JULIA COLLINS: When I first came to Silicon Valley, it was very clear that I was a fish out of water on many levels. I showed up in like Diane von Furstenberg dresses when everyone else was wearing hoodies. But of course, also I was this sort of very feminine-presenting woman and Black woman and when I first got to Silicon Valley — I really tried to pattern match. I tried to listen to the podcasts other people listen to; I tried to emulate them. It was a total failure. It didn’t work in any way. I wasn’t being me.

JEFF BERMAN: Julia Collins is a serial entrepreneur who has thrived at the intersection of tech and food. Her latest venture, Planet FWD, is a B2B platform focused on fighting climate change. As she embarked on this phase of her entrepreneurial journey, Julia realized that standing out was better than fitting in.

COLLINS: And I think once I realized that, I started to also have a better mindset because I thought being different is actually my superpower. And I stopped second guessing myself as soon as I stopped trying to pattern-match on other people’s success.

BERMAN: This week on the show, Julia shares hard-won lessons from the failed unicorn she co-founded — hint: it involved robots and pizza — and how, in her new business, she’s scaling solutions to climate change that are also good for her clients’ bottom lines.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host.

Julia Collins has always wanted a career that gave her a chance to serve people while solving big problems. We started by talking about the scale journey she’s in the midst of with her latest company: Planet FWD.

BERMAN: Julia, welcome to Masters of Scale.

COLLINS: It’s so good to be.

How does Planet FWD work?

BERMAN: I’ve been so excited about this conversation because there’s a lot for us to talk about. I want to start with what you’re doing now. Can you tell us about Planet FWD?

COLLINS: Absolutely. So Planet FWD was founded with a really simple mission, which was to tackle climate change by decarbonizing the global greenhouse gas emissions that come from our consumer products.

BERMAN: Okay. Can I just pause you right there? What does it mean to decarbonize it?

COLLINS: Right. So as you know, climate change is caused primarily by an excess of greenhouse gas emissions coming from just about every part of life. What we eat, what we wear, how we travel, AI. But, what is true is that we can actually reduce the greenhouse gases emissions related to all of those things.

And we call that decarbonization. It is the opposite of emitting too much greenhouse gas. It is the act of reducing the greenhouse gases that are emitted by all of our daily activities.

BERMAN: And what’s an example of how a company does that?

COLLINS: Yeah, so say, for example, you’re a large food company, because let me tell you something: Most people don’t think about food when they think about climate change.

BERMAN: Right, we hear about cows and their contribution, but beyond that, not much.

COLLINS: Beyond that, not much. It’s not just the cows, and some people would even say, it’s not the cow, it’s the how. It is what you’re feeding the cows. It’s the fact that you are slashing down forests to graze the cows. So if you’re a large food company, your footprint, collectively, around the supply chain of all of these goods is about 90 percent of your overall company footprint. So if you’re a large food company, the best thing that you can do is to look at that 90 percent coming from your supply chain, and look for ways to make smart trades and swaps to reduce the impact.

For example, you might choose renewable energy at one of your manufacturing processes. You might switch from a conventional ingredient to an organic ingredient. We did this with one food company, and they were able to reduce their emissions just by making smart swaps in their supply chain by 30 percent.

BERMAN: Wow.

COLLINS: Which is a huge number when you think about how much we need to reduce and how quickly.

BERMAN: When you describe that, it sounds like you’re a consultant and you’re helping them figure it out, but you’re not a consulting company, at least not at your core, right? You’re a software company.

COLLINS: So I’ll tell you about a company that I love to talk about, which is called Just Salad.

They’re a fantastic salad company. They’ve become a really big business operating across the country. Working with Just Salad, what we did was use artificial intelligence to analyze their supply chain. So not doing this in spreadsheets, but really using artificial intelligence to essentially create a digital twin of that company’s supply chain, showing them where their greenhouse gas emissions were coming from all the way from the field to the fork, how much is coming from the growing of the ingredient versus the processing versus the distribution, the consumer use, even the end of life. Is it composted? Is it landfilled?

And as you could imagine, that kind of very detailed fine work is hard to do manually. It’s hard to do for Just Salad. It’s hard to do for Unilever. It’s hard to do for every company with a large and complex supply chain. That’s what makes it such a perfect problem for machine learning.

