David Shepherd

With an aggressive national recycling target (50 percent by 2030); a renewed White House focus on climate change; and clamor for consistent state rules around cutting trash, the federal sustainability policy train is leaving the station. And increasingly, manufacturers and other companies are jumping on board. They are talking to decision makers about a subject that few had on their radar even a few years ago: product stewardship, which calls on producers to take responsibility for what they make at the end of life. Now they want to be in on shaping whatever rules lie ahead to set a level playing field. 

With new federal bills up for review and debate, and packaging being a bull’s eye, the status of packaging and recycling policy is in flux. With no cohesive approach in plain sight for now, there’s plenty to think about. 

“Our role today is to answer the questions: What is the current landscape for proposed packaging and recycling legislation, and what are the roles of business to advance recycling?” Dylan de Thomas, vice president of external affairs for The Recycling Partnership, told a virtual crowd Tuesday at Greenbiz Group’s Circularity 21.

Businesses’ role, whatever it may become, matters as many of them already have made commitments at some level.

“We talk about companies’ goals, and companies have big goals for recycled content. But all the work must be underpinned by strong, smart policy,” de Thomas said.

Mars, maker of candies and food, has diverse packaging needs.

“We have glass, paper, plastics, rigid and flexible formats. We do not want to see this packaging released into nature. We want to get it back in the market,” said Rachel Goldstein, North America policy director for Mars.

The corporation is aiming for 100 percent reusable, recyclable and/or compostable packaging by 2025.

“We look to redesign for circularity and are looking at extended producer responsibility (EPR),” Goldstein said.

EPR is product stewardship legislation charging producers with managing and paying for end-of-life consumer products. The topic, which often goes hand-in-hand with the concept of a circular economy, weighed heavy throughout the discussion. 

“Packaging EPR momentum keeps growing,” said Sydney Harris, senior associate, policy and programs at the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), a nonprofit that convenes its government members and industry to work toward a common EPR vision. PSI developed a packaging policy model that Harris said has informed 12 state bills.

“We support EPR to level the playing field rather than have just a few good companies trying to pull the weight for everyone. We want to make sure everyone is pitching in,” Harris said.

PSI advocates for a national approach to EPR. While there are such bills in 33 states and Washington, D.C., none exist at the federal level in the United States. That could change, stakeholders figure, as new policies and regulations evolve; one getting a lot of play is the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which builds on state laws and calls for EPR programs and product stewardship for packaging, among waste reduction efforts.

Companies have set aggressive recycled content goals, but some see the only way to get there is to invest in recycling infrastructure — better collection and sortation.

We support EPR to level the playing field rather than have just a few good companies trying to pull the weight for everyone. We want to make sure everyone is pitching in.

“This [infrastructure] enables markets to create a more circular economy. And we see producer responsibility as a lever to make it happen,” Goldstein said.

John Campbell, vice president of government relations for beverage can manufacturer Ball Corporation, echoed that thought, and paused for a moment on the collection piece of the puzzle. He sees this as important but made clear that collection is not synonymous with recycling because what is picked up is not necessarily recycled. This reality prompted Ball to release a report on recycling with environmental consultancy Eunomia.

“We did it because we saw a gap in information that’s available. Before we can figure out how to go forward, we had to figure out where we are. The Eunomia report looks at what is incorporated into new materials, and we consider that the real recycling rate [versus what is collected],” Campbell told Circularity 21 attendees. “There is a need for reporting. We hope this [study] becomes a tool to inform policy and serves as a baseline to build on what recycling rates are and how we can affect them.”

It’s complicated because there is no one efficient way to measure recycling. The system is too disaggregated, which is a problem that affects access as well.

“You see in homes, hotels, and businesses the different level of access and of support for recovering materials,” de Thomas said.

For a cohesive, working system, he added, “You have to have bins and trucks to pick up in the first place. You need transfer stations and the right MRFs [materials recovery facilities]. There are MRF deserts where there is not enough processing capacity,” de Thomas said, and brought the issues back to lacking policy.

