Intro/Overview
In this episode, Suzanne Shelton of the Shelton Group interviews Wilson Lau on his thoughts about sustainability. In this episode, they discuss:
- 1:26: Finding the greatest impact: global change or local change
- 3:42: Shortening the food supply chain.
- 5:33: The impact of technology on pesticides.
- 7:57: Eliminating food waste - is it worth the cost?
- 14:51: Are Synthetic botanicals the future of our food?
- 16:38: Wildcrafting is becoming a thing of the past.
- 20:21: The need for a more equitable supply chain.
- 22:24: Technology can provide a measurable and positive outlook on sustainability.
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Wilson:
Welcome to season two of Herbal Explorations. Today, I have Suzanne Shelton with the Shelton Group. I will have the pleasure of having Suzanne interview me today to give my thoughts on sustainability.
Suzanne Shelton:
I think it's appropriate for us to be having this conversation because we do talk about this a lot, and we've worked together a lot on sharing your thoughts on the long-term thinking that you have in terms of sustainability needing to be an important component of all the decisions that companies make, particularly companies dealing with botanicals. So I'm thrilled to be able to have this conversation with you.
The governments have a lot of impact on businesses and people's lives; there's always the whole complaining about regulation. I prefer to call regulations consumer protections, personally. What kind of impact will intergovernmental activities have on a business in the context of all this other stuff we've been talking about?
Wilson:
The governmental impact will be huge in the future. There are three main themes. Over the past two or three years, we're seeing this movement away from globalization. We can't reverse things, but we'll become less globalized and more regionalized. You see this because we see more and more barriers to free trade, whether artificial, real, necessary, or unnecessary, but there's just less free trade going on, and we're talking more about how we get our supply chains closer to home.
COVID, environmental changes, and the other themes we talked about are impacting that. It's not just government actions, it's also the reality of what's going on in the world with weather and disease.
It's this movement from globalization to regionalization, and then there will be governments worldwide making decisions on climate change and how they will address it. Whether it's in a global manner like what happened with the UN and COP27 recently, or how do we get countries that may not be able to afford to do climate change things? How do we provide them with the funds and the means necessary to do so?
That was a great improvement, but just at a local level, whether it's our local government, our regional government, or our state government, how are the changes in regulations going to impact that? I'll give you a perfect example: California wants to move away from all gas cars by 2035 or 2030; it's soon, less than ten years.
Suzanne Shelton:
It's ambitious. It's an ambitious goal.
Wilson:
It's ambitious, but these decisions will impact how we do things within the food supply chain. Also, California's laws coming from the state impact people In Illinois. We have this proposition that passed that said pigs need to have "x" number of feet of room. The pigs live in the Midwest; most of the pork comes from the Midwest. But to sell in California, you need to meet those requirements. Many of these intergovernmental regulations will also impact what we do from a climate and sustainability standpoint and will also significantly impact the food supply chain.
That's going to be something; that will be very interesting to see what's going to happen. Whether it's at a global level like CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or something more local with California laws, it will impact that. That segues into technology and how these rules and regulations impact that technology which will then impact the food supply chain and the food technology portion.
Suzanne Shelton:
What do you mean by technology? There are so many things that fall under that umbrella. Science is important for a company that does the extensive testing you do on your product and that technology for doing the ultra-customized extracts that you do, but that issue is bigger than that. What do you see on the horizon for evolving and changing technology?
Wilson:
Technology is such a big thing, and it seems like all companies are becoming technology companies. We do different things with technology. Having said that, there's the technology test which we're getting to see lower and lower and lower and gain better fidelity over time. We are getting better and better fidelity.
We live in an inherently dirty world. There will be trace pesticides on everything, no matter where it's grown because the world is dirty. We're at parts per billion, but you move the decimal point to parts per trillion, and then, you move decimal points one over because the machinery can go there. But with our current regulations in the U.S. per pesticides, there's no tolerance or zero tolerance, except for the ones applied.
Suzanne Shelton:
On no detectable levels.
Wilson:
You just can't detect it. But as equipment gets better, the detectable level keeps going down. We move these decal points, we started at parts per thousand, parts per million, now we're parts per billion, then soon, parts per trillion. When are you going to draw the line?
So the rules and regulations will also have to match the technology coming out and whether it's blockchain, seeing how we get traceability in the system and how we use our tools like that. It could be things as easy as, do we need expiration dates in the future?
