Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals Barb Stuckey: Okay. Now. Thank you guys so much. Really quickly, I would love to record this call. If you guys are okay, but I just want to make sure that I have your permission to do so. Are you all right if I record it? Shelie: Absolutely. Brent: Absolutely. Barb Stuckey: Great. Okay. Thank you so much. All right, so let me just introduce myself and if you guys would do the same, that would be great. This is Barb Stuckey I'm as you probably saw, I'm the President and Chief Innovation Officer here at Mattson. I'm sure Maddison has told you we're a food and beverage product innovation firm located in Silicon Valley. Barb Stuckey: I also write for Forbes.com and I write about food innovation, consumer trends around food and beverage, and I've been fascinated with this whole meal kit thing for about 12 years, believe it or not. I probably subscribed to the first meal kit subscription that ever was, which was a local woman here in San Francisco named Nona Lim who still has a line of food on the market, but got really, really fascinated with meal kits and have been tracking the category ever since. Barb Stuckey: So, I know a lot about this category, and I have to say that I have heard from consumers and from the press in the industry that everyone says that there's so Interview Univ Michigan Meal Kit Sustainability Page 1 of 12 Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals much solid waste and it can't possibly be efficient to send these ingredients direct to the consumer's home. So I've heard that ad nauseam and I guess, my first question is just, did the results of your study surprise even you? Shelie: So, they definitely surprised a lot of people. I actually think we went into the study though with the hypothesis that meal kits were going to be better because of exactly what you're saying. We were hearing from people that they were hesitant to use meal kits because it's so much packaging and waste left over and it was actually with a conversation with a friend of mine who was saying that she really enjoyed meal kits, but she just couldn't handle their environmental impact where I started thinking, this is potentially not as bad for the environment as you might think it would be. Shelie: And that's as far as introductions of sort of our research, we take big picture life cycle approaches to problems and try to undercover unintended consequences. So, that's really where we're coming at if from where it's like, I think the food waste is probably a bigger deal, and so you're really swapping in a food waste problem for a packaging waste problem. Barb Stuckey: Great. Shelie, just because you're starting the conversation, would you mind just introducing yourself and your background? Shelie: Absolutely, so I'm Shelie Miller. I'm an associate professor at the school for environment and sustainability. And so I'm a faculty here at the school and one of the things that we do, is look at life cycle assessment research and that's really just looking at products throughout the supply chain. My particular areas of interest are emerging technologies, so things that are new to the market, things that might cause major disruptions in new markets, trying to figure out unintended consequences of potential new products. And so the food space has been very interesting to me for quite some time and trying to think through sort of how to reduce environmental impacts on food systems, which end up being a pretty big environmental burden overall and so end up having lots of really interesting research questions. Barb Stuckey: Awesome. Thank you. And Brent, if you could introduce yourself, that would be great too. Brent: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Brent Heard, I'm a PHD candidate affiliated with the center for sustainable systems, which is housed in the School for Environment and Sustainability. Shelie's my PHD advisor and my research looks at the effects of the emerging technologies in the food supply chain and I have a particular interest in identifying effective consumption or production side interventions that can reduce the environmental impacts associated with getting our food. Before I was here, I got a BS in economics in environmental policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And I think, the way we look at problems in our Interview Univ Michigan Meal Kit Sustainability Page 2 of 12 Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals research through thinking about a full life cycle of products. So everything from its initial production to where waste ends up at the end is really valuable. Barb Stuckey: I am so glad that we found your paper, that is thanks to Maddison. So thank you, Maddison. Barb Stuckey: So, number two then, question is ... How do meal kits get onto your radar? It sounds like you're both looking at emerging technologies. Why meal kits and why this study? Brent: I think meal kits are particularly fascinating. I've always had an interest in them, though maybe not quite to the depth and background as you have had because not only are they just a different way of cooking and preparing a meal, but to create a meal kit really requires making substantial changes throughout the food supply chain and so meal kits aren't just a different type of meal you can prepare, they really are a fundamentally different way of supplying food to a consumer. And I think when you study an entire supply chain and think about the life cycle of a product, that can create some really fascinating differences compared to the typical grocery store supply chain. Barb Stuckey: Yeah, I actually love that part of your study that you looked at what we've been doing as a culture for the last 50, 60 years. And comparing it to that. That was so interesting. [crosstalk 00:06:37] Shelie: And I think that's part of it too because when we talk about the emerging product and emerging technologies, we often think of the emerging product as all of the environmental impact associated with that. We rarely sort of step back and say, "Well, what's the current waste products with the current system?" Barb Stuckey: Yeah, that's great. Brent: To be honest, that was what surprised me the most about our study actually. We had to critically think about the environmental impacts associated with the conventional supply chain compared to an alternative model and there's some really, really interesting differences and the amount of food loss that's involved in a typical grocery supply chain process is why I was thinking about transportation structure which is something I hadn't had to critically consider until this study and it really creates some interesting differences. Barb Stuckey: So, okay now I'm gonna veer off the script. What was most surprising to each of you in terms of where loss, waste, and inefficiency is happening? Shelie: So I think one of the things that for me was one of the standout pieces was what we call last mile transportation. So this is how you actually get groceries to your house. And this is another category where the meal kits were actually better than the grocery store meals, which is again a counter intuitive result for most Interview Univ Michigan Meal Kit Sustainability Page 3 of 12 Barb Stuckey full transcript of interview with authors Shelie Miller and Brent Heard from study: Comparison of life cycle environmental impacts from meal kits and grocery story meals people because you think, okay, there's these big diesel trucks driving around, how is that possibly environmentally better? Shelie: It's not saying that it's good, it's just better than the alternative, but it's because if you have one package, one meal kit a month, among many packages on that truck, and so it just gets one small fraction of the overall burden of that truck. Meanwhile, most people do roundtrip dedicated trips to grocery stores. So t hat's all the miles there, all the miles back. Even if they're shopping for a week, it ends up being more miles per meal than the trucks. Barb Stuckey: And I think we have a question, number seven, which was Maddison's question, which I think is appropriate here. So if that last mile is surprising and there's that roundtrip dedicated voyage that the consumer takes in their car, how do you think that would differ if it were a shopping service like Instacart or Shipt where you're ordering online and then someone is bringing the groceries to your house? Does that change things significantly or no? Shelie: It's a little hard to say, so we'd actually have to run the numbers on the assumption because some things would be more like the meal kit and some things would be more like the grocery store.