233 | Women and the Future of Food with Jennifer Stojkovic
Our guest this week on the pod is Jennifer Stojkovic. Jennifer is a multi-talented executive leader in the future of food and tech innovation space. In early 2020, she founded the Vegan Women Summit, a global events and medial organization created to empower women to build a kinder, more sustainable world.
Resources mentioned in this episode are:
Women and the Future of Food: Interview with Jennifer Stojkovic of Vegan World Summit
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Paul Zelizer, Jennifer Stojkovic
Paul Zelizer 00:02
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode I do a deep dive in with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many. Before I introduce today's guest on our topic, I have one request. If you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app you're listening to the show on, do a rating and review, it helps tremendously. Thanks so much for considering. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Jenny Stojkovic. And our topic is Women and the Future of Food. Jenny as the multitalented executive leader in the future of food and tech innovation space. In early 2020, she founded the Vegan Women Summit, a global events and media organization created to empower women to build a kinder, more sustainable world. Jenny, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Stojkovic 01:03
Thanks so much for having me excited to kick off the week on here. How are you, Paul?
Paul Zelizer 01:08
I'm doing great. It's beautiful here in Albuquerque. And it's a little weird how warm it is. But it sure makes it nice to be outside. And I'm grateful for that. How about yourself?
Jennifer Stojkovic 01:18
Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful day in California per usual, California winter is much different than where I grew up in Canada, so I'm not complaining.
Paul Zelizer 01:31
Cool. So Jenny, this topic of women and the future of food - we've never done an episode on this. I'm super excited to have you here. And there's so much to talk about it. And we're gonna get there in a second.. Before we do that. We're called to Awarepreneurs. And one of the ways we like to get to know somebody is to ask you about a wellness or resiliency practice that you personally use to resource yourself for this important but not always easy work.
Jennifer Stojkovic 01:56
So I'm going to probably go with the masses in athletic and physical feats, that has got to be the best way that I ground myself and everything that I do. I think that when you are able to accomplish a sort of physical feat, you are able to build mental fortitude and show yourself that you can do really anything that you set your mind to. So that's probably the way that I ground myself the most appealling.
Paul Zelizer 02:24
Our listeners get really tired of hearing me talk about trail running because it's my favorite.
Jennifer Stojkovic 02:31
Oh, yeah, I probably haven't even got into it. I just hiked Mount Kilimanjaro.
Paul Zelizer 02:38
Wow How cool is that? So this topic of women and the future of food and veganism and compassion. You've been thinking about it a long time, give our listeners a little bit of the origin story of your work. And how did you get into this space?
Jennifer Stojkovic 02:56
Yeah, absolutely. So I have been a vegan myself an ethical vegan for going on seven years, which, you know, honestly, for folks that were vegans back in the day, it is like a whole new day seven years ago, and 2021. It's like a different world out there for us vegans. I went vegan very much for ethical reasons, I experienced a great personal loss and tragedy that happened in my life that caused me to question much of what my impact was on the world and how I saw myself as somebody that was spreading compassion, rather than encouraging suffering in the world. So having that backdrop of personally going vegan, I did not connect it with my career for for quite some time. So for the last seven years, I was a lobbyist in Silicon Valley, a little bit of an A typical story. I built my career working with the world's largest tech companies, everybody from Google, to Facebook to Airbnb, the way that I like to describe it is if you pick up your phone, and they're an app on your phone, they're likely some of the folks that I worked with. And so having built this career in San Francisco, in the tech industry, I really focus a lot of my social impact work in my personal time until about 2018, where I started to see the future of food, food technology in particular gained a lot of momentum in the mainstream conversation. That's when you may remember starting to hear about things like the beyond burger, the Impossible Burger, just egg. These are when you really started to see people starting to consider plant based options as a real food. And so I was very excited about how much attention started to go into the space and I started to see the future of food and food technology as being the next big tech industry. So having done some programming in there, I was able to work on the ground with many of the leading CEOs and the veterans of the space you know, CEOs have just and Memphis meats for folks that aren't familiar, these are multibillion dollar plant based and lab grown meat companies that now exist, some of which will will likely go public next year with valuations anywhere from four to $10 billion. So if you don't know the names yet, you will be knowing them next year. And so having worked with a few of those folks, I was really excited about all the interest going into the industry. But I noticed pretty quickly, there was a very concerning trend. And that was, there was no women around, there was no people of color around. Unfortunately, many of the conversations that were happening in the future of food look very much like all the conversations that I had in the tech industry where, you know, I was the only woman at the table most of the time, I was the youngest at the table most of the time. And I began to be quite concerned that this burgeoning industry that was being built this huge new future that we were building was not diverse, it was not inclusive is not representative of the rest of us, so to speak. And so in the beginning of 2020, I created vegan Women's Summit BWS. For short, we are the only global media and events platform in the entire world that is focused specifically on empowering women to get connected to this work. Our community is it's incredible, we we've got reach across six continents, 10s of 1000s of women professionals all around the world, that are learning about the future of food and beyond and how they can help build a kinder, more sustainable world. So we have conferences, pitch competitions, we do founder support mentoring, we connect founders all across the world with investors so they can grow their their companies. We also, in addition to that are helping fill that talent pipeline. So women get more representation and leadership, more roles in the industry. It's It's really incredible, the momentum we've done in less than two years. But I'll save some of the other details for some of the next questions. That's my very long elevator pitch ball.
