Caryl Levine:
Thank you, Simon. It’s greatly great to be here with you.

Kenneth Lee:
Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

Simon Mainwaring:
Now I got to ask, the departure point of every entrepreneurial journey, there’s that moment of inspiration where your life changed direction. Where did Lotus Foods begin? I can’t imagine you know, just suddenly decided you’re going to import rice from foreign markets. Tell us a story and why it captured your imagination and then what you did to bring it to life.

Caryl Levine:
Well, I’ll start. I mean, it’s really a love story. When Ken and I fell in love in 1990, we decided that we had these remarkable skills that we can actually work incredibly well together, creating just some really wonderful social impact in our peer group. And so we thought, why don’t we put that to business? And so in 1993, we took a market research trip through China and we came home with 90 ideas. And the idea that really got us excited is early on in the trip after traveling through China for two months, we found a black rice in Sichuan Banan. This was an area in the Southwestern part of China that is not really… It has 26 different minority villages and we were in a dye minority village and we sat down to steaming bowls of black rice. Now, Ken who’s an American born Asian man, always ate rice two or three times a day, but it was always white rice. So this black rice was so exotic looking, but the taste was absolutely incredible. It was nutty, roasted nutty taste with almost a hint of fruit or floral at the end. And the next day we ran to the market, which was always our favorite thing to do anyway when we were traveling, and we kept on asking everybody, tell us about hamie. And hamie meaning black rice. And people were telling us these folk tales, these stories, that it was a rice that was reserved for the emperors because of its nutritional and medicinal properties. It was high end chi, it invigorated the spleen, it brightened the eyes. And we just thought, oh my God, this is really an exotic rice that also has nutritional benefits. And so we bought a couple of kilos and sent it home. And once we got back, we decided over those 90 ideas that it was going to be rice is life.

Simon Mainwaring:
And had you or Ken had any experience in this industry in agriculture before?

Kenneth Lee:
I think as Caryl was mentioning, I had eaten a lot of rice and that was, and I’ve [inaudible 00:04:52]-

Simon Mainwaring:
I’ve driven a car a lot, so I’m going to start a car company. I get that.

Kenneth Lee:
And my family was in a restaurant business. And so I’d always been around food. And I think it came in handy in terms of when you’re pioneering a new variety of rice that people haven’t seen before. We decided that the chef community in the San Francisco Bay Area, we conceived this idea of getting a business together while we were in Connecticut, that we would do a Pacific Rim business. But we realized we’d better get to the Pacific Rim if we are going to have a Pacific Rim business. So we moved to California, we took that market research trip. And then when coming back with this black rice, we realized, hey, nobody knows what this is. It’ll be a nice entree in the marketplace. We can differentiate ourselves. But who knows what we’re selling? Nobody. And so chefs were the logical choice, because there, we were in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably one of the food meccas of our nation and chefs would probably like to see a new product that they could show off. And so that was how we got started in the trade, but it really would not have happened unless we had this idea that we should be involved in a business together. And of course I think what I’m trying to say is, we didn’t have a preconceived notion about let’s get into the food business. It was more like, hey, let’s go out and explore. And we found something that we thought could have some legs and then the rest is trial and error. And maybe we like to say a little naivete. We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into, but it sounds like a good thing. And that’s kind of the early beginnings of it.

Simon Mainwaring:
I love that because I think what is so powerful for entrepreneurs is the permission they give themselves to explore and discover. And too often, especially today where there’s such a premium on success and being a billionaire and so on, you just don’t create that space for potentiality, which you are speaking to. So Caryl, sorry, what were you going to say there?

Caryl Levine:
Well, I just wanted to say rice is a commodity. And so when we knew we were going to get involved in the rice business and the food and beverage industry, the CPG business, we knew we had to differentiate ourselves. And be innovators. We weren’t going to be copycats. We wanted to do something unique. So when we discovered the black rice and soon after that, the Bhutanese red rice, here, these pigmented rices that actually we pioneered in 1993 or 1995. The only colored rices was brown rice. And the only imported rices was a basmati or a Jasmine rice. We really changed how Americans think about rice. And by using chefs, as Ken said, white tablecloth chefs, it gave us the panache that you could actually make rice from a commodity into a specialty food, something that was exotic from far away places.

