We are here today for 100 Climate Conversations, a project that I think is absolutely crucial right now. A project that I think is going to spark some really interesting conversation and debate around an issue that needs to be made more accessible to the day to day of people’s lives. We are in the gorgeous Powerhouse museum and it’s so nice to be back. There’s so much change in this building. 100 Climate Conversations is a really significant project for the museum.

We’re recording these conversations live that will become part of a bigger exhibition that will have a house in the museum. And you’ll see that if you want to take a look after today’s conversation. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land we’re on, always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

My name is Pat Abboud. Now to this lovely man sitting next to me. Nick Hazell is the founder and chief executive of v2food, the innovative start up work closely with CSIRO Australia’s leading research and development agency to develop plant-based meat. Nick spent a decade in senior research and development roles at PepsiCo and Mars Food Australia, having begun his career as a manufacturing engineer.

You are incredibly passionate about reducing meat consumption while supplying consumers with something that is tasty. It’s good, it’s nutritious. It’s all those things that we want from food. How does this work that you’re doing connect with the big issue we’re discussing here today? The two big C’s: climate change.

Meat is a real problem. It’s on a global scale. You could say that almost a third of the problem of climate change is associated with our meat-eating habit. And how does that work? Well, ruminant animals, they emit methane so that’s a direct carbon dioxide problem. But it’s actually more than that. It’s more about the food system. If you look at the average farmer in the world, what is a farmer doing? Are they growing vegetables? Well no, the average farmer is actually growing feedstock to feed the pigs and the chickens and the cows that we like to eat.

So the vast majority of agricultural land on the planet is devoted to our meat eating-habit, our animal meat-eating habit. The downside is we keep eating more and more meat. Now in Australia, we’re actually declining. But the rest of the world is catching up and we’re going to run out of land really soon.

So if you see all these horrendous pictures of the Amazon being destroyed: why are we doing that? Well, it’s actually to create more land, to grow more feedstock to feed the chickens and the pigs and we’re running out of land. So 70 per cent of the world’s land is already for human use for agriculture. So there’s very little left and we’re biting into it now. So the only way to solve this is by reducing the global consumption of animal meat.

I’m constantly trying to connect, say, for example, my family, I go to a family dinner and I try and bring up conversations around climate change because it’s something that I’m personally interested in and I’m watching my footprint and I want to be conscious and my family just kind of yawns. You know, they don’t really engage and they don’t take [it in] because the things that they connect with around climate change are the doom and gloom. They don’t feel like they have this sort of access point in order to contribute to a better planet.

And I think that’s because they’re also programmed that Australia, not just culturally from in terms of my Palestinian-Lebanese heritage. Australians are also huge meat eaters. Culturally, we love meat. Why do you think that is? I don’t know anywhere else in the world that has lamb ads. Our lamb ads every year are a cultural institution, they’re an event. Why do you think that is? Why is Australia such a meat loving country?

We grow a lot of great meat. I mean, the meat industry in Australia, we export 70 or 80 per cent of it to the world. And actually Australia will continue to export that. The world needs more meat. So there’s no worry. I keep saying to the meat industry, don’t worry, make sure that the meat that is grown in Australia is sustainable. And I know there’s work being done on that so you can make meat more sustainable. But we grow a lot of it and meat’s always been aspirational. Meat is aspirational for humans.

How much meat do we actually eat? Do you have the numbers?

I think Australia now is about that sort of 90 kilos or something per person per year. We have been as high as 120, I think. We were the kings of meat-eating in Australia. I think Hong Kong beats us now, which is kind of interesting because the average meat-eating on the planet is sort of 30 kilos per person per year.

That’s a huge carbon footprint.

If everyone ate as much meat as we did, animal meat, game over. There is no land that can support that. So the problem actually is, is that most people globally don’t eat a lot of meat, but in developing countries, they aspire to eat more meat. So from a v2 perspective, we want to solve the problem in Australia and have the best plant-based meat in Australia so that other countries which kind of say, well, maybe it’s cool to be like the Australians are doing.