Paul Zelizer 07:03
Oh, that's great. And I just want to highlight listeners, if you've been around for a while, you know gender is something we talk about .Seeing very few women leaders, leaders of color founders, like massively disproportionate white older men, and just good work on actually doing something about that. I'm sorry, I believe you. We've heard that in many other spaces, and for many other podcast guests, and I just want to celebrate you for saying, Okay, I'm going to notice it, I am going to have a lot of feelings about it. And I'm going to do something about it. So good work on that. So I want to highlight that you said you launched in early 2020. And here we are, as we're recording this, we're winding down, we're just about to hit December, this will go live early in 2022. In less than two years, you went from idea to a global community of women doing all these amazing things, and we're gonna get into all these things. But anything you can say about what's it been like to go from conception to a worldwide brand in a rapidly growing space?
Jennifer Stojkovic 08:05
It's wild, I've gotten totally wild, you know, there's, there's a lot of winds that have been blowing in our favor, certainly, some of which I, you know, I regrettably have to say COVID has been a big part of it, the pandemic has actually fueled a lot of our growth, so a little bit of a silver lining there. In particular, what's been really cool is that we started with 250 Women in a room in San Francisco, we now have over 30,000 women across six continents. And a lot of it has been our virtual growth, we have been able to really take the pandemic and the fact that so many folks suddenly found themselves at home for very, very extended periods of time and, you know, cross your fingers. By the time this airs, it won't be more extended periods of time in the pandemic. And so we were able to engage audiences all over the world that I think otherwise, pre pandemic we wouldn't have been able to do, I think that the value of virtual content suddenly skyrocketed for a lot of people. And that's the thing that excites me the most about what we're building is, is we actually have assessable content. I've got women that are sitting here in Berkeley that are talking with women in Kenya, or, you know, women in Mumbai or Manila, we have women that join from all over because that that virtual through line creates accessibility in a way that being in person before the pandemic never could.
Paul Zelizer 09:33
So there was this. It was like, open water in the vertical blue water in the startup space. There's like a lot of room to a lot of interest, and you had a lot of favorable factors. How did you decide how to turn this into a business? I mean, there's some really clear intentionality here about being of service but like, we're going to get into the specific offerings, whether it's a summit and the job fairs and the activities you're doing to help women founders get funded, like, just help us form a top level like, what should vegan Women's Summit be as a company? How did you decide that, especially when it was all moving so quickly?
Jennifer Stojkovic 10:14
That's a great question. And that's something that honestly was a little bit of an evolving fluid form for quite some time. So trying to understand who the stakeholders were in the industry, and what need wasn't being served. Right. So we have a number of different stakeholders, we've got the actual women professionals that participate. We also have the companies in the startups that participate. And then of course, we have the investors, the VCs, huge network of them, and each of them had a very different need. And so how could we as a platform, serve them in a way that they weren't being served? Is, is what we're doing the right way to serve them? First off, because there are many things that we tried where we figured out, nope, this doesn't make sense. We're not the best at it. So we shouldn't really be focusing our time on it, we should be focusing on what are the key things that we do best? And how can we deliver the best on them? And so yeah, I think, you know, for us, we just really wanted to figure out who do we want to serve? And what is the need, we can serve with each of them. And those three groups turned out to be kind of our key stakeholders in everything that we do both revenue model and otherwise.
Paul Zelizer 11:26
So baked into your name is probably what you're best known for. Is this summit. Tell us a little bit about that.
