Climate Change is Real. So is our Power to Act.

Today we are announcing that I am joining the PLNT Burger team as a founder to help drive PLNT Burger’s expansion and strategy as we roll out to several more locations in the D.C. area this year. I’m delighted that joining me as a founder is a longtime friend and fellow activist, Margarita Herdocia, an entrepreneur who I’ve known and admired for 15 years. I’m also excited to announce the launch of Eat the Change ?, a multi-sector platform to inform and empower consumers to make dietary choices aligned with their concerns around climate and health. Here’s how this all came together.

About three years ago I was on a food panel at George Washington University with Chef Spike Mendelsohn. As I always do with potential customers (Spike’s family runs Good Stuff Eatery and other popular DC restaurants), I brought along some sample Beyond Burgers for Spike to taste. He brought home the burgers and loved them. And equally important, his wife Cody is a vegan, and she really liked them. 

After Spike tried the burgers he reached out and proposed the idea of us collaborating to open a plant-based burger restaurant. I was interested in the idea but because of my (then) operating roles with Honest Tea and Beyond Meat (where there could be potential conflicts of interest), I couldn’t formally get involved. However, I was happy for my wife, Julie Farkas, to take an active role as a co-founder. Julie has always brought such wonderful insights and instincts to my work with Honest Tea and Beyond Meat, so I was glad to cheer her on as she got involved in an enterprise at the ground level.

A few weeks later I had lunch in Bethesda with Spike and one of the other co-founders, Ben Kaplan. After lunch we walked around town and discussed prospective sites. In my 22 years working in downtown Bethesda I’ve seen dozens of restaurants open and close, so I am extremely sensitive to the challenges of launching a restaurant. I said to Spike and Ben, “Guys, PLNT Burger is an exciting concept, but we have no idea if it will work. Rather than take on a long-term lease, and all the expenses related to the build out, why don’t I reach out to the folks who run the Mid-Atlantic region for Whole Foods, and see if they have any space where you might be able to incubate PLNT Burger?” 

As the ideas of PLNT Burger started to come together, Julie and I reached out to our oldest son, Jonah Goldman, who had been providing encouragement and creative ideas around the concept while he was working as a marketer in Israel. Jonah had convinced our family to become vegetarians when he was 13 and spent his career studying and working to repair food systems, so we encouraged him to join the PLNT team as the Director of Strategic Marketing. I also connected the PLNT Team with Mandy Coelho and Taylyn Tatka of T Creating Co. who had created so much of Honest Tea’s excellent graphics over the years. They designed an amazing logo – a colorful yin yang combo burger and planet.

Whole Foods proposed Silver Spring as the first site, and it’s been the perfect proving ground because it’s a very small space (115 sq. ft.) to operate, which requires simplicity and great execution. In addition, Silver Spring is an extremely diverse community economically, culturally and even religiously, so the early success in that location is especially encouraging. I’m also amazed by the menu that Spike and fellow co-Founder, Chef Mike Colletti have designed. Yes, the burgers are delicious, but so are the other innovations, such as the Crispy Chik N’ Funguy, a sandwich made from the fruiting body of an organic oyster mushroom, a part of the mushroom that has traditionally been food waste.

Now that I’m no longer part of the Coca-Cola Company and have shifted my role at Beyond Meat from Executive Chair to Chair of the board, I am able to formalize my role with the PLNT Burger team. But PLNT Burger is just the beginning of something larger, a platform to ignite change in consumers’ eating habits that we are calling Eat the Change ?. When Jonah was working on some of the marketing language for PLNT Burger, he came up with the phrase, “Eat the change you wish to see in the world,” a play on the quote attributed to Gandhi (though apparently Gandhi didn’t say those exact words). I realized that Eat the Change? on its own was a powerful call to action and a powerful brand name, so we filed the trademark and secured www.eatthechange.com and www.eatthechange.org

We intend for Eat the Change ? to become a platform to inform and empower consumers to make dietary choices aligned with their concerns around climate and health. The climate crisis has broken through to peoples’ consciousness – it is no longer a problem we will have to worry about ten years from now, or when our kids grow up. So this is more than “good business”, it is urgently needed business. 

The American Psychological Association has diagnosed something called “EcoAnxiety”. The best way to help someone cope with an anxiety is to 1) help them understand the issue and then 2) empower them with the tools to address that anxiety. PLNT Burger is the first for-profit venture under the Eat the Change umbrella, but I expect there will be others. But in order to create the change we need, Eat the Change ? needs to be about more than just selling stuff. It needs to be part of a movement to transform our diets. And in order for that to happen, we need partners from all sectors. That’s why Julie and I also intend to launch a non-profit grants program, ETC Impact, which will donate $1 million (in total) over the next three years to support non-profits that work to raise awareness and encourage people to embrace more climate-friendly diets. We expect to launch the ETC Impact (the grants program) this April.

All three entities, PLNT Burger, ETC Impact and Eat the Change are being run out of the same Bethesda, MD office that used to be Honest Tea‘s headquarters. And I’m very fortunate that my wonderful assistant Courtney Richardson is still working with me. It’s also worth noting that my commute and (bike) parking space remain the same!

I love working in the food space for so many reasons. First, I get the chance to help people lead healthier lives. Second, the way we eat is the single largest daily interaction we have with this planet, so when we can help democratize organic or plant-based foods, we can have a huge impact. Third, we have the chance to create economic opportunities for farmers around the world to shift to more sustainable crops. On top of that, there is the creative and fun challenge of building brands. Brands are crucial in the food industry because we are asking people to put our offerings into their bodies – an incredibly intimate relationship. It’s critical to create something that is authentic, transparent and can be trusted – what better way to combine growth with purpose and impact?