Adam Yee of UmaiWorks

Alex Shirazi sits down with food scientist and entrepreneur Adam Yee to discuss his journey through startups, consulting, and nearly a decade of podcasting with My Food Job Rocks. Adam shares how founding companies in the alternative protein space, traveling internationally, and interviewing hundreds of food professionals shaped his career and view of the food industry.

They also explore what food science really is, the realities of building food companies, and why funding has cooled in food compared to software. Adam highlights where he sees opportunity today, including science led innovation and the growing role of AI in food development, and why curiosity remains the most important ingredient.

Check out the My Food Job Rocks podcast at www.myfoodjobrocks.com
Check out UmaiWorks at www.umaiworks.com

The Series Swap from 2019: Adam Yee of My Food Job Rocks and Hugh Thomas of Ugly Drinks

Automated transcript:

Alex Shirazi: Hi, this is Alex Shirazi and I’m really excited to have Adam Yee on the show today. Adam, welcome back to the show.

Adam Yee: Welcome back. I don’t think, I don’t remember the first time I was on here. I think this might be my first time actually on your podcast. Alex, I feel like we did a unofficial episode where we swapped.

Alex Shirazi: Oh, yeah. But that’s actually, that was probably the first year. That was actually many years ago. That was probably 2018.

Alex Shirazi: I think we did a podcast swap because I was I was low on content actually, so I asked other people to pitch in their show.

Adam Yee: Okay. I remember that. Okay. And you pitched the podcast swap as you called it, and which makes me think that then maybe you have not officially been a guest on the show.

Alex Shirazi: I don’t think so. Yeah. But we’ve known each other for a long time. And I think we’ve crossed paths quite often in the podcasting alternative meet space too. We, yeah. And we could dig a little bit more into that, but for those that are tuning in and learning about Adam Yee, maybe you know him, maybe you’ve heard his show.

Alex Shirazi: Adam, tell us a little bit about your background.

Adam Yee: Yeah. I’m Adam Yee. I am a food scientist. Dan Serial entrepreneurs. So I’ve, I founded two companies in the alternative meat space better Meat Co and S Foods. One was a business to business ingredient company, and then the other is a consumer packaged goods dumpling company.

Adam Yee: And now I do consulting called Umi Works. I’m also a graduate student. So to fund my grad studies, I have to do consulting. It’s been going pretty well so far, actually, but, i’ve done a lot in my career as a food scientist. I’ve worked in all sorts of different industries. A lot of startups, not only founding my own startups, but also working for startups, and I’ve seen it all.

Alex Shirazi: Awesome. And tell us a little bit more about My Food, job Rocks and just your podcasting adventures in general.

Adam Yee: Oh, yes, I forgot. I didn’t even mention the the core of what I do. About nine years ago I started this podcast called My Food Job Rocks. It has over 300 episodes where we interview an expert in the food industry and.

Adam Yee: They range from farmers to food scientists, to entrepreneurs, to investors. We try to get everyone almost under the sun. And I’ve been doing this on and off for the past nine years, and it has been a keystone in my life, in a sense, in my career specifically where just started just interview people.

Adam Yee: And I really enjoyed it and I realized I, I got a lot of value out of sharing these episodes and sharing these stories. Or eventually it just snowballed. And there were times where I was like invited to conferences and I would say I even started my first startup because of this podcast.

Adam Yee: And. Just go where my curiosity takes me. If I have a job, for instance, and I don’t know what I’m doing, or I need some more advice, I would ask someone to be on the show just to learn from them and it would help me get to the kind of the next step of a challenge I had, whether it’s personal, professional, and the, I think the best thing I ever done with this podcast was I picked it up again when I was doing a sabbatical where I traveled to nine different countries.

Adam Yee: Learning about the alternative meat space in Asia and within these nine countries, I interviewed like a professional from each of them. And I think that not only was very enlightening to understand like the dynamics and culture of how we view alternative proteins in different countries.

Adam Yee: But also I made some lifelong friends from that. Even when I go back to the country, let’s say Singapore or Japan, I have friends there that I made because of that podcast sabbatical. It’s cool. And I remember and this is actually, dating it back because it was IFT in New Orleans, and I know they’ve been doing it in Chicago for a while, and you had invited me somehow.

Adam Yee: You, you got a ticket for me. Maybe it was a panel or yes. Or some other type of speaking engagement. But I remember, just walking through. The show floor. And you could see how much of an impact you had made on a lot of people’s careers because, people were waving to you left or right.

