Triple Bottom Line

Palm Oil Alternative to Save Rainforests

January 11, 2023 Taylor Martin / Jennifer Kaplan
Palm Oil Alternative to Save Rainforests
Triple Bottom Line
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Triple Bottom Line
Palm Oil Alternative to Save Rainforests
Jan 11, 2023
Taylor Martin / Jennifer Kaplan
Jennifer Kaplan, author, sustainability food systems expert, and director of sustainability at C16 Biosciences. Jennifer is helping C16 Biosciences bring a new form of bioengineered palm oil to market. One that could not only save rainforests but also reduce the carbon footprint of the nearly 50% of packaged goods that contain palm oil. Yes, it's in just about everything. C16 Biosciences is tackling a huge problem, but with a huge potential payoff. Learn how this technology can help shape a better future for us all.  https://www.c16bio.com

Show Notes Transcript
Jennifer Kaplan, author, sustainability food systems expert, and director of sustainability at C16 Biosciences. Jennifer is helping C16 Biosciences bring a new form of bioengineered palm oil to market. One that could not only save rainforests but also reduce the carbon footprint of the nearly 50% of packaged goods that contain palm oil. Yes, it's in just about everything. C16 Biosciences is tackling a huge problem, but with a huge potential payoff. Learn how this technology can help shape a better future for us all.  https://www.c16bio.com

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 48 | Jennifer Kaplan

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. We have Jennifer Kaplan on today. She is the director of sustainability at C16 Biosciences. I can’t wait to have this conversation about palm oil today. Some people may be thinking why palm oil? That’s because palm oil is an environmental disaster for our crops. We put it into all kinds of food products and nonfood products. C16 Biosciences is using an innovative process that is found in nature to brew sustainable alternatives to palm oil. Jennifer, can you elaborate on what palm oil is, how it’s use, and how your company is solving this problem we have with it?

Jennifer Kaplan
[00:56] Sure, thanks for having me today. Yeah, palm oil is the most ubiquitous edible oil on the planet. It is used in a wide range of products. It’s used in 50% of the products we find in our grocery shelves. That’s about 70% food, 30% personal care and beauty. It’s not just food. We find it in soaps and lotions and other things like that. It’s an incredibly efficient crop. You can grow a lot of it and very fast and so it’s very cheap. It also must be grown within ten degrees of the equator, which means it can only be grown on land that is currently rainforest, precious rainforests. There’s a lot of deforestation that occurs in order to grow palm oil because there’s no other place you can grow it. That deforestation is responsible for, in addition to tremendous carbon emissions, it is also responsible for a lot of human rights abuses, biodiversity loss. Endangered species are forced out of their habitats. There’s water pollution, air pollution, and like I said, a number of human rights abuses for the people who live in those communities around the rainforest. What we’re doing is we are bioengineering palm oil in a laboratory. We’re producing it in that way. We’re using yeast. We’re using a process called precision fermentation which is based on fermentation which is a very old and natural process. We’re just doing it a little bit differently in an industrial scale. We are, again, like I said, we are bioengineering the oil to grow in yeast rather than on trees.

Taylor Martin
[02:54] What is bioengineered food? I mean, some people who are listening to this may be thinking like, that sounds like GMOs. I’m so against GMOs. I don’t want this franken-food whatever bioengineered anything. Can you explain the difference between those?

Jennifer Kaplan
[03:09] Yeah, so the way we bioengineer our product is that we do genetically modify them at the beginning of the process with Crispr. That helps us allow the yeast to express more or less of a certain quality, so produce more oil than would naturally occur, take out color in a way that wouldn’t naturally occur. We are able to go in there and engineer that yeast, which is a natural product, to express more or less of various characteristics. By the time the oil is produced and grown, it no longer has any genetically modified content in it. It’s not a GMO, although we do genetically modify it at the beginning of the process, but that part is no longer present in the oil when it’s finally produced. Again, I should just note that I’m not a scientist and I may be getting this somewhat wrong, but I’m just explaining in my layman’s understanding of what bioengineering is.

Taylor Martin
[04:16] Before earlier we were talking about and you said it was more like a brewing process, like you brew these sustainable alternatives. Is that correct?

Jennifer Kaplan
[04:25] That’s right. We use fermentation as a process, which again, is a very old process. It’s been around for a very long time. Like I said, that’s how we brew beer. That’s how we make cheese and yogurt and other fermented product. Precision fermentation is done in these big huge industrial tanks and it is quite advanced in terms of the technology, but the fundamental technology is the same, which is we ferment the oil in big tanks.

