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- [00:01]
Dan Barber
LinkedIn news.
- [00:07]
Leah Smart
I've always been curious, always.
- [00:09]
Dan Barber
Looking for patterns in society, how people navigate and find their way. You always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue.
- [00:17]
Lars Schmidt
It's never a straight line.
- [00:19]
Tomer Cohen
I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief product officer of LinkedIn and this is building one.
- [00:26]
Dan Barber
So what Michael was saying to me in that moment was I could do a lot better than heirlooms, actually. I'm a modern breeder. I can do something very, very unique and delicious and nutrient dense and I can make the farmer quite profitable per acre. In doing that, I just need to be asked.
- [00:43]
Tomer Cohen
That's Dan Barber, the Michelin starred chef behind Blue Hill at Stone Bart's. And he's telling me about the conversation that set him on the path to build his own organic seed company. We're going to get into that and so much more. So stick around.
- [01:00]
Leah Smart
From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award winning podcast dedicated to personal development. Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in your work and personal life. Listen to Everyday better on the LinkedIn podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:20]
Tomer Cohen
Although my own career has taken me far away from the worlds of farming and gastronomy, I've always held a deep admiration for those who thrive in those skills. My grandfather was a farmer and some of my clearest childhood memories are of us walking the fields together, tasting oranges fresh from the trees. Those flavors surpass anything you can buy in a store. Years later, I worked as help in a high end restaurant to save money for college. The intensity of the kitchen was like nothing I have seen before. And it made me wonder how chefs manage such a relentless pace daily. Clearly, a profound passion for your craft is essential to excel in such professions. That's why I'm excited to introduce my guest today, the Michelin starred Chef Dan Barber. In this episode, we're doing something a little bit different. I usually interview my guests to find out the lessons they've already learned building their distinctly successful products. Dan is already a very accomplished and recognized chef and a pioneer in his field. But instead of interviewing him about the many things he's already accomplished, we're taking a different approach. You see, Dan is in the midst of building something new. He started Row 7 seeds, an organic seed company that seeks to forge a new path by aligning plant breeding not just with the needs of farmers, but also with the needs of a particular end user chefs. If you've heard of farm to table.
- [02:45]
Michael Mazurek
Think of this Instead, as seed to table.
- [02:49]
Tomer Cohen
When I spoke with Dan, he was at his restaurant in the middle of a 300 acre sustainable farm, Blue Hill at Stone Barns. In this episode, we get into all sorts of interesting details about food systems. Dan will tell us why, in his pursuit of democratizing flavor, he's moving away from the old historic varieties of vegetables, often called heirloom varieties, that he used to promote, how modern plant breeding can achieve with precision what used to take generations of stabbing in the dark, how he's seeking to harness culture in order to build a market for his product, the role AI can play in advancing organic seed breeding, and how an early failure fueled his relentless pursuit of growth and learning. Let's get into it.
- [03:36]
Michael Mazurek
So builders and entrepreneurs we talk to, they have very unique journeys, and most of the time their paths are very idiosyncratic. Yours is an extremely unique one. Even within our group and even within kind of the Michelin star chefs group, you stand out. It feels to me like you're at the intersection of cooking, entrepreneurship, farming, plant breeding, engineering.
- [03:57]
Dan Barber
By the way, you just defined the term gastronomy very well. We don't tend to talk about it in our culture that way enough. But gastronomy is all of those things combined.
- [04:08]
Michael Mazurek
Would you add anything else to that?
- [04:09]
Dan Barber
History. Culture. You know, history and culture being one and the same. But in that sense that you bring to food a sense of place and history that is tethered to something much larger than yourself, whether you understand that history specifically or just feel it from your family or friends or your community. Very important in how we enjoy food and sustain ourselves and our environment.
- [04:32]
Michael Mazurek
So when you look back on your journey, I'm curious, how did your career turn out differently than what you expected? I remember seeing a short clip with you working on a farm when you were young. So I don't know, farmer was one of the things you thought you would be when you could grow up.
- [04:46]
Dan Barber
My dad didn't want me to be a farmer. He didn't want me to be a chef either. So to be fair. But I didn't set out to be a chef. I set out to be a writer. I went to bake bread and cook because I was trying to earn money. And I just kept cooking. And I've kept writing too. But yeah, the original plan was not to be a chef of multiple restaurants and as involved in agriculture and now seeds as I am. There was nothing in the plan there. No.
- [05:16]
Michael Mazurek
And even through, like running a company right now. So is this like, you see trends that are super interesting to you and you just go deep on them.
- [05:23]
Dan Barber
Well, I'd like to say I have that kind of insight, but I don't think so. I had a small restaurant in the middle of the West Village and I got lucky with my brother as my business partner and my sister in law as the designer. We hit on something at a moment that was fresh and new. It was food grown locally that was prepared rather simply in a simple environment that was fairly casual. And there was at that Moment, this is 25 years ago, a rather large divide between high end restaurants and what we would say today are fast casual. And there was sort of a bullseye in the middle and I think we hit it. It wasn't so much a conscious plan as I was just wanting to be a little bit more accessible than the places that I had trained at. So I sort of fell into this. This Rockefeller walked through the door. That wasn't part of the plan. He became a business partner. And now I'm sitting in the middle of a 300 acre farm 20 miles from New York City. That's an old Rockefeller estate. And he wanted a restaurant that also partnered with a working farm. And then I became very involved in the farm and that led to the seed company. So as you can see, none of this was plotted out. I think you only see the stuff in reverse, don't you?