Adam Yee: And I was walking with you, I felt like I was walking with a celebrity. It was really cool. And I think, that, that kind of just shows that you do make an impact on a lot of people’s lives, whether you’re talking to them about. Personal professional or really just featuring them.

Adam Yee: So I, I think the impact shows, and it’s really cool, and I’m not just saying that it was, I’m starstruck actually. That’s the only conference where that happens. My food rocks target specifically to food scientists and I would say people adjacent to food scientists. And.

Adam Yee: It’s a great way to actually network because not only can you use the platform to interview people you never thought of talking about, talking to I was surprised some of the guests I got from PR firms specifically, they would ask me to interview celebrity chefs that I’ve seen on tv.

Adam Yee: I’ll name three that I. Clearly was Adam Richmond from Man Versus Food, Andrew Zimmern from bizarre Foods and Robert Irvine from mission or Dinner Impossible. Those are all like celebrity guests. Like I, I was like just starstruck interviewing them myself on the podcast so that’s one, but two, because I can launch these episodes and share the conversation with others. A lot of people who listen get inspired or get some knowledge from these podcast episodes. So it’s, it is this great tool to network without putting, your physical time or f or body into it.

What Is Food Science

Alex Shirazi: I want to ask about where you grew up and also some of, the travels that you’ve done but I think now actually is a really good time to, to ask you the question, what is food science? If you were to de describe food science to maybe somebody in general terms, how would you describe food science?

Adam Yee: Yeah. So I haven’t actually ref, I had a good article about this when I used to have my website. Now I saw a buggy mouse. But what is food science? It is the application of scientific concepts of food. That’s, for lack of better term, that’s the best explanation I’ve had when convincing someone to get into or look into food science.

Adam Yee: Is that anything that, any like physics, chemistry. Biology, like hard science concepts can be applied to food and those scientific concepts are really made to make your food safe. So one example is like right now actually as a master’s student, I’m learning about viscosity and that’s physics. The physics of viscosity from like sheer rate and like sheer stress and all that.

Adam Yee: For chemistry it’s the reaction. So what is the reaction of let’s say. Salt and a meat substance that dries it out. And then even biology, it’s specifically microbiology. It’s a study of, okay, what kind of food can spoil our food or what kind of micro microorganisms can spoil our food, like salmonella or e coli versus let’s say, what can be helpful for a food, let’s say at lactic acid bacteria in sauerkraut or kimchi?

Adam Yee: I always like to, I always like to say like food science. Is very tangible in that you can take these hard science concepts and apply them to something. Not only delicious, but I’ve been trying to position as profitable too. ’cause a lot of these scientific concepts do end up being a mechanism to prove that a food is either safe, delicious or is affordable.

Alex Shirazi: I am reminded about this scene from the the McDonald’s founder. Did you see that movie where they, it was like the founder of mc, not the founder, like Ray Crock?

Adam Yee: Yes. Yeah. The Ray Crock movie. The recent kind of biopic type of thing. And they had this like powdered milkshake.

Alex Shirazi: And I thought of that now because it reminded me, you, you just said profitable, right? And if you think of the. Typical foods or food ingredients or even, food in, in, in large scale that we serve. Applying a little bit of food science might increase shelf life, make, that’s something that obviously would make it more profitable or improve texture quality.

Alex Shirazi: And so that’s a interesting way to look at it and sure there’s good ways to do it and bad ways to do it, but ultimately it’s pretty impressive solutions that you can come up with food science.

Adam Yee: Yeah, I it. The main point of food science is to prolong like a commodity or raw material like a fruit, vegetable, grain or meat even.

Adam Yee: And there’s so many ways to do it and it’s stuff we don’t really think about, right? Drying is a type of food science. Adding salt or pickling something is food science. And I would one of the most fascinating technologies I really like is freezing technology, which is also food science as well.

Adam Yee: We don’t think about how. Awesome. Our cold chain is like the way we freeze things in the grocery store and how we ship things frozen and all that. But that’s all like for the sake of preservation, preserving food that is food science at the end of the day.

Preservation, Cold Chain, and “Ancient Food Science”

Alex Shirazi: It makes me think of two things. One, like ancient food science, if that’s even a term. You mentioned kimchi earlier. And so I, I’d love to chat with you a little bit about that. But I also wanna say when I was a kid and I first realized that some of those big trucks on the highways. We’re refrigerated.

