Welcome to my new Vegan Leaders series!

Given my new focus on working for vegan leaders, I’m repurposing interviews that Vegan Entrepreneurs Group (VEG) Networking Canada has done since 2020. I thought I should start profiling leaders who are vegan, and I realized we’ve already got over 4 years’ worth of interviews to draw from!

All these interviews were led by my co-host Justin Manning, Vegan Financial Advisor, and hosted on Zoom. What’s great is that each person’s story and journey is different. You’ll learn something new about each leader and get insight into their company’s status at the time of the interview.

I’ll include the video version in each post. As they weren’t all in speaker view, it might be useful to listen and follow along vs. watch.

If you’re vegan and a Canadian resident or working for a Canadian company, click here for more info on how to join VEG Networking Canada!

Without further ado, here’s the first vegan leader, Dean Blignaut, Co-Founder and CEO of TMRW Foods. This interview originally aired on September 10, 2020.

Justin Manning: Well, hello everybody. I have a long winded intro here to introduce our special guest for today. So bear with me as we get through the introduction. And then after that, we’ll have about eight conversation starters or eight questions for our special guest, and we’ll just get to know a little bit more about the whole story and the whole picture. So TMRW Foods is a socially conscious plant based meat company proudly cultivated in Vancouver. BC. TMRW’s flagship burger and mince are made from a mixture of quinoa, kidney beans, split peas, hemp hearts and sunflower seeds. The final product took over one year to formulate, stemming from TMRW’s care for the environment, animal welfare and human health.

TMRW believes plant protein can be enjoyed at home and in restaurants on busy weeknights for a quick and simple dinner and on weekends for a family gathering. TMRW wants to make products that offer endless versatility, inspire creativity, and that can simply and easily be used as alternatives to protein from animals for any occasion.

In early 2019, TMRW Foods began carving out its niche in the vegan food space with its TMRW burger and mince featured at events with MeeT Restaurants, The Juice Truck and Veg Expo, demand for the burger and product grew quickly among locals, and the mince became a topping staple at TMRW Foods’ sister company Virtuous Pie. Operating with integrity, unwavering ethics and compassion for our people, for the animals and for the environment. Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcome the co-founder and president of TMRW Foods, Dean Blignault.

Dean, welcome to VEG, the vegan entrepreneurial group, Vegan Entrepreneurs Group, where we get together weekly and we have conversations with people who are plant based themselves and are also offering that type of offering to the marketplace, and so thank you for being here. And the first of eight questions that we have for you today is:

When things open up a little bit more, perhaps it’s travel or something else, what are you and Antoinette looking forward to the most?

Dean Blignaut: Yeah. It’s actually funny. I was just touching on that with Helen before we started the call. It’s really kind of challenging at the moment to even imagine it, because the future seems so uncertain, at least for like, the next six to 12 months.

Honestly, what we really like to do when we find a gap and when things settle down is to spend a little bit of time in Europe. We’ve only been to Europe once before, and had an amazing time in Barcelona, and we’ve wanted to go back ever since. And I love to get into the sun, basically, drink wine, chill out for a while. So that’s really very much high on our to do list at the moment, or at least once Covid has— settles down and passes,

JM: Yeah, absolutely. Barcelona. I’ve never been but I’ll take your word for it that it’s amazing. Our next two questions are based around origin story, and the first one is personal, and the second one is business. So for the first one, on a personal level,

What was your plant based or vegan origin story?

DB: Yeah. So when my partner and I, Antoinette, got together, she’d been vegetarian for quite some time. I ate most things besides, like, the basic fussiness that you may find in a general kind of omnivore.

And she was very patient with me throughout the whole process. She never pushed it on me. And I, kind of, I never gave enough thought honestly when we had first gotten together, you know. And so you kind of sit with the general consensus that a lot of people who haven’t experienced this lifestyle, some of the basic ideas of—you know, keep them from it. And then, you know, she had gone plant based. I think it was in kind of early 2013. She was vegetarian for almost 10 years prior to that, so she was very familiar with that. She went plant-based.

