Sam Colbert

speaker

83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5 Jun

Sam Colbert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

You had Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio putting money behind Beyond Meat, and people like Oprah Winfrey.

And Jay-Z and Natalie Portman supporting Oatly, which is a big maker of oat milk.

And so I spoke to people who wanted to do for cheese what those companies had done for burgers and oat milk.

They wanted in on this plant-based revolution.

I interviewed a guy called Oliver Zahn, who founded a company called Climax Foods in Silicon Valley.

He had been a data scientist at Google and at SpaceX.

And he promised to use AI to make a zero compromise vegan cheese that was quote better in every way than the real thing.

Well, for that particular company, the timing was unfortunate in that the plant-based boom busted.

So some of those companies, beyond meat, impossible foods, Oatly, are now at a fraction of their former valuations.

And there's been a real cool on venture capital money for plant-based food research.

Simultaneously, consumer demand has dipped.

It did not meet the

Yeah.

And so it turned out that for companies like Climax, making a zero compromise vegan cheese was just harder and more expensive than anticipated and they increasingly got squeezed by the changes in the market.

And so for now you have bigger companies that are trying to iterate, say by adding a little protein without adding too much cost, but vegan cheese continues to wait for its breakthrough.

Yeah.

Sorry.

I want you to describe for me the taste, the mouthfeel of what you're

I think so.

That's all part of it.

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