Jennifer Stojkovic 11:33
Yeah, absolutely. So we started with vegan Women's Summit was originally one event, actually it before becoming this this platform. And so the first summit that we did, sold out in a week and a half, we had, you know, hundreds of women fly in from all over for a women's empowerment conference that was rather than being focused on, you know, business or, or being focused on wellness, for instance, it was focused on women that wanted to build a kinder, more sustainable world. So women that just for some reason or another had some interest in in the plant based or the animal free space. And so that very first conference was such a huge hit that we were able to continue on creating a massive platform of conferences. So we now actually produce several conferences beyond our flagship, we have created BWS Pathfinder. It's the only women founder summit in the entire world that focuses on all women CEOs and investors in plant based food, fashion and beauty that speak, we've then created a pitch competition. This was a really cool one, because when we started our pitch competition in the plant based space, nobody was doing one to this day, we're one of the only ones in the world, and we focused on women. And what was so exciting for us is we thought, okay, let's do a let's do a global pitch competition. And let's see how many people apply, you know, we're going to get a few 100. Well, since launching it, we've had over 1000 women across 31 countries apply. So it really showed wow, like there's so many more women founders out there, then that I think we had any idea. And until we created an actual platform and an event to bring them all in one spot. Investors were you know, they see a few dozen decks a month if they're lucky. And I had 1000 apply in the last year and a half. So there is clearly a huge demand, but nobody was funneling and creating accessibility for it.
Paul Zelizer 13:30
So how, like, if I'm a listener, I'm like, wow, that's really inspiring. And I want to do that with my impact focus business. Any tips for somebody for really getting momentum? When you see some indicators? There's, there's some interest, but like, again, from zero to 1000 people taking part in a pitch competition in 31 countries. That is amazing. And if I'm a listener, I might want to understand better what happened? And how might I borrow some of what you learned from doing that.
Jennifer Stojkovic 14:04
So one of the number one pieces of advice that I give to folks, especially when it comes to building a founder community is you have to think outside the box in terms of your outreach. So there's a assumption, I think that a lot of people expect the majority of founders to be on, say, a business platform like LinkedIn. Right. And that is where a lot of founders are currently found. That's the business social media network. But it is not the only place where folks congregate. There are so many places where there are thriving founder communities all around us. And if you want to reach people from all backgrounds, which was very important for us, 60% of our community is women of color, for instance, we thought we can't just go the usual traditional routes, we can't just talk to universities. We can't just, you know, look on business platforms. How do we find the founders that nobody's finding, and a huge part of it for us was Instagram, actually, funnily enough, we got very creative with the channels we were using, we tested each of them out. And the ones that really started to perform for us were not expected, we did not expect to find so many folks on Instagram. But it just goes to show that if you want to curate an audience, you need to test out the waters in each of them and see where you're starting to get the best returns, we did not expect the platforms that have grown the biggest for us in terms of our social media to be, you know, Instagram and LinkedIn. We also didn't expect LinkedIn to have a huge women professional community, we didn't expect so many vegans to be on LinkedIn. Turns out there's hundreds of 1000s, maybe millions of them on LinkedIn. So you know, a big lesson that I would say is just test out the different ways that you're, you know, talking to your audience, and listen and go with what is performing the best, not what you expect to perform the best.
Paul Zelizer 15:57
Great suggestion. So you started at the summit. And now you've got, like you said, multiple offerings, let's start to chunk them down so that people can understand what some of those are. So one of the things you're doing is this pitch competition, what is it like you told us okay, 1000 people apply? We got some of the numbers, but like, how does it work? And why is this pitch competition different?
Jennifer Stojkovic 16:22
So a pitch competition for folks that are not in the tech industry. So for those of us that have come from tech, you know, pitch competitions are par for the course, they're a big part of the culture. But if you're not familiar with them, it looks a lot like Shark Tank, or Dragons Den honestly, I it's, it's pretty much you walk up, you pitch your business, you explain what you're trying to do. You can either pitch for equity and investment, where you know, you're saying, hey, I want to raise money from you give me money, or pitch for a prize, ours is a prize competition. And essentially, yeah, that's that's kind of what it is. So we invite women founders from all across the world to pitch their ideas in the plant based and animal free space. What's unique about ours is, first off, it's all women. There's very few women, founder pitch competitions out there, because 97% of all capital investments in the world goes towards male founders, right? So we're talking less than 3% of all investments go towards women founders. So that's already pretty unique. And the other thing that's really unique about ours is it's all animal free innovation. So we've got plant based foods, we've got lab grown meats, we've got beauty, you know, vegan beauty, we've we've got animal free leathers, you name it, it's all related to kind of more sustainable options. Rather than just one industry category. It's more about the ethics around the product. And so it really brings a wide range of different folks out and just really interesting concepts and products altogether.
Paul Zelizer 17:58
And how often is the pitch is that once a year, how often do you do that?
Jennifer Stojkovic 18:02
We do it once a year. Right. And we'll put a link
Paul Zelizer 18:05
to the show notes for anyone who's interested. So in addition to the pitch competition, one of the things you do his job there, tell us about the job fair part of what you're doing.