- [06:37]
Michael Mazurek
You can see a theme throughout. There's a clear theme of your passion and interest in going deep. Or maybe I'm imagining it.
- [06:44]
Dan Barber
I think that's right. And the seed might be the culmination of that. Although that makes me sound like I'm 90 years old and I'm at the end, you know. But the seed is the, the deepening of the connection to food. You know, my food is just. I have 40 cooks behind me that work 20 hours a day. There's a lot of technique and a lot of precision food. But the plates, I think if you were to look at them, you would say, wow, look, that's very simple. There's most often not more than three ingredients on a plate. I get very itchy when there's like more ingredients or I feel like things are too manipulated. I do not know where that came from. But that fact in some ways is what becomes like the luge to where I am now. Because if you're gonna do that and you are hungry to be successful in the chefing business, you better put something on the plate that makes people say wow, because you're naked. There's not all these sauces and condiments and Garnishes. What's there better be really good, you know, discipline and precision. And the technique has a lot to do with that. Sure, but so is product. Product has tons to do with it. So I became very obsessed with product, and that led me to farms. And I started on a farm. Blue Hill Farm is a farm in western Massachusetts. I had this advantage of having been at least inculcated in that spirit of how nature works. Anyway, so to be successful, I kept digging what farmers actually produce, the thing that makes me look like a better chef. What are the things that I can do research wise and proactively engage with farmers. And once you start doing that, you start learning about rotations on farms, biodiversity on farms, soil types, time of year that things are harvested. It gets dangerous. You keep going, going, going. And then at a certain point, you know, the farms that are particularly great with certain ingredients, certain vegetables, certain tubers, certain animals. And, you know, the farmers who really care about what they're doing are connected to that farm and, and the soil types that are right for the certain vegetables at the right time of year. And you get all that squared away. The next thing is what varieties are the farmers growing in that good soil and doing the management correctly? Because, man, if the genetics aren't there, you could have the best farming techniques and the best soil, but if the genetics aren't there, they're not there to turn on. You don't have them. And that's a lot of the reason that the very best farmers and chefs evangelize over heirloom, over old varieties of vegetables, especially, because that's where the flavors is handed down. An heirloom is something that was handed down through generations, protected because it was so delicious. So I became an evangelist for these old, old seeds. And. And then at a certain point, I recognized the fallacy of that the change happened behind me in the kitchen at midnight. Fifteen years ago, a squash breeder, quite well known at Cornell University for being an up and coming, talented squash breeder.
- [09:42]
Michael Mazurek
This is the honey nut squash.
- [09:43]
Dan Barber
Yeah, this is the guy, Mike Mazurek. He came into the kitchen. I didn't know him. I heard he was down, so he had dinner. And I invite him in the kitchen. And I said, sort of a little bit aggressive. If you're such a great squash breeder, why don't you breed a butternut squash? It actually tastes good. Because butternut squash, you have to add maple syrup and brown sugar and honey to make the thing taste like squash. Like, why don't you create something? And he got Very serious, looked at me and said, the reason I've never created a butternut squash taste good is because nobody's ever asked me to select for flavor. And that, I think I always say it's like a before and after moment, you know, what do you mean? Who are you talking to? Of course he's talking to big industry. And who's driving the bus of the food chain, really? The marketplace. And the marketplace is dominated by few players. Few players are wanting the most efficiency. The most efficiency is to grow a lot of the same thing, a lot of one variety in one place, and it's usually pretty far away. That's the most efficient way to do food. And that's what's happened in the last 50 years. And that's why breeders have been forced to breed, to select, to prioritize that kind of food system. Well, that doesn't lead to deliciousness. And that's why deliciousness wasn't at the forefront of conversations that he was having about breeding. So that's what we started. We started a conversation about flavor, and that led him to work on a squash. That blew my mind, actually. It was better than any heirloom old squash. And the reason I felt so excited about that as a late inning revelation, I didn't really realize it till many years later, was that my evangelizing of heritage and heirlooms is actually quite elitist. Because what you are saying is that we need to go back a hundred years to have something that tastes good or that's nutritious. And the problem with that is those seeds are old and they are not resilient in the field organically, for sure. You know, it rains too much. They actually really don't even germinate. So a farmer's taking on all this risk. The yields are low in the field, and what ends up happening, you get charged. You know, heirloom vegetables are expensive. They're expensive because you're paying for that risk for the farmer and that low yield. So what Michael was saying to me in that moment was I could do a lot better than heirlooms, actually. I'm a modern breeder. I can do something very, very unique and delicious and nutrient dense, and I can make the farmer quite profitable per acre in doing that. I just need to be asked. So we started a company called Row7 many years later. But that was the proof of concept, because if a butternut squash is this, we introduced squash that was about less than half the size, and essentially it was throwing water away because, you know, we. We breathe vegetables for water, because water is weight, and that's where everyone makes their money, on selling weight. So it ended up being the most delicious squash. And it was proof to me that there's a possibility to take the things that are trapped in the four walls of this kind of restaurant and democratize it, get it out, and not have it be elitist and expensive, actually, but very delicious and very nutritious for a very large audience. So that's what we ended up doing.
- [12:40]
Michael Mazurek
Yeah, Dan, you touched on so many great concepts there. And I think for most of our audience, they're familiar with the concept of farm to table. It became obviously trendy several years ago. You've pushed it to the seat to table, actually, for folks that's familiar.
