Fabian sits down with Chris Kerr, the Chief Investment Officer at New Crop Capital, who has nearly 30 years of leadership experience with startups and venture capital investing. He has spent the last decade focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant based foods sector.

We recorded this episode the day after Beyond Meat hit the stock market. The brand is a poster child of Chris Kerr’s investment portfolio, and it also is an industry daring darling. And what went well beyond the wildest expectations with stock trading at nearly triples from the original IPO price the day after, this episode is filled with enthusiasm and learnings that go well beyond one brand.

An episode any entrepreneur should digest as we discuss the importance of naming, how you can build a company around a brand and how a startup needs to test, test, test, and then test again.

You can learn more about Chris via the New Crop Capital site.

____Full Transcript:

F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting the Mark. Today, we go beyond meat. Yes, that was a brand hint. And not only do we go beyond beef, but also butter, cheese, chicken, ice cream, sea food, and yogurt. Today, we’re diving into the future of food, for the development of replacements to animal protein products. I first read about Chris Kerr in the Good Business issue of Bloomberg Business Week way back in December, 2018, which dedicated four entire pages to his story. Which is quite an accomplishment. As sometimes is the case, good things take time. But today, he is on my show, and I couldn’t be any more honored to have him here. Chris is the chief investment officer at New Crop Capital, and has nearly 30 years of leadership experience with startups and venture capital investing. He has spent the last decade focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant based foods sector. As CIO, Chris manages the portfolio strategy and serves as a strategic advisor to most portfolio companies. Chris also serves as co-CEO and chair of Good Catch, managing member of TRELLIS NEW ENDEAVORS, director of Purple Carrot and Next Foods, and observes Miyoko’s Kitchen. Additionally, Chris is a director at Unovis Partners, Sirabella’s, Wicked Healthy, Math Garden, Pitcairn Financial Group, and Monarch Corporation. How does he do it all? I do not know. And how does he find time to talk branding with us here is less mystery than it is a testament to his dedication to the cause and to fellow entrepreneurs. With that being said, welcome, Chris.

C Kerr: Thank you very much for having me. I’m looking forward to a lively conversation.

F Geyrhalter: It’s a pleasure. You say lively conversation because you and I chatted before, and I know you only got two hours of sleep. So first off, congratulations, what a day. We’re recording this show on May 3rd, 2019, which happens to be the day after Beyond Meat went IPO. And what must have gone well beyond the wildest expectations with stock trading at nearly triples from the original IPO price. This also marks a first for a company making meat-like products from plants. So that’s a pretty big thing, to hit the stock market. Chris, Beyond Meat is a poster child of your investment portfolio, and it also is an industry daring darling, I would say. What does this day mean to you? What does it mean to the industry as a whole?

C Kerr: Well, my wife and I talked about this yesterday. My other business partner, Chad Sarna, who’s a chef in this space, I would put this down as the single greatest day in the entire time I’ve been working in this space. I got into this area, and I’m an animal guy. I love animals, enough suffering in the world. I figured, let’s try to take some of my abilities and work on putting them towards solutions to solving what we consider to be a crisis. When we started this effort, it was really around 2005. In 2007, I went to work for the Humane Society of the United States, trying to bring solutions to solve some of the things that they were working on. At the time, Beyond Meat was a little company called J Green Foods, the business plan was a very typical first business plan for a company, which if you’re smart, a lot of founders will throw those away as quickly as possible. The company really evolved, from really this startup mode. But it was as time went, Silicon Valley was just starting to pay attention to this particular space. What we didn’t know at the time was where this would go. So back in 2007, 2008, when I started this, really, it was very hard to get anybody to pay attention to what we were doing. The markets had collapsed, nobody really wanted to take any venture capital investments, let alone vegan food. Good lord, nobody thought that there was anything to do there. So to have this culminate from that, which was really kind of grabbing at straws, hoping something could evolve into a disruptive technology, to an IPO that then just outperformed everyone’s expectations. And I’ve got to tell you, that was only one of three amazing things that happened yesterday. I can’t talk too much about the other three. But I can just tell you that the world has completely shifted from the days of J Green Foods to what is now Beyond Meat’s IPO and the fact that virtually, every major strategic food conglomerate out there is sitting up and paying really big attention to this space. I have to say, I’m delighted that I happened to have stuck it out this long. So it was really a [crosstalk 00:05:12] day.

