Romy
speaker
233 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Romy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, to be clear, there's no evidence, at least online at this point, that anything actually fishy was going on. This was just some teenage theorizing at this point. But we decided to reach out to the company to see if anyone there was down to talk to us about their clay pots. Like a bunch of French kids think you're lying. I didn't go. That was not my email to the company.
And to be clear, we were going in skeptical, but also with an open mind. Chapter six, the yogurt executive. Can you hear yourself when you talk?
Yeah.
So I meet up with the students and their teacher David at Search Engine HQ. It's all very exciting. An executive at La Fermiere has very generously agreed to talk to us.
Okay, so hi.
So as the head of sales and marketing in the U.S., Charlotte would be the first one to admit, like, she's not a sustainability expert, but she does know the company and its products very well.
So basically, La Fermiere yogurt for many decades had come in wax-coated paper pots. And then in the 90s, Charlotte tells us that the company decided to switch to the terracotta pot, both because they wanted to stand out to their customers, but also because they were thinking about the environment.
And as soon as Charlotte is starting to, like, sing the praises of this terracotta pot for all of its ecological virtues, I can see the students kind of, like, squirming in their chairs. It's just making them more suspicious. They sort of get this wry smile on their face, you know, because Charlotte is more or less repeating what we found on the website.
High quality ingredients, high quality packaging, which is like a good slogan, but doesn't necessarily offer much of a window into how the company is actually thinking about the environmental trade-offs. And she's wandering into a room full of teenage sharpshooters. So Romy tries to press Charlotte on the topic.
And Charlotte's like, look, terracotta, not the villain here. The villain here is the other kinds of packaging and the word that nobody's saying. It's like, plastic's the obvious villain here. Like, terracotta is obviously better for the environment than plastic.
No, it is not. They're also asking these kinds of serious hardball questions. They're teenagers, but they just seem very well-versed in what I would think of as adult corporate consultant lingo.
It was almost like the students had decided to go full prosecutor here.
This is actually surprising to me. Like, I'd assumed that the French yogurt came from France, but the ingredients are actually arriving from in-state in New York, which did seem maybe more environmentally sound, although not something La Fermiere is particularly bragging about. We started to wrap up the conversation and we say our awkward goodbyes. We thank Charlotte for her time.
Charlotte, thank you so much for your time. This is really helpful. We appreciate it. We'll talk soon.
Bye now.
Romy and Anouk, coming off of that call, are just, like, positively elated. Like, I think, one, I just think they're excited to be in the same podcast studio that Maya Hawke was once inside of. Well, yeah. But I also think that, like, they just played hardball with the company executive, and they kind of won. Yeah, an adult flinch. Yeah.
There's no thing that makes a teenager happier than, like... An adult flinch. It's not like we got any answers. It's not like we're actually that much closer to the real answer to our question here, which is like, is terracotta more sustainable than plastic?
But Romy and Anouk at this point are just increasingly skeptical that the answers the company is giving us are anything more than just marketing speak.
Like for premium brands now, it's kind of a given that if they're going to price it so much higher, they're going to have to do something about climate change because it's like such a big concern. All brands now.
Even like food, makeup, clothing. Anything has to have a claim that, oh, we're doing this to protect the planet. Or ethical, whether it be ethics or sustainability. They're good at like making it show, even though it's not really true. Yeah.
Showing 101–120 of 233 · page 6 of 12
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