Exponential Technologies in Food: How AI and Biotech are Reshaping Our Plates

On this episode of Digital Squared, Tom is talking to Dr. Harold Schmitz. Harold has had an incredible career spanning academia, industry, and venture capital, with a focus on food science, nutrition, and innovation. He spent 25 years at Mars Incorporated, including as their Chief Science Officer, where he led groundbreaking research on cocoa and chocolate. Now Harold is a co-founding partner at The March Group, a venture capital firm investing in food tech startups. He's also a Senior Scholar at UC Davis, working to bridge the gap between industry and academia. Harold brings a wealth of knowledge about the food industry, emerging technologies, and how to drive meaningful innovation. 

Transcript

Intro  0:00  
Welcome to Digital squared, a podcast that explores the implications of living in an increasingly digital world. We're on a mission to inspire our listeners to use technology and data for good. Your host, Tom Andriola is the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and data and Chief Digital Officer at the University California at Irvine, join us as Tom and fellow leaders discuss the technological, cultural and societal trends that are shaping our world.

Tom  0:29  
On this episode, I'm talking to my longtime colleague, Dr Harold Schmitz. Harold has had an incredible career with contributions and innovations from the perspective of academia, industry and venture capital. He spent 25 years at Mars, Incorporated the largest privately held food company in the world. There, he started his career as a scientist with groundbreaking research on cocoa and flavonoids, and rose through the ranks to become their first Chief Science Officer. Today, he continues to be a pioneer of innovation as a co founding partner of the march group, a thematic VC firm backing exponential technology for the new food paradigm. Harold talks about this new paradigm and the changing expectations of consumers around food choice and recent trends in food as medicine and keeping populations healthy. We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Tom  1:19  
Harold, welcome to the podcast. 

Harold 1:21

Hey, Tom, great to be here. 

Tom 1:23

Absolutely. Yeah, hey, you and I have worked together for a long time for the sake of our audience. Take us through your career, the different stops and the opportunities you've had along the way.

Harold  1:33  
I've had a Yeah, it's been a few different stops. Started with the university sector from a student and graduate student perspective. So that's where I built my chops, in terms of what I do, which is the chemistry of food and how it interacts with human health and nutrition. And after I received my PhD, I joined Mars, Incorporated, which is a very large, family owned food business in the human space, as well as the Pet Pet Food and pet care world, including Veterinary Health, spent 25 years there, amazing experience. And in that in that lane, I got introduced to the university sector, University of California in particular, which then led me around the world in terms of interacting with universities, interacted with DARPA on some projects, so got a good dose of Department of Defense type of thinking, and then eventually intersected with the venture capital world and and so I left Mars in 2018 to actually really fully immerse myself in the VC world, plus really passionately drive the industry. Academic interface. Where I Sit right now is as a co founding general partner of a Venture Capital Group, the March group, and then also immersed a lot more in the university sector. And so I'm a Senior Scholar at the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis, and just constantly interacting at that industry academic interface to try and create new businesses that can change the food sector for the better. 

Tom  3:09  
One of the interesting things that you didn't talk about, but I'm gonna ask you about, is so you obviously were trained as a scientist. You were Chief Science Officer for entire Mars in one of the last roles of your career, but then you also did some corporate venturing. Right before the venture group world is you were part of corporate venturing within the Mars group, where you interacted the interface between science and business. Can you talk a little bit about that experience, and then what it taught you as you went out and started the march group? 

Harold  3:37  
Sure. Yeah. So, and corporate venturing is a really interesting phrase, and so I'm going to use it actually in the broadest sense of the term, because when you're part of a large enterprise, whether it's university or government or industry or company, there's a lot of different ways that venturing, quote, unquote, can happen. And so when I was with Mars, I got to experience, which was an amazing experience. I got to experience a full 360 opportunity to explore different aspects of corporate venturing. And the first sort of venturing that I did was back in the mid 90s. We were really interested in the emergence of what was the sports bar category. And so there was something called power bar that many people would recognize now, but was less recognized back in the day. So Snickers, I was part of Mars. Snickers was actually the example of a functional sports bar back in that day. But then this group called power bar started to emerge, and it started to become clear that, hey, there's actually a different way to do this. So the first corporate venture that actually participated in was figuring out a new product and a new brand that could compete in this in this sort of sports performance category. In terms of creating new bar. So we created something called VO2 Max in order to support the consumer benefit aspect of that and actually build a differentiated brand. We knew that research would be important for the sports community, and so that was the first interaction with University of California and the Davis campus. So the first corporate venture was creating a sports bar entry to augment our snack bars and do that with university research. And then that actually led to probably the most important corporate venturing of my career, which was really Yes, understanding what Go ahead. Tom, do you want to ask a question?