F Geyrhalter: And you played quite an integral part of this whole thing. Not only Beyond Meat, but of the entire, I guess we can call it now, of the movement. That really, like you said, just happened in the last couple of years, where it really started seeing an impact. So congratulations, it’s really big stuff.

C Kerr: Well thank you. Like I said, time, luck, circumstance, sometimes just being in the right place for long enough, something’s going to hit you. What’s the saying? Even a broken clock is right two times a day. So, [crosstalk 00:05:46].

F Geyrhalter: Very modest of you. So just the other week, I think it was last week actually, I listened to our local NPR station, here in Los Angeles, KCRW, and I caught Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown taking us through a behind the scenes tour of the factory. It was really, really fascinating. I’m a big fan of the product and so are a lot of people all over the world. I think by now, their plant based burger patties are being sold in the meat section, which by itself, is such a huge accomplishment, in about 30,000 stores. It’s in Burger King, it’s in Carl’s Jr, Del Taco, and I even spotted it at Dodger’s Stadium here, in LA. So the startup was founded in 2009, that’s when you were involved with them. The patties started hitting stores really in 2016, and I mean it’s 2019 now. So this is now actually going to market has not been too long of a distance to IPO. I mean, that’s pretty crazy. The brand also has some even higher profile investors than yourself. There’s Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, and former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson. When I heard about this, this basically underlines what you just said, right? The world is changing. Just recently, they secured the CFO’s of Coca-Cola and Twitter to be on the board of directors. So with Beyond Meat, when did the team start to actively invest either time or money into brand strategy? Or into defining the voice, or actually the design. Do you feel it was a conscious decision from day one? Or was it something that kind of happened over time?

C Kerr: It happened over time. But a lot of these companies don’t get it right right out of the gate. Like I said, the company was started as J Green Foods. It became Savage River Foods, which was the name of a river that ran through Ethan Brown’s home property in Maryland. It had to evolve. So branding was really interesting, and positioning is really important, too.

F Geyrhalter: Right.

C Kerr: I’m not an expert in any of this, by the way. Usually, this type of thing happens way above my pay grade. In this case is no exception. What we look at in our investment portfolios, we focus on what I refer to as the food pact. You may have heard me talk about this in the past. But we make decisions on food based on the efficiency of four key levers, it’s taste, awareness, convenience, and price. We looked at, even if you look at kind of the evolution of Beyond Meat, they came to market with a chicken. It was a pretty good chicken, it was gluten free. But arguably, it wasn’t the best on the market. Gardein was out there, it was a great product, but it had wheat gluten in it. So Beyond Meat said, “Let’s try something a little bit different with pea protein.” Which really kind of changed the focus towards pea protein, that was the early adopter of it. So their positioning really tied to that brand, their branding tied to that positioning. Who were they going to and why? So when you look at your customer, first of all, I’ve just got to focus on this. Taste is the most important thing by far.

F Geyrhalter: Right.

C Kerr: We always start with chefs. So in every case, chefs have to play a role in that. So when we start, when New Crop looks at a company, we always say, “Look, if we can get the taste right, the other things will slowly start to fall in place.” If you miss taste, the rest is irrelevant. So when you look at Beyond Meat, they didn’t start off really with chefs in there. We put a chef in there, a guy named David Anderson, who’s arguably one of the best plant based chefs on the planet. He really helped them kind of refine some of their products in the mid range there. About five, six years in, he started helping with that. The Beyond burger, it came later, right? That was really just … I’ll say this about food companies, there’s no such thing as an overnight success with food. Most companies don’t get it right right out of the gate. If you look at, a good example is Silk soy milk, which everybody now knows. But that’s a 40 year old company, and it was 20 years in before it invented White Waves Silk.

F Geyrhalter: Wow.