And then I kind of got to the point where I was like, you know, I’m actively choosing to live differently to her and to, you know, some other people that I know and I don’t—I didn’t really feel like I knew why. Honestly, I just kind of, that’s just how I lived. And so I took a real deep dive into researching the industry, watching as many videos as I could, reading a lot about it, and I wanted to, in essence, you know, structure my own thoughts on it, and be confident and be able to say with conviction that I choose not to follow that diet for XYZ reasons. And you know, very quickly it became apparent that there weren’t any good reasons to stick to eating meat and dairy and, and so forth. And I literally went vegan the next day and never, never ate anything again, basically, you know. So it hit me. It was a very profound kind of change. It was very much like an immediate pivot in terms of how I think about the way that I eat. And then, as I’m sure you know, you all know, that grew into the way I see the world. And it was a complete paradigm shift eventually. But it was just looking at it.

And for me, it wasn’t an emotional decision at first. It was almost purely, I suppose, based on reason. When I was like, I cannot see this equation making sense. Like when you take environmental health, animal welfare, all of those kinds of things, once you put it together, when there is a much better way to live that may be challenging. In South Africa at the time, it was really challenging. We didn’t have the kind of a copious amount of options that you have right now, especially for comfort foods. But even with that, it just didn’t make sense to me. And so yeah, I made the change and never looked back.

And then the longer I’ve been informed, the more immersed myself from the life, you know, obviously now it’s, it’s basically all encompassing, and work is all around and, like our social network is all around it. You know, you start getting a very, very deep level of compassion. And now for me, one of the biggest drivers is definitely on the welfare.

JM: Yeah. I mean, two things come up there is, you know, when you mention a paradigm shift, it’s so fascinating how a paradigm shift can be so massive, but it’s the slightest little tweak to something. And so I can appreciate where you’re coming from with that.

And then the next thing that I’ll say, you know, as a married man myself, behind every great man is a better woman. So I guess thanks to Antoinette for catalyzing this, In terms of origin story. Now, based on why we’re all here every week at VEG, is surrounding business and entrepreneurship. So the next question would be:

What is your entrepreneurial origin story?

JM: And you mentioned South Africa, I know that we’re probably going to hear a little bit more about the plant based confectionary that you had down there, maybe some of your partnerships with, maybe the sister company we mentioned earlier. But yeah, what is your entrepreneurial origin story?

DB: Yeah, so we, so Antoinette had lived in New Zealand for three years, and—this is for some context—we’ve known each other for a very long time. And you know, I was always, you know, very much more into her than she was into me. And she had moved to New Zealand at one point, and she came back and…for a visit. And you know, we got together, and you know, I kind of, at that time, I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna make this happen.” And I did. But she went back to New Zealand like, within three months, because it was there for a short while. And so I sold everything I owned, and was just, basically, “I’m getting on a plane. I’m gonna go live with her.” And so I did that. And when I got to New Zealand, I started working as Operations Manager for a large art supply company. They had thousands of SKUs and a massive 55,000 square foot warehouse. And, you know, I’ve been in operations management for a while up to that point, and, but mostly in logistics. And it was just very intense and not very fulfilling.

And we did that for a while, you know. We decided we wanted to go back to South Africa, and when we got back, we figured, well, you know, we’re still young, we’d saved some money. I’ve learned a lot in my career up to that point already, and felt pretty confident in my ability to structure and hopefully build a good company. And so we decided to, you know, create a really, really simple and small and manageable company in the plant-based space.

And once again, you know, at that time in South Africa, plant-based was very much an issue. Like, plant-based is still a niche, but it was like, you know, unheard of then. So we started with a range of macaroons, but they weren’t completely vegan at the time. We actually used to source local honey. And the company was called Moonbeam Vegan Bakery. We had these macaroons. We also had granola. And the premise of our company was that we would have dairy-free, gluten-free, raw, plant-based confectionery items. And so all our products were dehydrated below 65 degrees. And the range was, in essence, we had four or five different flavors of the macaroons, and we had two or three flavors of the granola.