Simon Mainwaring:
That’s such a powerful insight there because by inherently building in a premium quality to what the product is you’re taking to market, you are elevating its price. You are making it aspirational for people right out of the gate. But I have to imagine back then, people thought rice was rice. It was white or Jasmine and so on, as you said. What was the reception at first? Because no matter what your company is, a plant based alternative, whether it’s a bottled water, whether it’s rice, you’ve got to take it to market and get some sort of traction. So what was the reaction of the chefs?

Kenneth Lee:
Yeah. So just to kind of pick up where I left off talking to chefs. I remember clearly it was more than one chef who said… Well, actually just to back up a little bit. We identified the top 30 chefs in the San Francisco Bay Area in as many of them. And we sent these letters out just to introduce ourselves. And I was getting comments, to your point, about if you listen to the naysayers, you’ll never get anything done. People were like, “They’re too busy for you. You’re nobody.” And to our surprise, I got to call on all of them. Because no one had actually offered them black rice or red rice before. And so to me it was eye opening in that it was almost like we were sharing a new color with a painter and there’s something they could put on the palette. But the story I always like to tell is people did get fixated on that black rice. And I told them, it cooks up like a deep, rich purple color. And they’re like, just imagining that white, big plate that they have in the dining room and putting that down and then highlighting it with whatever else goes with it. It’ll just be so attractive. But they said, “Ken, this is great. This will look beautiful. But if this doesn’t taste good, you’ve made one sale and that’s it.” And so I think it was interesting because at that time I think what we observed was a blurring of the lines between specialty and natural. Whereas natural was all about good for you, not necessarily tasty. And whereas specialty was really tasty, but not necessarily good for you. And I think there was an appetite at the time for people to have something that was nutritious and delicious.

Simon Mainwaring:
That’s such a pivotal moment in the industry. Right? To sort of marry those two. And also I love the idea that you could romance the product through the color. But as you said, if the product didn’t taste good, it was dead in the water. It really wasn’t going to happen. I also know that there was even since the early days, you brought a larger vision to the role of the commodity by bringing it to the US and so on, the sustainability vision and so on. Caryl, why did you have that point of view out of the gate? Was that something that your training and learning had sort of inspired in you?

Caryl Levine:
Well, again, when we decided to go into the rice business and here, when we started to learn about how rice has grown around the world, we quickly found out that first of all, there was a tremendous loss of rice biodiversity. Potentially a hundred thousand different varieties of rice where now just a few thousand. And so to me, biodiversity was incredibly important. The second real tenant at Lotus Foods was actually helping the farmer. Most farming in this country is done by small holder farmers. And these are the farmers and the farmers that we were working with in Asia, imagine being a rice farmer and not having enough to eat or not having an income to support the farming practice. And so we pledged that we were going to do direct trade or fair trade and make sure that by partnering, by giving them access to a global market at a fair trade price, these farmers would actually have a living wage and be able to have the things that we all wanted. Everybody is the same. They want clothing on their back. They wanted to send their children to school. They want to have enough income for emergencies. Well, these farmers want it the same. And by giving them access to our markets at a fair trade price, we were able to do that. So these were the tenants that this was our intention from the very beginning.

Simon Mainwaring:
How did you build that trust? Because I mean, you hear about it now with restaurant workers or production line workers. Finally, the minimum wage is becoming a fair and living wage after way too long. There you are in a foreign market, talking to small holding farmers, these Americans who want to export their product to the other side of the world, how did you build that trust to build that supply chain rigor in the first place?

Kenneth Lee:
I’d like to say, you have to first get over this idea that, oh, Americans are here. We’re going to get rich now because we were pioneering. When we first started, our first shipment of rice was one pallet, a metric ton of rice. A 20 foot container, which is a small container, has about 20 ton capacity. So we weren’t even challenging a container load. So I think right off, I think the people we started working with understood, we’re trying to build something here. We’re trying to create demand for a longer picture view of success. So I think anybody that’s reaching out and saying, Hey, let’s work together That’s reaching out and saying, Hey, let’s work together. What do they have to lose? So I think there’s a kind of a trust factor there. I think that’s the nature of your question. But I think it was maybe just the sincerity of, this is not a get rich quick thing. This is like we’re trying to create a real movement to diversify, to highlight like heirloom varieties of rice. Because I think back to Caryl’s point about biodiversity, a lot of the varieties of rice that existed at that time, and even today were languishing in seed banks. They weren’t in fields, farmers weren’t growing them because milling had become so prominent. The people who control the means of production to get this finished goods to people, they were like, they don’t want to have to clean out the machine and work with 20 different varieties of rice. They’d rather have some cash crop thing that sells. And of course, because farming was so unsustainable, farmers wanted something that was cash crop-ish so that they could make money. So yeah, it’s an interesting process and journey that we’ve been on, but fulfilling at the same time.

