doing his thing with his different companies, SpaceX, Tesla, et cetera. And Tim Urban, if you haven't checked him out, it's called Wait, but why? And he makes these 38, 40, 45,000 word blog posts, which are essentially books on the Internet with pictures and drawings and all kinds of great stuff just to explain these really high level concepts. One of the things he really blew my mind, actually had a conversation with Kate, my roommate about this not too long ago is how do you change the world? How do you incentivize the world to change itself? So he's almost starting in a thing and he has this huge hairy goal how to change the world. He's not doing it for money at this point. He's obviously multi billionaire, but he starts with this idea of how do we create a sustainable business model that will fund the new thing that we want to create. So think Tesla, how they started with that, the roadster, which was, you know, raising $250 million, which then they could kind of niche down to the more mass market electric automobile and in doing so create a game changing industry that now people, through the value of supply and demand and adding value each other and would buy anyway, are going to be rushing to do that. And then, oh, by the way, we're releasing all our patents. Have fun, jump into it. So that incense the GMs and the, you know, the automakers of the world. So do you see a similar model being able to, to revolutionize the food industry by making it profitable, sustainable and available for these big players, you know, maybe the, you know, who is a major food conglomerate that you can name a couple, I'm sure that would then see the benefit of switching to your model and then changing the world in the process, making it more ecologically friendly and sustainable because that's, that's so huge.

I think we saw that happen in organic, organic food when it came onto the Market in a big way was much more expensive than conventional product. Now organic is at 25, 30, 33% premium to conventional. It's not a huge premium for a substantially better product local, which is even better because that's ultimately, there's nothing better than freshness. Was able to come in at the same price point offering product that was disruptively delicious, but at a price point that people had already wrapped their heads around. In my own business, we came in with a similar strategy as Tesla were. The first products that we rolled out with were the most different. We started off with our mighty microgreen and spicy microgreen personal salads. It was a two ounce pack of salad. It doesn't exist on the salad wall today, or it didn't until we rolled it out. So we came out with a smaller form factor of really delicious product. And it was priced in a way in which we could, we could get consumers to adopt it. It was at a lower price point than microgreens, which had been so expensive that folks only used it as garnish. We came in at a price point that you could eat an entire salad of just microgreens, which are so delicious and so nutritious, but had been so scarce. And we only plan to continue driving the price point down and, and getting further adoption. But I totally agree with that whole strategy of you come in with something that's new and different and exciting and then you make it as affordable as possible because ultimately that's the only way to have the impact, right?

And then when people see like the other economic players in the marketplace, they see, oh, this is a great idea, I can get involved and naturally the habits start to change and the incentives start to change and you create a movement where it was just one company, but you can really start. You know, you can't change the world all by yourself, but if you can get other people excited and incentivize them to do so, then you really have something there. That's a wonderful key point to take away, I think. So the other thing you kind of hit on, which was really interesting and I want to pull on this thread, is how you came from a medical background. So I was a bio guy as well. I went to Binghamton and got a biology degree. I wanted to go to medical school in New York City and Albert Einstein was one of the ones I applied to. So I kind of get where you're coming from there. And then you transitioned into a place where, at least I think you've made this connection. If you can start with what people are eating, that's 80% of the way there towards optimal health as opposed to, hey, let's go and fix the problem when they're already sick. Let's not make them sick in the first place. Is that a value you share as well?

Absolutely. My wife is a registered dietitian. She more than anybody would advocate that it all starts with diets. Anything that you're doing after what you put into your mouth is a corrective action.

Exactly. And I want to just leave that key point there out to hang because people kind of get all hung up on all the different band aids that we put on things in life. But if you can really start with the key simple fundamentals and not only works better, right, and towards having a better, more sustainable life experience, but it's also like you have so much more space if you just get the fundamentals. Right. To create other things that otherwise might be caught up with, oh, by the way, I have cancer now, or oh, by the way, I'm sick now, or oh, by the way, every time I travel I get, you know, and this used to happen to me. I'm not judging anybody who's having this experience. But if you can really drill down to those key things, like what is the food I'm eating, what water supply, what sleep schedule, what exercise routine. Those are some of the key fundamental building blocks for a life well lived. And if you can start with food, like you say, you can change a lot without having to get involved with the doctor. It's cheaper over the long run.

