Episode 118: Getting protein from the source, with Leaft Foods

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody In The Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, absolutely no one is tired of talking about protein, right? We are in the midst of a global obsession with protein, including in the United States, where the USDA recently released a new food pyramid that puts meat, specifically red meat, and dairy at the absolute top of the heap.

Now, there are a lot of things to take aim at here, including the actual impact of red meat on your health… and the fact that most Americans are getting far more protein than they actually need. I am going to focus on the fact that animal agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and cows specifically are far and away the largest contributor in that bunch.

In terms of personal climate impact, cutting out red meat is one of the most significant actions you can take. And then, of course, the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association are both quite clear that red meat is very not good for you. So there's that, too.

All right, so today let's talk about a different way to get protein with a company that's making food products straight from the source, the green leaves, where all the protein actually starts. As a byproduct, they might be able to help with some of the cow problem, too.

Ross Milne: So I'm Ross Milne, CEO of, uh, Leaft Foods. And we're a company that are trying to change the food production system.

Molly Wood: Perfect. Great one-liner. Now let's get into the details. There are many.

Let's, in this case, I think let's start at, it's always like the quest- the question of the day is always do we go origin story first or company first? But changing the global food production system is, I think, a good place to start here. What is the method by which you're trying to approach this pretty large problem?

Ross Milne: That's a good point. It's, it's an incredibly large problem. Uh, and in these things it's actually pretty easy to describe the challen- uh, the, the, the challenges that our existing system has. Um, it's pretty hard to find the solutions.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: And so when we think about that, we start with the raw material. Uh, so first and foremost, we're changing the raw material that is being used. Uh, so we work with green leaves. Uh, those leaves are alfalfa leaves. You might be familiar as a consumer, alfalfa sprouts, you, you, you know, see them in the supermarket, you buy them. We work with a version of that which is slightly larger, so it's about 20 centimeters tall.

Uh, and when we work directly with green leaves, the first thing that happens is we get a really large step change in efficiency. So we can grow a lot more food per hectare of land. Uh, we can grow a lot more protein per hectare of land.

Uh, and the protein that we're gonna sort of explore and talk a little bit more about today probably is one called Rubisco. It's the most abundant protein on the planet, and it's present in every green leaf. Uh, and what we have developed is some technology to, to isolate that protein and put it into a format that can be used throughout the food industry, both directly to consumer and consumer formats, but also as an ingredient into a wide range of applications like your favorite yogurt, your favorite milk, your favorite bakery-type products.

Molly Wood: We are definitely gonna talk a lot about protein in this conversation, because all we ever do, uh, is talk about protein, it turns out, we, writ large. Um, so this is exciting from that perspective, but I wanna, I wanna go back to the why. What is it that you are trying to solve for with this solution?

Ross Milne: Well, there's, there's two things, really. Um, for us as a, as a company, as a group of people, uh, we're trying to find a more sustainable, uh, way to produce food.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: And so, and that's actually what goes back to, to changing the raw material that we work with. Like, if, if we think about the food production system today, on one hand it's really, really complex, but on another hand it's really simple.

So today, like 65% of our global calories is essentially you grow green leafy crop, you feed that green leafy crop to an animal, to a cow. That cow produces either meat or dairy.

The other option is that you let that green leafy crop go out to seed. So you think about your pea, your soy, your rice, your hemp. You harvest those seeds, you mill those seeds, and you turn them into protein, uh, uh, oils, carbohydrates. Like, that's, that's the vast majority of the food production system.

So by skipping out the middleman, if you like, and going directly to, to green leaves, like I said, we can grow a lot more per hectare of land. And, and what does that mean? It means that the emissions profile comes right down. Uh, we got a 97% reduction in emissions, which actually intuitively is really easy to understand.

You, you, you know, if you skip over the cow and you go directly to the source, um, of course there is a large efficiency gain that is associated with that. So we sort of, our vision and our mission is, well, for me personally, I'm, I'm based here on the Canterbury Plains. This is sort of like the breadbasket of, of, of the country. Um…

Molly Wood: In New Zealand, we should specify for people who don't know.