Taylor Martin
[04:58] Yeah, it doesn’t sound like this is something to be scared of. I keep going back to that because whenever we talk about food and we talk about something that is biological or engineered, if you get those two words in the same sentence, people start to stand back like, whoa, what’s going on here? What are you putting in the food? This sounds like something that’s more like you’re cooking something up as oppose to changing the genetic code of something so it’s not as scary.

Jennifer Kaplan
[05:21] I think that’s a great way of looking at it. I think that we really use a natural process. Fermentation is a natural process. I like to say it’s just we’re growing this oil from yeast instead of on trees. Instead of plants on trees, again, grown from yeast, so it’s still grown. It’s still a natural process. The end result has no genetically modified product in it at all. It is GMO free.

Taylor Martin
[05:51] Do you guys have any data in terms of how much more sustainable this process is to the traditional means of harvesting palm oil? Because I’m sure it’s enormous.

Jennifer Kaplan
[06:02] Yeah, I mean intuitively one can completely understand why this would be more sustainable, right? No land, less water, less resources, less inputs, certainly no human rights abuses associated with it, which we see a lot of in traditional palm oil production, no environmental degradation to plantations and our precious rainforest, which really we can’t afford to degrade beyond what’s already occurred. Those are all the obvious ways. In terms of actual measurement, that’s a work in progress. The thing about measuring the sustainability of a process is that it is a snapshot. Today when we do a LCA, a lifecycle analysis or assessment, that’s a snapshot of a process and inputs that happen today. If you’re not using those same process and inputs in six months, that information is not really valid. We are iterating and coming up with the right measurements to determine exactly how sustainable it is, but our initial assessments suggest that it’s far more sustainable. In other words, it’s not going to use as much resources, not as much water, not as much land. I mean, the big question, quite candidly is energy. How much energy does it use to produce this, because obviously fermenting large amounts of product, industrial product, commodities, inside a tank, even if it’s in a warehouse, still is going to use energy and it’s still going to use some water. The question is how much less. I don’t think it’s a matter of if it’s less, it’s just a question of measuring how much less. We know we can grow enough oil in a 20-acre manufacturing facility that would require 200 acres of land to grow, for example. We know those kinds of things but we’re still working on our defined measurements.

Taylor Martin
[07:54] Yeah, I can see that. This product is not live. It’s not available yet. Can you give us any kind of guess-estimation or is your finance department saying don’t say anything about that?

Jennifer Kaplan
[08:05] We will have our first products available in Q1 of this year, so soon, very, very soon. Then we’re also working with a number of partners to roll out additional products in Q2, 3, 4, and beyond. This is the year. 2023 is the year.

Taylor Martin
[08:26] That’s fantastic. I would imagine because you’ve got to get your process in place and manufacturing and building production and all that. Are you getting any good interest from large corporations, big food America that wants to – that produces all different types of food? This could be a game changer for them as well because it’s a more environmentally conscious product for them. If it’s also more affordable, does it hit that mark as well?

Jennifer Kaplan
[08:51] No, I would not say that our product is – certainly currently not more affordable. Our goal would be to be on par from a cost perspective. I don’t think we’re ever going to be cheaper than palm oil. The thing about palm oil and the reason why it’s so ubiquitous is it is incredibly efficient crop. It is the most efficient edible oil crop on the planet. You can grow a lot of it in a relatively small plot of land compared to soy or canola or some other type of oil. That’s really what makes it so cheap is the volume efficiency of the crop and also that it’s grown in places in the world that have far fewer environmental and economic criteria for making products than we have in some of the other parts of the world. They can produce it cheaply with cheap labor and make a lot of it. Hopefully, we’ll be on par. Are large companies interested in what we’re doing and are we talking to them? Absolutely, we’re talking to large companies. We’re talking to small companies. Our first foray will not be into food because there’s some regulatory hurdles that one must ask for food to be, what we call GRAS, generally recognized as safe. We’re in process on GRAS, but we’re not there yet. We’re launching first into personal care and beauty where we don’t have those requirements. We’re talking to indie brands and big brands. Every brand you can imagine is interested in talking to us. Now we get to pick and choose who we work with because we want to make sure the partners we’re working with are not going to use us to greenwash their own products. We want to work with partners who are aligned with us from a mission perspective. We want to work with partners who value what we do and we respect what they do. We have lots and lots of opportunities. We’re talking to – you name it, practically we’re talking to them.