Harris mentioned the newly released U.S. Plastics Pact Roadmap to 2025 whose signatories — stakeholders across the plastics value chain — have committed to reaching defined targets through specific actions, to advance a circular economy for plastic packaging.

“What I appreciate about the Pact Roadmap is it includes not just goals but detailed strategy on how we get there, and that includes EPR but also deposit return systems and recycled content mandates that I think will drive investments in infrastructure. We need those policy motivators,” she said.

Consumers are moving in the direction of wanting more investment in recycling and a circular economy.

There has to be a tie in between goals and policy, agreed some panelists.

Injecting performance goals in policy adds accountability. But policy must be thought out in relation to goals to avoid unintended consequences, or to not advance one material over another, de Thomas said, commenting that the idea is to get all materials back into a circular economy. 

For Ball, all the attention around packaging is an opportunity to join new conversations, and timing is everything.

“Consumers are moving in the direction of wanting more investment in recycling and a circular economy. Engaging and participating in those conversations early is important. It’s harder to fix [policy problems] later,” Campbell said.

Harris added that the current state of affairs is an invitation to chime in and to get it right: “There are places where programs are in place and succeeding. And where they are not succeeding, we have the opportunity to improve in the U.S. It really comes down to conversation.”

Editor’s Note: The GreenBiz Group team honors Juneteenth on Friday as a time of reflection about the broader imperative to support diversity, equity and inclusion and the more specific intersection between environmental justice and sustainability. This essay originally appeared on the WeSpire blog and is republished with permission.

Opal Lee’s first march to make Juneteenth a federal holiday was around her church in Fort Worth, Texas. As she described it to NPR, “I got together some people here. We had a rally, and so after the rally, the people walked with me, and we’ve been going ever since.”

Opal Lee ended up walking all the way to Washington, D.C., in 2016. Quite the undertaking but even more inspiring because she was 90. She has continued to push Congress since. At this writing, her petition on Change.org has 1.6 million signatures. Last year, she finally saw legislation introduced, on Juneteenth, to make it a holiday. It didn’t pass then but has been reintroduced this year. (Editor’s note: Since this article was first published, both chambers of the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly have voted to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law Thursday.) 

What is Juneteenth?

Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas 150 years ago to commemorate the day that news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached Galveston, nearly 2.5 years after it was issued. Texas made it a state holiday in 1980. Since then, 47 states have added it as a state holiday or observance. A growing number of companies such as Quicken Loans, Nike, Citigroup, Target and, yes, WeSpire, observe it as a paid holiday. Major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, PNC and Fifth Third, close early.

For many who celebrate Juneteenth, it’s an opportunity to teach African-American heritage and culture. Traditions include reading the Emancipation Proclamation, singing traditional gospel songs and reading works by noted writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou. Barbecue and soul food anchor many a celebration and red food and drinks are served, a symbol of ingenuity and resilience in bondage.

We need to be aware that we can do so much more together than being apart.

For Lee, commemorating the holiday means more than recognizing a historical moment. It’s about embracing unity and equity more boldly as a nation. She points out in her petition that slaves didn’t free themselves and that they had help from allies — politicians, abolitionists, soldiers and others who gave their lives for freedom of the enslaved.

“We need to be aware that we can do so much more together than being apart,” Lee told CNN. “We can pull our resources (together), learn from each other, and make the world a better place to live.”

Continuing to strive for equity, unity and justice

It is that sentiment that ultimately drove our decision to celebrate Juneteenth at WeSpire. We need as leaders to acknowledge that the work of emancipation is still not done: not in our companies, our cities or our nation.

We must actively do more, every day, to bring about racial equity, unity and justice. It starts by increasing awareness and education, but ultimately it requires changing our behaviors. How we hire and promote. How we treat people in meetings. Who we choose to mentor and sponsor. Who we sit with at lunch and include in the casual, informal after-work events. And take it from someone who knows a lot about behavior change: This work is hard.

But it’s arguably the most important work we can be doing. Inclusive, equitable businesses are better, stronger businesses. Inclusive equitable communities are better, stronger communities. And inclusive, equitable nations are ultimately better, stronger nations.