Alex Shirazi: That kind of blew my mind. It’s wow. That makes sense, but it’s crazy that we have all this infrastructure to move frozen foods from one place to another.

Adam Yee: Yeah. There’s a really good book I recently read called Frostbite that talked all about the cold chain. And it talked about how, like, how we discovered gases that when you apply energy, we’ll cool things down.

Adam Yee: It talked about like surface area and just all and just a vast amount of frozen space in there. I can go on and on about it. I just think that’s a good example of an underrated technology that we don’t think about, but has been impactful in the world today.

Alex Shirazi: And you mentioned pickling and just it makes me think of maybe there were these like, food scientists, but people saw them as wizards back in the day to make things like kimchi and other types of pickle.

Adam Yee: I don’t think so. I actually don’t think that’s I think it’s actually more an accident happened and people found that accident and then they, and then they kept the tradition. Food science is all about writing stuff down and recording it and then making sense of it all. And I don’t think people actually did that in the past.

Adam Yee: Maybe one really smart guy did. But other than that, like food science is relatively decently new. In fact, I would say a hundred years ago. One would argue probably more than a hundred years ago, but like home economics classes were more popular than like food science classes.

Adam Yee: In fact, a lot of home economics classes changed in the food science classes. At least in my university that happened. So I, I think when we think about cooking and traditions and like pickling or baking or even like seeing yeast rise, those are actually all accidents.

Adam Yee: And then, eventually when, once the scientific method was invented we started applying to everything. And I think that’s how we built up this kind of, what we see today as not only just food, but almost everything. We do has a lot of science behind it.

Background and University

Alex Shirazi: Where did you grow up and where did tell us about your university experience.

Adam Yee: Yeah, I’m nothing special. I grew up in a middle class family in the suburbs of California. My parents were not involved in the food industry.

Adam Yee: What I learned from my food job, Rox, is a lot of people who know about food science actually come from food science families, or they transfer from in college. No, it’s very hard for someone to actually stumble into food science almost. Or Yeah, with without some technological help.

Adam Yee: And it’s honestly, thanks to Google that you can find it now or at least much easier. But yeah, I just grew up middle class parents were very supportive. I’m very happy for that. They didn’t push me very hard. So that means I could explore things.

Adam Yee: I didn’t even know what engineering was in high school. And then once I got into college, I knew what it was. Then I went to just a simple state college called Cal Poly San Obispo.

Adam Yee: I got really involved with the university there. Right now I serve as I think a board of advisors for the food science over there. And been and helped my professor with some grant projects.

Adam Yee: And funny enough that grant project also connected me with North Carolina State University where I am right now. So it’s really funny how that works.

Adam Yee: But, I think what I realized is it wasn’t until food science where I felt like I was going anywhere with life. I like for some, I’ve always loved food. I’ve cooked. I thought I was gonna become like a chef.

Adam Yee: And then I did one day of it and I got fired. And then after that I just, I had some decent grades in high school, so when I looked into what I could do with food and a university degree. Food science popped up and I decided to try it out.

Adam Yee: And I think that really changed everything. It it allowed me to essentially become fascinated with how food works and how we feed or make things with food. And I think that kind of snowballed from there.

Alex Shirazi: Wow. Amazing. And so did you go to Cal Poly St. Louis Obispo for food science to start?

Adam Yee: Yes. Correct. So you have to choose your major in Cal Poly, but yeah I did a little bit of Googling and I found out about food science.

Adam Yee: Fortunately a lot of people don’t find out about food science through Googling. I think it’s getting a little bit better, but still it’s a relatively unknown major.

Adam Yee: And it’s only available in certain universities called land-grant universities, but. I was able to find it and I, I really liked it. I really got involved. I’m really happy I got involved and those connections I made there are still my friends today.

Graduate School and AI in Food

Alex Shirazi: Very cool. And we’ll get to Umay in just a second. But tell us a little bit about the graduate program that you’re in right now.

Adam Yee: Yeah. So I’m in NC State. The professor I’m working with is an assistant professor, so she’s really new to this whole academic, like kind of world. So that that allowed me to like work with her a little bit to make it a different master’s program than I think other students have who are fresh out of undergrad and trying to figure it out.

Adam Yee: I’ve had 10 years of experience, so I have a little bit more, I have a little bit more need or want of what I wanna study.