And then eventually we added a superfood coffee blend and a few different kinds of products that grew as the company grew. We started super, super small, like literally done in our apartment. We had to cordon off an area from the cats and from everything to have, like a food safe region. But basically, our house became a factory. We had packaging all over, and we had all these different pieces of equipment and whatever else and it was just the two of us doing everything from bookkeeping to deliveries to doing sales to making the products. And basically it just became like a 24 hour kind of commitment.

And we—fortunately, people really liked the product, and it started taking off. And so, you know, we hired people, and then we moved into a location, and then we moved into a slightly bigger location, and then eventually we just had a really awesome team, like really, really awesome team. I struggle to believe that we could have been as fortunate as we were in terms of the people that we had working with us, and how much they cared about what we did and how committed they were. And just, you know, how hard they worked. There was really—it was really fantastic. And so we had the small team, and we were distributing all over South Africa, and we had a great lifestyle.

You know, we kept it really well managed, in a sense that once we broke through those first two years, we kept it at a level that meant that we could have a really good work life balance, because the first years were very intense. And then, yeah, and then eventually, we just kind of decided to move on, honestly. Like, you know, Antoinette had always wanted to live outside of South Africa, and we had decided to spend some time in Lake Tahoe, and from there, she wanted to study nutrition.

So we came to Vancouver to study nutrition, and we thought it would be temporary at first, and then as soon as we got here, we both kind of fell in love with it, which was strange, because we’d lived in other places before, and we traveled enough to have it not be so romantic that we immediately besotted with a place. And there was something special about Vancouver. And she was really happy. And of course, I’m really happy with the city, and this is where Virtuous Pie came in, because whilst we were here, I applied for a job with Virtuous Pie and got the role, started working there.

And then the group with the—you know, the [More] family and their family office, they were and are involved in quite a few different companies, and the company invests and owns lots of different businesses. And so I, very quickly, from Virtuous Pie, started getting involved with the executive team at Virtuous Pie, and then a few of the other companies that they work with. And, you know, just sort of, I suppose, building on that, and building on what they were doing.

Because, you know, obviously they share a lot of the same values, and they’re passionate about some of the things, and they really invest in and apply resources quite heavily into companies that are quite impactful. And that will hopefully end up making a real difference. And you know, I was very much captivated by that. And you know, Virtuous Pie kept growing, and I was still involved with Virtuous Pie.

But then in 2018 we decided to start positioning a company in the meat alternative space. Obviously, everyone could see that there was a trend towards that, and that there was a lot of market share that was becoming available. And that—it was just the right time to start, I suppose, building foundations for it. So we started, like, really simply in the office, with like, a [?] competition, and kind of…the first competition, the marketing director at the time for Virtuous Pie won, and the second competition, one of the chefs from Virtuous Pie won.

And then I created the first prototype in my kitchen at home. And from that point on, we started incorporating different kinds of chefs, different consultants. And we tried to find a good balance between chefs and then kind of food science experience to have a product that would kind of meet all the requirements that we have without leaning too much in either direction, like, you know, being I suppose, too homemade, but also not too, I suppose, technically refined.

And so, you know, the goal at that point was obviously to create something that would be analogous to the experience that you would have, you know, with conventional animal protein. And would have that familiar kind of usability in terms of the way that it looks cooked, from raw to finished. The way that it sizzles, the way that it smells, the way that the texture, all those kinds of things.

But what we wanted to do differently was we wanted to try and incorporate more whole foods ingredients into it, right? And that was a very important aspect of it, because we wanted to make sure that we could provide something we feel confident about the ingredient deck, but we also wanted to make sure that we had something that was obviously very different in terms of what was available on the market. So, you know that process was long, and we did, you know, you mentioned some of the collaborations and so forth. And we did a ton of testing and a ton of collaborations and a ton of verifying, and, you know, numerous iterations of the product to be sure that we had something that people would buy, and then, you know, would enjoy and hopefully buy again.

So we had a really patient entry into the market in that sense. But I suppose to answer your question, because I realized I just kind of started shifting into TMRW, my entrepreneurship, or I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always felt like I had that kind of drive, but it really became something that was prominent in my life with Moonbeam. When we started Moonbeam.

