Revolutionizing Our Food System: An Interview with Tom Simmons, Founder & CEO of The Supplant Company
By Georgia Kossoff
Long-time Gigaton subscribers already know the massive problem that food waste poses to climate change - until recently, it was our highest carbon potential solution profiled! We had the opportunity to interview Tom Simmons, Founder & CEO of The Supplant Company, a Y Combinator grad, which has created Sugars from fiber, a revolutionary new ingredient made from agricultural byproducts - which is both better for you and for the planet.
About The Supplant Company
The Supplant Company’s mission is to create a better food system - one with less waste and higher quality ingredients. Their product turns leftover crops - plant fiber harvested in agriculture that often goes unused - into a blend called “sugars from fiber”. Sugars from fiber has two benefits; first, because it’s made from underutilized pieces of the plant, it’s sustainable. Cane sugar production is resource intensive with multiple environmental impacts, including water use and biodiversity loss. Supplant’s inputs are harvested in other agricultural processes, so there’s little incremental footprint. Second, it has the nutritional benefits of the fiber that it came from: a lower glycemic response compared to glucose, lower in calories than sucrose and it’s prebiotic.
Dr. Simmons began his career in academia, completing a postdoc at the University of Cambridge following his molecular plant science Ph.D. He pivoted into entrepreneurship through the Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship, using his research background to develop The Supplant Company’s product.
Key takeaways
There’s overlap between health and climate. Our food system is a source of inefficiency for both, and by improving our underlying food system it’s possible to solve two problems at once, as The Supplant Company has done.
Solving a problem requires looking at its full impact - just because a product makes improvements on one axis doesn’t mean it’s a net positive for the world. In creating change, assessing the system level impact ensures a holistic improvement.
Translating research into a product is a powerful but complex process that requires multiple iterations to find product-market fit. The fastest way to get there is to have as many conversations with as many stakeholders as possible - customers, industry experts, etc.
Full supply chain ownership allows for larger scale change / impact.
What we learned
[Interview responses condensed / paraphrased]
At The Gigaton, we help aspiring climate leaders narrow their career focus. Can you share how you found your niche in climate and why you decided to focus on food?
Prior to starting The Supplant Company, I was a PhD postdoc fellow, primarily focused on research in areas adjacent to the food space but not actually in food - plant science, carbohydrate science - and my research was directed toward the sustainability side with renewable materials and renewable fuels. When I started the company, our breakthrough innovation was taking a robust body of research, understanding it fully, and leveraging it to address a well-understood but unsolved problem in the food space. That was really our original genesis - we were focused on addressing the health / nutrition angle but sustainability became inherent in the problem we were solving.
A goal of The Gigaton is to shed light on carbon quantification, to help students understand which solutions will move the needle most. How do you quantify the carbon reduction impact of Supplant products?
It’s an exercise we’re going through right now - and there are organizations specifically focused on carbon quantification. The thrust of our unique approach is that we use agriculture’s most abundant resource, and most wasted resource. Right now, 1/3 of what’s grown above ground is what the food industry considers the ‘actual product’ and 2/3 is the side-stream of stems and stalks. It obviously takes carbon and fertilizers and pesticides to grow the whole plant. So if we can bring those side-streams into the food system, there’s a net increase in output but no increase in inputs and energy to grow the material. So we avoid carbon either by increasing the outputs of the food system with no net increase in inputs or by saving tropical rainforests from the inevitable expansion that has to happen if you really want to feed our world’s population.
You’ve written about the importance of systems thinking - tell us about this.
We need to make our food industry more sustainable, but ideally not at the cost of feeding the world, both in terms of quantity and quality of food. To solve these problems you need to see how they’re connected, you need to think from a holistic systems level - the goal is to feed people enough food, quality food, and without harming the environment. It seems obvious, but most innovations in the food space don’t do this. The solutions which touch only one of those goals at best end up being a political decision among potentially competing compromises rather than being unambiguously positive. We need to emphasize an ideal where you focus on unambiguously positive steps forward - no backtracking on any dimension.
What was the development process like at The Supplant Company?
What we did was really connect the dots between domains of science that are typically siloed - my background was carbohydrates, plant science, and the company started quite broad and went through many iterations before settling where we have done. Food was one of the solutions, but it wasn’t obvious that sugar reduction would be the place we started. My advice to other people is to try not to nail down your ideas too specifically early on - the sweet spot will be matching scientific background to a real critical need.
Our company’s development was iterative. When I incorporated The Supplant Company, we were actually trying to do something completely different and then flipped again, and then flipped again. So our current business model is actually our 3rd. It turned into a sugar company because I heard people describe the problem for sugar reduction in food. Sugar-free drinks have been around for a long time, but there’s still no mainstream sugar-free baked goods. Understanding the problem enabled me to think of a solution that could be applied to that space - and that was the first eureka moment.
How did you tactically identify the opportunity to revolutionize sugar?
It was serendipitous that I was in the right group of people. It was the product of a lot of different meetings. For scientists, that’s the unexpectedly long-winded path - you think learning a scientific topic is the hard bit and applying is easy, but it takes a lot of time to learn about these industries, what moves the needle, and how you can scale.
One of the things we’ve done well as a company is create an organization in which there are really very few siloes. Of course, there are people in the company who work on their own stuff but most of us know everything that happens on a high level and a number of the core team have deep connections across the different verticals.
Second, we own the entire supply chain from a scientific perspective. We know the science of how you take raw materials, how the process happens, what ingredient comes out the other end, how it looks and behaves. This ownership allows us to connect the dots that nobody else sees. Narrower companies might focus just on manufacturing or just on formulation (recipes) but working at both ends allows us to see things other people can’t. All of our branding and marketing builds on making sure these two processes are connected.
For readers in academia, when is the right time to make the leap to entrepreneurship?
To make research a significant part of your journey, you have to have a certain depth of involvement, maybe a Ph.D. - I finished a Ph.D. and then did 3 years of a postdoc and then a 1 year fellowship so I’d been in the system for quite a while. But at the other end of the spectrum, it was a lot of work to unlearn habits from the university system - in the early stages of the business, I was straddling the university / business divide. But if your research / academic background is going to be a meaningful differentiator, you need multiple years of experience.
Is The Supplant Company recruiting? What kind of talent would be most valuable?
Yes, we are currently recruiting for a Chief Revenue Officer. We’re always happy to hear from those interested in joining - you can reach out to hello@supplant.com to start the conversation. We’ll have more formal recruiting processes in place shortly, so please do watch out.
And finally, the question we ask in every interview: what gives you hope in the climate crisis?
The current state of activity happening in the climate space is a step change from where things were not so long ago - the amount of money going into it, the amount of attention being garnered makes change possible in a way that wouldn’t have been before.