Adam Yee: But funny enough, like the reason why I am getting a Master’s right now is because last year I did some really cool research with Stanford University for under understanding how large language models can improve specifically plant plant-based meat.

Adam Yee: And we found that there is a lot of potential for using large language models to improve formulating. Plant-based meat through inputting certain data through saying certain prompts. And that has been expanded, but it got me really interested because if Stanford is looking at this type of.

Adam Yee: Research then no one else is probably going to be looking at this for a long time. So that’s why I decided to be like, okay. I have a good relationship with the faculty at NC State. I have this research paper with my name on it and I think I can pursue this further. So that’s why I moved.

Adam Yee: One I moved outta San Francisco is too expensive in San Francisco, but also ’cause it is a way to prove okay, could I, nC State does have a good track record for food scientists and food science research.

Adam Yee: Can I use. Can I convince them that AI is the way to go, therefore convince other food scientists in the industry that a AI can have an impact in my industry.

Adam Yee: So we’re try, we’re still trying to figure that out, trying to explore that, because it’s, I’ve only been here for a month, but in general, I think that’s the big reason why in graduate school one I do think I have the, I now have the time freedom and energy to do it at my age.

Adam Yee: But also I do really think this question that I’ve been able to. Find last year is really important to solve.

Alex Shirazi: Wow, that’s very cool. And it also makes me think of, now that AI is evolving, we’re starting to see more applications beyond the chat bot. And so maybe the next time you are, having a smoothie or even a burger patty there’s gonna be a lot of AI that went into making, producing, storing or, developing that that food product.

Adam Yee: Yeah, it’s, it is, it’s happening. People have a lot of thoughts about it and people are trying to push their little tool to help figure it out. There’s a little bit of struggle using AI right now.

Adam Yee: Food is generally a little bit of a conservative industry. They also don’t have a lot of margins to look into technology. So it, it will be a long time before we adopted. I think there’ll be other technology or sectors like let’s say Big four consulting that will take advantage of AI a little bit more than food.

Running a Food Company and Profitability

Alex Shirazi: Yeah, that’s, that, that’s a actually an interesting point about margins because when you look at the technology ecosystem software for example doesn’t spoil it doesn’t need to be stored. It, it doesn’t have different types of, it has regulation around it, but it doesn’t have re religious connotations around it too much. And as someone who has launched. Startups that are in the CPG space, what, what, how do you go about it from like a business perspective thinking, okay, we, to get these numbers to work, we really need to have a crazy volume.

Alex Shirazi: Can you and maybe this is a good transition into my, but can you tell us just a little bit about the challenges albeit rewarding the challenges of running a food company?

Adam Yee: Yeah, it’s extremely difficult and I’ve been fortunate with my two businesses that we were able to raise money before we were able to invest into manufacturing the product.

Adam Yee: But yeah, food is, in terms of a Valley of death perspective, food is pretty bad. Like you, you have to sacrifice margins to get because there are these bigger players that will, I guess charge you because you don’t have the scale yet, and basically had to pull to push this like gigantic boulder up a hill and get bombarded with not only in a product point of view, but also in a marketing or distribution point of, or, distribution point of view as well.

Adam Yee: You just get bombarded from all sides ’cause you’re just not scaled yet. So it’s a really difficult industry. It’s also a very scalable, or there’s a lot of how can I say this? Challenges scaling a food business and it’s, and unless unlike software where you don’t have to spend per kind of sale, you do have to spend money per sale for a food product.

Adam Yee: So your margin is just completely cut. Some would argue even to 10%. So it is a very tough business. All I can say for this is that most don’t get profitable in over 10 years.

Adam Yee: And I have not never been in a company where I’ve seen profitability. They’ve always raised money before they have been profitable.

Adam Yee: I would also argue like there when I was doing like better meat and solo foods, is that was like a. Literally the range when alternative proteins were getting funded really well.

Adam Yee: And I think that was a sign of okay, we, if we can get money early, then we can at least survive a little bit.

Adam Yee: This has changed completely in the past, like year or two, but it was. It was good to understand just how that model works, but I, and I think the biggest thesis, I think you would agree, Alex, is that VC funding it in food was wa was a very interesting time.

Adam Yee: And it was a very it showed us a lot about how the VC model, especially the software VC model can’t really work in food.