BERMAN: Yeah, it sounds like an incredible use of AI, but where I get stuck on the logical leap, and this is why I love this job, because I get to ask them questions of smart people. It’s not like you can just say, upload your supply chain, and we’ll analyze it. Right? So how does it actually work? How do you do it?

COLLINS: There’s so much information that lives in the financial transactions of a company. Imagine, for example, that we could get receipts from every single purchase that you’ve made over a given time period.

What you bought, how much it weighed, where you bought it from, then we can do all of this inference around that data point. And we can even work with external partners to do some additional assurance around those data points.

But so much information coming into our solution comes actually from the purchasing records of companies.

Have you heard of the term ‘cradle to grave?’ So ‘cradle to grave’ is the system boundary of a life cycle assessment. It tells you from the very beginning of that product all the way to the end of its life what the impacts are. The big innovation at Planet FWD is we’ve now done tens of thousands of these life cycle assessments. But we’ve stored not just those life cycle assessments, we’ve disaggregated all of the building blocks. Labeled and train those building blocks to be able to create new life cycle assessments using algorithms. And this is one of the big innovations at Planet FWD. We think it’s a fantastic use of AI to help save the planet.

There’s no silver bullet. We have to work on other sectors, but decarbonizing the consumer products industry would really give us a fighting chance.

The inspiration for Planet FWD

BERMAN: I mean, this is a really big swing. Where did this idea come from?

COLLINS: Oh my gosh, for me, I’ve always been really interested in food and food systems. It goes all the way back to my grandparents who had roots in the deep south and were scientists — well, they were dentists — who moved from the deep south to San Francisco to start their dental careers.

BERMAN: What brought them to San Francisco?

COLLINS: The great migration, as you know, was this time when millions of Black people moved from the south to the north to take advantage of new economic opportunities, many of them around wartime industries. But this was also a time when those northern cities were segregated, and so they didn’t have dentists or doctors that could serve all people, including Black people.

So my grandparents moved to the Bay Area to be a part of that class of people that built practices for everyone. Every one of every race, but the reason why my story about Planet FWD begins with them was they really moved to the Bay Area to be of service, right? They were trained as physicians, but they worked as dentists, and they moved to San Francisco to be of service.

And so I have always had this passion for serving people. So why is this related to your question? What better way to serve people right now then to create operationally sound, scalable solutions to address climate change? Like there are so many ways to have an impact, but for me, I cannot think of anything I would rather be doing with my life right now.

BERMAN: Were your grandparents influential figures for you growing up?

COLLINS: They were incredibly influential figures for me growing up.

BERMAN: How did this show up for you?

COLLINS: Let’s take my grandpa.

So my grandpa used to wear a button. He would wear a little button that said, “Serve people,” and it was a homemade button. And when the button would wear down, he’d make another button. And it said the same thing, “Serve people.” He was this incredible man, strapping man, six foot four, beautiful man.

And he worked with so much humility, despite the fact that he had incredible academic training, that he was really talented in his field — he just worked so hard for the people who came to his practice. Sometimes people didn’t have money to pay him, and it didn’t matter. He was about serving people. And so I think seeing someone who was absolutely the best in his field, but who never lost his humility and never lost that focus on taking care of others was hugely influential for me.

This is also a man who could eat a whole apple pie in a sitting.

The origins of Planet FWD

BERMAN: When did you start Planet FWD?

COLLINS: It in 2019, but it looked a lot different than it looks now. When we started Planet FWD, we always had this vision for using the power of food and other consumer products to attack climate change.

Now that looks like a software company, but in the beginning it actually was a snack company. The first product that we built was a brand, and the idea was, before we go and build software solutions and put them in the hands of other food brands, maybe we should understand what it actually is to be a food brand.

We knew that we could build a set of products that could really create a category around, let’s call it, climate-friendly consumer. And we knew that there would be some enabling technology that needed to exist to make that happen.

How did we know that? Because we couldn’t find what we needed. I didn’t know that I was going to build a B2B software platform that worked with companies like Amazon on decarbonization. I didn’t know quite that, but I knew that there was always a something else, some kind of enabling technology.