Jennifer Stojkovic 18:16
So BWS Connect is our job fair, which was a very, this was a very interesting feedback driven offering that we created. We had CEOs from plant based companies reach out to us and say, Hey, I've got a ton of jobs that I need to fill, I want to make sure I'm filling them a with mission driven people. So that means, you know, people that have some connection to the space, maybe they're vegan, maybe they're just environmentalists, maybe they're just someone that wants a social impact career. So first off, finding a qualified audience like that is very hard. Just you know, if you just post a job on Zillow or LinkedIn, you're going to get people from all over just auto clicking and submitting and you have no way of knowing if they even understand your industry. So having qualified audience first and foremost was huge for them. But so many companies also want to make sure that they have diverse recruiting pipeline. So they said, you know, we want more women to be in our roles, we want more women of color in particular to be in our roles and so for us, because we because we had amassed this community, we were the perfect place to launch a job networking fair. So AWS connect we do them every quarter and they are literally a job fair done virtually so you can walk in turn on the platform we have people on the main stage that you can actually go in and watch employer presentations from our employers that are attending and they pitch live just like you would if you're at a job fair in real life walking around going in each room here's beyond beyond talking to you about all they're really cool, you know, products. Here's impossible over here talking about they're really cool job opportunities. We essentially emulate exactly what a job fair feels like, but virtually weigh
Paul Zelizer 20:01
in, you're just talking about, you have created this really diverse community. 60% of the women in the AWS community are women of color. Talk to us. Like, I know a lot of founders are working towards goals like that, how did you do that, and especially so quickly?
Jennifer Stojkovic 20:19
Again, it really comes back to using non traditional channels and pipelines. Right. So, you know, there's, there's a really interesting phenomenon that we've noticed, and we backed it up with data, we've done the research. So here's a tip for folks. Black founders, and black professionals are more likely to be on Instagram and active on Instagram than they are LinkedIn. This is something that LinkedIn dealt with for a very long time, because it started off as a very college and university focused platform. I, you know, I didn't go to a prestigious university myself, I'm a first time college grad. So I actually didn't even use the platform until a few years ago, myself. And so it is predominantly a very white male audience that they're now trying to extend and it's diversify quite a bit, but it was traditionally that type of community. And so we thought, okay, we know that there are women that care about this subject from all around the world, women of all backgrounds, of all races of, you know, all walks of life. But why is it that we're, you know, only tapping into one of those communities. And so, by harnessing different platforms, all across the different channels that are available, we've been able to grow very interesting and unique. Following, we also make sure that when we have speakers, we do lots of events, we make sure that the majority of all of our speakers are women of color, our very first conference was 70% Women of Color speakers. Our last conference Pathfinder was almost 70% Women of Color speakers. So we really spend a long time digging, and trying to find all of those interesting women that are doing work that maybe traditionally aren't getting the same kinds of media coverage, you know, it's one of the problems actually, that we face in this industry is that when LA Times or wired or the guardian does a piece on the plant based space, they often focus on the same few founders that I mentioned earlier of those big companies, you know, so CEO of Impossible Foods, or the CEO of just or the CEO of, of beyond burger, they are cited 1000 times more than many of the smaller founders. And so for us, we go beyond just what is published in the media, and we try to find the folks that are not being put out there, the folks that we know, are growing businesses are engaged in the space and leading in the space that maybe aren't getting that same media platform. And I actually, I'm also a writer for Rolling Stone, a contributor there. And I focus all of my articles on elevating the women that people aren't hearing about, because that is the other piece of this is, you know, there's not enough investment in the space. But there's also not enough media coverage either.
Paul Zelizer 23:03
Such a good tip Jenean, we do the same with this podcast, I work really hard to find guests, if you look back over the years of our episodes, it's a much more diverse group of leaders that we invite on as guests then is oftentimes thought of in the social enterprise, you know, space as a whole. And I just am looking for interesting stories. So I just want to highlight what you said there and can't emphasize enough if you want a diverse community who do put on your stage, whether it's a literal stage, or a virtual stage, or who you invite on your podcast, who you put up as front and what stories you're telling matters tremendously. Thanks for that great tip.
Jennifer Stojkovic 23:45
100% representation is not performative. You know, you get a lot of folks that say, Oh, just putting more, you know, faces up on there is not enough. And obviously, it's only step one. But that step is really, really important because if we want to solve some of these great crises of humanity, the you know, for us the climate crisis is is squarely a focus for for folks that are in the plant based space. If we want to solve that, we need to make sure we're speaking to all audiences because this isn't like a you know, only a few of us can do the work and then it helps move the rest of the planet. We need to all be on board. And so the more the more faces you can show that come from different stories, different walks of life, the more people will be able to connect to it and say this is a place for me I have a place here. Veganism gets a bad bad rap for being a very white dominated industry and day diet for affluent white people kind of that whole foods look and it's not like the vegan space did a very good job until recently dispelling that myth. So that's really important to us because we know that everybody is a part of the solution and everybody's doing amazing work and if we just kind of use the same usual suspects To push our content, we're not opening up to new voices and new perspectives.