Alex Shirazi: So if I am starting a new CPG company, I should realistically say 10 years until I could be fully profitable. Apparently that’s a magic number.

Adam Yee: Yeah. Yeah. Apparently that’s a magic number.

Alex Shirazi: To me, that actually makes sense. If you think about all of the. The challenges, some of which we just discussed. It does take time. And when you do think of some of the huge food players they’re very old companies, right?

Adam Yee: Yeah. I think that makes that makes sense. Not to say that it’s. Not a good company to, to spend time on. Everybody is passionate about food. But yeah it’s interesting when you look at it from a business standpoint.

Restaurant vs. CPG

Alex Shirazi: Yeah. I wanted to ask you, do you think it’s harder to launch a food product than it is to run a restaurant? And I know that’s a totally different industry ’cause a lot of people say restaurant is one of the hardest businesses to run. But what do you think is harder running a restaurant or creating a new food product?

Adam Yee: Yeah, disclaimer. I’ve never ran a restaurant. I think but a lot of chefs, I do talk to some chefs that want to make their own product ’cause they believe is easier. They’re both challenging. And they’re both in all food, which is low margin.

Adam Yee: I think that the biggest challenge with restaurants is overhead and labor. And you can argue manufacturing’s the same way, but you just produce so much more output than the labor it takes for a chef.

Adam Yee: In a kind of like a core business standpoint, a restaurant is a lot harder because you have to deal with really expensive overhead which kind of stacks on like the regulations, especially for a fume hood, which is always delayed and is always more expensive than you think.

Adam Yee: Labor, which. You aren’t getting the highest quality labor for a reason. Just admitted people are very the chef culture is very temperamental. They can be it can be very toxic and and the staff aren’t, aren’t paid extremely well and they probably do it for a part-time job.

Adam Yee: Versus food you can outsource a lot of that stuff through, let’s say a third party manufacturer. Or a or, you can outsource your marketing. So there’s a lot of things you can outsource in a food business than in a restaurant technically.

Adam Yee: So in that way a food company’s a little bit easier, but there, there are still some inherent challenges to it, I think.

Adam Yee: I think they’re both vanity industries though, in a sense where, we don’t really need these industries to survive, which is why it always talks about, it’s always hard to say applied startup theory to these types of restaurants and food companies.

Adam Yee: Do people actually need a new restaurant or a new food product? Answer is no, but they’d like to embellish that need is really important. And some have been successful in finding that need, but it is really hard to find that. And I think it takes actually a lot of trial and error to find that need.

Adam Yee: But to answer your core question, I’ve never ran a restaurant. I’ve ran a food business. And luckily I’ve ran a food business that had. Prior funding, which I think is also important to really state.

Adam Yee: So I’ve never actually, I’ve never felt the pain, so to say, of bootstrapping it. But at least from what I have talked to with chefs and let’s say CPG founders restaurants seem harder, but both re still require a really good exam understanding of business fundamentals and numbers.

Umai Works

Alex Shirazi: I appreciate that response. Yeah. And it’s interesting to think about. I wanna get into Umai. So tell us what Umai is and where the name comes from.

Adam Yee: Yeah I like to call it Umai Works. It’s honestly a name that I’ve had in like in the back of my head for five years because I was just trying to think of a short word for something that’s memorable and unique and all that stuff. Umami is overblown.

Adam Yee: So I’ve chose Umai as like the core word and then works at the end. And I’m playing around, like combining it and all that. But Umai Works specifically is a, is just my, my I don’t even know what to call it, innovation studio.

Adam Yee: Just a cool little color code that I like to put to associate myself with. Umai means tasty and skilled in Japan. If you like Google it. If you google Umai, you’ll find those two words specifically. Umai can mean tasty or skilled, and yeah, it comes from Japan.

Adam Yee: If I go to Japan and I show them my business card they like to say it and they think it’s really funny when they see that word. But in general it is just a name. I think I associate with food and myself really well, I make tasty products and and I think I’m very skilled at it.

Adam Yee: I think even the kind of the tagline for my works, which I. Honestly generated from chat, GPT is crafted with skill, delivered with flavor.

Adam Yee: So it is basically a colorful platform that I use to show my services as a food product developer. I’m an independent product developer, and I specifically help people with just an idea.

Adam Yee: Which I’ve done all my life. And I’m having a lot of fun with it. There’s people contact me often and we, and there’s a lot of cool products that I’ve helped in both established companies and also brands who are just starting.