Initially, Jeff, I actually thought it would be a marketplace. A marketplace for procuring more sustainable goods and services to build your products — only it’s hard to build marketplace businesses.

Inside Julia’s cracker company, Moonshot

BERMAN: Nothing is easy. So what, what was the product that you built?

COLLINS: It was a cracker company called Moonshot, which we sold to Patagonia two years ago, which was a wonderful experience. And I still eat them under the Patagonia brand. What was different about them was we did everything we could to minimize the greenhouse gas emissions related to making the product.

That’s not a very sexy consumer positioning. So we had to think about what was the right positioning for the product. We named it Moonshot, so it would have this feeling of like uplift and you’re fighting for something and you’re taking a chance. They were delicious. They were beautifully packaged.

But underneath the surface, we were shortening supply chains. We were sourcing from farmers who were practicing regenerative and organic agriculture. We were using renewable energy. We were lightweighting packaging, and we were measuring all of that.

The measurement of it is what became the foundation of the Planet FWD.

BERMAN: And what was the inflection point where you said, “Oh, wait a second, we actually should be building a B2B software company to serve a massive range of companies to lower their carbon footprint?”

COLLINS: You know. I don’t know that there was one specific day when I like smacked my palm to my head and said, “Oh my gosh, there’s a bigger opportunity,” but it was really just the culmination of so many times realizing that the tools that consumer brands needed to build climate positive. Companies just didn’t exist, or they existed if you had a hundred thousand dollars to pay a consultant.

And I just thought to myself, there’s like… I have this like impatient optimism, “we can get this done, but only if we work around the clock.” And I felt so impatient that it seemed like somebody’s got to solve this, and it probably should be us.

BERMAN: I mean, I love that framing of impatient optimism. I feel like that’s something that entrepreneurs across the board share, right? Especially mission-driven. So had you raised money for what almost sounds like a different version of the company that was making moonshot?

COLLINS: We had.

BERMAN: How did you go about raising money for that? And then how did you go tell your investors, “Actually we’re doing something totally different here.”

COLLINS: So what the early investors were betting on, I think when they bet on Planet FWD V1 with Moonshot as the first product, is “Julia has a vision for something bigger, and she’s impatiently optimistic and incredibly driven, and we think there’s going to be a bigger opportunity here that was sort of like the seed thesis.” I think it was a big bet on me, and it was a big bet on, “Well, the magnitude of this problem is so large, climate and consumer products related climate change, that there’s probably more business to build here than the snack brand

The tricky thing was really going from the C to the A, and that was hard.

We still had Moonshot, and Moonshot was growing like a hockey stick. It was like that classic hockey stick growth. but it was growing as a CPG business. So it was growing with CPG margins and CPG operating complexity. Which is I think a great super investable business, but the investors who wanted to look at Planet FWD as a software company are looking at a much different…

BERMAN: Right, they want 80 percent margins. They want massive margins. They want SaaS economics.

COLLINS: Yeah. SaaS economics, triple, triple, triple, double, double unicorn. And we knew that we could get there with the software platform. But the hard thing was holding those two businesses together. I don’t have a magic answer for how we got it done.

I can only say that we were fortunate to have investors like Acre Ventures, Congruent Ventures, who co-led that round, who really believed in the larger opportunity and who trusted me that I would figure out the best value creating way to spin the two businesses off. There was also a bit of luck.

BERMAN: Still ahead, lessons learned from a failed unicorn tech company, which involves the robots and the pizza.

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BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Julia’s obsession with food & food culture

Long before Julia Collins founded a snack-brand-turned-tech-platform, she started her career working in the food business.

COLLINS: I always wanted to be in food.

BERMAN: Why?

COLLINS: I just have always felt most at home when I’m eating or with people eating; I’m like the person who will read a cookbook at the beach or like go to the grocery store just to watch people shop. I am obsessed with food and food culture. If I have ever had like two nickels to rub together, I’m buying a plane ticket to go see the hot new chef.

BERMAN: Oh wow.

COLLINS: Just always loved it. But my grandpa, who, as you know, is really influential in my life, was like, “You can do anything except just don’t go into food.” He said to me one time, “You want to go into food. You might as well just go pick cotton,” because when he came up, those were the jobs that you could have as a Black person.

