Ben Berman Co-Founder & CEO of Tomorrow Farms

Thirsty Thursdays @3PM EST

Welcome to Thirsty Thursdays @3PM EST! 😋 My name is Jessie Ott, the Host of this Podcast 🎙️ which is all about Beverage Innovation. I talk with Innovation Pioneers from Agriculture 🌾 🍇 to Glass. 🍷🍻 🍸

This week, I’m speaking with Ben Berman, Co-Founder and CEO of Tomorrow Farms. Ben, born and raised in Portland, Maine, has always been a food 🥘entrepreneur.

In middle school, 🎒 he convinced his high school to pay him $2,500 a year to recruit chefs to cook meals once a month at his high school. At 18, he started Mainely Burgers and ended up with three trucks and 16 employees, which landed his first celebrity appearance on The Food Network.

Ben shifted to consulting at Deloitte where he learned valuable insight into various business models before attending Wharton where he received his MBA. It happened during COVID and Ben turned to his roots and started Good Pizza and gave away 20 pizzas a week for 9 months and raised $100k which he donated to a culinary training program for low- and no-income individuals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was so popular he hit the media circuit again.

Instead of returning to consulting, he decided to look to the future of food with Tomorrow Farms. Their first project, Bored Cow, 🐄 is a dairy alternative to milk 🥛. It’s the world’s first fermentation-derived dairy milk. 👩‍🔬
They are feeding the DNA sequence 🔬 of cow’s milk to yeast, to microflora and letting the microflora ferment like beer. 🍺 The result of this process is identical to dairy but animal-free, lactose-free, and 97% fewer carbon emissions. It’s not a new process as it has been used to make insulin for a long time.

Given the constraints on land and the growing number of people on the planet, he wants to use technology to make dairy and beef in healthier, more efficient ways. There is more to come from Ben’s team, and I look forward to what’s next.

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