Paul Zelizer 25:05
Absolutely. So I just want to pause sort of the how I built this part just for a second, and you're talking earlier on about lab grown meats and and when, before we hit the record button, we were talking to me about, there's the vegan part of your community. And then there's more like the cultured future food part and talk to us a little bit about what is some of that conversation like, I know in our audience, we definitely have people into vegan lifestyle plant based living and did an episode not too long ago from a listener, shout out to add an Tasha up in Canada up in Whistler at ads. Brad, I'm a vegan based bakery. You know, that's one approach. And then there's the what's happening in laboratories all over the world, people culturing food in new ways and talk to us like, how is that conversation in your community going? I know sometimes. That goes really well. Other times people are like, not so sure about what's going on over there in petri dishes around the world. How was that in your community?
Jennifer Stojkovic 26:15
All right, how long we have here.
Paul Zelizer 26:18
A complicated issue. Paul's gonna go there, right? Oh, yeah.
Jennifer Stojkovic 26:22
This is a this is the nugget right? This is where this is where things get a little interesting. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I'm actually, you know, as I mentioned, last time, we spoke I'm completing a book in this space, the first one to actually thread together the future of food between both plant based and sell cultivated, because I see them as complementary industries, not opposing industries. And unfortunately for many folks, they have seen them as opposing industries, from both the plant based side and the non plant based side interestingly enough, so lab grown meat, that's not the the technical term you know, sell cultivated, as Paul mentioned, is what most folks use in the industry. But lab grown is what the the press has picked up. It's essentially growing real meat, or dairy, or eggs or any animal product. Actually, we've got gelatin collagen, others that are coming out through a means in which it is bio identical to real animal products. However, it was not sourced from an animal or it was not sourced from animal slaughter. And it is a very interesting topic, because for many folks, they see lab grown meat as the solution for the planet because the adoption rate of veganism while it is growing quickly, and reduce the terian ism, those are folks that are actively trying to reduce animal products, it's up to 47%. In the UK, the study just came out about a week or two ago. So it's growing very quickly. But again, if we look at how fast the planet is warming, and the fact that 47% of all carbon emissions are derived from animal agriculture, which is much more than transportation, even though transportation is where the majority of the government focuses on for climate change, we need more solutions than just plant based options. So for a lot of people, they see if we can create identical products to the meat and the dairy and the eggs that people know and love, we could get them to adopt a more sustainable, climate friendly option faster, because for many people, they don't really see themselves as adopting a plant based diet. And a lot of people may I have family members, I've very, you know, strong meat eating family members up in Canada, they'll probably never eat a vegan diet. But they would eat a diet that is comprised of ethical meat that could be sourced from cultivated cell based technology. And in the industry, there's a lot of debate whether we should be going forth with the future of food as being led by these cell based products. Or we should be going forth just plant based products, or the way that I see it and the way that we lead with BW s, we should be going forth with all of the products all together because we need all of the solutions to be on the table. And then we can see what works the best. So a lot of people see it as a this or that right? You can either eat plant based or you can eat lab grown meat. But for those of us that have been kind of deep in the industry, the reality is that the future of food will not be this versus that it's going to be in and and so the future products that we'll be consuming on grocery store shelves and 510 1520 years from now will likely contain both types of technology. So rather than you going to the store and picking up you know, here's the thing Only lab grown steak or a solely, you know impossible steak that's made a plant protein, we'll probably see hybrid products together, where they take the best of the various technologies. And there's actually more technologies in addition to this that can do similar work. And they will create a hybrid product that is the best tasting, the most sustainable, the best bang for your buck, you know, get the cost down as low as possible, sell based products are still extremely expensive, whereas plant based are dropping quickly. So maybe we do an 80% plant based product with a little bit of you know, perhaps lab grown fat or something to be inserted into it. But how can we blend all the technologies together to make the most effective, most most delicious and appealing products as quick as possible?
Paul Zelizer 30:49
Is it fair to say, Jenny, as I'm listening to your answer, it sounds like but tell me if I'm wrong. You let your values and the impact you want to have in terms of okay, like we're in a climate crisis, that's not my opinion. That's the IPCC, the world's smartest climate folks saying we are in a code red situation a couple months back. So it's not my opinion, that's really smart people. And he's that, alright, I understand there's this, you know, tension between these two schools. But when I were when we look as a community, what's best for our impact goals? It's best to include both of these movements and not pick one or the other. Is that fair to say?