Taylor Martin
[10:44] Yeah, I could see this really – we’re talking about the cost being equal or a roundabout, but in terms of especially publicly traded companies, their ESG reporting, this would help out greatly if they produce a lot of products and they could state that we are using a palm oil alternative because of the sustainable problems that it causes for our carbon footprint. That’s a huge win.

Jennifer Kaplan
[11:10] Yeah, absolutely. There’s so many wins when you replace these commodity products made in the rainforest reaches the world. A product like all these tropical commodities, they only grow within approximately ten degrees of the equator. That’s our most precious rainforest land on the planet. When we cut that down to grow – and it’s not just palm. It’s other commodities as well, soy, coconut, other things, we are not using our planet to its best and fullest use. We need the rainforest to absorb carbon and sink carbon. We need our rainforest for biodiversity, for the animals and wild species that live there, and for the communities that call those rainforest lands and that land home and where their economic viability depends on their ability to produce crops and food and things they can eat and sell and use domestically rather than have it imported out.

There’s all sorts of ways that tropical commodity crops are damaging to the planet and damaging to the people who live in those places. Our vision is a vision where we can coexist with the people and the parts of the planet that make palm oil responsibly and sustainability. There are some actors doing that. There is some responsible and sustainable palm oil being produced. Not as much as the RSPO, which stands for the Roundtable and Sustainable Palm Oil, not as much as they would like you to believe because there’s a lot of problems with that particular certification, but there are people doing it right. We envision a world where people – we live and coexist with farmers and farm holders and local communities that produce palm oil for the right reasons and are compensated for that palm oil properly and are treated properly and have proper health and safety practices in place and protect the wildlife and biodiversity that live in those places. We work in tandem with that and we supply large companies, small companies with palm oil and other oils eventually, not just palm oil, but some day other oils, but we’re starting with palm oil because it’s the biggest market. We supply them with palm oil that can get carbon off their balance sheets, that can get these egregious business practices, these human rights abuses, and biodiversity problems off their balance sheets. We’ve had tremendous interest. I mean, everyone is pretty much interested in getting rid of palm oil from their products because it’s so obviously not a productive crop in the way that we want things to be holistically good for the planet.

Taylor Martin
[14:12] Yeah, it’s an incredibly destructive product. When I heard you guys were doing the palm oil thing, my brain just went boom, no way, that’s incredible. We’ve got to talk about this immediately.

Jennifer Kaplan
[14:23] Yeah, I mean, it’s very much a topic that a lot of people know a little about. A lot of people know palm oil is bad but they don’t really quite understand why it’s so bad or the depth of why it is so bad. It is a post-colonial commodity. The major players in this industry are definitely remnants from colonial landgrab type business practices. They are very entrenched. They are incredibly powerful. It is the Number 1 edible oil market on the planet. These are very large companies with a lot of political power. They have a lot of ways to get around doing things the right way. As I said, there’s this organization called RSPO which certifies sustainable palm oil. They claim that about 90% of the palm oil produced industrially is sustainable. The problem with that certification is it has no teeth. It’s largely run by and influenced by those big players and by industry. The practices that they have farmers adopt, small holder farmers adopt aren’t really always that helpful to the farmers. They don’t protect biodiversity. They don’t prevent large scale deforestation. They don’t prevent pollution, water pollution, air pollution. They don’t protect the workers and they don’t pay the workers.

There’s all these problems, even with sustainable palm oil. Until sustainable palm oil becomes more verifiable and has less of – is less beholden to the large industry players, for now our position is no palm oil is good palm oil, but I don’t believe that’ll be the case. I believe that sustainable palm oil will actually be a thing of the future, at least some part of it. We’re never going to get to 100% and that’s why folks like us are going to exist, but we’re also a mission-driven company. We exist because we believe there is a more sustainable way to grow commodities crops rather than cutting down our precious rainforests. Because rainforests, I don’t know how many people know this, they have superpowers. They are not just regular trees and regular forests. They have superpowers. They have a tremendous ability to absorb carbon. They are carbon sink as is the peat that they’re grown on. They’re grown on peat bods and peat moss land. That also is a tremendous carbon sink. First of all, they’re a superpowered carbon sink, but then when you fell them and cut them to deforest, to clear the land for more plantations, that releases all that carbon from both the trees and the peat. Not only are they, like I said, a tremendous opportunity to mitigate carbon loss, but they also create a tremendous amount of carbon emissions when they’re actually deforested. Then there’s that impact.

