[Music] all right so welcome back of course to the baron report we are going to dive into something today i think that you guys are going to love and that is all about sustainable packaging and the technology that is driving some of the innovation in the space uh my name is paul barron and this is the baron report as you know we dive into these kind of things usually with ceos brand leaders insights uh and thought leaders around some of these topics and with me today i've got mark harrima who is with a company called new light but you've got a product that's very interesting in the idea of restore kind of as a food product that spun out of new light tell me a little about you and what you guys are doing uh there in terms of food packaging yeah so what we figured out how to do is make this material called air carbon and air carbon's a really special material it's it's actually produced um by microorganisms from the ocean and what they do is they consume uh in salt water air and greenhouse gas whether from carbon dioxide or methane and they build up this material inside their cells the technical name is php we call it air carbon and when you extract it it turns out that it's meltable and because it's meltable you can use it to replace plastic but the big difference is because it's made throughout nature it has a totally different end of life profile whereas synthetic plastics you know they the reason they never go away is because when they end up in nature nature doesn't know what to do with them the difference here is that because this material is produced throughout nature in fact it's made in the human body it's made in plants and animals nature consumes it like a leaf or a twig so it can it can be home compostable industrial compostable all these things that synthetic plastics can't do yeah for sure i well you know new light you guys have been around for a while uh you're going into a few different categories in terms of i saw some stuff around fashion uh also plastics replacement um where do you see kind of this whole approach going from new light as a company do you see other markets happening where what's kind of up for you guys in terms of the future well air carbon's a material that can just do so many things you know we kind of got lucky on this it turns out that that this material that is made in nature it just so happens to have a similar melting profile it's polypropylene polypropylene is one of the largest polymers in the world and so what that means is you can use air carbon for lots and lots of things whether that's injection molding a a chair you know in the furniture space or making parts for automotive so what we had to do is say okay right now you know it's going to take a while for us to keep building up our production capacity where can we have the most impact where can we bring the most value and the two features that kind of stand out the most with air carbon is that number one you have a a material that's been tested to be marine degradable and so that means we can make parts and pieces that help address end-of-life problems and so we said okay where can we leverage that if you look at what's happening in ocean plastics the pollution problem there the majority of product types that end up in the ocean are related to food or food wear and so we said we can we can use aerocarbon to help really address that problem and that's why we moved into the food ware space we developed a brand uh called restore which makes air carbon straws and air carbon uh cutlery and and we'll be rolling out a number of other products um but those we think can make a huge impact in helping address that problem the other really important feature of air carbon is that it's got a net carbon negative footprint so if you think about when this when this material is made in nature in the ocean uh they're using effectively you know the the renewable power and uh greenhouse gas that's around them so you have a net carbon sink we also use renewable power and sustainable greenhouse gas so we're also a net carbon negative process and so that's where fashion became really interesting to us because we said you know fashion is actually one of the the most the most impactful in terms of its environmental impact and we can use aerocarbon to help decarbonize that space what's been interesting to us is even in the food wear space whereas we thought the end of life features the degradability was going to be the most impactful for consumers we're actually finding that the carbon impact is almost equally impactful they want to not only reduce the amount of plastic that they use but also reduce their carbon footprint and air carbon allows them to do that so fashion and food wear are really are our first main focal points but you know obviously we have ambitions to get into a number of other spaces as well with this material kind of jumping away from the fashion food where you got me intrigued on the sense of being able to use this in other applications how strong is the material once it goes into a forming process can you control the tensile strength or any of the you know the composite ratios of of whether or not it's going to bend or break in other applications kind of curious how would that work yeah absolutely so you know first you know we look at the products we make we believe that in order to create uh in order to create the kind of impact that we want to we have to have scale and to have scale you have to have something that that performs just as well as the products that people are used to so if you think about why um paper straws are not you know why people aren't in love with paper straws because they don't work that well they work better for the environment but they get soggy and they're stick to your lips and all that stuff and that means if you're a hardcore environmentalist you shouldn't you shouldn't actually like paper straws because they they harm the effort they make people say ah do