Consulting Clients and Scope

Alex Shirazi: Very cool. And I see you’ve worked with big brands like Emmy or Prime Roots.

Adam Yee: Do you— They’re small or Emmy was small at first.

Alex Shirazi: Oh, yeah. Okay. Now they’re everywhere and they Yeah, they were. Yeah. Yeah. I helped them a little bit though yeah. Yeah. You got even credit for them. So do you work with all size companies from ideation all the way to optimization or startups or your niche?

Alex Shirazi: What do you do you have a focus.

Adam Yee: Yeah. I would say it, it has been random. And one of my best clients was a a a Chinese family, rice factory who got in trouble at the f FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and they issued a big warning. It’s called a 43, which you, if you Google the company, they’ll be shown as do not eat here, pretty much.

Adam Yee: And I was tasked to be their communication shield, so to say. So I was their like quality person and I had to pretty much do the audits work with the FDA to fix everything. And I would say we’ve done a really good job doing that. We had two audits, like while I was there for the whole year and one was brutal.

Adam Yee: It was the worst four days of my life. And then the next one, which happened three months ago was really nice actually. It was a different investigator, which tells you a lot. About how they work, but in general you, they could see the improvements and I was very happy with what happened.

Adam Yee: So that’s one of the things that. I did that was unique, but most of the time it is helping people with their technical problems or running through the, running through how they make a food product. There’s just a lot and sometimes it’s even cool AI projects. I work with Food System Innovation and Stanford University.

Adam Yee: It is basically just me trying to solve any problem in food. I think that’s how I like to position it. I would say a lot of people have been finding me to not only troubleshoot some interesting problems. Like one person just messaged me last night saying that their sauce tastes funny and they’ve found me through some channels and and they wanna work with me versus people who just have an idea they need like an expert to help them through and they think it’s worth it to to pay me money, to help ’em scale faster.

Umai Works Links

Alex Shirazi: Very cool. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. So as we’ve been, oh and I’ll put the link in the show notes and next umay com. Umay works.com. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Funding Landscape and What’s Next

Alex Shirazi: As we begin to wrap up, I, we talked earlier about how there was this let’s call it funding heyday for food companies from VC investors. Where do you see that landscape is now, and what do you think is like the next, exciting area for food companies.

Adam Yee: Yeah, so I write a lot about this and I try to look at the bigger trends when, whenever I think about insights into the food industry funding has definitely shrank a lot and people are being a little bit more conservative of their bets.

Adam Yee: One could even argue like AI is the culprit on this. So everyone is putting their money to ai. I don’t think though it’s really affecting the food industry as much as I thought. And I, what I’ve noticed in general with investing is that no one’s getting a good deal anymore.

Adam Yee: So generally investors have time horizons like 10 years, but now these are, now, a lot of their deals are extending like 12 to 15 years. So when you think about it in a year as a percent. Metric, you’re getting a really bad deal on your return on investment because the years are starting to grow while, your investment is not growing.

Adam Yee: In fact, it might even go down or to zero, even the chances of it getting to zero every year is a lot worse, especially as the years go on. And then there’s some weird stuff with secondaries and whatever, but I think in general, the invest the VC community. Is scaling back a lot because they are, they’re getting hit hard with the amount of money.

Adam Yee: They’re with the return on investment. They’re not getting food is just on the lower totem pole because it is technically a bad business. It is compared to software specifically. So you only get three to five x returns on food. You generally. You’re, especially with CPG or consumer packaged goods, you are in a very tough spot because you are consumers are more fickle than ever because they can switch or they’re more conservative, their money.

Adam Yee: It is just, you cannot predict what the consumer is doing in food. So it’s just, there’s a lot of headwinds in, in. Food, CPG, and I would even say alternative proteins, which also have not panned out in terms of investment situation. So what we’re seeing now is just a backlash or repercussion of things not fruition through the investments made in current rounds.

Adam Yee: And I think people are scaling back because of that. So what does that mean? It just means that. Because people are more conservative about the amount of funding they’re giving to food companies. They’re looking for 1 million a RR off the bat, like annual recurring revenue. They’re looking for big numbers to then put money in.

Adam Yee: And that, that is, that causes a lot of issues. It causes a lot of a lot of people come to me and ask me for investment advice, and it’s hard for me to give them now because. I’ll just tell you the honest truth is beg your rich uncle or family to give you money. That’s the best way to start.