Again, the biodiversity, the loss of biodiversity, we have orangutans, we have rhinos, we have lots of animals that live in the rainforest. The rainforest has been called the lungs of the earth. They’re incredibly important to sinking this carbon that we keep putting out there. To cut it down to make a crop that we could bioengineer and produce in an industrial lot and a manufacturing lot is just a bad use of resources. Furthermore, we could grow palm oil and other commodities anywhere. We can grow it in Iowa. We can grow it in Guadalajara. We can grow it in Toronto. We can grow it in London. You can grow it anywhere. You don’t have to grow this stuff in precious rainforests. That’s another aspect in terms of supply chain resiliency and making sure that we have the commodities that we need to survive and thrive economically as economy. These are also important considerations. We should be more self-sufficient. We should not rely on the supply chains of large industrial manufacturers who have no investment in what we’re doing here in North America. There are some political implications, economic implications, and there’s sustainability implications. Sustainability, like I said, is more than just carbon emissions. It’s the biodiversity and the health and welfare of the workers and the people who live in those areas of the world.

Taylor Martin
[19:01] Yeah, two things I’d like to say to that. One is that being able to create production that’s in the closer relationship to wherever the product might be used or built or produced, that’s huge. Just think about the carbon footprint just of that alone instead of having to ship it from the middle of the equator to wherever on the planet. That’s one thing that’s awesome. The second thing is I would love to see, because I’m a marketing guy, I would love to see some real hard data, and I know it’s not probably easy to collect, but eventually, I know you guys will be able to collect how much destruction the palm oil industry is creating right now sustainably and how large that carbon footprint is. Then once you get your engine in motion and you’re doing production, how much less that is in a beautiful pie chart, a simple pie chart or something like that, just so we can compare carbon footprint to carbon footprint. Because to me, that is a selling point and being able to get that into your marketing copy as well as your ESG CSR reporting, that’s great. When you can see that connection from one to the other, A versus B, I think that is when it’s really going to sink in for people what we’re really talking about here.

Jennifer Kaplan
[20:11] Absolutely, and we’re on track to do that. We’re on track to measure the footprint of these processes and be able to say a kilo of our oil produces 98% less emissions. I’m making that number up now because I don’t have it, but some percent less than if it was grown on a tree. Those numbers are in process. We will have those, but we want to be honest. We want to be transparent. We don’t want to put those numbers out until we know what they are accurately. The truth is this is still a pretty nascent industry. Our numbers are not going to be as great today as they will be next year, in five years, in ten years. We can do it. The risk of doing that, and we will do it because we believe in full transparency, but the risk of doing that is everyone is going to be like, oh, you’re only today 25%, 30%, 40%, 50% less emissions? That’s today. We’re at the beginning of this industry. Once we do things like create more capacity, once we have greater capacity, right now there’s not enough fermentation capacity to do what we need to do. These factories and facilities still are being built as we speak. Once the capacity is raised, then we can work on energy efficient in those facilities, improve that. There’ll be all sorts of efficiencies. There’s also tremendous opportunity to create a circular economy with precision fermentation. For example, we are doing work research on how we could use a waste stream, a food waste stream to actually create the feed stock for our oil. Then that would be a circular type of economy. It gets the waste stream from some kind of food manufacturer. We would use it in our fermentation process. Then theoretically sell that oil back to that food manufacturer to use in their products, so creating this really beautiful circular economy which would really reduce the emissions, possibly even to zero or net zero. I mean, it’s quite possible. That’s where we’re going. I mean, that’s certainly the ambition of the goal is to get to the circular economy and use waste streams as feed stock. We’re not quite there yet but we’re working on it, working on it hard every day and we have good partners working on it with us, too.

Taylor Martin
[22:30] Yeah, I see it as short-term versus long-term thinking here. We are so short-term thinkers these days, but if you look long-term with palm oil production just as it is today, how that’s going to improve, or should I say not improve because they just get more and more land, more and more destruction, whereas what you’re doing is not going down that path, brewing this technology, building it all over the planet. All the while, you’re going to be doing with your production, a little trim here, a little trim there on your carbon footprint of whatever it is and your energy sources all these different things. You’re going to be honing that. Long-term thinking is going to be going your cost is going to be going down. Your carbon footprint is going to be going down. Everything is going to be better, better, better in the future as opposed to the other means of palm oil production which is just going to go up worse, worse, worse.