- [12:53]
Tomer Cohen
What is a plant breeder?
- [12:54]
Michael Mazurek
Like, what is, for you, a plant breeder? How do you think of this?
- [12:56]
Dan Barber
A plant breeder is a breeder that creates new varieties of vegetables, grains, tubers. It's any variety. It's any scientist, breeder, or farmer who is selecting a plant for particular traits and then continuing to select for those traits and creating a new variety. You can do that today very quickly and very cheaply. You can take two parents that you admire a lot. Honey nut squash, the squash you were just talking about. Two parents came together, you have them procreate, and their offspring, if you select correctly, takes on the traits of both parents that you most desire. Michael once told me the best way to think about sea breeding is you're driving down a super highway as a breeder, and at some point in your journey, you have to take the exit. You know, there's a lot of beautiful exits to your left and to your right. The highway is nice and large and expansive. But at some point, you're going to put your clicker on and you're going to commit to a destination. And the destination is the key. Because if flavor is the destination, well, then that's where you veer off. Now, when you get off that path and you're on the side road, there are tributary side roads to go on flavor. There's also nutrition and disease resistance. You go a little bit slower, but you get there. But the main thing is what's your priority? And that's why when we talk to the top of our hour, talking about what's the definitive gastronomy, I added culture because culture drives that selection. You know, that's distinction. Food distinction is what drives culture, not the other way around. So as we think about what kind of food we want for our children and our future, the cultural imprint and our regional environment, culture, very important for how we think about creating the right exit to take.
- [14:46]
Michael Mazurek
That's wonderful, Dan. When you think about design principles, I don't know if you talk in this way, whether it's in your kitchen or with the product itself or 107 seeds, which is the company you created with Michael. One of the things I saw you talking about was the idea of prevention versus intervention. And just curious to see how does it work in practice. You mentioned, you know, Michael could spend all of his work, I'm assuming, just on durable ways of adding chemicals in. That's not what he's doing for you. It's prevention. So what are interventions in conventional farming, and why are you focusing on prevention? I think for folks who are less familiar with the field will help kind of distinguish between what you're doing and others are doing as well.
- [15:26]
Dan Barber
Well, I'm driven by flavor because I'm wearing this white coat. If I was wearing the other white coat, I'd probably say I'm driven by nutrition. But our interests are the same, and that is that we want a plant that's strong in the field. If it's squash or tomato or you name it, you as an eater and me as a chef and the other person as a doctor, we all agree that we need and want a strong plant. Why do you want a strong plant? Because the minute you don't have a strong plant, you need an intervention. You need a pesticide because pests will attack your plant. You need a fungicide because you've got fungal disease problems. You need some type of fertilizer because the plant is not able to extract the fertility it needs to grow strong. And a host of other interventions. Those chemical interventions will make your plant grow. But it's a little bit like steroids. It props up your plant. Actually, they grow quite well in terms of weight. Again, we're back to weight.
- [16:27]
Michael Mazurek
This is the water point, right?
- [16:28]
Dan Barber
Well, it's the water point, but it's also the point just structure, that you're getting bigger. You can take on more water fast, and you can then therefore profit quite well. So chemicals is a huge part of our food system. And my interest, going back to the beginning of this answer was flavor. Well, flavor and chemicals, they don't work together. It's not because you taste the chemicals, although I would argue you kind of do. What happens with chemicals is that the plant doesn't develop the root system and the phytochemicals that are possible to develop in a plant to defend itself. When you taste something Truly distinctively delicious. It is the plant telling you that it was strong in the field, it protected itself, and you are now the beneficiary of that hard work. If the plant has been coddled, you will then taste something that is less interesting, less distinctive, and less memorable. So we could change this argument, as I said, to just simply nutrition. Nutrition comes from flavonoids, this flavor, same thing. So a plant that's strong develops a complex array of flavonoids, in part to create strength, to battle with all the things that nature throws at that plant. So it becomes very philosophical. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of food you want to eat? And the problem today is that our food system, seeds are owned by four companies, almost 70%. Somewhere between 60 and 70% of our seed supply, which is our food supply, is owned by four companies. And all four of them are chemical companies. They're not seed companies, they're chemical companies.
- [18:11]
Michael Mazurek
So the business model is not selling seeds, it's selling chemicals.
- [18:14]
Dan Barber
It's the same as Jeff Bezos got an Amazon. What did he start with? Books. I wasn't where he wanted that. He got into people's homes, you know, and this is what chemical companies do. They saw opportunity because, see companies, and I know because I own one, they don't make money. Seed is just cheap. And the way to make money is the intervention. It's the chemical. So chemical companies don't mind that seeds lose money, because if you buy their seed, you are wrapped into a whole chemical environment. That is our food system. That is it. And this is a problem on a lot of levels. An environmental level, ethical level, but on a flavor level. I mean, flavor's under siege. And to liberate ourselves from that is a part of the job. I think of chefs or anyone who cares about food.
- [19:06]
Michael Mazurek
So what is economic viability in this business? Right? Like, it sounds like you're doing exactly the right thing, but how does it make money? How does it scale? Is this like a partnership ecosystem? Are you waiting for economies of scale to play into it, that folks will say, this is the right thing, so we're going to circumvent profits to do this. That's not gonna work, right? There's something else that you're planning on.