we really care about this so one of the great things about aerocarbon and again a lot of this was luck because this is just how nature made this stuff but if you look at this this fork here this is made from air carbon this is a really strong part if you if you you know try to put it into lettuce or or protein or whatever it is you're using it for it's not one of those things that's too flimsy or true too brittle it's just really tough strong stuff um and so that's super important you take our our straws and they're also you know they're great they're smooth they're they're ductile um they're it's it's everything that you liked and that was useful about plastics except they go away like like a cellulose or a leaf or twig in the environment so performance wise it's got this really good baseline characteristic but we also have the ability to mix it with other things and that can give it a range from you know super tough and almost rigid to something far more flexible this is uh my wallet made with air carbon leather and this you know we go from maybe 10 percent elongation to 400 elongation so um it's got a pretty wide range of properties and again that's been both a blessing and a curse because you can go down a lot of avenues we said let's first focus on where we can have the most impact and food where is absolutely a place where we think we can we can really make a difference yeah well the the numbers are definitely showing it uh just in the just in the u.s uh you know food packaging demand has been up over like i think it was 135 just this last year with that kind of uh frequency also when you're hovering around 250 billion different food occasions just in the u.s on an annual period the amount or opportunity especially when we're seeing this ratio of about anywhere between 35 and 65 percent off premise meaning i need some stuff to use for to go or food wear so all of these kinds of demand scenarios are really increasing not only the production requirements of a lot of manufacturers and packaging but just also obviously the consumer consumption of these things when you see that kind of lift in the market and you see the opportunities here in front of you guys right now i know i think you guys uh did a deal with chipotle i think that might have been how we uh connected up with you um uh shake shack shake shack okay sorry sorry randy garudi if you're listening to this shake shack so if you're going into uh brands like that do you see this as obvious it's a big opportunity how fast can you move or scale into the food service market well what's really exciting to us is we we just brought online our first fully integrated large commercial scale plant last year and so now we have the ability to make a lot of product and that's why we we're now launching with you know partners like shake shack and there's going to be some exciting announcements coming up in the next few weeks as well um so we expect to be in over 1800 locations by the end of april um and all that says is we now finally after so many years of work from developing the technology to progressively bigger and bigger scale we now have the ability to scale this commercial plant for us we call it eagle 3 in many ways it was our solar panel because from here going forward we just add more of these these plants you can you can see what it looks like on our website at new light but that's that's tremendously exciting for us and for our partners you know what we see is that um and maybe some people would would expect this maybe some some people want i find that most brands actually really want to do good by the environment but in order to do good by the environment you also have to be able to sell your product which means that they have to be good for people too and so what's what the reason we spent so long working on this tech is because we were excited by the fact that it represents this middle ground this really important middle ground of products that aren't just good for the environment but work really well for people i mean i love the guys doing doing wood cutlery but i don't think any of us like that feeling of you know sort of like you're gonna get a splinter when you when you pull it out i mean it's funny there's like this common currency wherever you go in the world and you and you talk about how you hate paper straws like everybody's on the same page with that these are products that they just they just kind of don't work and in order to create scale we have to have both sides of the equation and so now we can finally deliver that to people it's part of what is so exciting you know when i went to the first the shake shack when they when they launched our air carbon straws and cutlery part of the joy was just how non-eventful it was in the sense that wow this is just something that works really well and that's and that's what we need to create scale um right so i think uh you know there's definitely a very strong push um and you mentioned the sort of opportunity that's it's a growing space and that's a danger and an opportunity right i mean the danger is that we just keep flooding the world with with with plastic but in order to fix that we have to deliver products that people actually like that are also good for the environment and that's what we think we're doing here any any opportunity here to go into you know another big part of the business is the clamshell side of things for the packaging itself um these would almost be depending i guess on how flexible the material would be i could see some package design innovation that might make it you know if you're making it for like these leather wallet type elements um i'm kind of curious would do do you see this material being used in other actual food packaging or do you think it's going to be more in the cutlery and the accessory side short answer is is all the above you know our our mission is we want to see ocean plastics accumulation ended in this generation and our