And so he associated me being in food with his sort of roots in sharecropping. That was the association that he had. I think also for anybody who’s got this story, if you’re an immigrant, if you are somebody who came from a humble background, if you are a person of color, the grownups who raise you really try to keep you safe. Of course, all parents try to keep their children safe, but I think it’s doubly true if your parents have some of that intergenerational trauma or your grandparents have some of that intergenerational trauma around that lived experience. And so I think he also was like, “Please just be a doctor. If you can’t be a doctor, be a lawyer. If you can’t be a lawyer, can you please be an engineer?”

So I went off to Harvard to study biomedical engineering because then maybe grandpa would be happy, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I really wanted to be in food. So I went back to him after I graduated from Harvard, and I said again, “Grandpa, I really, really want to be a food.”

And he said, again, “Please don’t, whatever you do, don’t go into food.”

And I was like, “Okay. What if I get another degree?” He’s like, “Yes, if you get another degree, then I think you’ll be fine. So what are you going to get? Are you going to get an MBA?” And I said, “Okay, I’ll get an MBA.” He said, “If you go to Harvard or Stanford, only those two, then grandpa will pay for half.”

BERMAN: He had high standards.

COLLINS: So that is what we did.

BERMAN: You ended up at Stanford.

Lessons from Danny Meyer

COLLINS: I ended up at Stanford. And then finally I was like, “I got a job as an intern for the most luminary, the best of the best of the best in food. His name is Danny Meyer. I think I’ve made it grandpa.” And he was like, “Okay, baby doll. Okay.” But what I do think is when he passed away, he knew that I had found my thing.

And he knew that my thing was about serving people. And I think that that felt really good for both of us.

BERMAN: Yeah, it carries on his legacy.

COLLINS: Exactly.

BERMAN: What did you learn working with Danny?

COLLINS: Oh, first of all, Danny is everything that he appears to be.

So one of the things that I learned about Danny was really to walk your talk.

I really learned from Danny Meyer to walk your talk in all interactions. Like if you are going to be someone who believes that culture is the key to success, that has to flow through consistently the way you show up in every interaction. And I’ve known Danny for decades now, and it always does.

I don’t think you’ll find a person on the planet who doesn’t stay the same. So I really learned from Danny the power of walking your talk. I think I also learned from Danny, like now we sort of take for granted that culture is a a key competency of an organization, but I learned that when I read Setting the Table and then that was really his iconic book, which they teach at business school.

It’s not just for the hospitality industry, it’s for all businesses, so really culture as a competency.

Joining the Mexicue team

BERMAN: So, for a lot of people you have a dream of working in food, you have a passion for the category. You’re now working for Danny Meyer. I mean, it’s like you’re there. It’s like you’re aspiring to be in the Olympics. You made it. But you decided to leave and go start a company.

COLLINS: I know. Okay. So this is a very simple calculation. So I’m working for Danny Meyer, which is just my dream.

I wouldn’t have cared what the job were as long as it were in his organization. I would have stacked books, washed dishes. It didn’t matter. But when I looked to my left and my right, there were a sea of other incredibly talented people who all had more experience than me. And, because as you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was eight, I just thought to myself, it’s going to take a really long time to be an owner. And there’s a sea of people who are frankly more qualified than me to take that next spot. And I just didn’t feel that I had the patience. And so I knew that I could work within Union Square Hospitality Group for a number of years and gain some really good core skills. And then I just had to go out on my own.

BERMAN: Yeah. So how did Mexicue come to be?

COLLINS: I was set up on a friend date with these in two incredible guys, Thomas and Dave. They had built a food truck called Mexicue. It was the most successful food truck — this is like when the food truck thing was really happening in New York City. When you would like go on Twitter, not X, Twitter, and you would tweet where your food truck was, and you’d pull up, and you’d have a line around the block, and then the cops would shut you down, and so it was, like, the place I was working in restaurants, which was cool, but food trucks was like 10 times cooler.

BERMAN: This is the movie Chef right here…

COLLINS: Totally, and Tom and Dave were also just like intrinsically cool. And they needed somebody really to build some business discipline.

