8. Disrupting dairy to fix our broken food system with Aylon Steinhart

This is a tale of two friends, a top star chef and a previous software developer, who felt such a strong urge to tackle one of the world's most pressing challenge that they quit their jobs and set out on a visionary endeavor to disrupt the global dairy industry. They do this by replicating the micellular structures in dairy milk to obtain the same taste and functionality, instead of using ingredients such as coconut, almond or oat. The result? A plant-based product that is indistinguishable from conventional dairy. If that's true, that's some damn good news for the planet huuh? When launching their plant-based food company in 2018 with the intention to create “the Impossible Burger of dairy,” the two friends decided to use the symbolism of an eclipse providing a powerful storytelling of their big why: “An eclipse is a really, really rare moment in which something super tiny — relatively, like the moon — is able to block something that is massive, in this case, the sun. It’s the stars literally aligning to create something improbable that is just so spectacular that everyone stops what they’re doing and looks up — and it really moves them.” Aylon Steinhart is the co-founder and CEO of Eclipse Foods. He is one of the top experts in the alternative protein industry and was previously at the Good Food Institute, speaking regularly on food innovation at conferences and universities such as Harvard, MIT, Yale, Berkeley and Stanford. Aylon walks us through the great need to reimagine the global dairy industry, and the four areas of harm that made himself realise the epic need for new solutions: 1) Sustainability and industrial animal agriculture causing mass extinction of species, 2) industrial animal agriculture's impact on global poverty and starvation, 3) animal suffering, and lastly 4) human health and the link between the consumption of animal products to almost all major chronic diseases in the west, as well as the outbreak of pandemics like Covid-19. We also cover how to achieve price parity with conventional dairy as one of Eclipse Food's competitive advantages and focusing on the product categories where the largest impact in terms of offsets would be achieved. For all of you out there who fiddle around with the idea of making a leap of faith change in your life but feel that your current skillset and legacy is holding you back, this one's for you. Aylon provides some hands-on ideas for how to "kick in the door" to a new industry and get going for real. In my mind, he's really the perfect example of someone who dared to make a big change in order to chase the biggest dream of his.