My friend that I went to college with launched a digital smell company. He uses sensors to understand what the smell is. It’s being used in food, a lot of food production avenues to make sure that the product is consistently smelling the way that is within its tight parameters. But another use for something like that could be, has something spoiled?
Suzanne Shelton:
That makes sense.
Wilson:
I just saw an article recently that said, "what is this expiration date with food"? Is the food dangerous to consume, or this no longer meets the quality attributes? We all have eaten food that has passed the expiration date and probably lived to tell about it and didn't get sick. If we have tools that can move us away from our senses to determine if something is spoiled or not, that may reduce the amount of food waste out there. What was the statistic about food waste? A lot of the food that we produce is wasted.
Suzanne Shelton:
Isn't it 40%? It's insanely high.
Wilson:
You're right about the number. 40% of the food is wasted. If we can produce the same amount of food but we can reduce that waste by one-half even, which would be 20% food waste, many more people will have calories and food security.
Suzanne Shelton:
I just saw a headline in Food Navigator, but it was talking about products tailored to reduce food waste. I have no idea how you'd do that, but companies are starting to design products with that in mind, which is fascinating.
Wilson:
There are many ways you can design products to minimize food waste. One is designing the right serving size.
Suzanne Shelton:
The portions. Oh God, yes.
Wilson:
If you give someone three portions in one serving, they're not going to be able to eat the whole thing, and some of it will go to waste, especially if it's in a grab-and-go format.
I'll give you an example of my fridge that recently died. She just went kerplunk. But the new fridge that I got has better humidity control. Under my old fridge, which had poor humidity control, a bag of carrots may have lasted four, five, or six days. In the new fridge, it may last two or three weeks.
Suzanne Shelton:
Interesting.
Wilson:
It's ways that refrigeration can help by changing its attributes of it: the serving size, how you sell it, and package it for the consumer. How easy do you make it to convert? These are all things that can minimize food waste.
In South Korea, they have almost eliminated food waste to a huge degree. Part of what happens is that they don't allow food into the garbage system, so they have to buy these cheap plastic bags.
Think about it like the aluminum can fee; it costs something, but not enough to make it so people won't comply. So they buy these bags, they have to put them out, and they come daily to collect what we would call compostable material.
Suzanne Shelton:
And is it then composted?
Wilson:
They have less waste that goes into it because there's a cost to using the system, and they'll try to figure out how to do it better. The green waste is converted to other energy sources and doesn't go into the garbage landfills because they have a shortage of landfills.
It's looking at the problem in a 360-degree way and whether we have to do things at an individual level, but the government also needs to create systems to allow us to do it in an easy manner.
When it comes to food waste and technology, if we have better tools, we can improve these things.
Companies need to do things so there's less in the bag or a better size. Resealable bags also reduce food waste because the chances of someone opening the bag and not closing it now become less. We can do many things personally, individually, at a company level, and at a governmental level to make an impact on the environmental and social piece of things.
Suzanne Shelton:
Much of what we've been talking about has to do with long-term thinking. Longer term in our energy usage in social policies. With technology, thinking longer term as to how products are designed and delivered. Is there anything else about technology that you want to touch on?
Wilson:
There are so many things with technology, but I think the question is becoming, "what is food?" Are we all going to be taking an artificially nutritionally dense green pill and get our calories in that way, like a multivitamin?
Suzanne Shelton:
Showed in all those old science fiction movies? I don't think people will be willing to give up a piece of garlic bread, steak, or whatever.
Wilson:
The question is, "what is food?" Even in our lives, there are a lot of protein alternatives and replacements, a lot of them are plant-based or fermentation-based, but there can be subcultures that grow meat.
Scary thought, but technology can let us do that in the future. With botanicals, can we create chemically identical synthesis through biosynthesis, happening in certain parts of our industry and the food industry? How do we synthesize these things?
Suzanne:
That's become controversial because there are synthetic botanicals; that some people think that it's bad to have synthetics as long as they're clearly labeled that they didn't come from the earth or that they came from a fermentation tank, etc. Where do you see that going?
We've seen climate change impact botanicals for years. We've seen the societal impact on botanicals for years in terms of fewer wildcrafters being able to make a living at that, losing some of the knowledge that has been passed down through generations. We're seeing fewer young people farming and cultivating a lot of botanicals. So, where do you see us going with that? We're not going to end up all using the synthetics, are we? Tell me we're not.
Wilson:
No. We will not all go to GMOs and biosynthesis. The key is that there's a demographic change where the population is versus where the herbs are. We're talking about the movement of people from rural areas to urban areas. The fewer people in rural areas where these botanicals are wildcrafted and farmed, the less production there will be.