And so I agreed to do a little side project for them, and you know how these things go, that side project turned into years of working together.

BERMAN: It’s a story that you do see over and over again where you have people who are more on the creative side, who just desperately need a business partner, who’s got the structure and can handle the legal, the finance, et cetera. And it sounds like it was a really nice marriage of skills and passion.

COLLINS: And that is my passion. I love the structure of the business; that is actually what gets me excited, is like really building in margin and all of the financial tweaking that you can do to a business in the early stage so that when you’re scaling, you’re scaling a healthy business.

People think that’s crazy. They’re like, “Wouldn’t you rather be the one doing the creative things?” But I think building businesses is incredibly creative. I actually consider myself to be a creative. It’s just that my medium is business building.

BERMAN: It also takes a certain creativity and skillset to be organized and a thinker who can put those things together and work with people who are deeply creative and don’t have that part.

There’s almost a translation that has to happen in there for most people. If you can speak both, you can kind of make magic.

COLLINS: I think it is magic. It’s like peanut butter and jelly. If you have the data person alone, they’re just dry. They’re substantive, but they’re dry. And if you have the storyteller alone, it’s just jelly sandwich.

It’s sweet, but it leaves you hollow. You have to put the two together.

Founding Zume: “Is there a Shake Shack in me?”

BERMAN: So, I mean, you step into the role at Mexicue. Presumably you could have used that as a platform to build a lot more, but you went and started another company. Why did you do that? And, what happened there?

COLLINS: So, do you remember how you asked me before, “Well you’re working for Danny Meyer, and that’s kind of like the sine qua non of working in the food business. Why were you still not satisfied?” And, it was because I wanted to be an owner.

And I wanted to do something that was much bigger.

BERMAN: Absolutely.

COLLINS: And I wanted my Shake Shack. I saw the early days what it was and what it became, and I will tell you: I absolutely wondered if there’s a Shake Shack in me, a Shake Shack-like thing. It might not be a physical restaurant, but a thing that could scale and have that much impact.

Pizza & robots

BERMAN: Okay. And to be clear, Zume is not Z-O-O-M, the video conferencing app that we all use after COVID, it’s Z-U-M-E, which was what and how did it get started?

COLLINS: Yeah. So the problem that we were trying to solve at Zume is similar to the problem that we’re trying to solve at Planet FWD, which is essentially, how do you feed the planet without ruining the planet? And the thing that we wanted to do was to use technology, all types of technology — hardware, software, everything in between — to rebuild the food system from the bottom up.

Mind you, this is also 2015, right? So this is when we’re seeing the beginnings of DoorDash. Like this is when we’re seeing Uber start to launch Uber Eats. Like this is a really juicy, fruitful time to be building anything innovative in the food space.

And so I met my co-founder on a Skype call.

BERMAN: Another business set up?

COLLINS: Another business set up from somebody who I met at Stanford business school who said, “There’s this incredible visionary who’s got this incredible idea. He wants a CEO to run it, and he’s scouting for CEOs.” And there I was. And so I think we had a similar ambition and a similar point of view on what the food system could be. And it was again, just right place.

BERMAN: And what was that vision?

COLLINS: It was that we could rebuild the food system from the bottom up to make sure that we could create healthy, delicious, affordable food without ruining the planet.

BERMAN: And part of that involved robotics.

COLLINS: Part of that was robotics.

BERMAN: How did that become part of the vision? Because it really became a huge part of the company.

COLLINS: Well “robot” is a sexy word, and “pizza” is a sexy word, and when you put “robot and pizza” together, people lose their minds — even though there was so much more to the business, that part is, it’s just indelible.

BERMAN: Chocolate and peanut butter. It’s just two great tastes that go great together.

COLLINS: Go great together. And so have you ever worked in a kitchen?

BERMAN: I’ve served tables, I’ve not worked in a kitchen.

COLLINS: From your serving table jobs, when you even like cross the precipice of that kitchen, it is hot and it is dangerous.

BERMAN: It’s hectic.

COLLINS: There’s a lot going on. And in a pizza kitchen, you have a gigantic 800-degree oven in the middle of a space where people are working. Now that’s a really hard place to be. And so what we were trying to solve with the robots primarily was: How can we take away the jobs that are not the jobs, the tasks?