By taking a day to honor and celebrate when we did the right thing as a nation, we also will have an opportunity to reflect, and recommit to fixing, all that we still haven’t gotten right. So if you haven’t asked your company or school to make Juneteenth a holiday, go ask. If you’ve never celebrated it, start. The promise of emancipation may have started in 1863, but it’s up to us to see it through.

Soon — just as the plastic milk gallon in the dairy aisle and the beer can in the alcohol section have the three arrows signaling the packaging is recyclable — food products at grocery stores will have a new label to indicate the product is made with upcycled ingredients. 

Upcycling takes byproducts of a process — in this case, food production — that normally would be considered trash and incorporates them into new products for consumption. On the eve of the Upcycled Food Association’s (UFA) launch of a certification and packaging label for upcycled products, Alesha Hartley, certification manager of the Upcycled Food Association, and four member companies talked about the challenges facing the upcycled food world at GreenBiz Group’s Circularity 21 conference. 

Matriark Foods takes remnants of fresh fruits and vegetables from farms, and creates vegetable broths and purees for schools, hospitals and food banks. But the hardest part for the company wasn’t the food, it was the paperwork. 

“I think if we knew how complicated that would have been before we started, maybe we would have given up before we even started,” said Anna Hammond, founder and CEO of Matriark. “But compliance is huge.”

Food safety is an essential part of any food business, but with upcycled food, it’s even more of a hurdle. According to Hammond, her company had to invent some processes to become compliant because upcycling is such a new sector of the food industry. 

“It’s just part of the process of starting a new movement in food and changing the food system at any kind of impactful scale also [requires] figuring out that level of detail,” she said.

The new certification from UFA is a step toward making the process easier and more streamlined for future businesses. 

“Having the standard that was defined and is now being certified against adds a whole other layer of trust and transparency,” said Dan Kurzrock, co-founder and chief grain officer at Regrained, a platform that connects grain and malt byproducts from brewers to bakeries that use it in bread loaves, nutritional bars and other food products. “You can create a more unified voice for the upcycled food companies to ultimately convey the message of upcycle food and why it’s important.”

For Sheetal Bahirat, founder and CEO of Hidden Gems Beverage Company, the COVID-19 pandemic created upheaval in her upcycling business. The company creates an antioxidant-rich drink, Reveal, from avocado seeds it rescues from five Mexican restaurants. She and her team collect 400 pounds of avocado seeds a week by physically going to the restaurants every other day to pick them up. Bahirat and her company take the avocado seeds that would have cost the restaurants 8 cents per pound to remove and creates a beverage for them then sell on their menus.

“It’s literally putting money back into their pockets,” she said.

Over the next couple years, it’s going to be interesting to see how those plans and layouts are going to change as they have sustainability in mind.

Pre-pandemic, her team previously could have gone into facilities to adjust operations where avocados ended up in the trash to ones where restaurant employees save, wash and freeze the pits and create a process tailored to each store. But now that education had to be conducted without ever being in the same physical space and without seeing the kitchen set up or trash operation. 

According to Bahirat, most food facilities and manufacturers are set up for maximum efficiency without caring about how much gets wasted. How Hidden Gems works with restaurants is a small step towards shifting the focus of those ingrained systems.

“Over the next couple years, it’s going to be interesting to see how those plans and layouts are going to change as they have sustainability in mind,” she said.

Alex Waite is looking towards educating consumers to take her upcycled pet food business to the next level. Her company, Shameless Pets, creates dog treats from leftover veggies, fruits and even some products inedible or undesirable to humans such as salmon skin and eggshells. 

“One of our bigger challenges is really helping people understand what upcycling is,” she said. “I think the perception around upcycling can sometimes be gross. And we’re fighting that battle to really help people understand what it actually means and how that translates into food safety.” 

“We don’t want to yuck the yum,” Kurzrock added. 

Put down that beet-juice burger. The next big wave in plant-based protein is fake fish.

Buoyed by the success of red-meat mimics from the likes of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, a growing number of companies is angling to capture their share of the early market for animal-free seafood.