We already see that trend; fewer people are working on farms. There's traditional loss. Wildcrafting was always a way to supplement income; there wasn't usually the sole source of income unless there were wildcrafting something extremely, extremely valuable that was available year-round, like wild American ginseng truffles, but even those aren't year-round.
Suzanne Shelton:
In the U.S., people would trap furs in the winter and wildcraft roots and herbs in the growing seasons.
Wilson:
A perfect example, right?
Suzanne Shelton:
In the old West, that's how they did it. It's how they wildcrafted.
Wilson:
As society changes and our actions change, we no longer trap furs. Even if we can do wildcrafting in the summer and spring, what will we do for our winter income?
Suzanne Shelton:
Ski Instructors.
Wilson:
The environmental change has become such that will we have these ski resorts that you and I may have been to when we were younger or even now? Reports already say there may not be snow in Lake Tahoe, enough to go skiing all the time in the future. We're talking about bad ski seasons where our skis and snowboards get these big gashes. What happens when this is not enough snow?
Suzanne Shelton:
All those jobs will be lost. That's their living, so that's another industry that's being impacted.
Wilson:
Places where we traditionally use botanicals, where many of them are still being wildcrafted, have an aging demographic problem. The average age is increasing in these societies. Where the population growth is happening in most of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and South America, we don't use live botanicals from their outside. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and some of these places.
On top of the weather, the social demographic change will also change the availability of a lot of these botanicals that we may get from North America, China, and Europe because the society's aging, and there's no one taking over that. One of the things we need when we talk about society is how to make the supply chain more equitable.
How do we not pay the person collecting or growing it 2% or 3% of the value of the finished good? The further up the food chain you are, the more value you capture. Why do I need to do all this stuff? Why don't I do something else and move to an urban area and find a different source of work or vocation? That's one of the real key questions, how do we make our supply chains more equitable, fair, and safe?
Suzanne Shelton:
The only definitive outcome of COP27 was the agreement that the developed nations would fund the underdeveloped nation's ability to withstand the impacts of climate change that the developed nations created. It's these undeveloped nations that are feeling the more extreme impact.
The government of the people who caused that, to be willing to help these people not get wiped out by the changes in climate, was the right thing to do; Ethical. It will save a lot of money having to rush in and rescue all the people at the last minute in the future if we don't take a longer-term view and plan ahead now.
Are there some positives, Wilson? Are there any final points you want people to take away from these themes we've discussed? Is there any way there can be something positive in there?
Wilson:
We don't need to go out and buy a fifth of gin or whatever your poison of choice is to drown our sorrows. I think the positive part of this is that there's a problem the world's recognizing there's a problem. Humans are very innovative and inventive creatures. Hopefully, if we apply our desire to the problem and creativity, the problem will be to have major impacts.
The exciting part is that if this is the rush to do the right thing and do things better, there's a lot of opportunity to impact change. It's an exciting time because maybe we'll see things we would never have thought of. There's hope out there because, as humans, if there's no hope, we're just destitute animals. We can do things that make a change and see the change.
Technology will give us better tools to measure the impact of what we're doing as individuals, companies, governments, and society to make a positive change and hopefully see things in a different manner that is more inclusive and equitable. I am hopeful about COP27 because as a developing country invests, it will have a greater impact than if we did it in a developed country.
Well, everyone has a landline or a landline in the U.S. It took forever to adapt to cell phones and the technology behind them. Many people in the US still don't have cell phone coverage or a cell phone. If you look at countries like China or Africa, which have very few landlines, their cell phone adaptation is high because they need that to communicate. After all, they don't have a landline.
They didn't go through computers, so now their phone is their computer. So they're using technology in different ways, and they're able to leapfrog some of that because we have the infrastructure in place that we may not be able to do as quickly, but they have a blue sky mentality to this adaptation and change.
Suzanne Shelton:
Oh, that's interesting. All right. So there is the opportunity to do things in a more advanced, smarter way that's better thought out rather than just trying to follow in the footsteps of what other countries have already done. That's encouraging.
Wilson:
It is very encouraging. I think it's one of those things: if there's hope, how do we make better improvements as we go through things?
Suzanne Shelton:
That's a great note to end this on. Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you today.
Wilson:
Thank you for joining me today and agreeing to do this. It was a pleasure.
Suzanne Shelton:
Thanks so much.