C Kerr: So a lot of these companies take a lot of time. What looks like overnight successes was, in fact, a lot of trial and error ahead of that. I don’t think Beyond Meat’s really much of an exception to that. They had some good products early on, but not enough to be groundbreaking. It wasn’t until the Beyond burger came out that it really hit that inflection point. That just takes time sometimes. What they really did do is they really changed who the consumer was of this product. So if you look at the branding, the branding was not tied towards your early adopter vegans. Early adopter vegans, they’re very principled, they’re very loud, they love to talk about their findings, they have enormous price elasticity. They’re very forgiving around taste. As you move out of that very small niche, which like I said is really critical when launching these companies. But as you move outside of them, your branding has to reflect what that consumer wants. Beyond Meat really followed that path in a really good way, where they understood the early adopters. They absolutely never violated the principles of those early adopters, that’s really critical, because they will turn on you if you do. So you respect the early adopter’s principles, because they do a lot of work for you. And you build that in as the baseline to how you build from there on out. I think that Beyond Meat just did an exceptional job of that. They never violated those principles. They were questioned about them. I think if you bring on Tyson as an investor, or put on an ex McDonald’s CEO in the mix, some of those people will question that. But Ethan was spot on in saying, “Look, if we really want to help the cause, whether health is your driver, environment, sustainability, animal protection, welfare, you name it, everybody gets served by this if it can hit the mass market. So we really shifted that focus to addressing kind of the meat reducers, the flexitarians. And that Beyond burger is a bullseye. Sorry for the pun, but it’s a bullseye.If you look at that inflection point, I think going forward in history, you’re going to see everybody’s game just got stepped up quite a bit. Consumers are, by far, one of the biggest beneficiaries of that.

F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. I mean, I looked at how the company is currently using key opinion leaders, or influencers, and they are not at all the typically associated with the industry type influencers, right? As you mentioned, the company knew very quickly that in order to go mainstream America, they need to get mainstream America athletes and diverse people, like guys flipping a burger in the backyard, right?

C Kerr: Right.

F Geyrhalter: That’s the kind of people that they want to get. Forming that narrative must have been such a huge, important part of changing customer behavior. So yeah, I mean, well done. I also think about the packaging design, right? Which is so crucial to any big box retail company brand. Beyond Meat did something that I believe, I do not know, but I believe, it must have played a big role in its success outside of having a great product with an equally convincing story is that it creating packaging that actually looked like typical burger patty packaging. It was shrink wrap, it was see through. And that was a far fetch from the typical green cardboard boxes associated with vegan products.

C Kerr: Sure.

F Geyrhalter: Which in itself, are already pretty off-putting. Were you part of that time already? Did you witness that part of their story? Where they said, “Let’s just package it like meat, let’s try to get into the meat section of the market.” Was that already part of that?

C Kerr: Well I think early on, they’re not actually the first one to try to get into the meat section. Gardein did it early on, Kite Hill did it with their cheese in the dairy isle. The problem is, the early adopters don’t walk into that. So those who are the most, I will say, the loudest, don’t actually walk into those sections, right? That’s your kind of vegan early adopters. So it didn’t do great. When Beyond Meat came out, two important things happened. One was that the market had kind of shifted towards being a lot more open towards these types of products. But the other part is that this product was good enough to actually reside there. So once you hit that threshold of, you can actually stand next to a burger and it be darn close to parity on taste and price, then the convenience kind of falls into place and the awareness kicks in. I think Beyond Meat really had to hit that sweet spot there. Gardein was in the deli section of Whole Foods probably in 2008, yeah, 2008, 2009. It did okay, but not great. Kite Hill, their non-dairy cheese was buried in a very complex high-end cheese isle that was very hard to find. So when the vegans went looking for it, that wasn’t an area that they went to. When Beyond Meat came along, like I said, there was enough awareness about the product that it was happening. Plenty of marketing dollars went into that, but the market advising was really critical and letting consumers know where to look mattered, it certainly mattered. So I think, Whole Foods, by the way, has just been really critical in helping shape the merchandising so the early adopters can transition into the mainstream. So what they will do is, they’ll put you in what we might call the penalty box, which is where all the vegan food goes. But they’ll also put you in the deli, they’ll also put you in the prepared foods isle. In the case of Beyond Meat, they actually opened a burger stand right in the middle of Whole Foods in Boulder, Colorado, that served just the Beyond burger. And that was a guy named Derek Sarno, who’s one of our partners, he’s a chef who is the executive global chef for Whole Foods, that was his concept. It worked. It allowed people to try out the product, to demo it, to understand what it tastes like, how do you prepare it? Is it different than real meat? Most of these products … We have a company called Good Catch, Good Catch makes tuna fish. There’s two questions that are asked, right out of the gate. What does it taste like? And how do I use it? Price isn’t asked, nutrient value isn’t asked. People are curious about it, but those are the first two things they want to know. So when it comes to positioning and merchandising, you solve those two first things. And sometimes, you need someone to demonstrate it to you. That’s, quite frankly, where Whole Foods has just been outstanding in helping not just Beyond Meat, but all sorts of products, helped to do that.