Large companies including Bumble Bee, Nestlé, Tyson, General Mills and Thai Union are making various plays, whether by investing in upstarts or flexing their research and development muscles to formulate new products.

The startup space is buoyant with cash and targeting a blend of retail, direct-to-consumer and food service channels, playing with ingredients such as kelp, koji and mung beans. Plant-based and cultivated seafood companies raised $80 million in 2020, according to the nonprofit Good Food Institute (GFI), which counts 800 companies involved in the space. Overall, businesses creating all sorts of meat alternatives raised $3.1 billion last year, more than three times the level of 2019. Alternative meat, dairy and egg products make up more than half of that, at $2.1 billion.

Plant-based seafood only accounts for 1 percent of alt-meat sales, compared with 60 percent for beef, poultry and pork analogs, according to data from GFI and retail insights firm SPINS. Yet GFI has positioned the market for fake fish to become bigger, or at least more diverse, than those for beef and poultry alternatives.

The nonprofit has named the threatened collapse of fisheries and unmet demand for seafood alternatives as important factors. By 2030, it expects demand for seafood to be 30 percent higher than 2010 levels. Plus, the tens of thousands of edible creatures in the oceans offer a broader palette of flavors and textures to imitate compared with land mammals or fowl.

This is not lab grown meat; we actually use ancient techniques to make modern foods.

Plant-based seafoods are spawning in the freezers and aisles of mainstream stores. Gathered Foods’ Good Catch “tuna” is in a number of outlets, including Publix and Whole Foods. Trader Joe’s plans to stock alt-seafood, too.

The pitch

Acceptance of plant-based proteins has grown quickly in recent years as consumer sentiment has been shifting away from meat. Unlike the early days of tofu and tempeh, today’s alt-proteins are designed to please flexitarians and omnivores, not just to fill a gap for vegetarians or vegans.

Plus, the touted sustainability benefits to deriving seafood-like ingredients from plants include reducing the reliance on open-sea fishing and fish farming, not to mention sidestepping the labor abuses found in seafood supply chains.

Seafood stand-ins not only promise a low carbon footprint, but they also seek to serve people with dietary restrictions. For example, kelp-based “shrimp” is kosher and won’t trigger a life-threatening shellfish allergy. If the sourcing is done carefully, fake fish also should be devoid of the mercury and microplastics that can stem from ocean plastic pollution.

Here in random order are several key companies making waves in alt-seafood:

Nestlé

Nestlé has the advantage of already employing 300 scientists, engineers and product developers spread across eight research and development centers. The food juggernaut’s alt-seafood explorations are being made by Nestlé Research in Switzerland and in Germany and the United States under the leadership of CEO Mark Schneider, a vocal proponent of the sustainability potential of plant-based nutrition.

Nestlé often describes plant-based food as part of its DNA; in 1886 founder Julius Maggi developed soups with a “meaty,” plant-based seasoning. The company’s Coffeemate non-dairy creamer, born in 1961, is complemented today by non-dairy almond, oat, coconut, soy and rice milk. Nestlé’s Garden Gourmet veggie burgers are well established in supermarkets, as are its vegetable-based sausages, chicken nuggets and lunch meats. The company’s sales of vegetarian and plant-based items grew by more than $222 million in 2019 and leaped by 40 percent in the first half of 2020.

“In general, there is a lot of dynamism and innovation in this sector, and that is a good thing,” said Torsten Pohl, head of the Nestlé Product Technology Center in Singen, Germany, via email.

He credited Nestlé’s scale, size and proprietary technologies with accelerating the development of plant-based, jarred tuna in a matter of nine months, leading to the release of the six-ingredient, pea-protein-centered “fish” last year in Switzerland. Nestlé scientists, chefs and technologists prototyped and tested the new products in retail outlets, producing early commercial batches in its R&D centers.

Defining success for me is when I can sit down in a restaurant and order our product off the menu.

“We want to offer people the best plant-based meat alternatives in terms of taste, texture, flavor and nutrition,” Pohl said. “To complement our internal capabilities, we also strategically collaborate with researchers, suppliers, startups and various other innovation partners.”