Simon Mainwaring:
I mean it feels like there’s a huge economic opportunity plus gaps in the supply chain and so on, but let’s make no mistake. I mean, rice is the staple of the vast majority of people on the planet and it’s diversity could not be more important. But then again, you’re trying to start a food company with sort of no experience and you’ve got this global supply chain, you’re launching a new product. No one’s taken it to market yet. There’s no packaging. So what was it like starting a food company? Where did you begin? Any kind of key steps on the way or maybe some mistakes you made that you might share with us.

Kenneth Lee:
It’s interesting you mentioned packaging. We always laugh about it. We thought we’d be the unpackaged brand, like no rhyme or reason. Just kind of like when, when we brought it in rice from Bhutan, they put it in at this handmade paper bag that was hand silk screened and so it was totally authentic and unique to the country of Bhutan. And so we thought that could be like something we could bring, but of course from a branding standpoint it makes those sense, like how would anybody know it’s Lotus Foods? So we were learning as we went as well. But I think that was just an interesting point about what we considered as a possibility, which probably in the end was not a good idea.

Simon Mainwaring:
Caryl, I’ve got a question for you. Whenever you bring a new type of company to the marketplace there’s resistance from competitors, there’s resistance from the marketplace. I don’t know if there was a price premium on a sustainable biodiverse product because that’s often a barrier to entry as well. So how did you compete to carve out a little beachhead in the marketplace on top of the chef support?

Caryl Levine:
Well, when we started to go retail I think it was because of the innovation that got us through the doors and onto the shelves. Because, as I said, there was no colored pigmented rices. And so I think retailers were really intrigued by the rice itself, by our story and then it sold. Because then consumers had a alternative to commodity rice. We were the premium price rice in the marketplace. But again, first of all, the name, the branding of the black rice was forbidden rice. And that was something that Ken did early on when we were walking around the Forbidden City. We heard about the folk tale of the black rice. And Ken said, we’ll name this Forbidden Rice, the emperor exclusive grain. And that was just brilliant because people wanted something that was forbidden and so exotic looking as being black. So when we could educate the retailer and the consumer, it really sold itself. We were very fortunate.

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. And that velvet rope approach where you take something away because it’s forbidden is the most powerful sort of attraction to people out there. So very smart branding out of the gate. One of the most

Kenneth Lee:
I wanted add Simon, I think one of the other thing was we focused in the Bay Area, where we were and people always want you to demonstrate your product. So we were constantly cooking our rice and maybe pairing it with a dish and kind of exposing this to shoppers. And immediately when they would taste the rice, they were like, wow, that’s different. And then you’d talk about the nutritional aspects and how it’s grown with glacial water and then all these kind of the romance part of it, which had to do with the goodness of the rice. And so I think it was almost like building a brick wall brick by brick. It was very labor intensive. It was the way to go because nobody knew what we were selling. So we had an advantage, but we had a disadvantage because people weren’t on board with what it is.

Simon Mainwaring:
I mean, you’re building out a new category. I mean, everyone listening to Lead With We is in some product or industry category and we’re all trying to innovate, so they’re all faced the same challenge. What was the shape of your adoption curve? It tasted great, it was nutritious, it was flying off the shelves and it took off or was it a slow burn over five years, what did that look like?

Kenneth Lee:
Yeah. I don’t think it was flying off the shelves, but it sold well enough to keep its place in natural and specialty. Go ahead Caryl.

Caryl Levine:
Well, I remember one story and I don’t exactly know the dates because we’ve been doing this for over 27 years. But one morning, Good Morning America had Dr. Oz and it was January, so it was right after the holidays where everybody indulges in things that we shouldn’t eat on a daily basis. So it was a segment in how to start the new year with more healthy food and on television they had a package of the Forbidden Rice on the table and Dr. Oz talked about this incredible rice that he discovered and that it was great. And our phones were ringing off the hook because all of a sudden everybody wanted this rice and where do I buy it? And a lot of those incredible lucky breaks happen to us and that really helps, especially when you’re trying to educate the consumer.