- [19:27]
Dan Barber
Here's what I know. What I know is four companies controlling our food supply is not gonna last. I mean, there's. Once people wake up to it, and we continue to drive to lowest common denominator, which is food that lacks flavor and lacks nutrition and is Hurting our environment and hurting our health, that won't last. I don't know how long that's gonna be. But I think the tide's turning now. So that's number one. I want to be in the game when that recognition happens. And I want to have lots of bankable seeds with huge nutrition and huge flavor. So the investing community that I have, that I'm lucky, blessed to have, is thinking about that in long term investment, not in a short term, because that inevitability is there. So there's that. And now the idea is, well, how do you scale this? You know, I'm looking at scale in a bit of a different way from how the food system, I think, is looking at it. Do we think about scale as one variety of one thing that's going to blanket North America and then the rest of the world? Well, that's the playbook of the seed companies. That's how we got into this mess. You know, we're breeding carrots that are supposed to be grown in New York, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Oregon, Southern California, Canada, Mexico, China. It's like, well, what fucking carrot are you going to create that's going to be delicious, that can deal with all those climates? You don't. So thinking about this in a regional context, I think is one thing that we're gonna have. You know, we cannot think about one size fits all. So I'm hoping that when that happens, we're ahead of the curve.
- [20:56]
Michael Mazurek
It also runs counter to your cultural point from before around, where it's diverse and it's different and it's distinct to go there.
- [21:03]
Dan Barber
And that's at the bedrock of this, the food system that we have now is erasing cultural distinction, Just erasing it. Food is a big part of identity, cultural identity. That's. That also won't stay. That won't stand. So for now, for the moment, the plan first of all is to capture revenue that was being lost in the first couple years of the seed companies. We started seed companies, just seeds, you buy seeds. So people got very excited about some of these. Honey nut, as an example. It's not our seed actually, but got seeds like that, very exciting, because flavor is always exciting. The problem is distributors, the processors, the supermarkets, they all were growing it and then selling it. Not on the row seven name the seed company name, just on their own name. So who's capturing the profit? Right, those companies, you know, so I. So I was like, well, hold on a second, that does not work. So we started a produce company and now we're in Both coasts, East coast and west coast, as of next month, in partnership with Whole Foods. And we have our name on it, so we're capturing some lost revenue that way, which is very exciting. Very exciting. Produce now is available on the west coast starting in late June. We have 20 farms growing in California.
- [22:13]
Michael Mazurek
So do you need proximity of like, what is it like a day shipping to get that done or.
- [22:18]
Dan Barber
Well, we have doubled down on this regional food system here so that we're supplying all the whole foods. There's 340 stores, and all of them are being supplied by a regional farm. But it's how it used to be. I don't know that shipping food all over the place is a very good idea. But the other thing is, just from a practical standpoint, we're investing all this money in the genetics, you know, for things that taste good. And if you don't have the right environment for those genetics to become expressed, they really don't become expressed. So a lot of the reason that vegetables taste very dumbed down today versus, you know, what your grandparents were eating has to do with growing long distance, for sure, but also has to do with catering to long distance, with genetics. And when you try for those, you select against flavor just by definition. So that's partly why we're reversing not just the idea around seed breeding, but also around how our food system works. And because I think we've got the genetics that are extremely interesting. I really do. We're looking to go into product, into food product. That's the first seed to table food product company, actually. And then the next challenge is how do you take those genetics that you have activated and get them shelf stable. Not through sugar, salt and fat, because that's what everyone does. So that's what I've been working on. And that's the next phase of this.
- [23:46]
Michael Mazurek
Yeah, it's like a farm to table food product you bring to people's homes.
- [23:51]
Dan Barber
Seed to table food product seed. The nutrition has got to start at seed. It doesn't matter how great the farm is. I can say that over and over. If the seed isn't locked and loaded with the nutrition that we need and the flavor that we need, we are hampering our ability to really enjoy a future of democratized and delicious food.
- [24:11]
Michael Mazurek
And then for folks who are listening to this, you mentioned the word genetics a few times. And this is not genetic engineering. This is not gmo. This is not what people think about. When you go and you modify the organism, you're taking things which are already in Nature and you bring them together. But this is not GMO food. It's actually almost like the opposite. You're taking things that could happen. You're actually, you're almost creating serendipity. I don't know if that's the right way to describe it.
- [24:38]
Dan Barber
I think it's great. You're forcing serendipity. How about that?
- [24:41]
Tomer Cohen
Exactly.
- [24:41]
Dan Barber
You're being a yenta in the best possible way, which is to take two parents that you think, oh, they would, they would work well together and they would make a beautiful offspring child, and you bring them together. Genetic engineering is mislabeled. There's an argument to say what I just said. Bringing two human beings together to create new genetics is. It's engineering genetics. So in that sense, I guess we're genetic engineers. I don't know. The way that really genetic engineering should be labeled is transgenic. Transgenic is very different. Transgenic is you take a foreign genetic trait, a gene, and you force it into the parent lines because you want that gene to be in the offspring. And that foreign gene would not happen in nature. That does not happen in nature. And why would you put a foreign gene in something? Well, you would put a foreign gene in, let's say, corn, because that allows the corn plant not to die when it's sprayed. A chemical. For real. That's what some of the GMO corn is. And that allows you to spray a lot of chemicals on the corn and not have the corn plant die. That is transgenic GMO technology. The chemical companies do very well selling that seed. That's very profitable and it's patented and it's extremely hard to create that. But that's where the whole industry has gone. My issue, though is not really with the ethics of the whole thing, to be honest with you. It's just that GMOs never produce anything delicious to eat.