plan to do that is over the next five to seven years we're planning to roll out over 90 percent of the product types that end up in the ocean so that includes things like clam shells and and so forth so uh yeah air carpet can be used for packaging what we're doing is sort of systematically rolling out our product types we started with straws and cutlery and over the next few quarters you're going to see us roll out continually more and more parts of the foodware's end market and supply chain when you look at um let's kind of look down down the future a bit because there you know there's a lot of different packaging designs i've seen especially this last six months a lot of innovation coming into the market uh all sorts of things around one reduction of materials uh you know innovation in the material source itself like what you guys are doing with air carbon any kind of trend that you're watching uh there at new light that you're really keeping your eye on in terms of global packaging opportunities that you could kind of see maybe in the next you know few years or next decade really kind of shift the way we think about packaging in general anything that you're watching is trends well i think reusability is a really emerging trend um you know that's a tough one because there is a role first for single-use items just from a hygiene perspective if nothing else in society but then there's also a sort of cultural shift on people wanting to to be more involved in reusability so you're seeing more innovation in that space you're certainly seeing down waiting more of a push to paper i think everything going kind of plastic free is just sort of a general trend um and going to natural materials which is which is we think really important um and i think you know maybe the biggest trend is is is you know where does it start and it starts with the consumer the consumer is it's just the the awareness level has gotten so much higher where i think all of us now get to a point where if you're using a a plastic fork you feel it now right if you if you throw that thing in the trash and now you know that it will never go away and if you look at you know the recycling rates on this stuff there was a great john oliver piece that came out last weekend that talked about very very little actual material is being recycled and the stuff that is being recycled it's generally downgraded and so the um it it's it's not a system that's working and consumers recognize that and they want to fix it and that's and so just as a trend you know you're seeing companies that are benefiting by by really getting ahead and and showing their consumer that hey you know we care about more than just making money we want to do good by you do good by the world and so i think there's just a there's been a dramatic shift over the past few years and one of the things that was fascinating from my perspective at least was nobody really knew what the pandemic was going to do to all this i mean we could have expected that single use would go up but it wasn't clear if sustainability would um be become more of an afterthought you know is that a is that a good economy sort of uh push and when people say hey look i got other problems to worry about um we've seen the opposite and i'm sure you have too i i think the pandemic what it did was it demonstrated that we have these massive collective problems that require collective solutions and they can come back and affect the world in a huge way if we don't deal with them and so not only did we not see a slow i mean maybe in the very beginning but but net net it's hard up yeah no i i would agree we've seen a lot of that just in the area i mean we cover a lot of things over on one of our other channels that are around you know electrifying automation and and you know all sorts of really innovation towards sustainability from a technology standpoint so obviously with food you know packaging is one of the biggest areas of waste that we have other areas in terms of electric use and even in general trying to shift some of these facilities over to as much solar as possible i do think that the industry is kind of going in that direction i guess my question is in talking to a lot of the ceos it usually boils back back down to either one price what's my cost for my paper goods packaging in the scenario that most food service operators look at is it efficient enough or is the trade-off there unfortunately i see a lot of them are thinking very short term uh versus long-term and maybe what you know someone like a shake shack and and randy's doing over there they're a brand that's much more forward thinking much much further out in terms of how consumers perceive that do you find that to be the case in the food service space or are you seeing some potential opportunities in other words could we find another 100 shake shacks because there's 3 000 of them out there in terms of multi-unit brands that could really make an impact here the short answer is yes i do believe that and and we're seeing that and you're going to see that and announcements coming up but i i think the we have to be fair to these ceos that i think a lot of them again do want to do good but they also recognize that their customers don't like paper straws and there's other sustainable materials that aren't that sustainable and they recognize that and they get feedback on that and so i think you know everybody collectively we've got to come up with solutions that de-bottleneck um because absolutely you know brands should care about price and performance i mean at the end of the day they've got to be able to deliver products to people and have margins so that they can grow their businesses and provide great services to their customers all of that is critical you know we've always said that to be a hardcore environmentalist you need to be a hardcore industrialist because yeah you know you can't just shout out the wind and say we must do this