Kenneth Lee:
Yeah. Because now it’s somebody else advocating, it’s not just the people that’s their company, of course they’re going to be saying whatever they say. But because Dr. Oz at that time had a lot of credibility, so what happened was like the store shelves look like locust descended on them. They just obliterated. And then I think the other thing in addition to the Dr. Oz pitch… And he did it several times, I think two or three times. But in addition to that, there was also at the time publishing was still a thing, magazines and newspapers and people would read those. And we had a lot of coverage like in the Wall Street Journal or a Bon Appetit or the New York Times. And people were intrigued with the value proposition of the rice, that was something that was new and should be looked at. And so I think we benefited by a lot of those, especially with chefs leading the way, best foot forward, putting it in a good light.

Simon Mainwaring:
I mean, that’s such a powerful portrait of these media sort of pops with the chefs supporting it behind and then you’ve got point of sale. But I have to say in my experience, when things take off like that, it’s a double edge sword. How did you manage ramping up production to meet that need? There you are standing up a new company, you’re getting traction, you’re getting sort of retail doors out there, but then suddenly you’ve got this extra demand. So what was that like?

Caryl Levine:
Well, the good news is that the farming community no matter where we work, we started like with a village and as our supply demand increased, we were able to bring in more of the village farmers. So there was always a larger capacity than what we were able to sell. So as we sold more, just more farming families got involved. And so we were always able to keep up with the demand. And because as you recognize, rice is one of the largest commodity crops that have grown around the world. So as long as these farmers knew there was a market, they were happy to grow a rice that maybe they weren’t growing before, but they saw the success or the potential of their other family members or other members of the villages.

Kenneth Lee:
Yeah. And I’ll just add. The growth wasn’t like explosive or exponential. It was steady. It was a pace in which we could move. It wasn’t anything like when COVID hit. When COVID hit our revenue almost doubled and it was already larger than we’d ever been at that time. And so that was a challenge from a standpoint of cash, because you had to just go and get a whole bunch more and then our supply chain is long. So you’re putting out money and you’re not able to sell it, especially with all the supply chain delays that have evolved over these last couple of years. I think probably the nature of your question in terms of as you get growth there’s that double edged sword that you always confronted with.

Simon Mainwaring:
Just the price of a shipping container, as I understand it, it’s gone from 1,200 to $1,500 a container to anywhere upwards of $15,000 and to absorb that

Kenneth Lee:
Even higher.

Simon Mainwaring:
So what do you do in those circumstances? You just white knuckle it and just keep going, believing that the market is there and this time will pass?

Caryl Levine:
Exactly. That it’s a point in time and hopefully you have enough cash and enough bandwidth that you can get through it, but it’s been incredibly difficult. And for us, before we had the problem with the freight increase we had Trump’s tariffs since 2019 on our China goods, which is a large part of our business. So it’s been a double whammy for us.

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s not one thing it’s another. And also here you are starting a business together as a couple and that puts pressure on you in your own right. But also my question is you’ve got upstream and downstream to take care of, you’ve got all that growing supply network going on and you’ve got more retail demand with all the marketing and advertising going on. How did you divide and conquer your time? Did you take specific roles or did they evolve over time? How did you manage it?

Caryl Levine:
Yeah, we definitely did. I mean Ken and I really compliment each other but we have very different ways of operating. So I did marketing and sales and Ken did operations and then we both did the financial. And so that turned out to be a really successful avenue for us to be in business together. But, I mean, we lived and breathed this, this was 24/7. So you know, it was nice to have each other to bounce off everything from one to the other. Even though I might be doing marketing and sales, if Ken had a question or I had a question we would share and help each other.

Kenneth Lee:
Yeah. I think more often than not we would share like before you get sent on an email, it’s like, hey, check this out. Two heads better than one. So we had that from the beginning. But there was certainly a division of labor in terms of focus and still is today.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think one of the things there’s a whole other layer to what you’re doing, not only you bringing a highly nutritious, great tasting product to a new market and so on and building these global supply chains, but you are leveraging production methods or agricultural methods that people just don’t even know about that are so powerful, this SRI method. Can you help us understand what that is, what it meant to sort of rice as a commodity, but also how more broadly it can be applied to other crops?