Adam Yee: In terms of a funding perspective, VCs now are just, they just want, they’re just so scared to deploy their money that they wanna see really strong traction first. And I think that really is difficult for the ecosystem. But then anyone can argue, as I said in the, in little bit early in the interview, is that this is a vanity industry.

Adam Yee: We do, we really need another high protein. Donut or candy bar or whatever. The reason why Peter Rail from the David Bar could raise so much money is ’cause he was a past founder and he had a successful exit and he had a really good network. And I think that, and I think those who can raise that money, like celebrities or adjacent.

Adam Yee: Rich people. That’s their game now. There’s a really good book called ramping Your Brand by James Richardson, who also echoes this as well, that it’s, it is getting harder and harder because the more people, it’s harder to get the money from essentially rich people. So that’s all a big rant about that, I would say.

Adam Yee: But the answer is that it’s it is a lot harder right now to start a food company, but people still do it, and I think it’s a beautiful thing. As people still do it, they just have to think smarter. But the era of a stranger specifically handing you a bunch of money is unfortunately less and less.

Food Trends

Alex Shirazi: So are there any food trends that you see, whether they’re getting investment traction or not, are starting to rise up.

Adam Yee: Yeah, so the great news about Umai Works is that we get a lot of inquiries from food trends. And I would say I get a lot of protein projects. I get a lot of fiber projects.

Adam Yee: I got a lot of matcha projects that I’m rejecting. And I think that’s why.

Alex Shirazi: What do you have against matcha?

Adam Yee: I just don’t like it when non-Japanese people do matcha projects. I’m just gonna say it right here. It just, the best matcha comes from Japan yeah. Yeah. It just irks me the wrong way that people and why works was, works with a lot of Asian entrepreneurs too, and.

Adam Yee: I, I just don’t feel like the founder’s in it. If they’re ex, I don’t know if they’re using like a trendy ingredient. So and so usually if we’re seeing these trends early on and we’re getting inquiries about can you make this and they’re serious about it, it’ll take ’em about a year or two to actually make the product to launch, and then after that, it’ll take ’em like.

Adam Yee: Two to five years to actually scale enough for relevancy. I think that’s what I would say is still trending. Protein and fiber is what I’m seeing right now. There might be a new hit color but honestly what is interesting about the world today is that it is really flattening with kind of the attention economy, like with TikTok or even when we argue chat, GBT the trends are easier to spot because food companies are more conservative on the bets they’re gonna make.

Alex Shirazi: Do you think the trends are also a little bit faster to come and go?

Adam Yee: Yes. Yes. And one example is like Dubai chocolate. And this causes actually a really hard thing with the supply chain as well because I’ve had a lot of complaints about pistachio supply. Because of Dubai chocolate, for instance.

Adam Yee: Just the food industry can’t keep up with the virality of trends and Dubai chocolate. And, I would say even matcha are these examples of how virality increases so much demand that supply cannot keep up.

Alex Shirazi: Wow. Interesting. Thank you so much. As we begin to close out this episode, are there any last insights or call outs that you’d like to make for today?

Closing Thoughts

Adam Yee: I think those who are working in food I still think it’s a really fun industry and I think there’s still a lot to explore in food. You don’t have to do something like a vanity business, like a consumer packaged good product. I think. There are plenty of opportunities. There’s always gonna be opportunities to feed the world.

Adam Yee: I’m looking more on the science side of things which I think there’s still a lot we don’t know. And I think with just the changes in the world today, there’s always gonna be things to figure out with anything in food whether it’s the crop or the ingredient or the consumer bag is good.

Adam Yee: Other than that, I help anyone in food. My company is Umai Works and you can find me on LinkedIn Adam Yee I’m probably the only Adam Yee with the word food science in their in their title. But, I just like to talk and I’m very curious about anything in food and I think it is really all related at the end of the day.

Adam Yee: All these kind of in, in what I’ve learned throughout my whole time in the food industry and I’ve just. Kept on being curious about it. And the more I learned, the more I wanna learn more about it. And I’ve just realized that it’s more connected than you think. And there are nodes that you can make an impact that I think are just really cool to think about.

Alex Shirazi: Very cool. And the passion is definitely there and appreciated. Adam, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.

Adam Yee: Yeah, no problem Alex. Thanks for having me.

Alex Shirazi: This is your host, Alex Shirazi, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.