028: Aligning Your Mission with What Your Customers Want with Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute

As mission-driven entrepreneurs, we’re passionate and certain about the changes we’d like to see to make the world a better place.

But, what happens if the people you want to reach aren’t as convinced as you are?

You have a couple of options:

You can work really hard to educate your market, to convince them that what you’re offering is what they need, to get them to change their behavior in favor of what you’re proposing. (Spoiler: this rarely works and you’ll spend a lot of time and money on it.)

Or, you can give them what they want and shift your mission to align with that.

This is the point my guest Bruce Friedrich arrived at a few years ago, which we talk about in this episode.

This is also the point I see some of my clients at, as they struggle with communicating their message in a way that appeals to their potential customers where they’re at in their journey.

In this episode, Bruce and I also talk about the current state of food tech, what entices investors to invest in companies (market opportunity vs. values), the importance of in-person speaking and connections to reach your audience, and what happened to Bruce at age 12 that set him on his career path.

About my guest: Bruce Friedrich is Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, which works with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs to make groundbreaking good food (clean meat and plant-based meat) a reality. Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. Bruce is a popular speaker on college campuses and has delivered presentations on food innovation at most of the nation's top universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Bruce has co-authored two books, including the forthcoming Clean Protein: The Revolution That Will Reshape Your Body, Boost Your Energy - and Save Our Planet with New York Times bestselling author Kathy Freston, contributed chapters to five books, and authored seven law review articles.

Highlights:

• Educating the market (demand-side) vs. giving your customers what they want (supply-side)
• The current state of food tech (“nerds over cattle,” as Eric Schmidt of Google/Alphabet says)
• What moves investors to invest (finances/market opportunity vs. values/impact)
• What Good Food Institute does and how quickly it’s growing
• The importance of in-person speaking and connections to reach your audience
• What happened to Bruce at age 12 that set him on his career path
• The risks and rewards of standing for something

Links:

Good Food Institute = http://www.gfi.org/

Follow Bruce on Twitter @BruceGFriedrich

Connect with Bruce on LinkedIn

Good Food Institute on Facebook and Twitter

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods

Cowspiracy documentary

UN Report: Livestock’s Long Shadow

Influence book by Robert Cialdini

Clean Protein: The Revolution that Will Reshape Your Body, Boost Your Energy?and Save Our Planet book by Bruce Friedrich and Kathy Freston

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