Kenneth Lee:
It’s interesting you mentioned about the enormity of rice and how it feeds so many people. I always like to interject just for context, that more people on planet earth derive their livelihood from working with rice than anything else that human beings do. More than half of the world’s caloric intake is consumption of rice. The sheer amount of water that’s used to grow rice is enormous, it dwarfs the number two and number three crops combined. And that’s because rice is grown in flooded fields and so when you talk about SRI, one of the big tenets of SRI, the system of rice intensification, which we market as more crop per drop, we just think it’s a more informative way to kind of get people to understand what direction we’re moving in. So the more crop per drop means you can grow more rice, bigger yields with less water, less seeds, no agri-chemicals. And because you’re not flooding the fields constantly, the water’s drained intermittently audited off the field, you don’t create the circumstances for methane emissions. And so methane is one of the most deleterious So methane is one of the most deleterious greenhouse gases that are contributing to all this crazy weather, extreme weather and stronger wind, hurricanes. By not flooding the fields, you can create more with less and you mitigate methane emissions by upwards of 40%. So probably about 15- 20% of man-made methane is from flooded rice fields. So kind of long way to talk about how you grow rice really matters because underwater, when you understand that rice is not an aquatic plant, it doesn’t have to be grown underwater. The underwater part is a way to abate the production of weeds. The weeds want to contribute, that’s a big problem for people who grow stuff. That’s why Monsanto has a business model. They use chemical solutions. But if you can have a way to grow rice that doesn’t have to use all that stuff because farmers then get indebted to all these inputs that they have to put in and integrate soil. And then it also impacts the water holding capacity of soil. It impacts the sequestration of carbon in the soil. So there’s all these things, and I’m kind of rambling on. That there’s a multitude of benefits and that’s what we found why SRI is so empowering for farmers. It started as a niche kind of a thing in Madagascar. And it’s just kind of exploded after the turn of the century. Why? Because farmers are now empowered to actually produce more with less, and they can also grow the sieves that are meaningful to them, the heirloom varieties. Not the new hybridized or new [inaudible 00:27:48], high tech seeds that promise higher yields, but don’t necessarily come through.

Caryl Levine:
One of the other things that I wanted to share with you though, that Ken forgot to mention, was the empowerment of women. That system of rice intensification provides them. And that’s because there’s something also called the feminization of agriculture. And what that means is that the men are leaving the farms and going to the cities for livelihood to get jobs and to send money back home. So now the women along with tending the kitchen garden and rearing the children, now they have to go in the fields and actually do the major rice production. And so with SRI, they can actually work many, many hours less than they usually did. And early in the morning, before the hot sun affects them or in the afternoon. So they actually have more time for the children, more time for even other entrepreneurial things. So the thing that is so empowering about SRI or More Crop Per Drop is that you can have just by the way we change how rice is grown, we can have social environmental and economic impacts. It doesn’t get better than that. And so we just feel so fortunate to be able to do this work and that back in 2005 or 2006, Olivia Vent from Cornell University introduced this to us. That we totally were smitten by it and committed ourselves to this methodology because most people, consumers don’t understand this. Ken said that rice learned to survive in water, it doesn’t thrive in water.

Simon Mainwaring:
And let me ask you this, that’s incredibly powerful. The whole social fabric you can effect SRI, has progress been made here in the US? What’s the level of adoption of that sort of methodology, that approach to agriculture? And if it’s not great, or if it’s too slow, what are the barriers to adoption?