F Geyrhalter: It seems like it’s the good old Costco trick, right? You show them how it’s made right there, then people get to taste it.

C Kerr: Yeah, merchandising’s expensive. We vegans walk by tons of tasting stands, because we just assume that we can’t eat it.

F Geyrhalter: Yeah.

C Kerr: Let me tell a story about Just Mayo. Just Mayo was doing demos in stores, and people would walk up and they’d say, “Well what are you serving?” And they would say, “This is vegan mayo.” And the answer was, “I’m not vegan, no thank you.” As though only vegans could eat this mayonnaise. Of course, Fritos are vegan, and we don’t ask whether or not they’re vegan, anybody can eat a Frito. So I think that merchandising is really critical in getting consumers to understand where they fit in the equation. If it’s somebody who’s lactose intolerant, yeah, you’re going to want to try the newest nondairy milk. If it’s somebody who’s got allergens to soy, yeah, you might want to try a meat that isn’t made out of … meat analog that’s not made out of wheat. That type of stuff is quite relevant, and I think those demos are really important.

F Geyrhalter: Right, no, absolutely. I think, Chris, one of the most insightful things I learned when I read the Bloomberg Business article about you was that you have nine cats. I think some of them are starting to want to participate in this story, too. They said, “I don’t only want to be in Bloomberg, I want to be here, too.”

C Kerr: Yeah, actually the cat that was in Bloomberg is the one that trying to get out the door, so yeah.

F Geyrhalter: I think it’s because of the name that you have given the cat. It’s Claire de Lune or something like that? It’s a very French name.

C Kerr: Yeah, she normally sits on my desk here.

F Geyrhalter: It’s her business day has started. It’s like, “Hey, it’s 9:00am, what’s going on?” Excellent.

C Kerr: Sorry.

F Geyrhalter: No, no, no, that’s great. Hey so looking back at the success of Beyond Meat, and there’s no better day than today, on May 3rd, to talk about this. We already touched on a couple of these. But when did you think, when did you know that this is going to turn from a startup into a brand? When did you feel that … Not when you tasted it, or when you said, “This is going to be insanely good, people are going to love this.” But from a marketing perspective, when did you feel like, okay, something right now just shifted, and this is going to be a brand?

C Kerr: Quite frankly, when they settled on the name Beyond Meat. That was when the real marketing push came, and it had to do with how they were positioning it to the consumer base that went well outside of our vegan world. That shift really kind of said to the early adopters, thank you for your service, you’ve been phenomenal, let’s take it to the next level. That happened actually pretty early on. The company started, when we started working on it in 2008, 2009. It was probably around 2012 that that name was adopted and then put into play. Prior to that, they were really focusing on food service and the name Savage River wasn’t something that they were doing much with. I think by the time they came up with Beyond Meat they thought, okay, now we have something to rally around. That’s pretty critical.

F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And that name was created by an agency with help? Or was that internally crafted?

C Kerr: I believe it was internally crated. Beyond Eggs was out at the time, they were just getting started. So Hampton Creek had come up with the idea of using something along the lines of Beyond. Beyond Meat at the same time. Hampton Creek moved over, well they created Hampton Creek, and then Just. Beyond Meat was, I guess a good fit for them.