Ross Milne: Yeah, yeah, New Zealand. Um, and, uh, so this is an area that, uh, today is an incredibly pro- from a food point of view, it's incredibly productive. It's predominantly dairy, though. Um, and I imagine a future where we see alfalfa crops spread across that, and we're using those, those alfalfa crops to produce food for people.

And, like, that would be an incredibly cool outcome, um, of this technology.

Molly Wood: Is the, was the driving factor for you climate on some level? Was there, or I mean, there are so many, like you said, there are so many issues with food, right? The food that we consume, how we produce food, all the places that we ship it to, you know. Like, it, there's, there's a lot of ways to tackle this, and I wonder what, what were the driving factors for you.

Ross Milne: The, the driving factors at the end of the day are definitely climate. Um, I'm an engineer, so I, so it's, it's, it's also on some personal level it's, uh- It's problem-solving. It's finding solution.

Like, we, um, we all see the challenges. I was actually bi- I was actually in the food production system for the vast, you know, for, for my whole career. Um, I've been building really large food manufacturing s- facilities for, for clients all over the world. Um, so I've seen that. I've lived that. I've seen the complexity of it. I've seen the consequences of it.

Um, and really, Leaft begins with how would we create a more efficient system? The benefit of a more efficient system is that you get that climate advantage, right? We reduce the amount of carbon emissions associated with it.

Um, but you have to stitch all of these things together. For that to actually become a reality, we have to really focus on the consumer end of the journey as well, and what benefit are we gonna give to consumers in terms of products.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: 'Cause none of this ha- sort of happens without, uh, people loving our products and wanting to buy them.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: Uh, we also have to think about the complete value chain and everybody along that, along that supply chain, uh, to ensure that we have an economically viable system. 'Cause my belief is, is things only really change when they're economically sensible, uh, i.e., when everybody along that supply chain can make a, a dollar more than what m- they're making today, then change happens incredibly quickly.

So it's sort of stitching all of those different aspects together to create a truly viable solution that is actually scalable, that at the end of the day, we will actually see a benefit from a climate point of view. Like, that's what we're about.

Molly Wood: Right. I, I mean, I love an efficiency conversation, right? Because efficiency encompasses, in hope, all the things that you said. It makes things cheaper. It makes things easier. There's just less footprint as a sort of a natural outcome of a better way of doing things.

Ross Milne: Exactly. So we sort of have to lean into the complexity in order to get to a nice simple solution at the end of the day.

Molly Wood: Right. Um, okay. So then that, I think that does lead us to the product, because you can have a very good process that is in fact cheaper and easier and, you know, l- less emissions intensive, but if nobody buys it, maybe it doesn't matter? So-

Ross Milne: Yeah...

Molly Wood: So what is the, what is the, the product that we are g- all gonna wanna buy that comes out of this?

Ross Milne: So when we fractionate those green leaves, we actually produce a number of products. So, so we have, inside those green leaves, there are like 4,000 individual compounds. So there's every single building block of life hidden inside a green leaf.

You know, you think about growing up as a child, and your parents told you to eat your greens, there was a logical reason for that, right? Like, it had all of those, all of the tannins, all of the polyphenols, all of the minerals, vitamins, proteins, carbs. It has everything that we need. Um, and so that's, that's the first thing to understand, like this is a ridiculously amazing starting point in terms of a raw material.

That as a starting point makes it incredibly complex, because we have to separate all of those bits and pieces, and they don't always play nice together. So as soon as we open up that green leaf, like think about taking those green leaves, putting them into your NutriBullet, you blend them up, you get a juice. Uh, that's essentially our starting point, um, at the beginning of our process.

When you do that, there is actually a challenge, which is there's a lot of enzymatic reactions that start to happen really quickly. So this is quite hard to figure out how to isolate the things that we want to isolate. And the hero of the story, the first- the story's gonna have many heroes in it over coming years, but the first hero is a protein called Rubisco, and this is the predominant protein inside green leaves.