What we were trying to solve with the robots was: how can we reduce the tasks that aren’t really good for humans? So that those humans can be doing other things. It wasn’t about automating the job of being a cook. It was about automating the tasks that were a drain on safety and that were frankly repetitive like sticking pizza in and out of an 800-degree oven for an eight-hour shift

I will also say that because we were able to get the robot, it really improved our logistics in a way that’s harder to do with people.

We could do much more predictive inventory management and creation of product, because we could code that into the robots. And we had much more consistency around the product, which made it easier for us to distribute.

BERMAN: And if I remember right, part of the concept of the pizzas was also you would do assembly in one location, and then the pizzas actually bake on a truck on the way to be delivered. Is that do I remember that right?

COLLINS: Totally. So the robots were something that we co-created together. This idea for baking on the way, I give total credit to my co-founder, but you know, he was solving a real problem, which is anytime that you get delivery food, it’s never as delicious as if you got it at the restaurant. What if we cook the food on the way to the customer? And pizza is a great place to start because it’s flat.

Scaling Zume into a tech unicorn

BERMAN: So, Zume got big.

COLLINS: Really big.

BERMAN: You raised how much total?

COLLINS: More than $500 million.

BERMAN: That’s a lot of money. And you got to a valuation of $2.5 billion.

COLLINS: I think $2.25 billion.

BERMAN: Okay. I mean, that’s a massive, massive business over a fairly short period of time, right?

This is over just a few years. You were obviously catching a wave, which is easier than creating a wave, but this is a massive play. How did you get to that scale that quickly?

COLLINS: Well, I will say that one of the things that we did very well at Zume was to understand that there were multiple technologies that we could build that would be reinforcing of each other, but across different commercial verticals.

So we had an opportunity around a pizza business that we thought could scale to Domino’s pizza proportions. We had a technology around packaging using robots to create compostable packaging. That’s a massive industry. We had a technology around logistics, kitchen management systems, kitchen display systems, real time inventory management, which is a big problem to solve in any delivery company.

That was a massive business. And so these were all the technologies that we built, in parallel that reinforced each other, but that had huge addressable markets, any one of them. And so I think investors thought there’s seven bets on the table. Even if one of these bets is true, it’s going to be a massive business, but we like the odds of more than one.

And sometimes it felt like a well-oiled machine. Sometimes it felt like a Rube Goldberg device. And I think it just depends on the day

Lessons from the fall of Zume

BERMAN: Yeah. So Zume ended up not working out. It didn’t end up having its glorious exit. What did you learn from the rapid rise and then the fall of Zume?

COLLINS: Yeah. I mean, one of the hardest things for me and the story of Zume is that I left. And so much of what I would have loved to happen, I wasn’t there to be able to really see it through, and that’s hard. I think it’s hard for any founder to put that much of yourself into a business and have to leave.

But I will say a good lesson that I learned is : you can’t judge yourself or measure yourself based on the valuation of your company. You can’t value yourself based on the valuation of your company.

So whether we’re a unicorn, we’re a $2.25 billion valuation company — that made me the first Black woman to ever become a unicorn — that isn’t gonna be on my epitaph. That isn’t the thing that I hope my boys remember about me. It is absolutely how many jobs did you create? How much good did you do? How did people feel about the work that they did for you? How did you help people grow their careers? Did you return investors’ value? And so I also will say, I think because of that failure, I have like a little chip on my shoulder, which is incredibly motivating because I still feel like I have so much to prove. And so if we were to kind of link where we are now with where I was with Zume, I think kind of that bridge is some of the investors who came with me and some of the employees who came with me, even some of the press who covered me in both cycles. And that’s very grounding.

Codeswitching Planet FWD in a politicized environment

BERMAN: You and I are sitting here having this conversation in the first quarter of 2025.

COLLINS: Wow.

BERMAN: And climate change is a political thing right now.

How do you think about running a business that is both obviously clearly meant to make money and you’re a capitalist, and also serving a profound social mission? Does it change how you talk about it? Does it change how you pitch it? What’s different in the current world for you?

