Espresso: GAIL's Founder - How We Fix The Broken Food System?

0:01Good food world, right, is not at scale, right? So what's interesting is if you can get that - When you say not the good food. So it's a general term. Let's say people that are doing really good stuff, it's usually done at fairly small scale. If you can start to think that more people want that, and it's all driven by the customer, just like coffee. We could be living in a world where we're just drinking styrofoam coffee. That's what I always tell everybody. But instead, we'll work, and that'd be 50p. Instead, we're living in a world of four-pound coffee. Now, which world do you want to live in?

0:34Which world do you think? Well, I like good coffee. I know. And I think the world has voted that they like the coffee. You can't find styrofoam 50p coffee anymore, right? And I think the same thing should be thought of as food. But there's a whole ecosystem that has to grow up. And part of that is that when I look around and I look at the really great small producers or innovative producers that are medium size, I think, wow, if there's some scale there, you automatically go down on the price. Yeah. Okay? Because you just, you know, instead of one truck with one box, you've got, you know, a whole truck filled with, you know, it's that kind of concept.

1:14You also bring more talent into it so people can think a little bit harder. So, like for some of our guys, it's like, actually, I could put robotics here. That would save me, you know, 10 % on my cost because really I just have one guy, you know, spinning it, taking a cheese, you know, two times a week and flipping it over. Yep. You know, we just had the same thing in baking. You know, there's a bit of like when you cut something, the initial cut, if you can find something that you can cut and you're doing enough of them and they can cut it without hurting it, then it's great. Have it cut, right?

1:45And put all that manpower and brainpower that, you know, even my bakers would say some of that stuff that we were doing, you know, 15 years ago is dumb work, you know? And we don't want to be doing dumb work. We want to be doing smart work. Yes. Yeah. You know, and this is really quite important. So I think, you know, if you take those small guys and we can put some scale, it gets some scale economics, then, you know, you, it'll become more readily available. And I think I see that in what we've done, right? You know, you know, we, you know, you, you, you know, you, you basically can get better and better ingredients.

2:25You know, you have to jump ahead of it a little bit. You have to trust. When you say jump ahead of it. Well, sometimes you just like, you know, our flour, we're spending more on flour, not just because flour is higher overall globally, but because we're upgrading our flour wherever we can, wherever there's a, you know, we're buying a bunch of heritage grains, doing a bunch, as this stuff becomes available. And we're starting to talk to farmers about, hey, can you, you know, can you grow this? You know, do you want to grow this? And we know it's better for the soil. So we're starting to kind of work together and say, let's, we would like to change the thing from, from just saying, look, I need great flour.

2:59Mr. Miller, go find great flour, mill great flour for me to saying, let's get the miller, the farmer and the baker together. What does the farmer need to make sure that his land is, is healthy? And he says, well, I need to do these kinds of things. And these are the kinds of products I need to grow. And then we're like, okay, awesome. Now Miller, you know, you know, how do we want it milled? And then the baker says, okay, fine, I'm going to ask what the world, the earth can give us. And then we make the best bread from that rather than we just say we want to make the best bread. And that's partly because we as a society are redefining what bread is and what food is.

3:38It's basically, it's nutrient rich, not just calories. Tastes good and it's good for you, basically. That's what we're willing to pay for. And we should because it's great for our bodies. no chemicals nothing like that so you go back and you say i want that whole system to be healthy so i'll be healthy like nobody will buy a football soccer ball from you know uh or you judge it to be a good football even if it's good physically if it's if it's made by you know child labor in you know pakistan or somewhere yes you know that's not a quality football and it's not a quality loaf unless you unless you you know there there's some thoughtfulness there so this whole system has to be created okay it doesn't exist there's not a whole bunch of farmers that are sitting there doing amazing stuff and then just and and just you know looking for a market unfortunately it's not but but there is i think but we can change that whole thing yeah it might take a decade or two but you know you know you just start valuing the things that matter like which is nutrients good farming sourcing and then you know and you have you have bakers and not machines to start out with then you start to say i they can connect the whole thing and you got it thank you so much for listening to that espresso i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day let's be having your boy and please do subscribe follow the podcast share this espresso on whatsapp if you liked it and also there's a link to our newsletter in the show description i spend 15 hours toiling and writing this bad boy.

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