So every time you have a green leaf, uh, a spinach leaf or something like this, uh, uh, you know, in your, at your lunch, the predominant protein you're having is actually this protein called Rubisco. We have just concentrated that up into, uh, into a, a format that can be used in food products.

And maybe a few, a few things about that. Like, this is a really cool protein. I spent my whole career working with proteins. This one is pretty incredible. From a, a... You know, if we think about nutrition and we think about proteins, we always go to amino acid profile. That's the first thing of sort of how do we measure one protein versus another? Well, we look at the essential amino acid profile.

So we've got an essential amino acid profile that beats any other protein that's used in the food system today. So think about egg white, think about whey protein, uh, beef, chicken, you name it. We sit at the- Yeah ... very, very top from a nutrition point of view. So if you are…

Molly Wood: I feel like it's important to even stop and put a fine point on that, right? 'Cause I think people are probably hearing this and thinking protein powder, protein replacement, and you're saying, "No, no, no, we are better than beef."

Ross Milne: Exactly. From a protein point of view, from a nutrition point of view, we can line up all of those other proteins that you're typically consuming in your diet, and Rubisco is better than, better than that from a nutrition point of view. Um-

Molly Wood: And, um, audience, I'm gonna interrupt you one more time real quick. When you wanna look that up, just know that there are, like, a bunch of weirdly placed capital letters in that one. It must be short for something, right? It's like capital R-U, capital B-I-S-

Ross Milne: Yeah, there's a long version...

Molly Wood:  capital C-O. Yeah.

Ross Milne: Yeah. Rubisco is a little bit more easy, it's easier to say, so we sh-

Molly Wood: It's easier, yeah...

Ross Milne: We shortened all of those.

Molly Wood: It, but it's not a, but I guess I wanna say it's not a brand name. It’s like a science name.

Ross Milne: No, it's not a brand name. This is actually the name of the protein, right?

Molly Wood: Yes.

Ross Milne: Um, and, uh, and like I said, it's a protein that you've been consuming your whole life. It's maybe not surprising that it has this really strong nutritional profile, and you're probably thinking, "Yeah, but I can just eat green leaves and get it," and that is true.

Um, we- Our first product we developed is a consumer-facing drinkable pouch which is 100 mils. And in that 100 mils, we shoved, we squeezed, sorry, 18 grams of rubisco protein into one little pouch. Now, to give you an idea, if you wanted to just have green leaves for breakfast instead, uh, it would be 50,000 green leaves that you would need to consume to get those 18 grams. Um,

I mean, check out our Instagram. We actually piled up, uh, 50,000 leaves just to visualize it. Uh, and it makes a pile about a meter and a half... Oh, we're in America and so what's that? Like four foot wide.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: Um, you know, this is a, this is a large pile of green leaves. So, es ...

Molly Wood: Even if you cook those suckers down, you're still not gonna wanna eat that many.

Ross Milne: E- exactly.

Molly Wood: In one sitting.

Ross Milne: Yeah, so we make that job a little bit easier, right? We do, we break down all that cellulose material. We isolate out this rubisco protein. We concentrate that up, and first and foremost, we put it into this consumer format.

This is, this, this first format is called the Leaft Blade. It is really designed for nutrition. Like, we, being a technology business, being a technology platform, it was sort of only logical that we tried to break the barriers in terms of what po- what is possible from nutrition. So we thought about nutrition from a maximum point of view, like how much of this goodness that is inside green leaves could we squeeze into one pouch?

So we've got, in a New Zealand diet, we have 58% of your daily iron intake in that one pouch. We have B12, B2, B7. We have all of your vitamins, all of your minerals squeezed into one pouch, plus the best protein in the world. Um, and, like, that probably just speaks to us kind of nerding out on it from a nutrition point of view.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: This is the, this is the V1 product, so this is the kinda raw exemplification of what is technically possible. Um, and I guess probably solves a bit of a personal frustration in the food industry. We quite often see things included in our food products at a minimum level to make a claim on front of pack, and this product is sort of flipping that script completely on its head and thinking about things from a maximum point of view.