Tom  5:46  
Or no, go, keep going. 

Harold  5:49  
Yeah. So that that led them to to the to the most important sort of corporate venture of my career, within Mars, because of the territory that it covered. And that venture was to actually understand the full sort of business potential of our core raw material for the chocolate business. And of course, Mars, everybody knows that Mars is a one of the world's, if not the world's, leading chocolate Maker and Creator of chocolate brands, and we started to study cocoa in a very deep way. Initially, because we wanted to understand that if cocoa was supply constrained, which is a very real issue that actually we see in the world today. Like cocoa, prices are through the roof, highest in history, by several fold. We saw the first hints of that happening back in the late 80s and early 90s. And so the first venture in cocoa was we need to understand the molecular composition of it and understand if we could recreate it, if cocoa ceased to exist, but we could still make chocolate by understanding the chemical composition. And so then when we did that, and this would be sort of classic early stage venture, pivoting as we understood the molecular composition of cocoa in terms of flavor and sensory aspects, we learned that there were these really interesting molecules that could be quite interesting for human health. And so we actually broke into the first food as medicine, in my opinion, area, and ventured into that space, and we discovered a class of molecules that were remarkably powerful in terms of cardiovascular health and heart health. Now they're called flavanols, and they turn on this system called nitric oxide biology, which won a Nobel Prize. Not we didn't, but that area won a Nobel Prize in the 90s, and we actually created a venture based on the ability of molecules in cocoa to actually improve human health. And that led to different brands like cocovia, which is on the marketplace today. It led to researching dark chocolate. We created the modern dark chocolate category. Dove dark was the first sort of brand that carried this. And we actually created an entire new category for the chocolate industry. And then that led to a deeper understanding of cocoa and its supply chain, risks and constraints. And so we started venturing into, how do we make this crop even more sustainable? And so then we needed to have a understanding of the genetics of cocoa. So we learned about the genetics of cocoa, the agronomy aspects of cocoa, and how to increase the yields of cocoa, make it more disease resistant, so on and so forth. And so we were venturing in human health, we were venturing in environmental sustainability, and all of it was leading to creating new business benefits for the mothership, which was Mars, Incorporated at the time. So that was like when I got to I would say, learn a lot about all the different aspects of corporate venturing, ranging from what does it look like to do startups, which everybody thinks about, but also, how do you do entrepreneurship in terms of reinventing or rethinking core existing operations and helping them spark new ideas and new ways of doing things that can lead to new business benefits.

Tom  9:28  
Yeah, so again, it's, it's so interesting, right, how you've married science, business and even policy in terms of the things that you had a chance through your career to work across even though some people say he was trained as a scientist. How do you get to do all these other things? And of course, opportunities present themselves, and thoughtful people find their way into those conversations. One of the terms you taught me in our working together, and it's something that is become part of the vocabulary use, is you have this. Concept you call the uncommon collaborations. Tell us about that and like, why you think it's important as it drives innovation going forward.

Harold  10:10  
Yeah, thanks for bringing that topic up. Uncommon collab like, the root of uncommon collaborations is probably multidisciplinary collaborations. And the root of why that's important and why multidisciplinary collaborations are unfortunately too uncommon, which led to the uncommon collaboration part is that we, all of us, we tend to migrate to our silos and and one of the things that the food industry, and probably it's true that most, if not all, industries, like when you actually have to create a product and take it to market, by definition, that involves a multidisciplinary process. Some people call that innovation, and I do, and it's the team coming together to commercialize something. But at the heart of that is actually multidisciplinary collaboration. And the fact is, is that it's oftentimes hard for people from different areas to work together, because we all know about people talking past each other or just not connecting, because the mathematician doesn't necessarily understand the historian doesn't necessarily understand the biochemist, even though all of that needs to come together to create something. And so there's there's that aspect, and then. And so what we developed at Mars as we started to partner with the University of California. Actually the Davis campus, there was a gentleman named Carl Keen, and he recognized that actually, if the university was going to be the best partner it could for Mars Incorporated, which mattered a lot to the university, and what it was doing going forward, then it needed to actually do things that ended up creating commercially relevant things. And if it was going to do thing, something that that that involved creating a commercially relevant output, it meant that it couldn't just be nutrition research, which happened to be where he was based. Engineering mattered, because you needed to make stuff in a factory, actually historical context of cocoa and chocolate and the culture of it mattered, because people, when people put food in their mouths, it's more than just a functional relationship, it's actually an emotional experience. So actually interacting with the liberal arts side of campus was really important as well, and so we ended up developing this thing called a multi disciplinary research unit. And what the net of it was is that there were people across campus and between universities who were collaborating, who had never collaborated before, and there were people within Mars who were actually collaborating amongst themselves within Mars and then cross sector with the university that had never collaborated before. And the net of it was, as we looked at that and said, that is definitely the kind of collaboration we want to see. And it's definitely true, since it's not happening anywhere else that we can observe. It's very uncommon. So that's the root of these uncommon collaborations, is making sure that people who are in adjacent fields are talking with each other, working with each other, and surface chemistry matters, is what I would say, in a geeky sort of way.