Kenneth Lee:
I would often speak on a panel and that question would always come up. People would say, “Ken, just like you said. That’s sounds fantastic, but can we do it in the US?” And of course the answer is yes, but the difficulty is the legacy systems in which we deploy. The farm equipment. And so I would always just imagine, what would change? My answer was always when farmers are forced to change, because they’re not able to get the amount of water they need. We’re a California company and drought has always been an issue. I don’t know for how long, but it is an issue. And so right now in California, there are allocation of water rights and rice farmers only getting about maybe 25% of what they would normally get. So right now, many rice farmers are not going to grow rice. They’ll rely on maybe crop insurance and get some remuneration that way. And then maybe sell off their rights to almond growers who can’t let their trees die without watering. And so it’s a dire situation, but I think we have the ability and we’ve seen this with other countries who have said, “Hey, we’re not going to do hand transplantation of rice like most of the small holders do. We need to do something that’s a little more automated.” I think if you get enough smart people in a room that have this type of agricultural background, you can figure out the machinery, whether it’s drilling the seeds in the ground at a certain distance, because you need more distance between the seedling. So they’re not overcrowded and they’re not competing for nutrients and it’s just part of the paradigm of how you do SRI. I think the ability to do it is there, it’s a matter of the will. And kind of reminded me of when SRI was first introduced in Madagascar. It really took a while. It’s like 20, 30 years turn of the century before people really started adopting it. And I think it’s that kind of inertia that happens with human beings about changing something that’s fundamental or it’s like a big deal for them. Think about whenever we make New Year’s resolutions. Sometimes those are shattered in a matter of weeks and that’s maybe just about some minor thing. So growing rice for farmers who are largely subsistence farmers, it’s a big deal. And so I think it took a while and I think what made the difference was when aid organizations like Oxfam or [inaudible 00:32:16] or Catholic Relief Services, as many out there, development agencies. They would have their own test plots and they would invite farmers to see what they’re doing. And then they could see that by planting younger seedling with plenty of spacing and intermittent water on and off that you can actually get more bushier plants. They call them tillers and pinnacles and more rice hanging off them and that’s actual proof. And then the neighboring farmers, once they see their neighbors doing it first, they criticize them like, “Oh buddy, you’re going to go out, your family will suffer.” But then when they see what’s actually happening, then they want to know how to do it too. And then that’s why we’ve gotten to this point where it’s in maybe 60 some odd countries, maybe 25 million farmers, but it’s still a drop in the bucket. And so our hope is to really catalyze this change. If we can, through building onto the farm gate price with added premiums, whether it’s for organic or fair trade or regenerative, organic certification, all these things that are coming to the fore, this could be a way to move this along. And then the ultimate last thing I just want to say, I know I’m going to ramble. But the last thing is if we could monetize this for farmers so that these practices that we’re talking about, they’re not like my ideas. These are peer reviewed by scientists that say this works. I loved your program they had with Paul Hawkin. So project [inaudible 00:33:43] talked about it. I think his subsequent publication talks about it. But if we can get the farmers to get carbon credits or through some insetting program so that they benefit by it because they’re the ones who are mitigating carbon and all that. Then that’ll cause a sea change in terms of people wanting to adopt this and growing more rice and better rice.

Simon Mainwaring:
So Ken, I wanted to ask a practical question. When you’re dealing with an unknown supply chain marketplace, there are ways of doing business there that you do or don’t understand. Sometimes there’s corruption. Sometimes there’s the way that things have always been done. Did you encounter any challenges building out a business in a foreign market to then bring the products to the US?

Kenneth Lee:
Fortunately, the answer is no. And I’ll say when we started, I mentioned earlier in the conversation that we started really small, like one ton of rice. And so I think we always heard horror stories about people working in foreign countries and how they got taken and a container was full of rocks or something like that. And so I would say because of the size we started at, the people who were willing to work with us at that smaller scale, there was no motivation to cheat us because there was really no money involved at that size. And so I think that’s how we got started and we just attracted honorable people that we still work with today. So I think that’s a testament to our good fortune. Maybe that means the universe wants us to succeed. I don’t know. We’ve seen a lot of things that cause us not to almost go out of business. I don’t know. I think that didn’t play a part for us.

Simon Mainwaring:
I want to ask you a question. I want to pull it back to the business. Because one of the challenges for all of us who care about the power of business to drive change is we can immerse ourselves in these larger ambitions. These absolutely critical shifts in the way that we show up in business. At the same time, you’ve got to run your business. You’ve got to make a profit, you’ve got to stay in business. So how did you calibrate or integrate these larger ambitions, these impact ambitions with moving rice off the shelf to grow your company? Was it just seamlessly woven in? Was it something that you sort of pointed back to in monthly meetings? What did you do? How did you go about that? It was always part of our DNA, but I really want to go back first to talk about your question about, are we doing any of this in the US? And I have to say for 25 years, we were just working in Southeast Asia and Asia. But for the 25th anniversary, we really wanted to create some domestic production. And we were really fortunate enough to meet up with [inaudible 00:36:30] and the folks at Jubilee Justice. Who, during this whole movement of reparations and working with Black farmers, giving them access to markets as well. I shared with her SRI and she just started running with it. And so now Black farmers in Missouri and Louisiana and Georgia and Mississippi are actually growing rice using the SRI methodology. And Lotus Foods partnership is that once they have enough for market, we will bring it into our distribution channel. And so we’re totally excited to be working with this group of farmers and just giving them also access to markets as well. This is the third year. They’ve been experimenting with 21 different varieties for the first two years. And this growing season, hopefully we might have enough to start working with some top chefs who really want to try some of this SRI USA grown rice.