COLLINS: What’s different in the current world is I do think we have to be more careful about positioning and really being willing to use the words and phrases that create a big tent. You and I can sit here and say we don’t believe climate change is a political issue, and I really believe that. But for many it does feel that way, and I have customers across the country. I have customers in many, many pockets of the world, and I am totally willing to adjust my language so that I’m speaking in a way that feels resonant for them.

I don’t have to talk about decarbonizing consumer products. I can talk about building healthy soil. I don’t have to talk about fighting climate change bite by bite. I can talk about building more resilient supply chains. I don’t have to talk about sustainability being the new ethos. I can talk about improving efficiency. Because what’s beautiful for my business is that’s actually true — using less resources is a great way to save costs. Improving the health of your soil and the health of your farm system is a great way to build resilience, ensuring that you still have coffee to grow and almonds and cashews. Well, isn’t that a good risk mitigation strategy if you’re a coffee or a chocolate company?

So that is what has changed.

I actually feel lucky that I have the knowledge and the know-how to codeswitch a bit. I think it’s something that you learn if you have the opportunity to be in diverse populations as you learn to codeswitch.

I think this is a codeswitching moment.

And so one of the things I’ve learned about working within this consumer product space is you just always lead by listening. You never lead by telling, and I think that’s what you’re saying. The thing that I do worry about in this moment really is misinformation around climate. This actually is my great worry. And I don’t know that I have a solve for it, you know?

BERMAN: Why is that your great worry?

COLLINS: Because it is very much the case that, okay, here’s an analogy. Do you remember the ozone layer problem that we had? We’ve kind of solved that. And it was because the world and governments, private sector, public sector, and people.

Remember how hot and bothered we got about styrofoam cups all of a sudden? Everybody came together and said, “No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want a hole in the ozone.” There weren’t a lot of standouts, Jeff. There weren’t a lot of people saying, “Oh, that’s not true. There’s no hole in the ozone” — very few. You would look like a flat earther if that were you… There were very few large companies or governments.

I can’t recall any who were saying, “This is not a problem. We don’t have to fix this,” but that’s not where we are with climate change. We’re in a space where people are still trying to disprove what’s true. And so my great worry is not so much about repositioning solutions so that we can continue to accelerate and do great work.

My worry is about kind of the larger scale disinformation that’s going to make it harder for everyday people to stand up and get involved.

BERMAN: And do you have a theory of the case as to how we address that in the context of climate?

COLLINS: I mean, my greatest hope really is young people. I have a seven year old and a three year old, and the three year old’s not quite there yet, but boy, that seven year old. I was brushing my teeth and had the water on the other day, and he raced across the bathroom and turned it off and was like, “What are you doing?”

And I was so proud. I was a little annoyed, but—

BERMAN: That’s awesome.

Scaling Planet FWD across categories & markets

What’s what’s next for Planet FWD?

COLLINS: What’s next for Planet FWD really is scaling across all categories of consumer products. We have a really good foothold in food and beverage, fashion and apparel, but we want to get into consumer electronics. We want to get into every single category. The other big push for us right now really is global expansion.

I think there’s still a market here in the United States, but the market’s really being made in the UK and in the EU.

BERMAN: Julia, you have a seven-year old and a three-year old. When you think about this legacy of service that has been passed down from your grandfather to you, what are you hoping to pass on to them?

COLLINS: I mean, I really have the mind that your job as a parent is to emulate your children more than having them emulate you. I really believe that. I’m not sure if that was Khalil Gibran. There was some really great poet that said that. Be more like your children than you aspire for them to be like you. And I believe that. So, I think my greatest aspiration is to just create the conditions for Mosey, my seven year old, to be fully Mosey.

And for Olu, my three year old, to be fully Olu. I will say, though, that they’re brothers and there’s two of them. And, I think the greatest job that they have is to protect and care for one another.

BERMAN: That’s beautiful. Thanks so much for being with us.

COLLINS: Thanks for having me.

BERMAN: Julia Collins’ approach to her business is innovative, and her politics are pragmatic. Let’s hope that that combination can unlock real results in her mission to fight climate change.

One of the best parts about sitting with Julia and entrepreneurs like her is that their mission is composed not just of doing well, but of doing good at the same time. Let’s hope for more of that.

I’m Jeff Berman, thanks for listening.