Tom  13:36  
That's good. So you retired from Mars and still had a passion to have impact. Tell us about the march group and the thesis behind it.

Harold  13:44  
Yeah, the March group is built on, frankly, everything that I learned during the Mars years and the interactions via those uncommon collaborations with universities around the world, government research institutions, other companies, etc, and basically what the synthesis of the learning is that one, we have a food system, a modern food system that is absolutely amazing and unimaginable. If we were sitting here 100 years ago having this conversation, because there would be, I forget the exact number, but let's say there'd be about a billion or one and a half billion people on Earth, and we'd be sitting here saying we're capped. There's no way we're going to be able to feed that many more people. And that actually was the dogma of the time. And then the modern food system emerged, and so here we are. We're sitting here with 8 billion people on the planet, and we're able to feed them. And so there's an amazing sort of achievement that has happened through the modern food system. In parallel, during the last few decades, there's been a really clear problem that has emerged, and that is. As the modern food system emerged to achieve this food security, the nutrition security aspect has been lost so very specifically, there was a great research study published in The Lancet about a year ago, and what it demonstrated was that in 1990 still, the predominant problem in global health was under nutrition or food security. In the year 2022, the primary problem in global health is actually over nutrition and metabolic health consequences, so obesity, diabetes, so on and so forth. And so the food system needs to change in order to address, you know, this new opportunity of let's not only be able to give people food security, but let's give them nutrition security so they can maximize their health. So I gained all of this understanding through the years of Mars, I also gained the understanding that changing the food system from within the large existing operating base was not going to be possible. The only way to change these large systems is actually new creations that occur outside the system that then challenge that incumbent system and be get brought in. And so I left Mars in 2018 extremely difficult decision, but did that so that I can create a venture capital group that is pursuing a new food paradigm. And that new food paradigm is very simple. It's that there should be no compromise in terms of food products that deliver great taste, great health and are affordable. And that is a new food paradigm, and that's the purpose of the march group, is to create companies and grow companies that deliver this new food paradigm.

Tom  17:09  
So it's a classic Innovator's Dilemma, you know, challenge, right? Which is the existing companies, because they have such a they have success in such a venture. This is in the current model. Is not where the disruption, when disruption is needed is going to come from of course, you can't talk about that disruption today without the new tools and technologies that are fueling it. So how does thesis around the marsh group interface with some of the new tools that we have to work with, like AI and advances and things like biotech?

Harold  17:39  
Yeah, so that's a great question, and definitely the heart of the matter, because the venture capital itself is a legacy or sort of incumbent sector, and there are certain metrics by which people say, hey, if I'm going to put money into a VC, then there needs to be outputs that come that are financial metrics, and those outputs need to be really high multiples on the investment you put in. That's the essence of venture capital, or successful venture capital, the food sector, in the way that it's set up, is not obviously a sector that can reliably deliver that in terms of the way that drug development venturing can, or digital venturing can. And so the key is, it's like, what are those technologies that can be incorporated into this massive food sector, multi trillion dollars. So there's money lying everywhere in it. You just need to actually figure out where you can drive a wedge through so you can really disrupt that in a highly efficient way, faster, better, cheaper, is my mantra. And so what the march group does is it looks for technologies, very specific technologies that would be classified as exponential technology. So they can be put into the food system in a way they can create new products, and it can be done without having these massive cap capex or capital expenditures that are typically required by the food industry, which is a heavy industry, and so we invest into things like aI integrated with the food system. And so what does ai do? It takes the massive amounts of data that already exist in the food system, and if it's used smartly, it can actually enable faster, better, cheaper innovation in a variety of ways, and we can talk about some of those in a minute. We can also leverage biotechnology, so there's an opportunity to develop new ingredients that are called enzymes. Which are enzymes? Are these materials that you only need a really small amount of them to affect really big changes in a food ingredient supply stream, for example. And so actually developing enzymes that can. To alter, let's say, our protein supply for the better. That's an opportunity for an exponential technology to affect the large grid and actually then provide a very high, disproportionate return on the investment for the enzyme and the manufacturing of the enzyme with the money that's happening in this multi, multi billion dollar protein grids. The core of the march group is you can change the new food paradigm via venture capital, as long as you deliver returns that are that are high and are enabled by these exponential technologies like AI and biotech. 