Simon Mainwaring:
That’s so amazing. And also there’s a really powerful lesson in there, which is that when you have shared values and a common purpose, then you can partner and provide the economic empowerment you are by helping these entrepreneurs embrace these SRI methods and so on. And then they in turn can benefit your supply chain. It’s amazing how purpose shared values can really benefit all and [crosstalk 00:38:04]

Caryl Levine:
In collaboration. Collaboration is such a powerful tool because again, working in our own particular silo is not as empowering as working with colleagues or groups that have like-minded. That’s why we love being a mission aligned company because we get to work with other mission aligned companies and the sum is certainly greater than the parts. And so we’re all working together, whether it be on climate change or sustainable packaging or [inaudible 00:38:36]. We have a much larger impact than just being in our own silos.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I think this idea, you are providing a systemic solution looking at the whole ecosystem and the supply chain, the value chain of the business. Not only to course correct our future and put less methane out there and so on. But to benefit everybody by seeing everybody as collaborators, I think it’s the big unlock that we need in business. We’ve been holding it all too close to our chest for too long. You need in business. We’ve been holding it all too close to our chest for too long, not realizing that we just compound the problems within industries that hurt everybody, and so we need to unlock that. Coming back to the business. I mean, how do you then continue to drive growth after 25, 27 years now? You’ve had this momentum behind you’re getting through COVID and so on, what is the vision moving forward? Is it to really loop in these other farmers from different groups out there and build them into the supply chain?

Kenneth Lee:
I always like to say, if I were to write a book, one chapter would be called, “You got to get out of the house.” And so what I mean by that is because we were visiting our suppliers on a frequent basis. We got to observe that they had this equipment, they were making these noodles, and that’s what got us into the rice ramen kind of world. And the reason I’m mentioning that is in this conversation, we’ve just talked about rice, dry rice, and you have to have a horse to ride to be successful. There has to be something that is driving revenue. You can’t do good without doing well. And so, I think at some point there’s only so many varieties of rice you can have on a shelf. And so by getting into added value products, I think we were able to innovate to stay relevant because I think you have to continue, you just can’t keep doing the same thing. I don’t know, maybe some people can, but for us, we wanted to enter more, be more accessible, like in the mainstream supermarket too. And so with these noodles, we found the rice ramen noodles. We found these lines were kind of coming together again where, at the time gluten free was becoming a thing. And so, ramen noodles are typically a wheat based noodle. And so for us, we said, “We’re a rice company. We’re all about changing our rice is grown [inaudible 00:40:53]. So we made it a rice ramen. And so at the same time, culinarily, sweeping of the country here in the US was this ramen craze. And I think a lot of people that used to eat like 10 packages for a dollar type of ramen when maybe they were in school, didn’t have a lot of money, they had this nostalgic feeling about ramen, but they didn’t really want to eat that salt bomb version of ramen. And so, there we were with something that was good for you and tastes good. And so, I think that got us our first foot into the added value section of the aisle, and then we’ve launched other doodles too. And so I think that was really key in terms of continuing to innovate, but being true to what we wanted to do was preserve the biodiversity of rice. And so, what better way to do that than to have a product that continues to use more roads?

Simon Mainwaring:
And I don’t want to ask you both Carol, the overarching principles of SRI, because they sound like they’re universally applicable across different crops and just a whole mindset that you can bring to agriculture, the food supply system and so on, can you just break them out first us? What are the priorities of SRI in terms of how you grow crops?

Caryl Levine:
So it’s really using regenerative, agricultural methodologies. So it’s all about the soil. And so, cover crops, also making sure that you’re using compost, that you’re putting back in the soil what you took out of the soil, it’s giving your plants more spacing, so that you get more photosynthesis and more uptake in the micronutrients of the soil. It’s keeping the carbon in the soil, it’s being holistic and it’s not just taking care of the soil and the farmer, it’s actually taking care of the whole village, because the whole village life revolves around the planting of rice and agriculture. So, it’s really social welfare, and economic welfare and farming welfare. So it’s everything; it’s life. That’s why we call it. Rice is Life.