- [26:16]
Michael Mazurek
Going back to flavor, number one principle.
- [26:19]
Dan Barber
Yeah. Why would we be genuflecking over something that's never produced anything delicious? They make some claims about health. They've tried to change the conversation to bring real intense nutrient density into seeds, but I don't buy it. You know, this souped up yellow rice with huge vitamin A that they've talked about for years as an example of that. But you know, the problem with those technological advances is that they don't work in a biological system. That's probably at the core of all this. You know, I just skewered to what the core is. The core is we think too much in. In technological language. We understand technological language because we admire the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates of the world computers, and we understand that A to B is. It's very exciting. Biology is very complex. It's frustratingly inefficient. And the biological world of planting a genetically modified rice to give you vitamin A so children in India don't go blind is a good idea. But in reality, if you're not having a diet that's, let's say, filled with fat or enough fat, you don't metabolize the vitamins. So what are you doing? Why are you producing that? You know, at billions of dollars and marketing the benefits of genetic modification, this is just so silly. That goes back to the cultural thing again. So I don't like gmo, not because I think the technology is going to kill us or that it's unethical. I don't like it because it doesn't produce anything. It's really delicious. And we have a food system that is allowing our diets and our health to crash and our environments to crash. And if we're going to change that, I believe we have to start with.
- [27:54]
Tomer Cohen
C. We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, Dan breaks down how Rose 7 makes seeds that align everyone along the food chain.
- [28:05]
Dan Barber
And the farmers give us feedback. What was it like growing in the field? How was the yield? How was the disease resistance? Would they want to be growing this again? And we're getting that feedback while simultaneously getting the chef's feedback? How's the flavor? How would I work with this in the kitchen?
- [28:22]
Lars Schmidt
From the minds of visionaries to the desks of disruptors, I'm Lars Schmidt, host of the Redefining Work podcast. Join me each week as we explore the new world of work through the lens of those shaping it. CEOs, HR leaders, investors, and more. Be a part of the conversation that changes everything. Subscribe to Redefining Work today.
- [28:49]
Michael Mazurek
All right, we're back.
- [28:50]
Tomer Cohen
I'm speaking with Dan Barber, the Michelin star chef behind Row 7 seeds, a new kind of organic seed company focusing on seed to table.
- [28:59]
Michael Mazurek
Dan, let's go back to the ecosystem. You run with it because it's super diverse. And again, for folks who are not coming from the field, there is multiple key stakeholders you work with. Actually, you brought chefs into it, but you make seeds and then your seed product needs to work with a pretty amazing kind of food chain supply chain of plant breeders, seed growers, retailers. Whole food is a big partner with your venture. And then you brought in chefs. And then again, goes back to your first number one principle. It's about flavor. This is where I would say your edge is at. Like, your seeds will bring flavor to the table like nobody else's business. How does this food chain work? And what I'm actually most curious about is who do you envision influencing at the end? Like, when we build products, we talk like, what's the target audience? Can you envision the target audience? And I was curious when I was going for this is the target audience. Me as a consumer, when I'm like, wow, you know, that tomato was unbelievable. Like, I need to figure out what it's from. I'm going to buy from this place going forward. Or is it the farmer or is it the retailer? Like, who do you have in mind when you're like, that's the person to convince of my product?
- [30:09]
Dan Barber
The easiest answer is to say everyone. Of course, you always want the biggest target. But no, I don't want you. And I know the farmer will come aboard. You know, the problem with you as the target audience is you pick super sweet corn in a blind tasting and everyone runs towards sugar. That's the problem with you. You know, I'm not looking for the market because the market doesn't exist. I'm looking for, what did Steve Jobs say? People don't know what they want until you give it to them. I want that. The reason chefs are paramount, if I had to choose somebody, it would be chefs. We curate this stuff every day. And we also influence, and I am interested in influencing the culture, Changing the culture from a squash that's filled with 80% water, that's bland, that everybody just knows to add brown sugar to at Thanksgiving to make it taste good, to a squash that you don't have to add anything to make it sing. Or a cob of corn that is sweet, but has many other characteristics involved in including corniness. Like, you taste corn, not sugar. That wakes people up to what's possible. Chefs are a way into changing that culture.
- [31:20]
Michael Mazurek
This is where you see product, market, fit. Chefs saying, this is it. I want Dan's Row 7 seeds on my table.
- [31:27]
Dan Barber
Because we tend to chase things that are very interesting and people tend to be influenced by experts, and in this case, we're experts at flavor.
- [31:37]
Michael Mazurek
So this reminds me of, like, an example. I don't know if it's actually true, but there's that kind of axiom about, like, Nike actually Designs shoes for 17 year olds. And the notion is, like, you convince a 17 year old that those are great Sneakers. And then everybody else falls along because those are the trendsetters.
- [31:52]
Dan Barber
Yeah, that's great. The same with chefs. You're right. We're designing for chefs, but I'm also interested in chefs designing with us because those chefs are our partners. So we don't release anything until we get a broad consensus from chefs. Not just my favorite chefs or chefs that I admire. I want chefs from very different cultures and backgrounds. I want chefs in very different regions, because it goes back to that cultural. First of all, simultaneously testing these potential seed varieties are farmers. So farmers and chefs together. So we never send potential seed varieties to just chefs. We send them to partner farmers with the chefs, and the farmers give us feedback. What was it like growing in the field? How was the yield? How was the disease resistance? Would they want to be growing this again? And we're getting that feedback while simultaneously getting the chef's feedback. How's the flavor? How would I work with this in the kitchen?