Tom  20:36  
You can do millions of experiments with the use of AI on enzyme development, which then makes your exponential square into your new food paradigm, right? Which is the really powerful thing that it really having been in some of these conversations with you, talking to more traditional thinkers. It's like they just don't understand exponential all that well. And then when you talk about exponential, building on exponential, you're talking about having to think completely different about how you might address an opportunity going forward.

Harold  21:04  
That's right, just to so now we can begin to connect the dots for the previous part of our conversation, which is what we're talking about is uncommon collaborations that are multidisciplinary. So the reality is that, although we're talking about food, new food paradigm, AI, biotechnology. The reality is that in the world as we know it, the food sector does not interact with the top tier or world class biotech players. They don't interact with the world class or top tier AI players only when those players have something to sell to the food industry do they come to the food industry and say, Hey, we've got a better idea. But the food industry is not actually going out to those players and seeking collaboration, the uncommon collaboration and the surface chemistry that we talked about that can create these new opportunities. And so that's where a venture capital firm, that is, if you're going to talk about a raison d'etre for why VC should exist, that's exactly why it should exist. It's the surface chemistry between these people who should be collaborating, but they're not collaborating. So you create the bridge for an uncommon collaboration.

Tom 22:19  
Yeah. And one of the things that you and I both think a lot about is, how do you cultivate the ecosystem to have those players in the ecosystem create the platforms by which they can interact with each other and learn from one another? You all and again, within your ecosystem that you've been curating for really a couple of decades, there was a recent announcement I really want to point to this because, you know, it, with all the talk of technology, we sometimes look past the more obvious thing, which is, you do need these very adaptive now humans to take advantage of all of this advancement. And the post that came out, and I retweeted it, it goes around, something that you all launched. It was a combination of your work with the people at Davis, collaborations that come through the march group, the bio Innovation Institute in Denmark, Novo Nordisk was involved. UC best investments was involved. So talking about the ecosystem that Harold Schmitz helped curate, talk a little bit about that innovators fellowship program and why you don't get the new companies without building the through the fellows, the people who run those companies.

Harold  23:23  
Yeah, thank you for raising the question, and thank you for retweeting it and everything as well. It's definitely been a labor of love. The names of the institutions you reeled off are again an example of an uncommon collaboration situation. One way to say the mission is that if we are going to create a new food paradigm that has new companies emerging from it that are technology based, we're going to have to get the industry academic interface actually doing something it hasn't done for A long time, if ever, and that is actually create new technology based food companies that leverage exponential technologies. That is not going to come from the people of our age, and in terms of as company founders, and as in the new inventions and the new IP that is going to come from the rising students and the rising entrepreneurs. And so the value of the innovators program, it though, is, although there's a lot of people now, and I think, I think the numbers support this, I don't know them off the top of my head, but as I understand it, students are more and more interested in Hey, not only do I want to learn something, not only do I want to have a great career, but I actually want to make an impact. And so what is becoming, what is becoming obvious is, if I wanted to have an impact, and I need to, in some cases, I need to invent new things. I need to translate those into companies. And so do. That's easy to say, but actually to do is very difficult. And so the value of these programs that we've created with the Novo Nordisk foundation and UC Davis and II FH and UC investments, is it enables students who want to do this and have that entrepreneurial spark. It actually enables them to have hands on experience in terms of trying some of this out, working with some companies in the space, startup companies actually understanding, working with venture capital companies to see in the portfolio as well, what's failing, what's working? Why is that happening? So it's giving them actual hands on experience and exposure to what it actually looks like to in a tangible way, drive progress, as opposed to saying, hey, I want to do it. So basically, the innovator program is an accelerator program. These people would, they probably all go out and do this anyway. The only issue is they'd go out and for five years, they'd stumble around in the wilderness and fail and waste that time. So let's just, let's compress that through this program and accelerate the opportunity for these people to make impact.