They adopt plant-based meat. They don’t even go to meat, they go straight to plant-based meat. And that would be – that’s really important because if we ignore the developing countries… And that’s why v2 is so focused on Asia and China, because that’s where the biggest meat consumption is in the world.

How are you shifting that? What is it that you’re doing specifically to shift that? Obviously, you’re making plant-based meat, but that’s the first step.

Job one, plant-based meat as much as possible, just the quantity, because today our carbon footprint is two and a half kilos of carbon per kilo of meat. Difficult to know, is that good or bad? Well, beef will be 70. So we’re already 30 times better. We think that we can get to carbon negative, and that’s when it gets really interesting. When you eat meat and you know that it’s good for the planet.

And the way we’re doing that is by reducing our carbon footprint, so renewable energy in our factories, et cetera. But then when you start looking at our ingredients, which are things like canola oil and soy, you can grow those crops in a way that sequesters carbon into the soil, and that means that you end up with a net carbon negative. And then we added [it] all together, and this is work that we’re doing with the CSIRO, and we have a roadmap. We think we’re going to be carbon negative in about 4 years. It’s going to take a lot of work because we’ve got to grow the varieties of soy in Australia.

And there’s already some great farmers up in Queensland that are doing this. They’re experimenting with this.

Absolutely. And we’re working with CSIRO on varieties of soy. We’re working with companies. There’s a wonderful company called Loam that does carbon sequestration and sort of builds all this lovely sort of black strands in the soil. That’s fungus. That’s fungus and bacteria working together with the plants in a symbiotic relationship. That is good agriculture, healthy soils, healthy plants.

And the good news is, is we can destroy soils very easily – that’s use of fertilisers and pesticides, that’s the average sort of cropping but we can also restore soils using the science, and we can restore them quite quickly back to a really healthy carbon-filled state, which is what they should be. And if we do that, you could sequester an enormous amount of carbon. It’s almost a third to a half of the total carbon footprint of Australia. We could sequester back in the soil. So we’re trying to stimulate that sort of research and that sort of activity.

And I also want to give people an understanding of where you come from and the world that you’ve come from and sort of where you’ve landed in terms of the great work that you’re doing now because I suppose your approach is so well informed by the industries that you’ve traversed and the roles that you’ve been in. You spent a long time leading research and development teams at some of the biggest international food companies, and you’ve got a phone call from the CSIRO for a collaboration with Hungry Jacks. You got this phone call. What happened?

Well, at the time I was teaching innovation at UTS, and I was consulting to a number of companies and the reason that CSIRO gave me the call is they knew me. I had consulted to them. I’d done projects with them when I was an R and D director and they said, would I be interested in doing a start-up? And they asked me if I would look at the possibility of forming a company and leveraging some of the science that CSIRO had because they’d done a lot of research in meat.

They understood meat pretty well. But was there an opportunity for Australia to do something like what they were doing in the US? And I took a look at it. I said, ‘Look, give me a couple of months and I’ll look at it to see if there’s an opportunity,’ but within about a month, I went back to CSIRO and to Jack Cowin, who’s the guy behind Hungry Jacks, and I said, ‘I’m in, I want to do this thing’. And that’s when we formed v2food.

We called it v2 because it’s like version two of the food system. We knew that the food system is broken. How can we use this plant-based meat thing to kind of figure out a system that works? The human population is going to stay pretty high. That’s not going to change. So we better figure out how do we work within the limits of the planet? And then what we did is we just worked like hell to develop a burger that tasted fantastic.

But at the same time, I was always thinking about mince because burgers is good, but we eat a lot more mince. And then I thought, well, beef is good, but what about pork? You know, if I’m going to be in Asia, I better do pork. And what about lamb? And what about chicken? First of all, is acknowledge that we like meat. I’m like you. I’m not a vegan. Our products are vegan, but I’m not a vegan. And it occurred to me when I started the business.

