S7. E8: Sonalie Figueiras: Green Queen
“I think we've prioritized certain things in education and in culture, but we're really deprioritizing curiosity. The joy of going into a research hole and just digging… I still do that every day.” – Sonalie Figueiras
Sonalie Figueiras is the founder and chief of Green Queen, the award-winning media impact platform advocating for social and environmental change. Green Queen started as a blog in 2011 and now it's Asia's largest plant-based media platform.
She is also creating a marketplace to source organic and natural foods. She’s the founder of Ekowarehouse, a global sourcing platform for certified organic products, with a mission to make safe, quality food accessible and affordable for the whole planet.
I’ve been following Sonalie and Green Queen for years. Green Queen is an incredible source for information and breaking news on all things related to alternative proteins and the future of food. Check it out here.
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Learn More About Eko Warehouse
Transcript:
Sonalie: [00:00:15] I think we've prioritized certain things in education and in culture, but we're really deprioritizing curiosity and the joy of going into a research hole and just digging, and I still do that every day.
Elizabeth: [00:00:42] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Sonalie Figueiras. Sonalie is the founder and editor in chief of Green Queen, the award winning media impact platform advocating for social and environmental change. Green Queen started out as a blog in 2011, and now it's Asia's largest plant based media platform. Hi, Sonalie, I'm really excited to have you on the show. I know you started Green Queen many, many years ago as a blog, but how did this happen that you became like the media queen and the site to go to for all of this information?
Sonalie: [00:01:53] Obviously, it's an evolution, but deep down, I am less of a blogger and more of a news junkie at heart, and the blog was accidental. It was really about sharing solutions to how to live a life that is healthier for the planet and healthier for humanity and for ourselves. I basically kind of let it just organically grow first. At the same time, that Green Queen was sort of slowly growing. I was also launching this other business eco warehouse that is a matching platform for certified organic suppliers and B2B so trade buyers.
Elizabeth: [00:02:37] Will you explain what that means?
Sonalie: [00:02:39] I had an idea a really long time ago to start a green Starbucks. So in university, I worked at Starbucks for four years. I did many jobs, of course, barista being one of them, and gosh, I learned so much from working at Starbucks, at a university cafe. I would not trade those experiences for the world. So I do have a love for coffee shops and Starbucks, even though I know now it's like a massive mega chain, but I just have a soft spot for it. When I changed my life, because of health issues, I changed how I ate. This was, I'm talking about 10-12 years ago, when the world was very different. I felt there was a space for a chain of coffee shops, cafes that were exactly like a Starbucks and that they were convenient and they were in busy urban areas, but that they would be filled with food that I wanted and could eat. So coconut yogurt and almond milk and monk fruit sugar and all kinds of things like that. So for every item, the replacement would be the healthier version, the more sustainable version, the animal free version. So I was researching that business plan, and I found this site called Alibaba, which at the time was a not very well-known company based out of China.
Elizabeth: [00:04:12] Wow.
Sonalie: [00:04:14] They weren't public and we knew them in Asia. But it was not very well known, and the biggest part of their business at the time was their B2B marketplace, which was a model that is not very familiar to the U.S businesses but became quite a big model to follow in Asia. It was basically a website where you could find suppliers from everywhere of all things. I started looking for organic food and things like organic coconut sugar, and that was a big search and I couldn't find anything. There were no organic results. There were no options. There was no trust that I could be sure that if I was ordering some food, it really was organic. I mean, organic wasn't even a tick box that you could choose. So, I had this idea to do the green version of Alibaba. That's how it all kind of started. So I thought, wouldn't it be great if we want businesses to change and we want to give consumers different options, what we're going to need to make it easier for people to source green products, fair trade products, organic products, compostable packaging. I mean all these things we had in the eco warehouse at the beginning and then it just so happened that the organic food took over. So it became really dedicated mostly to organic food. But at the beginning we had everything we had sustainable certified, fair trade certified organic. I'm trying to think of all the different labels, and we had certified BPI, which is the bioplastic institute, meaning it's compostable. So we were doing packaging, we were doing fabrics, we were doing food, we were doing household goods, beauty products.
Elizabeth: [00:06:06] When you started Eco warehouse. Did you immediately find a huge demand for it because there was nothing?