Molly Wood: Right. I don't entirely wanna name names, but there's, like, a really popular supplement like that that's, that's like, "Oh, we have 75 things in here," and nutritionists will tell you that, yes, it, there are trace amounts of 75 things in there.

Ross Milne: And we, we won't name name names, but, um…

Molly Wood: It’s Athletic Greens, by the way. That's what I'm talking about. [Laughs]

Ross Milne: I mean, this is all coming from one raw material, right? So we're just taking-

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: …this from alfalfa leaves. Yeah. Um, what we, what we remove is the fiber portions that we are not good as human beings at digesting. So we think about the, you know, you can't- Uh, achieve the same thing from just eat, directly eating those big, big pile of green leaves, 'cause we don't have four stomachs. We can't break down all that cellulose material.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: So in terms of the technology and what we do is we do that first piece to open up those plant cells to let all the soluble compounds come out, and then concentrate them up, and removing the things that are actually really well-suited to a ruminant, that are really well-suited to a cow with four stomachs, and not well-suited to a monogra- gastric like human beings.

Molly Wood: Right. Um, I'm glad you brought up cows because I do think that there is, you know, in the... Certainly in the US there is a national obsession with protein, and there is a sense that plant-bra- plant-based proteins cannot get you there. And, you know, what a lot of vegans will tell you is that the, the cow is actually just a middle-

Ross Milne: Mm-hmm

Molly Wood: ruminant. It's a middle ruminant for the pr- the actual protein.

Ross Milne: Yeah. Um, and this is, this is true, right? I mean, this is how we think about it. Um-

Molly Wood: So you're like cut out the, cut out the middle animal and the produ- you know, just to put a finer point on it, you're saying let's cut out the, all the animal production, get to the leaf in a digestible way for humans?

Ross Milne: We think about it slightly differently, right?

Molly Wood: Okay.

Ross Milne: Right. Um, it probably speaks to just my, my sort of natural engineering background and system efficiency. So what we say is th- partly what you just said, right? So we skip out the middleman, we go directly to the leaf, but actually what's the, what's the best starting point we could use?

A green leaf is an incr- you know, if we go one step up, it's- it's the sun, right? Sun provides energy to a plant, plant grows, um, green leaf is photosynthesizing. That's what enables it to grow. So like that's- that's the starting point for everything, and if we took that as the starting point in this conversation and then said, "Well, what is the best way to… the best use of that leaf?"

So in some cases the fiber is actually really well-suited to an animal. The, the, the parts that we were just talking about, they are well-suited to an, to a, to a cow with four stomachs. Like, there is also a lot of soluble, highly nutritional, uh, compounds sitting inside those plant cells which is really well-suited to a human.

And so if we start to map this out... So the beginning of the leaf journey is actually starting with that, mapping that out, figuring out what would be the, the best possible way or the best utilization of each part of a green leaf.

And today we produce some of our co-products which are going into animals. So that fiber stream I talked about goes into, goes into a dairy cow. Um, and the interesting thing there is actually when we feed that into a dairy cow, that dairy cow is more efficient. So there's a bit of a nuance here wi- but when we, when we remove all the soluble parts, and we feed the fiber back into a dairy cow, the amount of milk that that dairy cow produces increases, so we get an increase in productivity, and we get a decrease in emissions.

And the emissions I'm talking about are nitrogen emissions, so this is nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas or nitrates as a, a contaminant down into groundwater. And so, and, and that, that nitrogen that ends up at the back end of the animal, so this comes actually out in the urine stream and it goes in those two directions, um, that comes from the soluble protein.