- [32:43]
Michael Mazurek
Which to me sounds very complex, by the way, because on one hand, you're getting very scientific, raw, Excel, spreadsheet type of data, and on the opposite side, you're getting somebody's palate.
- [32:52]
Dan Barber
Yes. And we have a team of people who analyze that all the time. It's fascinating. You know, you think, oh, we just. Flavor principle only. It's like, no, it has to work really well for the farmer. If farmers aren't interested or they feel like the yield is not there, that's never going to work. So it's the combination of two. And yes, it's very complex, but I find that very enjoyable. It's really not top down. It's not me saying I like that. You know, it's. It's a community effort that feels very energizing.
- [33:22]
Michael Mazurek
And it's very hard to get consensus. I'm assuming.
- [33:25]
Dan Barber
Yeah, I don't know that we get 100% consensus, but I listen, I'm conservative, man. I am not a bold guy. Everything we release, we know we've got something that is broadly in the chef community accepted and generally in the farming community, because we've done our homework on making sure that these are strong plants, don't need a lot of intervention, don't need a lot of care, and will yield for you. Very important.
- [33:48]
Michael Mazurek
You mentioned in the past the notion of R and D gap, and it's hard to have a conversation about innovation without AI you know, when I look at AI, the idea of optimizing crop management, the idea of actually introducing flavor as an attribute that AI will take into consideration from Taste to drought resistance. Is this something you're thinking about?
- [34:09]
Dan Barber
I just spent an hour and a half with an AI breeder this morning, so I fascinated by it.
- [34:15]
Michael Mazurek
I love the term, by the way. AI breeder.
- [34:17]
Dan Barber
All breeders are looking at AI possibilities and it's so fascinating in its potential. I think, and I'm saying this from a very naive point of view, I think the answer about AI and its effect on breeding in the future could be very positive if it's in the right hands, because it goes back to culture, where we started. What's in the highway? What exit are you trying to get off of? Because you've got to give AI coordinates of where you're going when you do that, and you do it in the spirit of flavor and nutrition, you could use AI to great effect. Speed is just amazing. Our grandparents stabbed in the dark. Today we have genetic markers and we have technology that allows us to be very specific, allows breeders to be very specific in their work. AI is the next generation of that specificity and that efficiency and that speed. That feels to me very exciting. Technology in that realm doesn't scare me.
- [35:17]
Michael Mazurek
It's beautiful because I think when you think about AI, AI is not good or bad. The outcome is by the humans.
- [35:23]
Dan Barber
That's right.
- [35:24]
Michael Mazurek
That's right.
- [35:25]
Tomer Cohen
I would love to end with a.
- [35:26]
Michael Mazurek
Quick kind of rapid fire round. And this is more integrated to how you kind of intuitively think. But when you think about the field of sustainable agriculture, what did you think was not possible and then discovered it was?
- [35:39]
Dan Barber
I didn't think it was possible to get the kinds of flavors that we're seeing from our work, democratized, scaled. I thought there was a choice flavor and deep nutrition and a farm to table chef asking $300 for the meal. Flavor, nutrition and yield are at opposites. And that is a false divide that is just wrong. A plant can give a heck of a lot of nutrition per acre. We just need to breed for it. And we've spent the last 40 years thinking that that is an elitist pursuit. It's absolutely bonkers. And it's fed into why our food system is in such trouble or it's wreaked such havoc is because of that divide.
- [36:24]
Michael Mazurek
Dan, on the flip side, what is not possible today, but you would love for that to be possible.
- [36:29]
Dan Barber
Well, what I find not possible today, and that doesn't mean in the future, what I find not possible today is the idea that I used to talk a lot about. Michael Pollan, a great food writer and also evangelist for Good Food, talked about which Is that with the farm to table model, with the closeness to farmers, you vote with your fork three times a day and that you can change the food system. It was very empowering. And 20 years ago when we opened this Stone Barns center for food and agriculture in Blue Hill together, we were capturing a zeitgeist. At the moment, the most exciting social movement in America was that there was a movement that we're not going back to the kind of food that I grew up with in the 70s. Right. And the truth is the last 20 years, big food has only gotten bigger and environmental degradation has only gotten worse and seed companies only gotten stronger and multinational agribusiness companies bigger and health crisis, diabetes, diet related diseases off the charts compared to 20 years ago. And I've talked to several people who've said the same thing. No one really understood how powerful the industry was and how helpless actually as eaters we are. That's a very depressing way. I don't want to end on that note. But the truth is the monopolies that are in place, seed companies I think are a big ass reason for this are just overwhelming. And so what's not possible today is to dismantle that. We can chip at it and that's the best we can do. And that's why we're starting a tiny little seed company. That's the David and Goliath comparison. But it's not, not gonna be good enough for my children who are 8 and 11. But in their lifetime I think we can do something dramatic. But it's gonna be step by step. And it feels very frustrating because here I have genetics that can feed ton of people really at scale in incredibly delicious and nutritious ways. And what's stopping is the powers of the system that's in place. From the seed company to the agribusiness farming conglomerates to the distribution power to the marketplace. And it's more than just voting with your fork three times a day. We've got to do more advocacy and more understanding and take control of our food system before the environment really gets to be problematic and our health deteriorates even more. So anyway, I don't want to end on that.