Tom  26:16  
I think that's exactly the point, right? Is you're going to get so many, when you look at startups coming out of universities, your university, IP, right? They tend to be the graduate students who are working under that world class, you know, Professor, researcher, and of course, they went to that program to become expert in that field, not to become the CEO of a company, and have all the skills of CEO of a  company. So I can envision the Fellows Program are understand the financing around company, right? What? What does it mean to have enough understanding of regulatory and compliance issues? How do you build a sales and marketing engine to get out to market? How do you really understand the competitive landscape? How do you understand pricing strategy? There's all sorts of other things that those five or 10 years, you stumble around and get a little bit here and there, or you can compact it into a fellowship program, like you've done. I think it's brilliant, and I think it's also really necessary. I have to say, I don't see a lot of the especially when it's a very heavy science oriented play, like we're coming through here with food, having so much to do with biology and chemistry. 

Harold 27:18  
So to that end, it's, um, it's not a big stretch for the better students to understand there needs to be a technology strategy. That's if you can't get that, then you know, there are other things to do in life, in insights and technology, but if you want to go make an impact in the business world, it's not a big stretch for people to learn about, oh, I need a technology strategy. Not only do I need the invention, but I need the technology strategy. What is a big stretch is actually the integration of a commercial strategy. And I think if I was going to truly, yeah, boil it down to the functional essence of what's happening here is these students are are grasping in fairly easy way, oh, I need a technology strategy. And here's what it is for these companies. And then the big leap, and the ones that are most successful out of the program are grasping the commercial strategy aspect and integrating it. It's really cool.

Tom  28:23  
Yeah, that's good. So let's pivot to one of those exponential technologies you mentioned, right? Ai everybody's favorite topic. I like to talk about it in terms of its GPT should stand for general purpose technology. And we talk a lot about conversations I'm in. It's amazing how often amaras law gets quoted? Right? It's we're going to overestimate and build hype around this in the short term, but we're going to really underestimate it in the long term, and we're going to wonder somewhere down the road, how did we ever work without this? If I were to put to you, given that AI is fundamental to the thematic focus of the march group. Where do you see it creating hype and over expectation today? And then, if you went, let's say, 10 years out, what is AI going to do to the new food paradigm that will look back and say, How could it ever have been different?

Harold  29:16  
So I love the question, and I would say that I think the food sector is living Amara's law right now in terms of the first part, and of course, we're going to talk about that and the second part. So the first part is, in terms of that is that there is, so there is no question, like 100% of people queried would agree with the following statement, the food industry could innovate much faster and more efficiently, and businesses could be more profitable and have more impact. So everyone would agree with that, and what? What I. Because of that, and what everyone else would agree with as well is AI can help with that. There's plenty of examples in the world to see where that's happening in various industry sectors and whatnot. And so what the food sector is doing, and this is the first part of Amara's law, is all of a sudden now it's, Oh, I get it, that's right. And so there's the emergence of AI companies that are seeking to be singular tools in a toolbox. So it's like, how can I do my consumer research faster? How can I do my food safety program better? How can I improve line efficiencies in some operation situation, there's all these almost infinite list of things that, as a food industry operator, I can see I could do better with AI tools. And the problem with that, and why the hype is happening in that regard, is that for a food business to actually run significantly better than it already is running, it's many of those things actually coming together and working at the same at the same, increased pace, and doing it in a way that is frictionless, as opposed to filled with friction. And so what's happening on the over hype is that AI is starting to emerge in different companies, and so we can help you do this, that, or the other thing, a lot faster. And that's true, but it doesn't actually help the business run any better. In fact, it can create more friction in a business when all of a sudden, one aspect of the business is now operating 10 times faster, but the rest of it hasn't caught up. All that does is cause people to get angry and upset at each other, and so that's the first part of Amaris law, and I think we're living through that right now. I think what the march group is doing, and actually is the pioneer, in as far as I can tell, is actually comprehending that the second part of Amara's law, which is we will have underestimated the impact for the food sector, is when we actually integrate AI into the center of the business model, so that every vice president sitting around the management team table is actually utilizing AI, doing so in an integrated way, and actually matching up each of their operations, so that everybody's not only running faster individually in their focus area or division, they're actually running faster together. So it's the old saying of if you want to go fast, go alone. That's where we are right now. If you want to go far, you need to go together. And that's AI at the center of food business models, as opposed to being one of the tools in a toolbox that's only going to impact one singular aspect.

