This summer, Reuters Events launched Transform Food 2023, a event accelerating innovation and collaboration within the global food and agriculture industry. As a precursor to the main event in Fall, 2023, Reuters Events teamed up with Full Stack Food's Aditi Roy, who moderated a panel discussion addressing the issue, "How Must We Rethink Emotional Resonance in New Food Categories." Irina Gerry, Chief Marketing Officer at Change Foods, and Paige Graham, SVP of Social Impact and Sustainability at Edelman joined Aditi in discussing why storytelling and building emotional connection with mass audiences is a critical part of scaling in new food categories. In this special episode, we bring you the unedited panel discussion. In addition, Aditi, Brett, and Stephanie discuss some of the topics highlighted during the panel, and ponder why and how storytelling matters in food innovation.

Adam Maxwell and Kelsey Tenney are almost polar opposites. What makes them such a formidable pair of co-founders is the one thing they do have in common. They are both downright obsessed with the science behind food. That mind meld led the pair to launch Voyage Foods, which makes your favorite staples with alternative ingredients to produce food more sustainably. The Oakland-based company recently launched peanut butter without the peanuts, and they’re also working on chocolate without cocoa and coffee without beans. Kelsey and Adam’s partnership began across the country on the East Coast - he had worked in fine dining, and she had a sweet tooth. Together, they believe they can replace ingredients that are becoming increasingly scarce in the world…with her capacity to solve hard problems and his big vision…and counterculture attitude that arose from his Boston childhood.

Tyler Huggins is not a man of many surprises. Rather, he is a study of consistency. The things that matter to him most today are the same things he cared about as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult. For one, he loves nature. And second, he wants to devote his life to preserving it. Tyler feels a kinship with land, trees, air, and water that feels core to who he is and it drives what he does. As a student, he studied ecology, biology, and engineering - marrying his love for the outdoors and living things with his passion for solving problems. Tyler also studied grizzly bears when he took up a side-hustle as a forest ranger....and also worked on water issues. After college, he started a land restoration company .. and later, as a PhD student, he landed on mycelium as a sustainable way to make structures from battery components to leathers and even building materials. After a brief flirtation with air filtration, Tyler realized that ultimately, he could have the biggest impact on the world by making food sustainably. And that's how Meati was born. Today, Meati - which makes plant-based meat from mushrooms - appears to be a raging success...it's backed by celebrity chefs, it just entered a partnership with Sprouts and it's building a mega-ranch to meet insatiable demand for its products. But for Tyler - the man of few surprises - none of these endeavors are far flung from his childhood growing up next to a national forest…

Markets and data transparency may sound like dry subjects, until you hear Kellee James talk about her life’s work. Kellee is the CEO and founder of Mercaris, a market data service, and trading platform for organic agricultural products. Over the course of her life, Kellee saw the power of exchanges in addressing social or climate issues. One example is, how cap and trade programs solved the problem of acid rain. And now, Mercaris is bringing more transparency to organic markets by providing farmers, processors, and consumers packaged goods companies with pricing data for organic foods. Mercaris is also a trading platform for organic commodities. In providing that transparency, Mercaris helps remove the hidden costs of those foods, and could help incentivize more farmers to switch over to organic crops. While it’s hard to imagine Kellee working on anything but market economics…that subject was pretty far flung from her childhood dream of riding horses for a living….

Riana Lynn’s company, Journey Foods, applies data to the world’s biggest food supply chains to help bring plant-based foods to market faster and more cost efficiently. That may sound like a big undertaking, but it’s just one of Riana’s many superpowers. From her days as an elite athlete and pre-med student to her early entrepreneurial experiences as the founder of a massively successful juice bar and a stint working for the White House - one of Riana’s early challenges was figuring out where could have the most impact while doing what she loved. Today, Riana sits at an unique intersection of food, data, nutrition, and culture that reflects her own journey…

We’ve interviewed many founders for Full Stack Food, but Jennifer Stojkovic is truly one–of-a kind. She created The Vegan Women Summit, which brings together more than a thousand women to help make our food systems more sustainable, accessible, and equitable. She's also an investor, founder, and author of "The Future of Food is Female." Stojkovic is devoted to increasing representation for women in the food system; she's started programs to increase the number of women launching, investing in, and working for food innovation companies. Above all, Stojkovic says she doesn’t expect everyone to become vegan; rather, her goals are more about systemic change - about targeting the food system to create more opportunities to bring delicious and affordable vegan choices to mass consumers.

You may have never heard the names Jon King and Rob Forsythe, but there’s a good chance the work they are doing will someday impact something in your fridge. The pair launched Milk Moovement, which is a digital platform which tracks everything along the dairy supply chain, from production to delivery. The work they are doing is wildly disruptive - before they started their company, Jon and Rob say much of the business along the dairy supply chain was conducted through phones, fax machines, and even snail mail. Milk Moovement started in Canada, where Jon and Rob are from, but the two say they’ll have a quarter of the U.S. market this year. How did they do it? They both started off in Newfoundland - meeting in college and originally working in the oil industry before pivoting to dairy. Through it all, their childhood experiences in Canada still guide the work they do today.

It’s not often that a company comes along and develops a product so game-changing, that it not only disrupts an entire industry, but sets the bar for any other company innovating in that area. Blue River Technology is that company. The startup was launched by Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden when they were Stanford grad students. Their mission was to help farmers take on some of their biggest challenges by making agricultural equipment smarter through robotics, AI, and machine learning. Blue River focused on precision agriculture - its first product was a piece of computer vision hardware you hitched to a tractor that targeted weeds and sprayed them with surgical precision - saving farmers time, money, and product. From the earliest stages of developing their product, Jorge and Lee talked to farmers and had them test it out again and again. In 2017, ag giant John Deere acquired Blue River in what turned out to be a seminal deal in agricultural innovation. Five years later, Heraud is still with Deere - doubling down on his mission to ensure the world’s rivers are clean.

Cannabis has arrived, and it’s spreading fast, far, and deep. Marijuana is legal for recreational use in nearly two dozen states. Gwyneth Paltrow, Jay-Z, Joe Montana, and Martha Stewart are just some of the A-listers backing cannabis companies. As a result, many entrepreneurs are switching from other industries into cannabis. One of them is Kyla Sirni. She started out in software, and launched a software platform managing reservations at nightclubs. That startup - called Tablelist - was hit hard by the pandemic hit and business wiped out overnight. That’s when Kyla pivoted to cannabis. She started Dispense, which helps cannabis companies run their e-commerce sites. Since it launched, Dispense has been growing...yep, you guessed it, like a weed. While Kyla’s success isn’t surprising, cannabis is pretty far flung from her roots growing up in a traditional family in upstate New York.

Benson Tsai is the CEO and co-founder of Stellar Pizza, a pizza-making truck operation that Tsai calls a “spaceship on wheels.” Why? Because inside the truck, the chef making the pies is actually…a robot. The spaceship analogy is particularly apt because Tsai is a rocket scientist who left his job as a battery engineer at SpaceEx to launch Stellar. His co-founders and nearly one dozen employees are also former SpaceEx employees who jumped ship to join the so-called spaceship. They aren’t alone in betting on pizza-making robots…recently, Jay-Z invested in Stellar. For his part,Tsai seemed destined for this journey…having been an engineer turned entrepreneur after grad school and then working at Lucid Motors and of course, SpaceEx, where he said he learned a lot about innovation from his face-to-face meetings with Elon Musk. But Tsai’s drive to build new things also comes from his childhood…where he learned to do hard things.