Nestlé cites the sustainability benefits of reducing overfishing and protecting ocean biodiversity as motivators of these projects. Following its tuna substitute, the company plans to release imitation shellfish and other fish next.

New Wave Foods

Shellfish are the specialty of New Wave Foods, which Tyson Ventures, chicken giant Tyson’s VC arm, backed in 2019. The startup completed a Series A $18 million funding round late last year.

The San Francisco-based startup is making mungbean and seaweed-based shrimp that’s supposed to have the “snap” and succulence of the real thing and can be dropped into any hot or cold shrimp recipe.

“2021 is the year of the shrimp,” said Michelle Wolf, co-founder of New Wave Foods, which is doubling its staff of 15 people by the end of the year and moving its Connecticut R&D kitchen to New York. “And that’s what we’re really focused on is just blowing out our shrimp product over the next year and delivering that movement.”

A main New Wave Foods ingredient is moisture-absorbent alginate, derived from brown kelp and used in biomedical applications including hydrogel for wounds. New Wave blends it with mungbeans. To recreate the colors and textures of shrimp, the team consulted with Brad Barnes, a certified master chef and director of consulting at the Culinary Institute of America. The product is kosher and doesn’t trigger problems for people who can’t eat soy or gluten either, according to New Wave.

In March, the company inked a deal with Dot Foods, one of the nation’s largest food distributors, aimed toward rolling out New Wave-branded shrimp on the menus of foodservice institutions and restaurants, which make up the vast majority of the market for shrimp. Wolf believes the disruption of the pandemic has caused consumers to embrace plant-based foods partly as a way to address climate change on a personal level. To reach young adult flexitarians, college campus dining is a special target for New Wave, in addition to corporate dining and independent chains that have weathered COVID well.

Market research in April by Fact.MR projected “shrimp” to be the most popular product in alternative seafood.

“We saw a huge opportunity with shrimp because it is by and far the most consumed seafood in the United States, but it is also the poster child for a lot of issues in our seafood supply chain,” said Wolf, who moved to San Francisco from Pittsburgh following a master’s in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, seeking to join a plant-based meat startup. Instead, she co-founded her own venture. 

Depending on who’s counting, about half of shrimp is farmed, which in Southeast Asia has been wiping out coast-protecting mangrove trees. Shrimp is responsible for four times as many greenhouse gas emissions as the same amount of steak by weight, according to a study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in 2017. (It described the carbon footprint of a steak and shrimp cocktail dinner as equivalent to driving from Los Angeles to New York City.)

In general, there is a lot of dynamism and innovation in this sector, and that is a good thing.

Seaweed, on the other hand, which makes up New Wave’s shrimp-mimic, sequesters carbon and reduces ocean acidification. Wolf hopes that spurring demand for plant-derived shrimp will have upstream effects, such as boosting beneficial ocean-based agriculture while reducing demand for farmed shrimp.

“Defining success for me … it’s when I can sit down in a restaurant — which is going to be sooner rather than later — and order our product off the menu and text my family back in Pittsburgh and say, ‘Hey, you know, go to so-and-so and get the shrimp,'” she said. “That’s going to be the moment for me where like, wow, we’ve really done something here.”

Prime Roots

The mission-driven, direct-to-consumer brand Prime Roots is seeking to open the hearts and minds of consumers while helping to reduce the market for animal-based products. “Bacon” was an early offering, and “lobster” ravioli is its latest. Its fermented “superprotein” koji is the key ingredient. Koji mold, the fungus Aspergillus oryzae, has been core to savory foods for millennia throughout Asia.

Koji can be tinkered with fairly easily to replicate the texture of muscle fibers of various creatures. Additional ingredients are added to bump up nutrition and finetune the mouthfeel. From Prime Roots’ R&D kitchen in west Berkeley, California, the five-year-old company grows koji in a nutrient-rich broth in a process similar to brewing beer.

“This is not lab-grown meat; we actually use ancient techniques to make modern foods,” said Kimberlie Le, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “I wouldn’t have even thought to look at koji as a source of protein if I hadn’t started to learn about fermentation when I was like 4 or 5 years old with my mom.” Her mother, Chi Le, is a well-known chef who appeared on the show MasterChef Vietnam.