Right.

Pay 33% more for an avocado that's organic versus non, and maybe stem off a huge bill later down the road. I don't know what the exact correlation is, but that's kind of how I look at it.

Well, I think there's more than just health with our food choices. The choices that we make in terms of food that we buy are probably those with the most outsized effects. You eat, there's, of course the health effect, but then there's the climate implications. How is the food grown? There's the local ecosystem. So beyond just climate at large, but residential areas near farms have some of the highest rates of certain chronic diseases associated with agricultural chemical use. So that's, you know, that's a local ecological issue, but then that becomes a political issue as well. Right. The food that I buy in the grocery store, how does that affect the community in which that food was grown? There are workers rights questions as well. You know, is this food grown ethically? And so I think when we think about the food decisions that we make, it's not just about how does it affect my health today or tomorrow, but it's how does this dollar that I'm spending on a piece of food contribute towards the world that I want for myself, my family, my community and people because I care.

Absolutely. So kind of riffing on that and there's obviously far reaching implications in all of these different places that we can could go to. But like, let's start with food again. Like, what do you see as the lowest hanging fruit, you know, to quote upon, you know, to turn a phrase for people who want to make a big impact in all these spaces, but can do so through food? Like, what do you see as being the biggest opportunity in the food space right now that people can jump into either with your help or mentorship or on their own and kind of really make a difference in that space?

Knowing where your food comes from is the single most important thing that you can do. Buying locally is a really important way. Go to a farmer's market, talk to your farmers. They're incredible people. But in general, really focusing on integrity and transparency is perhaps the most valuable thing that everybody can do.

Awesome. And then in New York especially, I mean, we've both lived in New York. I lived in New York for 27 years in long island, upstate in the city. What is the biggest shift that you've seen happen over the last 10 or 15 years in the city? And what do you expect that, what's it trending towards? What do you think that the New York City of 10 or 20 years from now will look like?

Well, I'd say in terms of food sourcing, the single biggest trend is local. So both for. And there's a huge amount of data on this, but local produce and local seafood are the two top trends in both restaurants and grocery. That's a great signal about where the market is headed. And in terms of just being in New York, the. The amount of food that is being grown and produced in the city is extraordinary. There are obviously the immediate effects of just having access to great products. But even in terms of, especially in the current political climate, in terms of like manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs, food manufacturing jobs have far outpaced the growth of manufacturing at large, which is really interesting. And New York has invested heavily in manufacturing. We think of ourselves, I mean, agriculture is very much a type of manufacturing. You produce a good. Using a certain process, you can kind of roughly say that it's a type of manufacturing. And so I would say that this will become more and more part of New York's economy as well as it tries to diversify away from just like finance, ad tech, fashion, which have historically been huge industries in New York, New York is pushing big on manufacturing. And the thing that's sticking is food.

That's really fascinating because to use the 3D printing analogy again, shapeways, they're from Sweden originally, I believe. And they also have a, you know, presence right there in New York. So, you know, the manufacturing is taking hold there. And that food is really a form of manufacturing. To create a product through, you know, verifiable system is actually a really key insight that I didn't really get. So, okay, if you know, you're drawing analogs to other cities as well, what do you expect the future of food to look like? You know, if I'm a guy who, you know, now I have all these delivery options and I can go all these wonderful restaurants, I can go to all these farmer market living in 2000, 2017, what's my average diet going to look like in maybe 2030 when now we have drones delivering and now we have all these different things. I'm kind of curious to see what the future holds for this.

I think our diets will be increasingly whole and fresh food. We're going to see a lot less packaged food. But we're also, I think going to see our fresh foods being more standardized. Because if, for example, Amazon's bid to acquire whole foods says anything, what it says is that fresh format, which whole foods is, isn't going away. So these produce and fresh foods or fresh meat, fresh dairy, et cetera, that's not going away. But at the same time, all those products are going to get a lot more standardized and efficient. And so I think you're going to see a lot more things like, like what we do with packaged salad. You're going to see a lot more of the fresh, delicious foods that you're used to being sold in convenient, ready to eat or ready to use formats. And that consumer packaged goods which have historically been like shelf stable product is instead is going to be fresh ingredients.