So the solu- when you feed the soluble protein like Rubisco to a dairy cow, it actually doesn't utilize it very well. It actually takes a metabolic toll to process it through the rumen wall- Huh ... um, and into that urine stream. So we're solving a problem and making that animal system more efficient with a lower carbon footprint, but at the same time, we're taking everything that is really well-suited directly for human nutrition and providing it directly to humans.

And in the future, as these systems evolve and as our knowledge evolves, that balance will, will change. We could be feeding that fiber into fermentation systems, anaerobic digesters, and producing energy, for example, in the future. That technology isn't quite at scale yet, um, so as someone else develops that piece of technology, another company in the world, then we could, could see that coexist with our technology.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk a little more about how this super-efficient protein can be used and turned into a product, and how it can, like Ross said, help the entire global food system.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Ross Milne of Leaft Foods. When we left off, Ross was explaining how even the co-products of Leaft could improve animal agriculture.

Molly Wood: This explains, I think, why you talk about your technology as something that improves the food system. Like, 'cause you're…

Ross Milne: Yeah

Molly Wood: It's really a, you know, for i- in a sort of ironic way to put it, it's like a whole-beast approach. You have this green leaf. It can do a lot of incredible things, including improve the way that we do animal agriculture for as long as…

Ross Milne: Correct.

Molly Wood: that is necessary.

Ross Milne: Yeah. And this is what makes it an economically viable solution, right? And so it goes to some of your ear- your earlier questions in terms of, how do we think about the world? We really think about it from the systems-level point of view, and if we can create something that is more efficient and more economically viable, then it is adopted, and then we will see it scale, and then we will ultimately achieve the outcomes that the two of us want on this call, right?

Those carbon benefits, we will ultimately get there, but we'll only get there if we figure out smart systems that are adopted really easily.

Molly Wood: Right. Okay, well then, let's go back to products. So the, um-

Ross Milne: Yeah ...

Molly Wood: There is currently the Leaft Blade beverage, which I will be trying in an accompanying TikTok for sure…

Ross Milne: Perfect.

Molly Wood: for this interview, um, which I'm excited about. What else, what else are you producing in kind of that world of protein and nutrition?

Ross Milne: So, so that one there was our consumer product. Like I said, it included all of the, all of the goodies that are inside a green leaf, right? So it included all those minerals and all those vitamins, and so that is a green product, right? It, and it tastes like it's healthy for you. That's what it's supposed to do. It's really packed with nutrition.

The second product that we produce is more of an ingredient. So this is now a white, uh, high-purity protein ingredient, um, and this is, this is a really functional protein. When we say functional in this world, we're talking about food functionality, so we talk about functionality being the ability to gel. So once you heat it, it holds together.

Now, that's really important if you're trying to make, um, a sausage or something like that. You want it to bind and hold it together. That's kinda what animal proteins do when you cook them. They, they hold together. Um, you want it to emulsify, which is, means the ability to hold lots of fat and lots of water together.

So if you have a, a yogurt, one of the key things that the, that the casing proteins from dairy do is s- they're a strong emulsifier. They have the ability to hold that fat and water together, and it gives us that beautiful texture that we, that we love in yogurt so much, right?

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: Um, it's a foaming, uh, protein. So I mean, it's, it's... The foaming capability is crazy. I, I can make, like, a cold foam or a hot foam, uh, which is just beats anything else out there. We made a pavlova, I don't know, a meringue or a pavlova. You normally use egg white-

Molly Wood: Wow.

Ross Milne: And you beat the egg white and it foams up. Um, and we used Rabisco instead.

We sit around sometimes here and eat pavlovas, 'cause it's just why not?

Molly Wood: Dang. Some baker, baker minds are exploding right now.

Ross Milne: Exactly.

Molly Wood: Baker brains, just pew.

Ross Milne: And so this is one of the categories that we're operating in. We, we have this ingredient. Um, we, we won't operate in every food category ourselves. You know, like, we wouldn't enter into the bakery, uh, category. We're far better off to find the best bakers in the world, partner with them. They use our ingredient and, and that enables them to make the most, you know, the best products that they possibly can.