Tom  33:07  
And so going together, in this case, could be a lot faster than in today's model, right? Where we talk about in a business context, and actually a conversation you're having this morning, it's velocity wins. Yes, business right? Because it means you're first to market. You're first to make the adjustment. You're first to meet the customer's new expectations. So you know, if all the if all the pieces are moving, then sales is hearing the customer differently. That's translated back to the people who are in product management, who can get back to the scientists to say, let's figure out a new enzyme to get it into the product. And if we could be there first, and if we can put the marketing spin around it to meet the new customer's expectations and appeal in a way that touches emotion and not just functional science, then we win. So that's the promise of AI at the center. Love it. Absolutely love it.

Harold  33:56  
That's how we literally one of the companies in our portfolio, rivals, which you're aware of the as a company driving a new the new food paradigm. They're driving a healthy snack food paradigm where, where, via great tasting snacks, they're delivering four times the protein, four times the fiber and a healthy glycemic index compared to other competitive snacks in the category, and they're doing it in an affordable way. So we had a meeting with that management team a few days ago, and the purpose of that meeting was to evaluate, how are we doing at aligning all of those things that you just said, using AI at the center, so that the company organically, has committed to, hey, we're going to do all those things. And if we're going to be a successful venture capital investment outcome, we're going to have to do it faster, better and with less people than a traditional food business. So we need AI at the center of this. For AI at the center to work, the Chief Marketing Officer.,the Chief Sales Officer, the finance guys, the R & D guys, they all actually have to be leveraging AI and the same AI engine and actually integrated in their human intelligence, as well as the artificial intelligence that's driving the insights.

Tom  35:16  
Absolutely awesome. All right. Harold last question, all my guests get this same last question. It's not specific to the food industry or your background, but given that we live in the age of AI, I ask all of our guests, what is the coolest or weirdest thing that you've seen someone using AI for in the last 90 days? And I have to put 90 days on it, because it's changing so darn fast things that were weird six months ago, people just blowing them away. But what's the coolest or weirdest thing that you've seen? 

Harold  35:48  
Yeah, so the I'm going to do the coolest thing, because I'm not deep enough in AI to actually know the weirdest things going on. I would throw that one back at you, and that can be an offline discussion, but I do get exposed to the coolest things. And the coolest things are, there's two cool things going on, but one cool thing is the rivals model that I just actually talked about. So this, the reason this meeting I just talked about was so important was because it was the first time. So I've been in the food industry for 30 years. I have been a proponent of and trying to convince people in the food industry to utilize AI. Since 2007 we're starting to get long in the tooth on this right, and I've seen it. I've seen big companies, I've seen small companies. I've seen the whole thing, and I've never actually seen it come together and work in an integrated and frictionless way. And so the coolest thing I saw was actually in this meeting that I just described, where it's actually happening, and output is happening in that the products are being in a quantitative way, made faster, developed faster, made better, and consumer insights are being integrated better, and sales are happening in a better way, such that I can tell you that the business is going 21% faster than the benchmarks because of the AI. That's the coolest thing I've actually seen, is actually a management team in the food industry getting it and using it and delivering on it. So I'm really excited about that. The other thing I have to say, I'm sorry, I have to say two things, is the food metabolic health in humans is going to change as a result of food for the following two reasons. One is an actual under a full comprehensive understanding of the molecular composition of food, which is amazingly complex. I like the stars in the universe. And number two is AI coming together with it to actually translate what in the world does all this molecular complexity mean? And so I am seeing that here at UC Davis with a professor named Carlito labrila, who's actually unpacking the molecular diversity of food in an unprecedented way, and he's combining it with a TMG fellow named Russell Alvarez who's incorporating AI to actually figure out what each of these molecules together in combination and in combination, does for human health. And so that's a really cool thing as well. That's happening precision health and nutrition is coming to life via food, via molecular diversity. And AI absolutely.

Tom  38:52  
All right, we're going to leave it there for today. Harold is always fantastic talking to you. Thanks for being on the podcast at this time. 

Harold  39:00  
Yeah, thank you for having me. It's always great to talk to you, Tom.