With a staff of 25, Prime Roots is small but Kimberlie Le believes its proprietary koji brewing can scale up fairly easily. Pound per pound of protein, its processes are far more resource-efficient than harvesting meat from animals, the company estimated.

“We really hope that people will support that and see that there’s a better way of eating and making protein and that we’re fundamentally rethinking our system,” Le said. “We’re really excited to be able to be there for our community online and really get to go from farm to table, essentially, which is something that’s important, to connect people to their food and where it comes from.”

Gathered Foods’ Good Catch

Good Catch is becoming the most visible fish-free consumer brand in the frozen aisles, where its bags of shelf-stable “tuna” already appear. The company uses a “six-legume” blend of peas, chickpeas, lentils, soy, fava beans and navy beans.

In May, its maker, central Ohio-based Gathered Foods, released a line of $6 frozen fish sticks to be sold in Safeway and other supermarkets, following an April Series B funding round of $26.4 million. Good Catch is in 5,000 U.S. and Canadian stores, and its plant-based tuna salad is bound for 200 Whole Foods prepared food counters.

The irreverent Gathered Foods co-founders, brothers Derek and Chad Sarno, have corporate roots at Whole Foods. The self-described “culinary ninjas” also launched the Wicked Healthy plant-based community, and Chad continues to lead plant-based developments as an executive at Tesco.

Gathered Foods has attracted funding from celebrities Woody Harrelson and Paris Hilton, and early in 2020 pulled in an investment from General Mills’ venture branch, 301 Inc, an early backer of Impossible Foods. 301 Inc’s founder and managing director John Haugen told GreenBiz that seafood is “another compelling proposition that meets the needs of consumers today.”

Among its other big-name supporters, Gathered Foods has a distribution partnership with tuna titan Bumble Bee. 

Bumble Bee

Founded in 1899, Bumble Bee claims 28 percent of the market for shelf-stable seafood including tuna, salmon and sardines. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019, a move industry observers blamed not just on a price-fixing scandal but on a lack of innovation. Taiwan-based seafood trader FCF now owns Bumble Bee.

At the same time, consumers had been turning away from canned tuna, especially the millennials and members of Generation Z, known to circle the fresh and chilled items that tend to ring the perimeter of a grocery store. Packaged tuna sales in general, lackluster for years, enjoyed a temporary lift during the early months of the pandemic.

I honestly thought I was eating conventional shrimp when I took a bite of it.

Those events and trends sent Bumble Bee on a process of soul searching, which led to redefining its purpose as “feeding people’s lives through the power of the ocean.” Beyond fish, the San Diego-based company is casting a wide net by considering ingredients derived from plants and algae, from fermentation and from cell-based or cultivated methods, too.

Bumble Bee points out that it’s the first shelf-stable seafood name to support regenerative practices for the ocean, as well as the first to offer a tuna traceability tool to its customers and to use blockchain technology to trace its frozen seafood’s origins.

“With all of that, it became very natural to start talking to a company like Good Catch,” said Renee Junge, Bumble Bee’s communications vice president. The tuna giant and the alt-food startup signed a distribution agreement in March 2020, the first relationship of its kind between a major national seafood brand and a plant-based one.

The two CEOs — Jan Tharp of Bumble Bee and Christine Mei of Gathered Foods — speak on a weekly basis. Bumble Bee brings its expertise in sales, orders, logistics and warehousing together with Good Catch’s expertise in innovation and production. Through investing in systems and resources, the tuna maker gets a cut of Good Catch’s sales. Bumble Bee describes this joint alignment as reflecting the companies’ shared values of protecting the ocean via alternative food sources.

“That said, our two companies do have different histories, origin stories, business approaches and cultures,” said Tharp, who also serves on Gathered Foods’ board, via email. “There is a great deal that we can learn from Good Catch; their entrepreneurial and culinary approaches are something we are trying to incorporate into our practices. On the other side, we have systems and processes that are tried and true, which can help Good Catch with efficiencies and scalability. These types of partnerships are not easy, but they are fruitful and essential.”