Um, it's kind of this utopia conversation. Like, is there a protein that can do what eggs do, does in, in bakery? Uh, and that has been, for a long time, a challenge, you know. Um, you know, I live a plant-based diet, um, and yeah, there's like chickpea brine and there's a few other things, but not really. Not really. Like, they're not that good.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: Or maybe I'm just not a very good cook at home. Um.

Molly Wood: No, I mean, we've all... This is a great struggle.

Ross Milne: Rabisco, Rabisco does this.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: Yeah, so Rabisco does this, so that's why, you know, you'll see us partnering and, you know, we've announced a few already, uh, with bakery companies, uh, around the world providing Rabisco.

And, uh, I mean, one of the most exciting things just recently is, uh, we took a banana cake in. The banana cake was made... We had two banana cakes, one which was the original baker's recipe, uh, from a particular bakery, uh, and one was replaced all of the egg with Rabisco, and we did a blind taste test with seven of their bakers, and seven out of seven preferred the one with Rabisco in in a blind taste test.

Molly Wood: What?

Ross Milne: And so for me personally, that is immensely cool. That is just, that just speaks to just how amazing this little, well, not so little, this big protein is. Um, so that's one of the applications we're working in.

We're obviously in the yogurt space, we're in the milk space, uh, because of that other functionality that I just mentioned, and this ingredient is really there to try to provide a functional benefit, to make it more enjoyable for the consumer, and at the same time we're adding a natural protein, so we're adding something that, um, is boosting that nutritional profile of those products.

Molly Wood: I feel like natural protein is, uh, an important part of this kind of marketing conversation because, you know, this leads us quite naturally into where the market for alternative proteins is. There is certainly a hu- an unstoppable market for protein. At least if you're in the United States, it is the only conversation that we're having about food right now, and I'm assuming that it's happening elsewhere too.

Ross Milne: Very much so.

Molly Wood: We describe it as a full-time job trying to get all the protein that is all of a sudden recommended. Um, and yet the market for alternative proteins has not necessarily panned out in the way that, that people hope. Like, certainly protein powders are still big. Um, but again, you know, there's like a l- still a lot of talk about collagen, and so I, I wonder what is the w- what is the sales conversation that you're having, and what does this market look like?

Ross Milne: Well, it's actually exactly what you said, right? The demand, um, is huge right now. Proteins are just on. Like, every customer company that we deal with, every food formula that we 

deal with is just looking for more protein. It's protein, protein, protein. Um, and you're right to describe the alt-protein scene the way that you did.

You know, we've seen… this demand for protein was there six, seven years ago. We all knew it. Um, there were many approaches to technology that were trying to solve it.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Ross Milne: Unfortunately, not all of those approaches have worked, and the price point, the technology didn't advance as quickly as people had hoped, um, or believed that it would, uh, and therefore the price points didn't come down or the scalability wasn't there.

Uh, and so that has meant that there's a, it's, it's, the language around that, the sort of whole alt-protein category has become a little bit negative, but it doesn't detract from the fact that the demand for protein was there beforehand. The demand for protein is, is still there, and in fact increased quite dramatically, probably due to the incr- uh, you know, the adoption so, or the fast adoption of GLP-1 drugs.

Molly Wood: Right

Ross Milne: That are really pushing that protein aspect of our diets, uh, further, uh, than people anticipated. Um, and so I think it's actually a really exciting time to be in the protein space because of these reasons.

Molly Wood; Yeah.

Ross Milne: Um, and it, I think it's a very good tailwind for what we're working on. Um, it does come back to leveraging a natural protein that is already the most abundant protein on the planet, and we are, we have developed technology, and that was quite a big challenge, a technical challenge for us to figure out sort of how to unlock that protein from those green leaves.

But now we start to see the benefits of all of that hard work over the last six years, which is, yeah, which is exciting for, for myself and for the team.