Jennifer Kaplan
[23:20] Absolutely, and the reality is, whatever our footprint is today, we have to continue to improve and be more efficient and iterate because our entire reason for our existence is that we will be and are more sustainable. If we can’t prove that, if we can’t measure it and show it in a real way, then we have no reason to exist, frankly. That’s our reason for existence, our company, is that we are more sustainable. That’s our entire business proposition. We have to be more sustainable. There’s no question we have to continue to iterate and continue to improve and be more efficient until we really maximize the efficiency of this kind of production system. Otherwise, yeah, go use palm oil. I mean, there’s some really bad problems with palm oil beyond the carbon footprint that aren’t solved by the efficiency factor, but the reality is the carbon footprint is what’s driving this industry, driving down the carbon footprint of these commodities and eliminating destructive nature of industrial monoculture commodity agriculture is what’s driving all this investment and technology. That’s really where we have to focus first. That’s also the greatest opportunity. There’s really a tremendous amount of carbon that can theoretically be saved through these methods.

Taylor Martin
[24:40] Do you see other bioengineered solutions happening right now? I know it’s outside of your wheelhouse but do you see others – not like competitors but just other bioengineered food or ingredient items that we need in our products?

Jennifer Kaplan
[24:54] Oh, gosh, yes. Absolutely, you name a commodity product that’s grown tropically and there’s someone making it through precision fermentation. I see precision fermentation coffee, honey, sugar. You name it, it’s being made out there and there are companies doing great, great work. Some of it is coming to market right now as we speak. Perfect Day is a great example. That’s precision fermentation dairy that’s already available on the market.

Taylor Martin
[25:27] What? What kind of dairy is this we’re talking about here, a plant based? 

Jennifer Kaplan
[25:30] It’s plant based, yeah, sure. We’re plant based, too, technically. We’re made from yeast so we’re plant based as well. It’s vegan and plant based. It’s dairy not grown from cows but it’s actual dairy. It’s the same. In the same way we’re the same as palm oil, it’s the same as dairy. It’s just not grown inside a cow.

Taylor Martin
[25:52] What about the nutritional values that people have to compare the nutritional values of palm oil versus this bioengineered palm oil?

Jennifer Kaplan
[26:00] We have not focused on nutrition. It is possible to engineer nutrition into these kinds of products. That’s not been our focus. Our focus has really been scaling up as quickly as possible so that we can make the biggest possible impact as soon as possible. There are people out there working to create a more nutritionally robust oil. We’re not doing that. It’s absolutely possible. That’s really up to the company and its focus. It can be done in all these commodity precision fermentation products but that’s up to what the company focuses on because you actually have to engineer it in. If you want a souped up more nutritional product, you have to engineer it in. That’s where you have to spend your effort rather than, let’s say, production efficiency or making enough to make it viable commercially.

Taylor Martin
[26:52] Right, if you’re making these products for nondigestible nonedible products, then I feel like it’s going to be easier for you to work on that, get your routine down, if you will. Then if you turn your gears towards, okay, now we want to make it edible and we want to get into the food market, what do we have to do to increase the quality of our product to make it more attractive? That might just be one of them because it’s just like it sounds like it’s a cook in the kitchen, well, let’s add some ingredients in it to make it more nutritious.

Jennifer Kaplan
[27:22] Absolutely, there’s all sorts of things that you can engineer into your product. We engineer out color for some of our products. We have to engineer, like I said, the ability to produce more oil than would naturally occur, otherwise it would never be on par cost wise because it’s just – yeast doesn’t produce enough oil in enough volume to be commercially viable on its own. You have to soup that up. You have to spend your resources as a biotech company building in and engineering in the characteristics that you feel would make you most commercially viable.

Taylor Martin
[28:02] We have got to conserve our energy and conserve our waste and reuse it and circular economy, all these wonderful things, but it takes time. It’s a huge ship we’re trying to redirect. How do you see this playing out for bioengineered food? How do you see bioengineered food playing its part in this role?