Jennifer Stojkovic 31:29
Absolutely. And and I don't see them as separate movements for us, from my viewpoint, as an investor and advisor, somebody in the space, I look at the impact of of these products, not as you know, what is the individual category, but I look at it as we have reached biological limitations to what can be done with an animal. Ethically, I oppose it, but maybe you don't. There's lots of people out there that say, I think it's okay to use an animal in this way. The climate says it's not. So we know that we've reached the limitations of traditionally sourced factory farmed meat, we need to think, what are the ways that we replaced that as fast as possible? And how can we adopt from technology a technology B technology C to get there, because if we kind of continue in this siloed conversation, we're holding ourselves back from potential solutions that we need to implement yesterday, we don't, we don't have five years of him and in hiring on this, we need to implement go to market and get these products on people's in people's fridges tomorrow. So that's that's why it's very important to me that this is a conversation that includes all folks, and they understand that these are all sustainable solutions. One thing that I like to, to clarify to folks is that people say, vegan means no animal products, and therefore lab grown products can't be vegan. But we need to understand that the term vegan was coined almost 100 years ago, when they were trying to say, we do not want to exploit or hurt animals in any way. And therefore we do not eat animal products, the concept of an animal product existing without its exploitation, or slaughter, was not within those parameters. 100 years ago, we're on a new frontier of food and a new paradigm that has now shifted to a reality where you can have meat products that do not include exploitation and slaughter. And so in my opinion, from a symbolical, philosophical perspective, that should thus be included as a vegan product.
Paul Zelizer 33:33
Wonderful. So let's do this. In a moment, I want to come back, you have a book coming out, I want to hear how BWS works as an enterprise. That's one of the reason our listeners Listen, before we get into all that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Do you have a business that's about making the world a better place, and you want it to grow both in terms of your impact, helping more people and your income? If so, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about research. One of the things that scientists talk about when we're as humans trying to make changes, like grow an area of our life, the single biggest predictor about whether we're going to be effective or not something that scientists call social support. That's true, whether we want to get fitter. We want to stop smoking, or we want to grow a business. There's tremendous amount of research and all of those to me, when you're trying to grow your business. One of the things that helps is a community of people that are on a similar kind of journey. Think about the way a 12 step program works. When it's a high day and things are going really well high five and celebrate your wins. When things are hard. You didn't get that client or it was a rough week, a place to go where you can say this has been a hard week, where printers has a community of hundreds of impact oriented business owners who are very generous and will be in that kind of relationship with you. It's called the AWARE printers community and whether you need a lawyer For a logo, trying to figure out what email system to use, we need somebody to build you a website that understands these kinds of businesses. We got your back, you can go find out more at aware printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the world printers community who sponsors this podcast. So Jenny, let's talk about the book you're writing. That's exciting.
Jennifer Stojkovic 35:22
Yeah, absolutely. So the book that I am, we're just actually turning a manuscript in so it's going to be published in the spring is called The Future of Food is female. And it is the first ever industry look at exactly what we have been talking about the women that are powering the change that we are seeing in the food system from both innovation and beyond. For many of the women that we chronicle and spotlighted in our work, it is the first time they've ever been featured, despite the fact that these are like just absolutely mind blowing CEOs all around the world. We also even have celebrities, investors, we've even got a member of the European Parliament that has been a part of the future of food, his female project. And it's all about highlighting how women from all across the world from all backgrounds are able to build the kinds of world changing innovation that we need to change the food system.
Paul Zelizer 36:15
How exciting when do you think that'll come out?
Jennifer Stojkovic 36:18
We're looking at April of 2022. So you know, we're working on a tight tight timeline right now. But we're very, very excited about the project. And we're excited to put it out into the world we have the types of, of content that is in this book. As I as I mentioned earlier, it's the first time we've threaded together the plant based and the food tech space. In particular, we even have data and AI CEOs that are changing the food system from a literally like artificial intelligence perspective. It's all of the incredible stuff that's going on out there that perhaps we don't all hear about all the time, and how it's going to radically change and hopefully save the planet.
Paul Zelizer 37:01
That's exciting. So help us understand one of the reasons listeners listen to this show. 10 years, they won't understand how something works as an enterprise. So there's lots of great information, all the links to everything Danny just talked about will be in the show notes go take part in the summit. So the big picture of what BWS is doing alright, or listen, Obama listener like, Alright, I got it. I got I got a good sense, and I know where to go to go find more. One of the things that isn't always public information, because we're not usually on this podcast, publicly traded companies how something works as an enterprise. So give us an example of like, how your revenue streams work, like is the summit, mostly where revenues coming from? Are your pitch competitions, like how does it work as an enterprise?