F Geyrhalter: That’s extremely refreshing to hear that a name was kind of that propeller into that next phase of the company. And where you felt like now it’s a brand. But vegan is, as a whole, as a brand, changed tremendously. From not to tasty to incredibly cool. In fact, it also turned quite important given climate change, right? Which is one of the big reasons you’re in this business. And yes, it also morphed into a very tasty food option. But most of the brands in your portfolio are also extremely design focused, I realized. The dairy free butter brand Fora, which I can’t wait to get my hands on. But also your other investment firm, Unovis Partners, it seems like branding and design is always top of mind for you in many of your brands. What does branding mean to you? Either personally or to your industry as a whole? I mean obviously, with Beyond Meat we get a pretty good sense of what it can do.

C Kerr: Yeah, honestly, it’s absolutely critical. You think about it, it’s communication, right? At the end of the day, you want to very quickly communicate to a consumer what it is you do. If you can get that in a brand, I think plenty of people overthink or they try to be creative with brands, and it just can kind of flop. A really good brand matters, because it really is that flash point around decision making. Again, you go back to the food pact. Awareness is critical. I use this example, if you are in a desert dying of thirst, crawling along the sand, and there’s a body of water over a hill, if you don’t know it’s there, you’re still going to die of thirst. Awareness is really around what is it that a brand or a company’s trying to convey to you? So you need to know where it is, what to look for, then be able to make a rather quick decision around why you might want to buy it. So clearly, there’s an industry around that. That’s no surprise there. I think when you have an innovative product that’s new to the sector, that’s novel, disruptive, and consumers don’t quite know what to do with it, you better get that brand right. You can’t be too cheeky. Too many plays on words, that kind of stuff. You don’t want to confuse the consumer in the process. So I think Beyond Meat really hit a good stride there. There’s a couple other ones that did a good job. They didn’t have a lot of professional help, but Daiya is another company that people kind of knew what it was right out of the gate. It was dairy but not quite dairy. Silk, perfect example, Silk soy milk. A grand slam, people pretty much knew, it’s soy milk. You think about that when it comes to identity. For the consumer, there’s not a lot of confusion for the consumer. Ultimately, I think that, when it comes time to make kind of very quick decisions, impulse decisions, the difference between a good brand and a bad brand is going to be the difference between a sale or a pass. The ones that are successful, they know how to really run with it.

F Geyrhalter: So at what time in that startup journey with your portfolio companies is what time do you advise those companies to actually invest in branding?

C Kerr: Day one, day one. Good Catch is a great example. We knew that we could get a formula … We didn’t know what we were going to do in seafood, we just knew that we were going to get into the seafood space. We had started the company from scratch, we worked with a branding agency. The brand is what we built the company around. So coming up with the name Good Catch really set in motion exactly what that company was going to do and why. With that, we can fill in the blanks pretty much in any direction we want. Now if we had come up with something that was cheeky or confusing, a rebrand is incredibly expensive.

F Geyrhalter: Yep.

C Kerr: Nobody wants to go through that. So to spend an extra 25 to $50,000 on an early brand saves you upwards of several million later in the game, not to mention a failed start, which is the worst possible outcome. So I recommend, by all means, don’t just come up with a name between you and your founders and think that it’s great. Test it, put it in front of groups. There’s great organizations that will actually do concept testing for you, and New Hope is one of them that’s in the natural products space. For very little amount of money, you can test a couple concepts and see how it resonates with consumers. Spend that money. To nickel and dime that early stage is arguably a death nail for a company, if you get it wrong.

F Geyrhalter: Amen. It was a very tough pill to swallow for a lot of bootstrap, early stage founders.

C Kerr: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: But in the food industry, you basically cannot be too bootstrapped in order to make it to the market, so.

C Kerr: Well also, I really encourage people to not fall in love with their own branding. It’s easy to do, you feel like it becomes part of your own personal identity. You came up with it, or your family did. It really is important to relay a message to the consumer, not to your sister. I think at the end of the day, a good brand will reach a really wide swath of the world and tell them exactly what it is you’re doing. That’s pretty critical.

F Geyrhalter: Chris, this is how I started pretty much every speech to entrepreneurs. I tell them, everything you do right now is not about you. It’s about them, right?