- [39:02]
Michael Mazurek
No, no, no, this is not, I think like this actually helps explain beyond creating products and obviously having your restaurants and thinking about the scale of Row 7 seeds, you're also a big advocate. You educate a lot. Like you know, if people want to learn more about you, it's like it's really easy to see what you stand for and what you believe. In and I think of it as a big part of what you just talked about, like the educational part. This is where maybe like the end goal is to reach people like me and kind of educate from within.
- [39:29]
Dan Barber
Look, I'm a bottom up guy, you know, I believe in bottom up movements, but I don't see how the food system changes. Bottom. I do believe the influencing of the chef community has a huge and potentially effective broadcasting power. But it's gonna be a bit of a longer game than it should be. But we'll get there. I feel very confident as I go back to what we were just talking about. There's no way that four companies are gonna control our seed supply. Like right now, three companies control the meat industry, you know, and the grain industry controlled by five companies. I mean it's just so consolidated that it's ripe for a breakup and an enormous disruption that's coming. So I want to prepare everyone to get on that train when it comes.
- [40:12]
Michael Mazurek
You've been so close to research, it kind of feels like it's a big part of your DNA, what you stand for, your restaurants. And I'm curious, what practices do you keep to actually stay so open to new ideas, to people? You mentioned interactions. They kind of felt serendipitous. But I'm wondering if there's like dedicated practices you do to learn and go deep.
- [40:32]
Dan Barber
Fear of failure. Fear of failure. I failed very early in my career. A restaurant closed, went bankrupt. And I have never gotten rid of the smell. I really think there's a smell of a restaurant that's going under. You walk into a restaurant that's going under and you can feel. It's just. There's something beyond sad really. You just want to get away from it. When you're a chef and that happens to you, you will do anything. It's. You're like a hyena, you know, you'll do anything crazy to get away from that feeling. And I honestly think that my career has been that and, and I have turned it into a lot of curiosity to improve, continually improve what we're doing.
- [41:17]
Michael Mazurek
But that spiral, right? Like is there like sources or people or like you go to.
- [41:22]
Dan Barber
Yeah, good point, good point.
- [41:23]
Michael Mazurek
Do you have like the self directed processes you've learned by now to like. For example, I would try to find somebody who's really knowledgeable of field and just like spend an hour with them and like riff for them and literally like I'm a 5 year old and I just want to send it from like ABC to, to the top. I'm just curious about how you go so deep. Feels like you're doing so much.
- [41:42]
Dan Barber
Yeah, well, I luckily to have gotten a reputation that allows me access to a lot of incredible people. And once I find them, I'm very dogged. I really feel like I've been lucky. I know that sounds falsely modest, but I've been so lucky with the people that I have gotten farmers first and foremost when I started, and then this community of breeders. And what's been so fortunate for me is the breeders have been so ignored. You know, it's like breeders call me from all over the world. They're getting in touch with us now because they feel like, for one, somebody is paying attention to the science around creating seeds. And a chef community especially is very exciting. And so the doors have just flung open and I've just very luckily walked through. It's really nothing more than that in the sense of, I think if I can take any credit, it's that I've. I'm very dogged about going deep on learning, and I'm inspired by the people that surround me.
- [42:38]
Michael Mazurek
Was there. Was there like a key learning that you remember early on that kind of changed the way you thought about career, life, what to invest time in.
- [42:45]
Dan Barber
I don't think there was one moment that stands out that drives me, except for that closure of a restaurant 30 years ago, which, by the way, I had not a lot to do with. The owner was a drug addict, and it was just like a mess. But it still, I felt so responsible, and it lives with me today. You know, I once did a survey many years ago, very informal survey of successful chefs. It was unreal. Like 99% of them had had a closed restaurant. It's like it's the real driver because you never want to get within 50ft of that feeling again and you'll do anything. So I think that's a big one.
- [43:23]
Michael Mazurek
I think it also talks to how hard it is to maintain a restaurant at those levels. So I think it talks volumes to one, how challenging and difficult this career is, but also to just the fortitude of just staying there for such a long time and keeping it on.
- [43:38]
Dan Barber
Let me ask you something, Tomer. What's a career that isn't really challenging to stay on top of?
- [43:45]
Michael Mazurek
I think you can hide behind careers where you don't have to be the best. You know, you disappear within, like, massive amount of people who are doing some sort of a job for you. I don't think you can hide behind anything. And my sense is you feel like you get Tested every day.
- [43:59]
Dan Barber
It's funny you say that, because I was just, we were just planning some dishes for tonight, and a lot of my motivation is to keep a really strong team, you know, And I've got cooks from all over the world that come to work here. And most of my day is spent trying to create an atmosphere and environment of learning. So that motivates me to make sure that I can teach it well. And so it drives me to be educated and surrounded by good people. But it's also just I want to keep these cooks energized because once I step back from that and relax, it becomes deadened very quickly and you lose the quality of people that you're surrounded by. So I'm always complaining about the hours and the stress and the pressure, but if you don't have that, you get a very deadened crew around you very quickly in this industry. In this industry. And that's a very uninspired way to spend the day. That too, I fear, a little bit.