And then I was very fortunate, you know, to immigrate to a country and to be able to find myself amongst people that can help keep that going, basically. You know, we’ve only been in Canada for just over three years, and we’ve been really, really fortunate in that sense.

JM: Yeah, no, that was great. You talk about entrepreneurial origin stories of turning a part of your house into a factory, you know, on your own, and then taking another. There was already leaps of faith to get to there, and then more leaps of faith to come to here. And then you connect with, you know, Rob, Ben, and Alex and I’m sure their whole network that could take your entrepreneurial spirit to a whole another level. So amazing.

And then it’s funny in your response, you mentioned something that leads right into our next question. You said, you know, back in 2018 or thereabouts, everyone could see that there was a trend starting to develop. So the next question here, the fourth question is:

When it comes to your industry, what trends have you noticed and what have you spotted, if any at all?

DB: Yeah, so there certainly are. It’s really hard to determine you know, I suppose when certain products or certain kind of product lines are trends, and when they’re not anymore, you know? Because, for example, you know, if you look at what we’re primarily in right now with‌ burgers and grounds, you know, you could argue that it really hit the peak of a little while ago, and now you—the train now is that you’re seeing a wave of competitors coming into the space, trying to, you know, very clearly eating into Beyond Meat’s share. And there’s still, that’s still going.

But in terms of kind of, I suppose, new trends that I see, I think there’s probably a big trend towards the responsibility of doing food better than before. So there was, I think there’s two kind of key trajectories that I see with companies. If you look at companies like Beyond and Impossible and so forth, you know, what they’re doing, they’re doing really well. They put a lot of resources to put towards it is trying to create an experience that is almost a replication of what animal protein offers. Or as close to it as possible. But at the same time, to get that experience, it may forego, I suppose, some concern or some impetus in terms of improving the types of ingredients that we use in products.

Then you have brands on the other side that are pushing the envelope in terms of creating experiences that are ancillary, or in addition to what a conventional diet is, and then trying to push a little bit more in terms of, how do we, how do we kind of create food that is really enjoyable and amazing, but also, you know, stay on top of using better materials to make those foods?

And I think that I’m seeing a lot of that at the moment where you where you’re seeing people go, okay, cool. We’re making a dairy alternative, or we’re making a meal alternative, but, we’re using this to make it. And, you know, I think that both, both of those kinds of parts are important, and they have their pace, and different people believe in different attributes in terms of level of importance, but I do believe that the biggest trend I’m probably seeing is that more thoughtful approach to composition of products versus replication of all costs, if that makes sense.

JM: Absolutely makes sense, I’m sure to everybody here that totally, totally. Yeah, no, great. So our next question here, we’d like to start by congratulating you and your team for opening your new production facility in April this year, because that goes without saying, what this year has been like. So just to kind of lead in with that part of the question, and the question is:

Where is your brand TMRW Foods going in the future?

JM: Maybe you mentioned, you used to do some ops management for a company with thousands of SKUs. You guys have two right now. With the new production facility and everything going on, where is TMRW Foods going?

DB: Yeah, so to kind of to lead into that, you know, I think that for us and for other plant-based brands in the space now, we’ve got a really important responsibility that we carry in terms of what we put out there. And you’ve got a lot of people are very interested and very curious about plant-based products at the moment, but the risk is always, if you offer a mediocre experience, you run the risk of actually putting somebody who could potentially be a big supporter of plant-based for years to come off of it by providing them with an average experience. And then they go, “Oh, it’s kind of average. I thought it’d be average. I’m gonna stick to what I know.”

And so I say that because, without, with our burgers and our grounds, you know, we took quite a long time to create it, because we wanted to be sure that we had something that would do the industry justice.

With products that we create next, we’ll follow the same path. So we’ll always plan to grow and we’ll plan to release more products, but we’ll also always bear in mind that we have to do it only when we believe that we’ll be doing the industry justice and it’ll be providing or meeting and exceeding the expectations of our customers.