Molly Wood: Well, and again, there's that natural protein phrase, because I, I think one of the other concerns, you know, the... It feels like there were dual concerns in the alt protein space.

There's certainly price. Um, some people like me will pay a price premium because we're trying to help the cost curve or have a better product. Um, but the, the kind of concerns that came out were about, look, accurately or inaccurately, were about kind of chemicals. Like, is this artificial? And then, is it as good? Is it as effective of a protein?

Ross Milne: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: And so when I hear you say natural protein, what I hear you saying is, like, this is, again, there's nothing artificial about this, and…

Ross Milne: You have, you...

Molly Wood: it's as good or better.

Ross Milne: Yeah. Ever since we've been human beings, we've been picking up green leaves and eating green leaves, and this is the predominant protein that you've been consuming.

Um, the... One other interesting side point here is this protein seems to digest incredibly well, or, or let's, let's word that round the other way. As human beings, we seem to be able to digest this protein incredibly well. We were quite surprised just how easily, uh, our bodies can digest it. We ran…

Molly Wood: Huh.

Ross Milne: You know, we run various tests for this, uh, and we look inside the gastric phase and the intestinal phase, uh, and this protein breaks down predominantly in the gastric phase. So that means when it hits your stomach, the enzymes that we have in our stomach do a really amazing job of breaking down Rubisco.

And when we first saw that, it was this kinda like, oh wow, Rubisco's really amazing, but actually it's probably the other way around. It's our fa- the fact that our bodies have been used to consuming green leaves for so long, they have obviously adapted to be very good at breaking down the proteins, uh, that are in those green leaves.

And what we need is we, obviously, our bodies need to break those proteins down into little peptides or little amino acids, which then get absorbed into our body, and that's what we use to build all of the, the important critical things in our, in our body. You know, building muscle, building, et cetera.

Molly Wood: So when it comes to your business, is the primary business the process, or are you also an agriculture company? Like, how much alfalfa, how much green leaf are you planning to have to grow here?

Ross Milne: Uh, no. Uh, we, we work with growers, right? So there are amazing growers all around the world that are very familiar with growing alfalfa, and this is sort of what- there's a number of reasons why, why select alfalfa? Um, 'cause we could actually work with just about any green leaf. Um, but we work with growers that are familiar with this, that have learnt to, to grow it over, you know, over many years, understand those systems well. We partner with them. Uh, they grow the crop for us. We partner with rural contractors that come along and harvest it.

Um, our technology, uh, sits in that processing, uh, capability, uh, and then it sits in that, what we call NPD, new product development. It sits in understanding how do we make the best yogurt that we possibly can, or how do we make the, you know, the highest nutritional product that we possibly can. That's, that's where our expertise sits.

Molly Wood: Right. And then when it comes to future growth, alfalfa is a, a pretty global, relatively global crop, right?

Ross Milne: Yeah.

Molly Wood: Like, you could really be doing l- pretty local processing.

Ross Milne: Yeah, for sure. Um, alfalfa's an amazing crop. Um, it just is, like a little bit of a side note. It is, it's a perennial, so it stays in the ground for multiple years. So we're not cultivating every year. It's kinda like just watching your lawn, you know? So it just, it grows, we come along and we harvest the alfalfa, and it grows again, and that just continuously happens.

Um, it's a legume, uh, so that means it fixes its own nitrogen, uh, so its requirement for nitrogen fertilizer is really low. Uh, and it has a really deep taproot. So once you plant alfalfa, um, I mean, it has taproots that can go down to three or four meters.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Ross Milne: We have alfalfa that has been planted only 12 months ago, and we've dug a couple of the plants up, and they have taproots that are about one and a half meters long already.

And so that means that it has a really high water efficiency because it can have these big roots that go down and find water. So the requirement for irrigation is, is significantly reduced. And as you said, like, um, alfalfa's grown in, you know, across the USA, uh, and many geographical regions. It's, it's a crop today that has been grown to feed to livestock, and we're talking about growing it to, uh, for the protein to feed to humans. That's the difference.