Okay, and then what do you think about GMOs? I know that could be a dirty word depending on who you talk to, but I mean this way corn is a gmo, right? The yellow, nice, pristine corn that we had, that wasn't what it was two, 300 years ago. We've been self selecting for a long time based on a genetically modified organism that we believe to be superior. So whether we initiate that change through in vitro or cellular level or as a function of selection, artificial selection over time. What do you think of GMOs and what do you think the future of that are both the benefits and maybe the possible detriments?

I'll start by saying that I am not an expert on GMOs. It's obviously something that just being in agriculture, I think about Edenworks certainly does not use GMOs. The biggest risk that I personally perceive is in terms of choice with genetically modified crops. There are risks of gene drift. There are genetically modified crops can change the soil microbiome. And so even if you want to eat, if you want to eat organic food or non GMO food, your right to consume that product that you choose is threatened, potentially threatened by the use of GMOs because of the effects that it may or may not have. And there's just, there's a lot of uncertainty there. And so that's the issue that concerns me is there are all of these unknowns around it. And so anything that I would say in terms of health, et cetera, would be speculation. But what I do know, in fact is that there's a great article in the New York Times perhaps a year ago is that much of the promise of GMOs is that it was going to reduce, it should reduce chemical use, it should reduce fertilizer use because the plant itself would be able to, to do more. But Europe, which largely been the use of GMOs in the U.S. which did not, yields are about the same in Europe and in the US and yet agricultural chemical use in the US is higher than it is in Europe. And so what that says is that the promise of GMOs has not been fulfilled. And so with that in mind, I think you've got the promise not being fulfilled and the fact that yields can be achieved without them, combined with the fact that there are so many unknowns in terms of health and known changes to things like the local ecosystem and known risks like the ability to eat organic or Nanjian food, being threatened by gene drift from GM crop. Those are the issues that I personally as a consumer think about.

Yeah, and that's important for people to understand what these implications mean because ultimately they're voting with their dollars. Right. That's all economics is. It's like I'm going to make a choice on what should exist and what I think should exist more based on what I purchase. And if we are going to have a enlightened discussion about that through the action of voting with our dollars, then we have to have all of the information, right? We can't just have the promises that never go unfulfilled, as you said. That's a really interesting statistics about the US versus Europe. And when you go to Europe, you're not getting the thing that always looks perfect and pristine every time and it's full of pesticides and all that. And I actually kind of prefer that. I want food that resembles food. So I think maybe there's others in the world that would share that philosophy. So tell us about edenworks. Tell us about what you guys are looking to change in the world, what's most exciting to you right now. And you know how we can maybe support that because, you know, here at Make More Marvels, we're all about collaborating towards a better future and creating more for everybody. So what's a way that the people listening at home or myself or anybody could add a connection or resource or an opportunity or a person or a system? It's the crops analogy that I love to use, which I think is apt to help move forward the either personal mission of Jason Green or the edenworks mission.

The way that you can learn more about what edenworks does wherever you are is you can follow us on Instagram or Twitter. I especially recommend our Instagram. You can get a look inside our farm and how we use our products and. And you can follow us. Edenworks. Gross. For those in the New York area, we do have two personal salad lines that we offer at the Williamsburg Whole Foods store. And we are going to be doing a larger rollout across all of Whole Foods New York City stores early next year with a bunch of different product lines. And I would invite you to enjoy those products that really are delicious. It's our spicy Microgreens Personal salad and our mighty Microgreens Personal Salad.

Right on. And if people want to get in touch with edenworks or yourself personally, how would they do that? The best way. Is it through Instagram or some other.

You can find us@edenworks.com and you can reach out to us through the site.

Right on. Thank you so much, Jason. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. Any parting words or final thoughts to the audience today?

Vote with your mouth. Yeah. Everything that we eat is a statement. It affects us and it affects our communities.

Right on, brother. And we thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast for more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth and relationships, Whatever that means to you. Head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out out our cool explainer video about what we're about and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play wherever you're listening to your podcasts. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.