Kenneth Lee:
So, I’ll just add to what Carol was saying in terms of how they grow the rice in terms of not flooding the fields. And she talked about uptake of more micronutrients. And so, the way that happens is in a flooded field environment, the water is right there. The roots don’t have to dive down into the soil to access the moisture and the nutrients. And what that means is, when this plant, I talked about how the plant is bushier and is more rice, but if you’re going to have a bigger plant that won’t fall over, you need deeper root system, so the foundation is basically the big root ball as a result of planting rice that way, not in flooded fields. And that’s a big deal because at the time, when the rice is flowering and about to mature, when you about to harvest the monsoon winds may start to blow, and then that’ll knock the plant over and then you may lose half of your crop. And so that’s why a lot of improved varieties of rice are stubbier, shorter so that they’re not so tall and fall over, but if you don’t cause them to have a shallow root system, they have a deeper root system that can access more micronutrients in the ground, then you kind of make a more stable kind of a root ball, and that can support all that extra rice.

Simon Mainwaring:
You know, this is all about just working with nature rather than against it and being sort of additive rather than extractive. I want to ask you, it’s easy to be disheartened in terms of the future of food, because if you look at the climate emergency disproportionately affecting those in the global south, you look at extreme weather, you look at lack of access to clean water, and the possibility of unsustainable agriculture and then climate refugees, and so on and so on, it just compounds because everything’s connected, as we said. How do you, as people with a unique perspective, 27 years of actually building out a new approach to a very well established industry, how do you see the future of food and what are you optimistic about?

Caryl Levine:
We’re optimistic that we have part of the solution. And so, we just have to keep being passionate, and committed and even more committed than ever because it’s more dire than ever to go back to our roots of education. And it’s helpful when you have books like Regenerative or Project Drawdown that gives you solutions, not just talking about the problems, but actually a real solution. So we need more Fortune 500 companies to really get behind this. I mean, it’s amazing how much rice is being used, whether it’s making beer or in other products. And if these Fortune 500 companies would adopt SRI growing methodologies and therefore have so many more millions of acres in SRI, and then mitigating more methane and soil sequestration, then the solution actually it’s right there. And so, that’s really right now, Ken’s getting very involved in advocacy within our lawmakers and things like that, but there’s so much more to be done and we just have to stay focused and committed, which we are.

Simon Mainwaring:
And Ken, tell me, how do we go about it? Maybe give us three different steps, [inaudible 00:46:21] to your industry, but that are applicable beyond that. How do you get it done?

Kenneth Lee:
Well, I think there’s a confluence of factors happening here. And I think, even policymakers are searching for ways and regulatory agencies are saying, “Hey, big business, we’re going to require you to kind of give us your carbon footprint. Oh, what are you doing about the externalized cost of how you do a business in terms of the atmosphere of the climate and this?” Because it’s a real thing. This is not some type of tree hugger issue where it’s like, you want to save some endangered species. No, we’re trying to save all of the species that are on the planet.

Simon Mainwaring:
Including us. Including us, right?

Kenneth Lee:
Exactly. And people erroneously say, “Oh, we got to save the planet.” You know, that planet will be fine. It’s us, the human beings who are causing all this disruption that will be gone. And I don’t want to lead with that when you said, “What can people do?” I don’t want to BU people out, but there are things that we can do. And like Carol said, like Drawdown as a roadmap; there’s 100 things that we can do as human beings that we already know how to do. And I mentioned government getting involved in terms of, if they can actually switch policy so that we can subsidize things like regenerative agriculture, that sequesters carbon, that build soil. And then, there’s like consumer base, these movements that are underway, that people care about how farmers are growing the rice and all their food. And so, I think there’s a access point for everyone to get on board to kind of lead in some way there’s enough things that we can do. They’re out there, and I just, I’m hoping that we can do our part to inspire people to vote with their wallet, to make smarter choices that have an impact on all of us, not just what we’re going to put on the dinner table tonight.

Simon Mainwaring:
Well, I want to thank you both, Carol and Ken for the leadership you’ve exhibited for 27 years, long before all of this was top of mind in the daily headlines, and also, for not just bringing great products to market, but a whole new vision for our food systems, which could not be more critical or essential today than it is. So thank you for your time, thank you for your insights and here’s to more adoption of SRI and the success of Lotus Foods.

Kenneth Lee:
Thank you.

Caryl Levine:
Thank you. And we couldn’t agree more. Thanks again for giving us the platform.



Simon Mainwaring:

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With we, our show is produced by Goal 17 Media, and you can always find more information about our guests in the show notes of each episode. Make sure you follow Lead With We on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. And if you really love the show, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also watch our episodes on YouTube @wefirstTV. And if you’re looking to go even deeper into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Lead With We, which is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Google Books. See you again soon. And until then, let’s all Lead With We.