So in saying that, it’s a long way of saying this is what we plan, but it really very much depends on what kind of results we see in our testing. But you know, our end goal is to build a brand where you find one of our products in every household. So it’s pretty grand.

We’ve got a very long way to go from where we are now to getting there, but we plan to grow into multiple categories. We want to be a food company. We are not a burger company or a grounds company. We want to make sure that we create great products that are always plant-based in various different categories. In the near term future, we’ve got breakfast patties launching next month, so they’ve been finished, and they’ve been picked up by our distributor. And we’ll probably start seeing those in stores in November. And then just after that, we’ve got a range of three to four different coarse ground sausages that we are working on that will come out beyond, I suppose, towards the end of the year as well.

And then we’ve got quite a few other interesting things that we’re dabbling in, and I’ll probably share more on that once we have a better idea of what’s going to happen when. But you know, we do plan to grow our range of SKUs and fairly rapidly, as long as we can ensure that we keep exceeding expectations of our customers. And we do plan to grow into multiple categories.

JM: Yeah, I guess some anticipation is always good. So I’m sure there’s some [?] leave and in your back pockets that we’ll really be looking forward to. I mean, to be honest, if we open up my freezer, I’m at my home office, of course, if we open up my freezer here, we’re gonna find some burgers, some TMRW burgers in the freezer. I’m one of those people that you know, I’m a breakfast for dinner. Breakfast is the best meal of the day, every day, all day. So I can’t look forward to the patty, sausage patties, breakfast patties.

And I can appreciate your sentiment about, like, where is your brand going? And it’s like moving the needle and moving it effectively. Like, doing right by the whole movement as a whole. And because of that, I can imagine, since 2018, fast forward all the way up until now, there was probably so much heavy lifting.

And you’ve said it a couple times now, and it rings true in the way that I’ve seen you guys build, I guess, is, you’re testing a model and you’re testing levels to see what the appetite is like. And because of your ability to do that so much early on, I can imagine when you do hit that stride of being able to stack on further more SKUs, that they will come rapidly because you’ve dialed in what people really expect of that high caliber quality. So that’s outstanding.

We’ve mentioned a few of them, and this is always an interesting question we find when we ask our special guests, because sometimes it’s brands we’ve heard of before, sometimes it’s brands we have no idea existed. And this question is, what are some—we’ll get back into TMRW a little bit. But:

What are some other brands that you love and your team loves?

DB: Yeah, that is a good question. I tend to be quite biased in terms of, I have‌ a love for most plant-based brands. By default, if I had to think about any specifically…

JM: And this is what I said earlier, too. We can gloss over it. No need to put you on the spot and single out anyone. So what I’m hearing from you is any companies that are plant-based and for the right cause and for the movement is, I’m sure, just like all of us, those are our favorite companies.

DB: Yeah, you know, I definitely, I’ve got, a list. And I think this is one of those things where sometimes it’s like, when something’s also very obvious, you just can’t collect it’s just won’t come up. Maybe let me have a process in the background for a few minutes, and then I’ll maybe come to a conclusion as to which ones that really stand out to me.

JM: Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of this, we’ll give you the floor to kind of close it down, too. So that sounds good to us. This one we’re also very interested in, and what trend I’ve been picking up on this is a lot to deal with mental health, so maybe some of your answers are going to surround yourself with this. But whether it’s you, Antoinette, or your team, or your advisors or whatnot:

Are there any podcasts, books or apps that you guys find yourself really gravitating towards?

DB: Yeah, that’s a good question. I find that for me personally, what I’ve been trying to use effectively at times is Blinkist, you know, because I find that I want to develop myself in various different ways. But, you know, I personally found that a lot of the books tend to have, like, a few core messages. But then to be able to create a book that you can sell, there’s a lot of in between. And the time it takes to kind of get through to the gems is sometimes challenging if you’ve got the kind of schedules that we have.

So I found that Blinkist is actually really useful. They’ve got a range of books, and they just fill it into like, 15 minutes. And, you know, I listen to it in the car, because even podcasts, I love listening to podcasts. And there are a few that we’ve been listening to lately. Impact Theory is one with a guy called Tom Bilyeu who’s got some interesting ideas. I used to listen to Tim Ferriss a little bit as well, but I find that Blinkist, to me, is the most effective way of spending the time and absorbing really great messages, but only spending 15 minutes getting to that.