Molly Wood: So what is next for you? What are the next, like, one to five years look like? Road to scale.

Ross Milne: The next part of the journey for us is, is, is scaling. I mean, that's, that's where we're at.

Uh, we have, you know, we're among the first companies in the world to figure out the technology. We're, we believe we're in front in that regard. Uh, and now we're just at those early stages of making really exciting food products, you know? We now get to, uh, sit down every day and, and taste the various food products that we produce, interact with, uh, other, uh, companies around the world, interact with bakery companies, interact with dairy companies, either plant-based or actual animal dairy. Um, and, show to them what Rubisco can do in their products.

So that's the point which we're at right now. Uh, and then it's just about scaling that. You'll see us starting to build out larger manufacturing foot- footprints to meet, uh, to, to meet demand. Um, and ultimately that's the exciting piece because by doing that, we start to get back to the beginning of the conversation, which is how we have an impact on, on land, um, which is the really cool piece.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Ross Milne: On land and then on climate.

Molly Wood: Love it. Do you have, like, a test kitchen? At what point did you go, at what point did you go from lab to test kitchen? Like, how early was test kitchen?

Ross Milne: Uh, it was actually really early.

Molly Wood: Yeah, I feel like it would have to be, right?

Ross Milne: Yeah, the first three hires in the business were actually, um, one person looking at what we're growing, how we're growing it, how we grow it in the right way to, to sort of get the outcomes that we want.

One person on process, like there's this big audacious challenge on can we be the first company in the world to figure out how to isolate Rubisco protein in a food scalable manner, in a food sense.

Uh, and the third person was a food technologist, so they were spending all of their time looking at the first, very first ingredients that we were producing, uh, and what could we make from them.

Um, actually a little funny story there. The first 26 grams of Rubisco protein, which at that point in time in the world was probably the largest amount of Rubisco protein isolated, uh, only six years ago.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Ross Milne: So 26 grams, which is, you know, um, half a cup or something. Uh, we had just hired Nicola, uh, who's our f- uh, who was our food technologist, and we gave her all of our product, so all of those 26 grams, and we said, "Do you think you could make a pavlova?" Uh, and so she went and used her grandmother's recipe and made a pavlova, which was a six-egg white pavlova, replaced all of the egg whites, uh, put Rubisco in instead at the same ratio, uh, and made a pavlova, and we sat around and ate that, uh, at the end of the year.

And that was kind of in hindsight, it was a little bit comical 'cause that was all of the protein we had made for, I mean, for one year. So that was like our whole warehouse.

Molly Wood: [Laughs] Take all the crown jewels and cook ‘em.

Ross Milne: All the crown jewels. Um, and so m- maybe in that regard it sounds a little, a little silly. There's probably lots of other, um, tests that we could've done.

But from a, from an exemplification point of view, it was really powerful. It was sitting around, I remember it very clearly, sitting around eating that pavlova was a, wow, look what we c- what, look what could be done. And if you can make a pavlova, there's a world of possibilities.

Molly Wood: Yeah. You really went straight to the mountaintop there.

Ross Milne: Yeah, we kind of did.

Molly Wood: [Laughs] I love it.

Ross Milne: Maybe that's a Kiwi approach.

Molly Wood: I like your style, Ross. Ross Milne is the CEO of Leaft Foods. That's, like, the perfect place to end it with the, the Kiwi approach. Ross, thanks so much for the time.

Ross Milne: Thank you very much for having me.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. If you're into this kind of thing, there's actually a little bonus content in the newsletter this week. I asked Ross why no one has brought a Rubisco product to market yet, and we had a really interesting chat about the science and the failures that got Leaft to where they are today. Plus, I got to try the Leaft Blade drink.

You can find the newsletter at everybodyinthepool.com or go straight to the source at mollywood.co.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the protein obsession, the new food chart, whatever you're interested in. That address is in@everybodyinthepool.com. Voice memos are very welcome.

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Together, we can get this done. See you next week.