well it's like well it's gotta work and it's gotta it's gotta make financial sense um and so um you know we there there is a demand there what we spent a long time doing was figure out how we could unlock that demand and and um so i i think we're at the beginning of a of frankly a new wave we've seen the electrification of vehicles be a wave i think the um uh sustainability of materials is um is going to be a massive push in the years ahead yeah for sure last thing here uh mark is material science um because there's a lot of manufacturers out there that potentially are in the food service space and other kinds of packaging areas that we use for retail products and services um i guess with what you guys have done i mean you almost have kind of a a format or a platform so to speak that could be used across the industry is there any plans on either one i guess i won't say open sourcing but you know giving it giving what you've done with new light being able to help the industry in a much bigger scale ability maybe bringing more engineers in other companies as partners anything like that in the in brewing with what you guys are planning for the future very much so um last year bringing eagle 3 online was a big deal for us because now we're going to be doing two things one we're going to be growing our production capacity as fast as we can it's a major focus of of mine in particular but the other thing is a recognition that both the plastics industry is so massive and so much capital has been invested that it's going to take a long time um so we can't we can't get to the impact state that we want without working with partners and we see collaborations whether on joint venture or licensing or elsewhere as a critical part of how we're going to address this thing at the scale that we want and now that we have eagle three this is a this is now a um you know again sort of our solar panel where we can say hey you know if you want five of these um so that's gonna now allow us to really de-bottleneck are our ability to maybe not open source but but we would like to see a model where we do have a lot of collaboration and we move this thing as fast as we can yeah on eagle 3 that's your manufacturing facility right correct yeah so uh with that facility have you guys incorporated things like solar and any kind of additional attributes to keep low carbon footprints in general how is your your current manufacturing setup oh yeah that's been a huge area of focus for us so everything um that we do we we buy power off the grid and we buy wrecks off the grid so 100 renewable power um and but we go much further than that so we've had two independent life cycle analysis done on our process one by uh scs global and the other by carbon trust both demonstrating calculating our material as net carbon negative um we have had our process accredited as a carbon credit generating process by vera and that was a two-year effort to get that in place and then all of that is tracked by an ibm blockchain system i believe where the first and i think only in the space where we where our whole production process is tracked by by blockchain technology and the reason we do that is so we have ultra verifiability on our carbon footprint um so that's a really really important thing for us is is making sure not only are we making this beautiful material and air carbon but also we know with precision the carbon footprint and then we can convey that to our to our customers yeah what does the facility look like ego one or eagle three sorry uh what does it look like is it how big is it is it somewhat con you know compact could we put a bunch of these around yes um so we have a production facility in huntington beach uh in in orange county california and uh you can see it on our on our website uh basically what it looks like is a big tall 50-foot tall tank and you can think of it like a little slice of the ocean so we put salt water microorganisms from the ocean and then they they make air carbon inside their cells then we purify that turn it into a powder and a pellet um and so as we grow we're just basically going to be adding more of those vessels so as we're now designing our subsequent facilities you just you you see a tank farm of these uh of those systems so um yeah at this point it's a highly replicable process is there any pla and i don't know the science behind this but is there any place in our oceans with the vast amount of ocean oceans that we have that are more rich and dense in in how this material could be potentially farmed well uh one clarification we we don't actually we don't farm microorganisms from the ocean uh they were sourced originally but once you have them we just keep re-growing them over and over yeah so we don't have to keep harvesting from the ocean excellent stuff there i think you guys are on the right kind of mission for sure mark so uh first congratulations on everything you're doing there i can't wait to see more on restore especially as you hit more brands so good luck to you out there in the in the food service side of things anyway and it looks like you're on to some other stuff so thanks for stopping in well thanks so much for having me really appreciate it all right excellent stuff over here of course if you guys are listening in over on the podcast make sure and give us a rating also a review that's how we get feedback from you our audience if you're watching over on youtube make sure and smash the like subscribe to the channel it's how we kind of dump this great content over to you and we try to get as much out of as we can each week on a lot of topics as you'll start to see our technology material is really uh starting to trend so make sure and hit us up there as well if you guys have an idea for a show here on the baron report shoot us an email to producer footabletv.com or you can hit me up on twitter at paul barron we'll catch you next time right here on the baron report [Music] you