Interviewee
Ali Wing, CEO & Board member with a track record of brand building, entrepreneurship & data-driven growth critical to building enterprise scale. She have split her career between building venture & PE-backed growth companies & transforming within larger, public companies And she is passionate about working to solve big consumer problems -- particularly around health.
Transcript
Ali Wing: I'm thrilled to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Oobli is a special company that's working on plant-based sweet proteins to really change the way we all can satisfy our sweet tooth, but do it in a way that's much better for the planet and much better for our bodies. And I was lucky enough to join here as the CEO about a year ago, but I joined the technology, the technology co-founders that have actually been working on this project for about seven years. So I'm super excited because we are together now just bringing it to market in 2023. We just started selling products.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, that's great. So only one year. And look at all the changes that have been happening at the company. I think that's exciting.
I wanted to ask you about the latest news. I know that you guys recently closed and over subscribed to a 25 million series B funding round. Could you share what this means for the company?
Ali Wing: You know, a really important part of me coming in was building a commercial strategy. So that series B round was about our commercial strategy and that was sort of our, what will it take for us to bring it to market and show proof of concept around different products and different customers categories. So the bulk of the dollars go to commercialization, but there is a pretty significant amount of the investment that we're actually doing automation and just acceleration of our technology because we have about six or seven proteins on the platform and each one goes through its own regulatory process. And now that we actually have results of those regulatory processes, which are great, we're just excited to be accelerating more of those proteins into our solutions. So it's kind of the three part of commercialization, technology, automation and then acceleration of multiple paths for the proteins because any one protein sort of acts as part of a toolkit for us making the solution to not have to use sugar and use sweet proteins without any trade off on taste, be more available in more products.
Elisa Muñoz: That is good news. And this is kind of like a, I don't know, like a new path in the food tech industry. How will you say, Oobli is making the difference or will make it?
Ali Wing: Well, I'd like to think there's a lot of reasons Oobli is gonna make a difference. I, I'm personally here, not because I'm not super excited about the climate positive element of precision fermentation and just what a lot of us are excited about in food technology today. But in Uley in particular, we're really tackling a very big health issue that's a global health issue and that's diabetes and obesity. Our, you know, it's normal for humans to crave sugar. We were all biologically hardwired to crave sugar and seek it out as energy sources. What we weren't designed for is it, for it to be recklessly abundant the way it is in our diets today. So we need better solutions that can change the metabolic interaction of our sweet tooth and what's happening with our bodies and sweet proteins are that solution. So for me we not only get to do what I think we share with our brothers and sisters of food tech, which is bringing really important solutions for food supply and climate change, but we also have another impact and that's tackling helping us start to tackle one of our big global health issues.
Right now we're on a fairly premium chocolate and we're going out with drinks this spring and neither of those have particularly big categories that are affected from a purchasing point.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you for sharing. And you, you mentioned diabetes, right? Was it hard for you in order to find the best product market fit?
Ali Wing: We're still in the journey, right? Because we've been in r and d for seven years and we're just starting to commercialize and certainly we're out with chocolate. That's certainly not the end all be all of where we're gonna take sweet protein. So we'll be doing a lot of product protein and market fit discovery over the next few years. What I will tell you is that you can get excited about sweet proteins simply on taste because they're, they're not like a lot of sugar alternatives, they evolved outta nature to actually trick your brain to think they're sugar. So we don't really notice the difference, which is sort of victory number one when trying to replace sugar. I think number two is we do, we do really reduce the use of sugar cane fields and, and give a CL climate positive way to get much more efficient in all of that. But I think the big unlock that we'll see lots of applications for are just all the creative ways we'll start to use it in foods and we're, we can see the product protein fit right now very cleanly in just about every category, but we get even more excited when we can be using two or three proteins at once, not just one. And today we are just through regulations with our first proteins. So the products you see out there are generally about 70% reduced sugar.
When we get multiple proteins onto the market, we'll be talking about 90% or greater sugar reduction. So that's what I'm really excited about when you talk about the ultimate fit cuz that just makes it easier in a world where people tend to kind of think about, it's harder in some ways to be at 70%. It's easier to have people understand 90 to a hundred and a hundred percent and we're just excited about what that can mean without being a trade off to having something be people's favorite food. Right. We want taste to still be number one.
Elisa Muñoz: I was just about to ask about the next steps of the company.
Ali Wing: We, you will see announcements from us, not just with our first protein in the US but our proteins actually getting approvals in other countries. That's a big priority for us. We introduced our own chocolates, but we're not just thinking that we're only gonna make our own products. So you'll see some announcements with some bigger companies this year and we're helping them rehabilitate some of their products with a better sweetness solution and we're very excited to announce our big launch this spring. We will be launching beverages and I can't tell you more about it quite yet, but stay tuned. Follow us@oobli.com, which is O O B L i.com and get in the know, we'd love to tell you about where we're showing up.
Elisa Muñoz: I can't wait until spring comes and hear everything about it! Also, I have recently interviewed different CEOs and founders in the industry and most of them are involved in the procurement process. So how does that work for you?
Ali Wing: In our world, we have a lot of different types of purchasing. So we're the manufacturer of the ingredient, but we also work with ingredients and we're a purchaser of those ingredients and then we make our own products and then we also sell to third party pro companies like CPG that make their products. So then we're a seller and we're in the middle of all of that. What I would say from a purchasing point of view, no big callouts, I mean the same ones that everybody sees in the macro climate right now, which is, you know, inflation is true everywhere and certainly we've seen some of that, but we don't have a particularly high sensitivity to changes that have happened just based on the product categories that we're in. Right now we're on a fairly premium chocolate and we're going out with drinks this spring and neither of those have particularly big categories that are affected from a purchasing point.
Elisa Muñoz: I think that's really interesting because especially in the industry, you know, most of the hardware companies, hardware intensive companies have had different kinds of issues or challenges when it comes to the pandemic, you know?
Ali Wing: It's a good point. The one area that I would say that we felt it the most, because we were only at an r and d stage all during the pandemic. So we weren't selling products at the time. We did notice as we were upgrading the automating lots of parts of our lab, we could get everything we wanted but everything was delayed so it took us a lot longer to get the new equipment. So decisions that we made for improving automation in our technology sort of stack those purchases were very slow to get the actual equipment and get them loaded in. So most of that's caught up now. We don't feel much of that anymore as of 2023.
Elisa Muñoz: That's great. Last but not least, I would love to hear some advice from you in the future CEOs and founders in the industry.
Ali Wing: Well you asked the question earlier, that's always the most important question. I come from being a builder and I've built many companies with one, you know, the top thing to keep in mind always is what is the consumer market and what is the problem that you are solving and how well do you uniquely do that? And you talked about product market fit earlier on and that's, that's still what's gonna drive it even in a cyclical economy, whether we have covid affecting supply chain or not, it's really what's the winners are always gonna be where's the strongest product market fit and where's the problem that is in most in need of a solution.
And in our world today we know 75% of consumers are actively trying to reduce sugar because we all know we need to, we're just not very good at it cuz we like the taste of it. So ours has a very big macro pull and I'm very excited about that. But any entrepreneur building any company always has to be going back and talking to consumers and saying, are we solving that problem? And is that problem a big enough problem? And can we uniquely be the solution that not just consumers, but that investors can be excited about.
Elisa Muñoz: That was great. Ali, thank you so much for being here.
Ali Wing: I enjoyed the conversation, I appreciate the opportunity to share with everybody our excitement for Sweet Protein. So thanks for including us.