Jennifer Kaplan
[28:20] Yeah, I mean, I think we’re in the middle of a transition away from high carbon industries and products and services to low carbon industries and products and services. We’re in the middle of the transition. I didn’t think this up. McKenzie has documented this very well. The allocation of resources that are going to occur in the next decade or two away from products that are high carbon to products that are low carbon, it’s happening and the allocation of resources is being directed in that way. There are commitments of companies and nations and countries to become lower carbon. In order to do that, they’re going to have to adopt lower carbon products like ours and other products. Agriculture is a category is an industry that has a tremendous amount of opportunity to be more efficient and lower carbon. Right now, we still grow things the way we were growing them 200 years ago, I mean, largely, certainly palm oil and commodities like that. They’re just very high carbon industries. They have to become low carbon industries.

I’m very hopeful. I think that this transition creates opportunities for companies like ours and all technology. I think the only way to solve this is through technology. I don’t think we have enough – we have – we’re going to be 9, 10 billion people by 2050. We have a certain number of calorie count we have to produce in terms of food on this planet to feed all those people. We don’t have enough land to do it and we certainly don’t have enough rainforest to cut down to grow enough palm oil and other edible oils to do it. We have to come up with more efficient effective ways to grow food and technology is the obvious choice. There’s tremendous opportunities because companies that don’t embrace technologies like ours, they’re going to run into more and more supply chain challenges. They’re going to have harder times making their commitments, their sustainability commitments to their chairholders and to the countries where they operate, they have commitments that they have to meet. It's going to be harder and harder to meet those commitments unless they embrace technologies and products like ours.

The writing is on the wall. It’s happening. The question is how fast can we scale up, how fast can we drive down the emissions of our processes, and how can we stay true to make sure we just don’t create other problems, unintended consequences with our production systems that we haven’t anticipated yet that may be probably not equally bad but differently bad than the ones we’re currently facing. I think the beauty of companies like ours is the people who run it are quite mission-driven. We don’t want to just make another product. We want to make a product that actually solves a problem, that has market transformation involved with it so that we can see these real shifts and changes that will help the planet. We really are quite committed to sustainable development goals. We take them quite seriously. We’re not going to produce something that isn’t better for the planet. It’s just not what we’re going to do.

Taylor Martin
[31:33] Yeah, decarbonization definitely requires a shift to low carbon agriculture.

Jennifer Kaplan
[31:37] Yeah, I mean, agriculture is a Top 5 industry that’s where the opportunity lies in terms of decarbonization. It’s happening. The question is how do we decarbonize it. There’s a lot of tech being developed to make agriculture less unsustainable. I’m not a big fan of making unsustainable systems less unsustainable. That’s kind of just chipping away on the edges of the status quo. What we’re trying to do isn’t that. We’re not trying to make an industry – an unsustainable industry less unsustainable. We’re trying to actually transform the market to build in sustainability to the production process. It’s just a different approach and one that I think is much more transformative and much more valuable and actually gives us a shot at real decarbonization as opposed to just chipping away at the edges of the unsustainable agricultural systems we have today.

Taylor Martin
[32:34] Is there anything else that you guys might be doing with this technology that you have? It makes, from a layman’s point of view, I feel like there’s other products or other revenue streams you could go into. Could you share some information on that or is that top secret?

Jennifer Kaplan
[32:49] No, it’s not top secret. I think, ultimately, we are a fats and oils company. We will be developing other fats and oils, industrial fats and oils, edible and nonedible. That’s, I think, our long-term goal. It’s certainly not our short-term goals. We’re starting with palm but it certainly doesn’t end with palm for us.

Taylor Martin
[33:10] Yeah, well, you picked a big one. I mean, palm is the huge target out there. Again, I was so happy to have this podcast show with you and discuss all this, because again, it’s something that always unravels me when I’m going to the supermarket and I turn over and look at the ingredients and I see palm oil. I’m just like, ugh, God, they use palm oil. To see an alternative to something like this is going to be fantastic. I hope you and C16 Biosciences all the best for this technology to come out and to help us clean up our carbon footprint in this realm. Jennifer, how can people follow your company as well as yourself?

Jennifer Kaplan
[33:46] Oh, yeah, well, you can sign up for communications on our website which is c16bio.com. We’re also on Instagram under PalmLess which is our platform that we just launched. TikTok, I think we’re on TikTok, too. LinkedIn, if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, that should be pretty easy. We also have the C16 page on LinkedIn as well. Of course, our very dynamic CEO Shara Ticku, you can check her out on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Taylor Martin
[34:21] Excellent, Jennifer. Thank you so much for being on today’s show and enlightening us about how we can finally get away from palm oil.

Jennifer Kaplan
[34:28] Thank you for having me.

Taylor Martin
[34:29] Over and out, everybody. 

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[34:31] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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