I also I try to, personally, not absorb an excess amount of information, because, you know, bandwidth starts running quite low, and you’ve got so many different things going on at all times, and you know, you reach a point of mental fatigue where that information comes burdensome more than something that you would effectively apply, or that would actually enhance your ability to work or process information or think. So I try and take it in like really short bursts. And then in terms of just consuming information, I rather read at night, like read fiction, and just trying to move myself a little bit from some of the more intense pieces of life, basically.

JM: Amazing, absolutely. You know, without giving away the farm here and maybe not talking to other brands, maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’re going to be answering this question by kind of rallying your team and speaking to them or whatnot. But this last question here, the eighth question is:

What is your advice for your team or other brands as we plug away and through this challenging time?

DB: Yeah, so I think personally, I would probably say that it also ranges a little bit for industry. You know, like we’re fortunate that we’re in retail and grocery, you know. So what I would suggest for any company, I suppose, who are going through this right now is to really hone in on understanding how to build a very lean business, how to be resourceful, how to ensure that you’re prioritizing things in such a way that you doing, you’re spending most of your time and your resources on your team’s time and resources on things that are truly impactful and not necessarily trying to do everything at once, because you know, business is going to be tight for quite a while.

People are going to…the economy is, I mean, it’s difficult to say where it’s going to head, but one way or another, it can only be good for you to really focus on simplifying, being resourceful, being super lean, building a really good culture around that. And then when things move beyond this point, and you can have that culture perpetuate, you will see a lot of gain from that regardless.

But in the short term, it also probably help you just to get through this time without unnecessary burden or unnecessary stress, or without that kind of pressure of trying to figure everything out at once. And we’ve been needing to do a lot of that. We can’t, we’re in a really critical time of our lifespan for this company, and there’s so much that we want to do, and there’s so many exciting things, and we’re fortunate to have a team that is incredibly committed and really great at growing, really great at evolving and improving and all of that.

But the most important thing for us right now has just been that focus. Like knowing how to pinpoint what is the most important for us over the next 12 months, basically. We’re not trying to think three years from now, five years from now. We know we want to end up, but we’re not trying to plan for all that. We literally just trying to plan for like, six. to 12 months, keep the team as small as possible, keep our focus on the most important aspects of what our business needs. And then put the rest aside for the time being.

I think also just in terms of, you know, the plant-based space, something that I would advise people on this is to also understand that it’s gonna be really hard. There’s a lot of excitement around the space, and there’s a lot of people getting involved in it, and there’s, you know, a lot of talk of the market share that will become available, but it’s still a fairly small industry, and there’s still a fairly small amount of market share compared to conventional industry, and you’re gonna have to work really hard.

You have to be really creative and really innovative and do business really well to be one of the brands that makes it through this.

There’s a lot of brands that are getting into—and it’s really exciting and very cool to see. But I think that people underestimate, regardless of Covid, regardless of anything, that these are still businesses that have to operate like normal businesses. The trend will not carry you. You will need to be able to create a business that can go head on with, you know, conventional industry, and to do those things right as well.

And when I speak to a lot of people in the space, you know, some people in space, and especially people outside the space, there’s a little bit of an aura of plant-based is just huge. It’s gonna blow up. Everybody on plant-based is gonna kill it. And I think that that’s not really the case just yet. I think there’s still a lot of hard work ahead for companies to make it through and to really be legacy brands in 15, 20, years from now. Other companies that drive industry.

And that’s what we hope to do. We hope to build a really solid foundation, get through Covid, grow, build a fantastic foundation so that we’re the type of company that can actually make a change. You know, can actually drive decisions on much larger levels than what we currently are capable of. And I think that, yeah, that’s the advice that I give…I’m kind of rattling off quite a few now. But is to also not discount the importance of making small improvements regularly and celebrating our small wins, especially during covid. Like, you know, we find sometimes, being a startup, you’re constantly going, like, “Okay, well, until we get here, like, what is it to celebrate?” And kind of pushing that, but that, you know, that kind of mindset can really filter through to the team, and people don’t know how to celebrate small wins. So people, you know, don’t feel like they’re making that much progress. But you also stop, kind of continuously, making little adjustments that make your company better, but also make people feel good. And I think in times like this, that’s really important.