It’s only just over three years ago, and I was at a conference in San Francisco to try and find out about this sort of cool alt-protein thing. And I was in the room with a lot of Californians, a lot of CEOs of alternative protein companies. I was feeling really uncomfortable and I kind of realised that one of the reasons I was uncomfortable is because I wasn’t a vegan and they were. I have a huge amount of respect for people who have the willpower to be a vegan because it’s really hard because most of us love meat and it’s kind of in our genes.

It’s because we’re sort of pre-programmed.

Yeah, there’s a nutritional advantage in meat, which we would have had as hunter-gatherers. You know, it’s pretty dangerous to go and kill an animal. If you could have just foraged berries or something, that would have been a lot safer. But we’re programmed to want meat. We can’t unwire our genes. That’s a given. It is how it is. So let’s make plant-based meat that actually gives you the same hit.

We’re humans. We have these instincts. Let’s not try and pretend that we can be better [than] who we are. You know, we can try really hard and some vegans can, but there’s a few things that are going on. One is that we’re very conservative with food. I bet you if you asked, what are your top five meals? They’re probably the same top five meals that your mum cooked you.

I was going to say, it’s also very cultural. I’m Palestinian-Lebanese. My mother, you know, there’s nothing that she doesn’t make without meat. It’s a very meat heavy diet.

So the job to be done – because we can’t tell people to change your diet, we know that never works because you go back to the things that you love – so what we need to do is, we need to fit our plant-based meat into the dishes that you love to eat. That’s the job to be done. So the meat that we create? Yeah, it’s a burger, but it’s also mince. In Australia, for example, mince is the biggest form of meat. And what do you do with mince? Well you make a spag boll or a chilli conc.

Or a kofta if you’re Lebanese.

Yeah. And so our meat’s got to work in exactly the same way. So you don’t have to change your diet, you just carry on eating, but it’s plant-based instead.

You said the word ‘burger’ several times, for obvious reasons, you make burgers, burger meat. But what makes the perfect burger? And how do you convince people or, I suppose, emotionally help them connect with the idea that you’re still having this scrumptious, delicious, juicy burger, but it’s plant-based?

I think when we started v2, I went out there and I ate more burgers than I’ve ever eaten. The thing about meat is that it’s not homogeneous and you never really think about it, but you think about a burger, imagine a burger, and what are you eating? You see, there’s a crust on there and then there’s different textures and then you put it in your mouth and you bite on it and it squelches and it squirts liquid.

Stop – I’m so hungry!

There’s fatty mouthfeel and that fat is delicious and it smells sort of grilled and then you realise that it’s a really complex problem. And how do you reproduce all of that in a plant-based meat? And that’s the scientific problem to be solved. We had like 38 different individual projects, all coming together to give you the Rebel Whopper at Hungry Jacks is a v2 whopper, and it gives you all of that meat experience. But it’s plant-based.

If we are going to have a genuine impact on bettering the planet and in turn, climate change, where do you start and what’s going on in the lab? I want you to take us inside that space so we can see and feel the process because I think if people feel the process and they understand what goes on behind the scenes, if you like, then it makes it not only more believable, but you actually genuinely then feel the change that you’re contributing to by consuming plant-based meat.

You start with a source of protein and it’s going to be something like soy, or it could be pea or it could be – it’ll be a legume because legumes have a high amount of protein. So that’s where you start. We chose soy because it has a really good nutritional profile and also it doesn’t taste [like] very much.

So job one, get your protein. Try and make sure it doesn’t taste of anything because you don’t want your plant-based burger or your mince to taste of soy. You want it to taste of meat, so start off with something that doesn’t taste of anything. And we’ve got research projects to make sure our soy doesn’t taste of anything and you’ve got the soy and then you’ve got the colour system and the fat system and the flavour system.