Jennifer Stojkovic 37:50
Yeah, absolutely. So of course, our flagship Summit is where about 50% of our revenue comes from throughout the year. But we also through various different brand partnerships, different types of sponsorships put on smaller events throughout the year, we also do really cool campaigns with big partners around the world, and really just ways that we can capitalize on this very engaged, very mission driven community that we have, and who are the folks that want access to them?
Paul Zelizer 38:21
So talk to us a little bit like, what does your team look like? When you started? It was just you are you mostly BW s in terms of who's actually running it has the team grown any.
Jennifer Stojkovic 38:32
So there's about four of us that are that are running AWS, we all wear different hats. The main, you know, the main focus that we obviously do is, is programming content production. So we kind of ramp up and ramp down depending on what time of the year it is, obviously, now that we're going into the the summit, we've got the summit in four months from now, we'll be bringing on a few folks that will temporarily work on the project as well, in addition to our core team,
Paul Zelizer 39:00
anything you can, you know, share with our listeners, again, you've grown from 250 people to 30,000 plus around the world, anything you can share about how you that different, where you're going to invest your time, and what the ROI of taking on a project is, when you're also trying to balance impact. That's something a lot of our founders are asking themselves.
Jennifer Stojkovic 39:25
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually, interestingly enough, one of the very first things that we had to deal with was, you know, are you going to work with exclusively plant based companies? Sounds like a, you know, sounds like a simple question. But it's it's really not from a, you know, philosophical perspective of who we want to be as an organization. We had to make the decision very early on, you know, are you going to have a very, very tough litmus test of which brands and which speakers and which people you're elevating? Or are you going to take a different approach? Do it. So for us, we are very much in the mindset of supporting folks that are building animal free products, supporting companies so they can transition to more animal free products. And so because of the fact that we focus on all different vegan lines, all different folks that are getting into the vegan space, we actually brought in our, our group of investors and sponsors quite a bit because of that, I think that it's really important that you understand that if we want to build a full market category, you're gonna have to at some point or another work with folks that are not in your market category if you want them to expand to it. So that's definitely one of the ways that we had to make a judgment call early on. I had people asking me at the very beginning, every time we had different speakers and CEOs on Oh, are they vegan? Are they vegan? And eventually I just said, I have no way of knowing if they're vegan, but I can tell you that they have a vegan company like I'm here based on impact, not you know, who what are the personal attributes of that person, I'm not the police of people's diets. And so because we take a more holistic perspective of building plant based innovation, we've been able to have a lot more sponsors and folks support our work that I think we would have if we had stayed more siloed. Same with the lab grown meat conversation to
Paul Zelizer 41:18
Yeah, I can imagine that that conversation in this space is a lot of other. Yeah, a lot of companies might have made a different decision. And I imagine that that has had an attraction factor A bringing people in, and I imagine some people are like, well forget it. I'm going to go over here where I know in this company, when they put somebody on stage, they're 100% vegan, and I honor you for I can imagine, you know, the dialogue that that choice created, let's just say that,
Jennifer Stojkovic 41:50
Oh, 100%. It was. It was a judgment call, like I said that we made early on because from a practical perspective, you can't police people say it's someone can say that they do X and do Y right. So you can't actually police that. But the second thing is, if you want to expand, so more people care about the mission driven work you're doing, you need to let them pull a chair up if they want one. Like that's just bottom line, if somebody wants to help me, and making the world a little bit kinder, and more sustainable, come on board, I am all yours.
Paul Zelizer 42:24
And I really appreciate that as somebody, I'm mostly vegetarian, I want to be vegan ethically, and my body doesn't do well. 100% vegan, I'm a trail runner and a fitness guy. And I just don't do well under high output. If I am not living that lifestyle, I can eat anything I want. But but with the output of my body, it just like it, this is just what I found over, almost going to be 54. And I started in high school athletics, as in junior high, like, in a lot of years, for decades of experimentation, this body needs a little bit or at least does better with a little bit of cheese and a little bit of animal products. And I wish that wasn't the case. But 40 years of research tells you know, aside, I just want to say that all out. I appreciate the decision. And I know enough about the conversation. I can only imagine what some of the tone or the heat of some of the conversations have there around that decision. So I just honor you for being inclusive in that way.
Jennifer Stojkovic 43:23
Yeah, absolutely. In our in terms of some of our programming participation, it's upwards of 40% non vegan at this point. And that is by intention, I am i We are creating a space that is accessing more individuals than traditionally something that would be animal oriented. We're also creating a through way of women, right, so many women come to our content, ignoring the Wii entirely. They came for they came for the fact that they're empowered that other women, particularly other women that look like them are doing something cool and impactful.