Other alt-fish players

Alternative proteins are a big focus for the future of another tuna giant. Thai Union in March began selling its OMG Meat products in Thailand, including meat-free crab meat, fish nuggets and dim sum. The Chicken of the Sea seller is working on “shrimp” as well.

The tiny Van Cleve Seafood Co. in October began marketing crunchy coconut “shrimp” in Publix’s GreenWise grocery stores. From the Netherlands, Schouten is exploring alt-tuna with its wheat and soy-based TuNo, and it plans to follow with salmon-like and cod-like products. The private company has been producing plant-based proteins since the 1990s.

Meanwhile, lab-grown fish is taking off. Out of San Diego, startup Blue Nalu hopes to bring its cultured mahi-mahi to U.S. plates this year. It reeled in $60 million in debt financing in January. Its partnerships with larger companies include Nutreco, Griffith Foods, Pulmuone, Rich Products and Thai Union Group. Blue Nalu is building a demonstration kitchen with a microbrewery-style restaurant, reportedly able to grow analogs to red snapper, yellowtail amberjack and bluefin tuna.

What’s next?

This is just a sampling of the organizations exploring the seafood-analog realm. It’s possible that pioneers in alternative proteins, such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, will break their silence with offerings in this area as well.

Jen Lamy, senior manager of GFI’s Sustainable Seafood Initiative, is excited to see big-name companies getting involved here and hopes others will dive in. What’s the business benefit?

“There’s a lot to be gained from companies in this space that pertains also to the efficiency and the ease of the production system compared to relying on a supply of, for example, wild capture fish from the ocean,” she said. “There are all of these reasons coming together at the same time that will, hopefully drive a lot of the companies into the space.”

I’m hoping we’ll see a lot of other companies really focused on taste above everything else because that’s what consumers need to need to experience before anything else.

Business-to-business activities could accelerate innovations, she added. For instance, companies could open-source their technologies for seafood textures or flavor profiles, she noted. “There’s not sort of one code that everyone is trying to crack,” Lamy said. “Because there are so many differences between the companies, they’re all using either certain ingredients or going for different products or going for different markets.”

Consumers have been interested in supporting ocean sustainability for a long time, buying Marine Stewardship Council-certified fish or buying from local fishmongers, but the options for acting on those values haven’t been clear in the past, Lamy said. Not only do plant-based options provide a clearer sustainability story, but the rise of sustainability labeling for them will help to boost consumer confidence.

An additional selling point for seafood stand-ins is their nutritional benefits, as chefs seek to right the wrongs of their predecessor, the low-protein, additive-packed crabstick, industrialized since the 1970s. (Its main ingredient is blended-up fish product called surimi, which has been used in Japan for about 800 years.)

A key challenge to winning over consumers is in delivering a seafood aroma that’s not intensely fishy, Lamy noted. Among the early offerings she has tasted, the coconut “shrimp” from family-owned Van Cleve Seafood stood out.

“It was pretty impressive to me; I honestly thought I was eating conventional shrimp when I took a bite of it,” she said. “I’m hoping we’ll see a lot of other companies really focused on taste above everything else, because that’s what consumers need to experience before anything else.”

Last week may be seen as the pivotal moment when climate change finally got serious.

I’m not talking about the anticipated rise of wildfires, droughts, floods and other natural disasters, although we’re bracing for the worst of what Mother Nature will throw at us this year. I’m not necessarily talking about any breakthroughs in the U.N. process, although those may be forthcoming in the run-up to COP26 in November. And I’m not even talking about the onrush of net-zero commitments by companies, government and others, although they seem to be happening at an almost-daily clip — so much so that they are no longer news.

I’m talking about markets, plain and simple.

Consider these stories from the past week:

“Carbon is now a buzzword on corporate earnings calls,” reported the Financial Times. Corporate execs are uttering the word “carbon” on earnings calls at a “rapidly rising rate, triple over the past three years, to about 1,600 per quarter,” the FT said. It cited data from global finance firm UBS that investing in a portfolio of companies with lower emissions intensity — the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of revenue — led to annual returns 1 percentage point higher than the MSCI World index of developed market stocks.