- [44:52]
Michael Mazurek
I think that combination of a single threaded leader with that level of operational excellence and responsibility for so many people translate into what you're saying, what you're doing, which is at the peak of how challenging that career could be. I'm curious, just for the last question, if you were to go back to school today knowing you wanted this career necessarily at the chef, but like you wanted this revolution in sustainable agriculture, you knew that it's about flavor and nutrition, what would you study? Like you wouldn't study English like you did? What would you study?
- [45:26]
Dan Barber
I always say, why do we go to college when we're stupid? If you could do it over, I'm sure what you just asked is a question you've asked yourself. What would I do if I were back in my youth?
- [45:36]
Michael Mazurek
I'm flipping this question back to me, but I think it would be more first principles. As I think if you start learning first principles, you can build a much better understanding of the kind of, you know, cascading you can do on top of that. But if you don't have first principles, then I think you're kind of lost in opinions that they're not always connected to the ground.
- [45:52]
Dan Barber
That sounds exactly right. And that is what a liberal arts, you know, in many ways is meant for. As you develop into a person is learning first principles in many different subjects. Yeah, I wish I could go back and do that now. I wish I would. I take the sciences, I take biology. If we could think about a way to translate biological principles and create a language around it. I think it would give tech a run for its money because that is what we need for the right kind of food system for the future. We need to understand biology. Biology is so complex, it's so inefficient. As I said, we have two eyes, we have two ears. You know, there's always inefficiencies. I'm looking out on the field of vegetables that we grow and it's just, you know, those principles are incredibly complex and we don't understand, we understand technology. And I would I had done more of that back then, but look, it gets me depressed to go back to think the time you missed. But maybe if there's young people listening to this, they'll think twice when they sleep through their science class.
- [46:50]
Michael Mazurek
Never too late. I wouldn't be surprised if the next five to 10 years would be revolutionary in biotech. Combining with everything you talked about before as like kind of your optimism plus the stuff you wanted to be changed and a lot of it, I would combine AI to it because I think the connection, the pattern matching we can do, the connecting points we can do with folks like you that we're bringing knowledge that doesn't exist in those algorithms right now could be transformational. But that's me.
- [47:13]
Dan Barber
That's a very inspired way to think about the future because mostly people I don't think think the way you just said about AI and about technology. But I hope you're right.
- [47:20]
Tomer Cohen
I hope I'm right too. I love my conversation with Dan. Here are some of the takeaways, particularly for those of you who are thinking of building something completely new. First one, look to the source. Dan's first and most important design principle is flavor. That's what led him early into promoting farm to table. But he didn't stop there. And that made all the difference. Dan realized that if he wanted to master flavor, his main value proposition, and make it truly accessible, he had to start by improving his product by redesigning it at the source level. Using modern breeding techniques to create seeds to meet today's needs. The vast majority of industrial produce seeds are engineered for size and weight. But Dan decided to focus on flavor. Second, Dan did not stop at flavor. He sought better value chain alignment. He understood that there's been a long standing disconnect between the fields where our food is grown and the people preparing and eating that food, the two ends of his value chain. In order to ensure better alignment, from seed breeders to farmers to chefs, and get better yield, better disease resistance, but also better flavor, Dan literally brings chefs and farmers together to trial new vegetables. Think about it. Instead of writing recipes with what's available in the market, Dan is instead allowing recipes to start at the seed level. Third, understand how much of the value chain you can capture. It's well established that selling seeds alone is not a great business plan, and Dan and Mike were unable to capture much of the value arising from the adoption of their first project, called Honeynut. Instead, after Honeynut's success, Dan and his partner established Row 7 to be not just a seed company, but also a produce company. So now partner farms get the seeds and the contract to grow the vegetables specifically for Row 7. And as exclusive wholesalers to Whole Foods, there's more margin. And as a food company, Row seven can become even more profitable. Fourth, think about distribution from the start. The food distribution ecosystem is complex and entrenched with strong incumbents. Dan needed a funding partner who can bring more than just funding. Whole Foods isn't just investing in Row 7 seeds. It also provides crucial retail infrastructure for Dan's product. With that, Dan can go to farmers and show them that if they grow the product, they'll actually have a ready distributor. Lastly, and this is a particularly tricky one sometimes you need to create demand for your product. Dan freely admits the marketplace he's looking to sell in doesn't exist just yet. That means he has to be extremely thoughtful with how he works to get demand going. One element shouldn't be too unfamiliar. Dan looks to chefs as influencers of taste. If a wide variety of chefs and cooks use the product and it's affordable and it's accessible to all consumers, then consumers might actually give it a shot. And maybe, just maybe, they will never look back. Can you think of a time when you needed to index on one key constituent of your entire value chain to influence demand for your product? Share that with me on LinkedIn. I'm Tomer Coyne. Thank you for listening. I learned a lot from this conversation and I hope you did as well.
- [50:47]
Max Miller
If you liked this episode, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back in two weeks with our season finale. An interview with Spotify's co President Gustav Sagerstrom.
- [51:00]
Dan Barber
Good products that might leverage a technology innovation or a UI innovation, but great products almost always incorporate a business model change.
- [51:08]
Max Miller
Building one is a LinkedIn editorial production. Our host is Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. This episode was produced by Max Miller. Our associate producers are Lolia Briggs and Rachel Karp. We're engineered and mixed by assaf gadram at LinkedIn. Sarah storm is senior producer. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Koop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor in Chief of LinkedIn. Thanks to Alicia Mann and Jenna Kaplan. If you know of a product leader we could all learn from, send us a line@pitchinkedin.com.