And you’ve got a bowl and you put some water and you sort of mash it up and then you then put in some other fats to make sure it sizzles. These ingredients come together and then you put it down a burger line, for example. So it’ll go down to a place like a meat factory, a burger line or a mince-packing line. And then that’s basically the product.

And then that will then go to a restaurant, if it’s Hungry Jack’s, or it’ll go to another restaurant who will take the mince and turn it into a dish, or it’ll go to Coles and Woolworths, and you can buy it in the supermarket and it’ll be the same price as meat or cheaper, because that’s our goal. And you can cook a spag bol or a chilli conc or a kofta, and it’ll just work, and our job is just to make sure it just works.

How do you make plant-based meat that bleeds just like real meat? Because that is something you’re working on right now.

We are. We identified all of the big technical challenges that we need to do research in, and one of them was blood – It’s not strictly blood, it’s called myoglobin, but it’s the red in the meat. And how did you do that? There’s a number of ways of doing it. You could put blood in there, but vegans wouldn’t be very happy with that.

But there is a there is a pigment, which is also an iron-based pigment that exists in algae. And we discovered this and we’ve patented it and we have been working for more than a couple of years now with UTS and with a Dutch company and with the CSIRO in trying to figure out, can we can we grow this deep red colour in algae? And we now have algae farms with this deep red thing. It is a bit weird because it almost looks like a dialysis machine.

But that could be a solution. What’s great about it is that we’re doing some work, again with the CSIRO, to look at the iron bioavailability of this red pigment. So if we can crack this and it’s early days, it’s not in any product today, we need to do regulatory stuff because it’s an algae, we don’t normally eat the algae, so we need to make sure it’s all safe, but we’re going through that process this year.

We think that by the end of the year, you will be able to buy products with a v2 heme in it. It’ll be our colour system. At the moment our product is red, but it’s things like beetroot and just natural colours. The difference is that the algae, it’s red when it’s raw, but when you cook it, it loses the colour. So the outside is brown and the inside is red. And that colour change when you’re cooking tells you that you’ve cooked enough.

So again, part of the job to be done is to make it exactly the same experience so that your mum or your grandma when they cook it, they know when to stop because the colours change and it’s a bit red on the middle. The magic happens when you cook it, and that’s when the chemistry starts, when you cook meat, and ours is exactly the same. All of that chemistry happens when you cook it and actually the red stuff is part of that chemistry.

Speaking of solving problems, a lot of the work that you do is obviously innovating, it’s ideas, it’s experimenting, it’s using science and testing things out to create a solution to something as big and grand and scary as climate change. What does innovating mean to you? Because it’s something you also teach, you share your wisdom around innovation with people.

The thing I teach about innovating is first of all, figure out what is the problem you’re trying to solve? Innovating is solving a problem. We’ve got a planetary problem that needs to be solved. So how do we solve that problem? And that’s the way I always look at it and you frame it up in terms of here, it’s a food system problem and a problem with meat the needs to get solved and then you start breaking it down.

This is probably the biggest problem that I’ve ever worked on and also the most satisfying, because if we crack it, we actually do something useful.

How do you teach innovation? Because that is a big part of your world too. How do you impart the knowledge around how to innovate?

Innovation is not a mad scientist in a lab. That might be an inventor, but that’s not an innovator. An innovator is somebody who can take something all the way through to have an impact. And what we teach is that innovation is not in the realms of a mad scientist, it’s actually: you can innovate across all of the different fields. And then when you get all of them together, and this is what we teach at UTS, it’s called transdisciplinary.

You’ve got to get the scientists talking to the lawyer, talking to the marketeer, talking to the business economist, and you bring them all together in the room. They all have different ways of inventing and innovating and you bring them together because innovation always happens on the edges of the field. It’s a really great example of where bringing people together to work on a problem will get much better outcomes than if it’s just one mad scientist or one marketeer trying to solve the problem.