Paul Zelizer 43:56
So talk to us a little bit, one of the things that you're doing both formally and informally is helping women founders access capital to grow their business, which I just again, just celebrate you hands up in the air. Great job. Thank you for doing that. Talk to us a little bit about how you're doing that. And what are you seeing? Are you seeing any changes? It's historically, like you said been incredibly low particular, for women of color founders. Is that changing at all? Are you seeing through some of the conversations you're having that you're able to help them in particularly women of color, who struggled so much to get access to capital?
Jennifer Stojkovic 44:34
So to answer the second question, is it changing? The unfortunate news that I have for everybody that I'm sure folks have seen is that last year in 2020, investments in women declined. It was the first time in many years that it actually went down, which is just really shocking, because there was a record year of investments all together in 2020. And unfortunately, the dialogue was generally that you need to make safer bets. It's a pandemic, and people saw male founders as a safer bet. So, we are trending downwards, we are hopeful that we can start to turn that around in particular with what we are doing with BWS. We connect women through both our pitch competition as well as through elevating at our conferences with not just investors, right, when you say access to capital, there's there's a lot of ways that you can start getting you know, access to grow your company, we also have helped women run successful crowdfunding campaigns, we have connected them with some of the key business contacts to drive revenue, we actually launched or we will be launching a little bit a little bit later this year, which will be announced by the time this airs, but we're launching the first ever copper branch, which is the world's largest plant based restaurant chain, they have over 50 locations all around the world. We're launching their first menu item that we created as a collaboration between VW s and copper branch to elevate a woman founder. And so we actually did a North America wide search for women founders to win a contract a food service contract with a major brand. And we awarded them through the campaign, a contract, right? That's the kind of out of the box thinking that we're trying to think about how we can help these women grow their companies beyond just introductions to investors. But how do we help the women that have already raised a couple rounds, and they've just kind of hit a wall, that's another really big problem is getting women to Series B and beyond many, many women founders just completely stalled before the 10 million in revenue mark, and we can just never get them beyond that. So thinking about women at all stages of their business and how we can support and elevate them, not just the early stage. And also thinking about non traditional ways to access capital, such as crowdfunding is huge. That's also something that's gaining a lot of momentum, particularly with things like Republic now being available, they change the laws around, you know, who's a qualified investor in both the US and beyond. And so there's a lot of ways that you can raise pretty significant amounts of money, like, you know, half a million few million bucks without going to a VC. So the
Paul Zelizer 47:13
space has been changing really quickly, Jenny, when you look at you've been on the front of it for a while now the bleeding edge, what do you see happening around women in the future of food? What are some of the trends you're tracking? Well,
Jennifer Stojkovic 47:27
there's a lot, a lot of cool innovation that's happening right now in terms of new industry categories, or categories that have been traditionally underserved, you're going to see a lot of new products that are going to hit the market in the next six to 12 months, particularly, particularly in the US and in the UK. Those are two of those, those markets. Unfortunately, if you folks are tuning in from Canada, or you know, one of the other places in the world that is kind of leading and founders, the US and the UK is turning out an unprecedented amount of founders, Sweden's doing really well to India is actually doing pretty well as well. So there's a lot of new products coming, you're also going to see a lot more animal free textiles and materials. Many of the technologies that have been used for the future of food, have a really novel way to be repurposed for leather and other things, right. Because if you can grow meat, theoretically, you can grow materials that would have been sourced from those animals too. So I know of actually a couple of food companies that will be pivoting and launching materials in the next six to 12 months as well.
Paul Zelizer 48:31
And I could hang out and talk to you all day and your busy moment. And our audience is busy as well. If there was something you were hoping we were going to get to today, as we start to wind up and we haven't gotten to yet, or there's something you want to leave our listeners with, besides listeners, go follow him on Instagram go take part in the summit by the book when it comes out. All the links will be in the show notes. So all that in addition, any of that, what do you want to leave our listeners with?
Jennifer Stojkovic 48:58
I think that anybody that can see what is you know, going on right now with the planet. I think all of us can agree we want to be a part of change. And the single most impactful thing you can do is change your diet. You don't have to ascribe to any sort of label you don't have to make any giant change overnight but just start thinking and considering the various decisions choices and product products that you buy every single day and find one that's a little bit kinder and more sustainable each time and before you know it you're making a very big difference. So don't wait don't hesitate. You can start today start small and it will get very big
Paul Zelizer 49:39
teddy thanks for the important work you do and thanks for sharing with us about how you do
Jennifer Stojkovic 49:44
thank you so much for having me.
Paul Zelizer 49:46
Again, all the show notes all the links will be in the show notes below. Thank you for listening before you go just want to say we love listener suggested topics and guests. If you have an idea you can go to the wire printers by website, go to our contact page, we have three criteria, we try to be really transparent there right there on the contact page. If you say my ID is a fit, please send it on it. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care and these intense times, and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working poor