So something that we do at the office is, every week, every person has to list three wins or three small improvements that they made for the week, and then we all get to kind of celebrate those things. And it helps take away a little bit from the grand ambitions and the giant challenge that is ahead of us for the next 12 months or whatever. So yeah.

JM: Pardon me, outstanding. So in terms of advice picking out the top three there, is, which, yeah, like, it sounds like it’s a no brainer, but it’s hard to do. That’s what moves the needle forward, and that’s focus hard work. And a lot of people talk about celebrating the small wins to keep the momentum going. So that great answer. So Dean, we’re very grateful to have you here today. We’d like to give you the floor to wrap up this conversation with. You know…

If there’s any way we can help you, if you’re hiring, anything at all, if there’s anything that you want to kind of wrap up with, the floor is yours.

DB: Cool. Well, firstly, thank you very much for the time. It’s really wonderful to be able to have this conversation. And for everyone who spent the last 35 minutes listening to me, thank you.

In terms of, you know, anywhere where I could see, you know, potential symbiosis, or so forth, one thing that we’re really focusing on at the moment is how to improve our packaging.

And so, you know, I think that our business is, is there to make food products, but, you know, we want to do business as well as we can in every aspect of that. And so packaging is a big deal if you want to build a company that is truly kind of striving for sustainability. And we know that we can’t do everything perfectly immediately. However, you know, at this point in time, we do use a PET tray, and we want to be able to move away from that. But what we don’t want to do is do something critical for the sake of, I suppose, customer perspective on our product or on the packaging.

So we want to make sure that we’re doing things that are actually better, if I can kind of distill it into something so simple. So we’re looking at switching out our trays at the moment for sugarcane fiber, which is a byproduct of the sugar industry, but it also is something that can be recycled. You know, we’ve looked at composting, and there’s a few different things we’ve looked at.

But long story short, if anybody’s got any kind of really good info, really good contacts, just in terms of understanding what is really going to be better, not just what seems better, that’s something that would be really helpful for us at this point in time. And I have good feelers out there, and I’ve spoken to some people, but you know, this is really a priority for us at the moment. We’re looking at a few options. I just want to make sure that we’re making changes that are truly going to have an impact.

In terms of hiring, we have one or two positions out at the moment. We had a position for product development chef, and we had a position for marketing coordinator, which has been filled. But if you know of anybody that’s super passionate about this industry and is bright, got some great ideas, we would always love to be able to connect with those kinds of people.

We understand that, you know, one of the most important things for us to build a company that will really set itself apart will be having a superstar team. And you know, if you know anybody, and maybe a superstar, please send them our way so we can connect with them. And it may not be immediately, but at least we know, okay, you will have these people that align with what we do, and may want to join the team once that position becomes available.

Like obviously, we anticipate a lot of growth over the next six to 12 months, and so I’m sure there will be more positions that come up. But besides that, I don’t really have anything else.

JM: Yeah, and that’s the impetus for this Vegan Entrepreneurs Group in VEG, is having an opportunity to have these conversations and connect with people who share the care for the environment, animal welfare and human health, because then it’s a no brainer for us to have these people who we like, know and care about as friends and entrepreneurs, keeping them top of mind for anything that we can hear about, and just passing the—passing it all around.

So you heard it: packaging, and you know somebody who might be wanting to join an all-star team, well listen. Thank you for sharing your time with us today, Dean, and all the best to you and Antoinette and the whole TMRW Foods team. Thank you for all that you do and for everybody listening, of course, you can find TMRW Foods on the web at TMRWFoods.com and on Instagram @TMRWFoods.

Dean, thank you so much. Take care.

DB: Well, thank you. Cheers.

 

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