I think it’s really important to compare how Australia is doing [in comparison] to other parts of the world. What are the challenges around innovation in Australia? In terms of the way we develop, how we make the product, how we cook it, how we get it out there.

What’s really interesting about Australia is actually we have some of the best universities in the world, and they measure themselves, there’s ranking systems. And actually, Australia are right up there in terms of their academic performance. Best scientists, best engineers in the world. But then when they measure themselves on impact… And there’s other measures, how much economic value is derived from Australian universities? It’s one of the lowest conversion rates. Australia for some reason has lost that ability to convert the science into products and into activity.

That’s where companies like v2 come in, working with all of the universities and the CSIRO to try and take the science and turn it into something which is valuable. That’s how we work. We don’t actually have an enormous R and D part. We’ve got a few people that work with me on the science. But most of my scientists are actually sitting in universities or in the CSIRO, and we work with them every day and we demand results and we’re enthusiastic about the science. But this isn’t something that’s going to be a paper that gets written and then published in three years time. No. That’s going to go into my food product.

There’s great access points and innovations that are occurring on how we can have a positive impact on climate change. How do you think Australia is perceived in terms of how we’re innovating in response to the impacts of climate change?

Well, Australia has the worst carbon footprint per capita of anyone on the planet. Apart from Qatar, I think Qatar trumps us. But apart from that, we have the highest carbon footprint per person of anyone on the planet, so it’s deeply embarrassing. And, OK, this isn’t political, but I sometimes have to say when I’m in Europe, I don’t necessarily say that I’m Australian because we don’t have a great reputation when it comes to fossil fuel. But it’s changing.

The good news is, our capacity to be the solution rather than the problem is enormous. Photovoltaics – a lot of the science of photovoltaics is Australian, so we can solve this. It’s not that it’s not physically possible, but you need to get the political will and you’ve got to get the movement going.

But it’s also the consumer, the everyday person. I think that’s a huge part of the problem, right? Because I think we’re sort of desensitised to the idea that we can have a positive impact on the changing planet. And we can contribute in a positive way to climate change. From your perspective as an innovator in the world of food, what is the final frontier? How do we really make people understand that it’s the simple things, the kind of banal, simple things that you do day to day that can actually shift the carbon footprint, can actually shift the impact that we’re having on the planet?

So changing your diet, plant-based: single biggest thing you can do. Figure out how you transport yourself, another big thing you can do. Think about the stuff that you buy. How much stuff do you need? Every bit of stuff that you have has a carbon footprint associated with it, and everyone can do those three things, and that would probably solve more than half of the problem, just those things.

Companies like us, we’ve got to make it easier for people so that they can afford to feed themselves. It mustn’t be more expensive. It mustn’t be more difficult. I think that’s the responsibility of entrepreneurs and companies to figure out how to change the system so we can just be good humans doing what we love to do. And in doing that, we’re also good for the planet. That’s the key problem that we have to solve and there’s a lot of companies out there in Australia that are trying to solve it in just that way.

I’m curious to know how do you think that us as Australians will be eating in 20 years time?

It will be the same dishes, but it’ll be plant-based. So it’ll be exactly – you’ll be eating your kofta that your grandma cooked for you and that kofta will be made by v2food, or someone else, and it’ll taste absolutely delicious and you will just love it and you won’t even think about it. You might not even think that you’ve just save the planet. You’ll be doing what you love, eating the food that you love and we’ve figured it out so that that will actually be carbon negative and restore the planet. You will just have a wonderful conversation with the people that you share the food that you love with, and you won’t even think about it.

That is a perfect way to wrap up our wonderful conversation this morning. Join me in thanking Nick Hazell. Thank you so much. You can listen to this podcast wherever you subscribe to your podcasts on all those platforms and visit 100 Climate Conversations the exhibition, which is in this gorgeous building the Powerhouse museum, or go online to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and records of the conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time.