C Kerr: Well said, well said. Ego can really get in the way of these. One of the things that we do with the companies that we start up with, our job is commercialization. Part of that commercialization is an education around the branding side of it. So if you look at the New Crop team, we’re actually made up of a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, people who have started companies before. One of our guys, Dan Altschuler, used to run a branding agency, it’s what he did. We have another woman, Laura Zane, who helps us put together the decks. Because quite frankly, selling investors on it is very similar to selling a product. You need to sell them on the concept, and they need to be able to understand it quickly. So that starts the design phase, by the time you’re hitting the shelves, at that point, it’s too late. So absolutely, you need to think of it from the ground up.

F Geyrhalter: Any piece of brand advice and founders as a final takeaway? I know you already dropped a lot of them. Anything that you didn’t share with us yet, as we come to a close?

C Kerr: Test, test, test, and then test again. And by the way, the world isn’t static. When we launched Good Catch, we did testing on words for our packaging, and two years later, the entire market shifted and we need to test it again. So by all means, the consumer changes, consumer perception changes, the markets change. Don’t be afraid to change with them. Your job there is to get consumers to understand what you’re doing. The other part of it is, test your products. Try new things. At the end of the day, don’t be a believer in your own stuff. You need to actually rely on the broader community to help you with that. The good news is, they are delighted to help. Particularly the early adopter world where I come from. Vegans love to try new food, and when they find something great, they are incredibly loud about it. Be partners with them in that, and allow them to test as well. I think everybody can have fun with it when you’re testing new things, so it’s not a challenge, it’s a joy. I think if you look at it from that perspective, everybody gets to have fun with it.

F Geyrhalter: Fantastic advise. What’s still untapped in the plant based market? I mean, is there something you’re excited about that you’d love to see a team create, or something you’d be excited to invest in next? Or is this all beyond … Not Beyond Meat, but beyond closed doors?

C Kerr: So we’ve now hit pretty much every area out there. We’re working on, pork still hasn’t been done well, and that’s a massive market, as you can imagine.

F Geyrhalter: Right.

C Kerr: We’re working on some things there.

F Geyrhalter: It’s a huge necessity too, right now, I suppose.

C Kerr: I’m sorry, say that again?

F Geyrhalter: Pork is in huge demand, and there’s lots of issues surrounding pork. And there’s a shortage, and God knows what, right? So there’s a huge need for it, too.

C Kerr: China alone, I mean, it’s just not …

F Geyrhalter: Right.

C Kerr: So here’s what’s both sad and exciting. The meat, dairy, eggs, and seafood market’s over a trillion dollars, and we are just, just, just getting in there. We’re a rounding error in that. So the opportunities are global, they are massive, and they are urgent. You put those things together and create a little bit of R&D around that, these are going to be exciting times. Give us another decade. Look at what happened with the Beyond burger and the Impossible burger just in the last two years. They just got onto the map on an industry that’s a couple million years old at this point.

F Geyrhalter: Yeah.

C Kerr: Since we started eating animals. This is going to be a very, very exciting ride. I would say collectively, if you ignore the marketing side, collectively, R&D and the plant based meat world, and dairy, I would argue, is less than $100 million in the history of it, that they’ve actually put into the R&D side of it. The more money that flows into that, you’re going to see some absolutely phenomenal outcomes. I would imagine that the next decade is going to be spectacular for consumers, for animals, for the environment. Everybody’s going to win, and it’s going to be a fun time.

F Geyrhalter: I think on that note, I want to thank you, Chris. It was impeccable for you to make it onto Hitting the Mark the day after the big IPO, I so appreciate the time you took away from doing press or simply celebrating on this huge day.

C Kerr: Thank you.

F Geyrhalter: It’s a huge day for you, your company, and Beyond Meat. So absolutely, thanks for being here.

C Kerr: Well, and thank you to the Beyond Meat, they’re a spectacular team. They did all of the work. I got to sit back and watch the ride. But thank you for having me on, I really appreciate it.

F Geyrhalter: Thanks to everyone for listening, and please hit the subscribe button and give this show a quick rating. I’m seeing way too little TLC from you out there, I know how many of you are listening. So if you have a split second and enjoy the show, please give it a quick rating. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, the brand consultancy creating strategic, verbal, and visual brand clarity. You can learn more about FINIEN and download free white papers to support your own brand launch at FINIEN.com. The Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness One, I will see you next time when we once again will be Hitting the Mark.