Future Of Agriculture

Today’s episode highlights two interesting consumer trends in food and agriculture. And on the surface, these two trends seem to be going in totally opposite directions, but not necessarily as you’ll hear from our guest today.  The first trend is the increasing desire for healthier, simpler, more nutritious food. The second is that demand for processed food is strong and getting stronger. You might be thinking, wait aren’t those two things complete opposites?  Well, not necessarily. Our guest today, Joanne Zhang is the founder of Phytoption, a food ingredient company that uses proprietary technology that allows them to replace certain ingredients in processed food that are synthetic or modified - like certain emulsifiers and texturing agents, with essentially simple flour like rice flour or chickpea flour. This allows more processed foods to be made with more naturally occurring ingredients.  As you’ll hear Joanne describe, these ingredients are used because they make food functional. For example, they hel