It’s important to recognize key moments and milestones that foretell a potentially positive outcome. Last week was one of those moments.

“Green finance goes mainstream, lining up trillions behind global energy transition,” read a headline this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. Assets in investment funds focused partly on the environment reached almost $2 trillion globally in the first quarter of 2021, it said, more than tripling in three years. Investors are putting $3 billion a day into these funds, and more than $5 billion worth of bonds and loans designed to fund green initiatives are issued — every day.

“Banks always backed fossil fuels over green projects — until this year,” reported Bloomberg. It noted that banks have poured more than $3.6 trillion into fossil fuel projects — almost three times more than total bonds and loans backing green projects since COP21 in 2015. However, data covering nearly 140 financial-service institutions worldwide found at least $203 billion in bonds and loans going to renewable energy projects and other climate-friendly ventures through mid-May, compared with $189 billion for fossil-fuel projects.

Carrots and sticks

So, why is the financial world going gaga over green? Simply put, it boils down to carrots and sticks.

First, the sticks. Obviously, climate. Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made official what even casual students of the climate crisis have long known: To have any chance of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, investors must stop funding new oil, gas and coal projects — immediately. Those investors already are well aware that as the impacts of a changing climate grow, the increased volatility and uncertainty will roil markets. They’re aligning a sizable chunk of their investments with that reality.

Within 48 hours of the IEA report, the G7 countries vowed to stop new financing for overseas coal projects and to make “accelerated efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C relative to pre-industrial times, the first time the seven powerful nations have come together with a public statement about 1.5 degrees.

A day later, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that, among other things, “encourages” the Treasury Secretary to assess climate-related financial risk to the stability of the federal government and the stability of the U.S. financial system. It also directed the Labor Secretary to “consider suspending, revising or rescinding any rules from the prior administration that would have barred investment firms from considering environmental, social and governance factors, including climate-related risks, in their investment decisions related to workers’ pensions.”

The fossil-fuel industry just may be seeing the writing on the wall. “The eventual death of oil and thermal coal won’t come from environmentalists or even directly from renewable energy — it will come when big banks decide to stop financing it, rendering it ‘unbankable,'” wrote the influential petroleum industry website OilPrice.com, in response to the report.

The carrots? Simply put, the economics, viability and risk profile of renewables keep getting better and better. A report released last month by the U.K. think tank Carbon Tracker found that with current technology and in a subset of available locations, we can capture at least 6,700 petawatt-hours annually from solar and wind, more than 100 times global energy demand. (For reference, a petawatt-hour is equal to 1 million megawatt-hours.)

As Forbes noted in its coverage of the report: “Renewables could kill off fossil fuel electricity by 2035.”

Wow. Just wow.

Add to all that the seemingly rapid transition to electric vehicles; the growing push to electrify buildings, homes and factories; the increasing viability of alternatives to energy-intensive concrete and steel; and the rise of the circular economy. What a remarkable moment we’re in.

Of course, there’s no end of work to be done. The rise of deforestation, the health of the oceans, the quickening loss of biodiversity, the potentially game-changing climate feedback loops — any one of them could be devastating to human well-being.

All of these have significant business implications. And companies — both customers and suppliers of the products and services connected to these issues — will find themselves in the crosshairs of investors, activists, regulators and other influencers and changemakers. Expect a new wave of campaigns, demonstrations, boycotts, investor pressure and other tools of the trade.

A thought experiment: As the fossil fuel companies turn tail, who will become the next villains?

For now, let’s stop and appreciate where we are and how far we’ve come. Progress all too often feels slow and incremental, largely because it is. But it’s important to recognize key moments and milestones that foretell a potentially positive outcome.

Last week was one of those moments. And from here, there’s simply no turning back.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my Monday morning newsletter, GreenBuzz, from which this was reprinted, and listen to GreenBiz 350, my weekly podcast, co-hosted with Heather Clancy.