Sonalie: [00:06:12] No, I think that what happened is the organic food demand was there, so organic worked from the first day, it was very clear that people have been waiting for a site where they could source things like organic coconut oil. This was the era in the mid twenty, fifteen and onwards where health and wellness was just absolutely taking off. We had so many customers that were juice bars and smoothie companies and super food companies, and we just became really well known for organic superfood powders, organic coconut products, organic flours, organic nuts, everything that you would imagine that you could put in a box and ship, but that was certified organic. Our real niche and our real kind of speciality was that we were verifying the suppliers. We were checking all their documentation, we were reviewing them every year. So we were really a curated selection that you could trust and that really differentiated us from Alibaba, which eventually did go public and did change their website and became much more Western friendly because our site had been quite difficult to use in the beginning and very unfriendly to people who weren't maybe from Asia. So they completely changed and it's so funny because a lot of what they did was in our original business plan. But what they never were able to do is have the trust because there were all these issues with scamming and fake products and fake reviews. So we really were able to hold on to our space. But for example, we had compostable packaging, we had recycled paper packaging, and none of that had a big audience. Then today, of course, fast forward to Twenty Twenty One, where I actually co-founded a green packaging marketplace because the world is now ready, but the world wasn't ready in twenty fifteen.
Elizabeth: [00:08:07] So now do you have both?
Sonalie: [00:08:09] I do have both. They're a little bit different because Eco Warehouse is a matching platform, which is exactly like the original Alibaba, so you cannot complete your transaction online. You do your business off the site, whereas our packaging marketplace is complete from beginning to end so you can complete your purchase on the platform. So that's a big difference.
Elizabeth: [00:08:32] You're starting eco warehouse and you're kind of starting green queen.
Sonalie: [00:08:37] Yeah, right, more of a guide. Just putting stuff out there and not really planning for it to be a media company. But what happened is because of the eco warehouse. I was going to all the biggest food shows in the world, especially the natural ones or the organic ones. So the two big big big ones are Expo West in California. The bigger one there is also an expo east, which we would also sometimes go to, but it's smaller and then we would go every year to boi Fok, which is the biggest show for organic products, trade organic products in the world, and those shows opened me up to the future of food. Now it is true that food is always looming big in my life. I come from a food family. My grandmother was a very famous, well-known home cook in her native Delhi. She was a bit of a pioneer. She got married when she was really young to my grandfather. It was an arranged marriage, but then they had a beautiful love story until he passed away. She was an army wife and went all around Indian Army bases with him and eventually went abroad to Japan. That's where my mother ended up making her life and that's why I've ended up being this sort of third culture kid and why I'm not just 100 percent Indian and grew up in India. My grandmother would hang out with all the American army wives on the bases, and she learned how to make brownies and loaf cakes, which were not common in India. She was one of the first people in the country to give lessons to other housewives on how to bake brownies. Then my mom took it another step further and taught herself how to cook in her thirties. It's a really funny story, because when she first got married, she didn't actually know how to cook an egg. Now she's one of the best cooks I've ever met. I grew up eating food from all around the world and always homemade and always with this focus on cooking at home. But I never had any education on where the food was coming from and how it was grown. So, of course, when I had my awakening around health because I had all these health conditions and they weren't getting diagnosed, and so I took matters in my own hands. I started learning about how food was grown, and that's how this whole journey into the green space started.
Elizabeth: [00:11:11] I just want to talk for a minute about the health issues because no one was diagnosing you properly. You had real inspiration to kind of fix yourself, right with food. How did that all kind of go down?
Sonalie: [00:11:23] I lived with a lot of pain and a lot of digestive issues for many years, and no one could diagnose it or if they were diagnosing it, they weren't helping me. I grew up with doctors who never, ever discussed lifestyle choices or food choices with you. So when I did my own homework and realized, that what you ate had a huge impact on how you felt, you know, beyond just, oh, don't eat too much fat or you'll have a heart attack, which, when you're 18, doesn't really seem very, it's not really what you're thinking about. I changed what I ate. I started to really consider where my food was coming from. I never really thought about it. I grew up in Hong Kong. In the eighties and nineties, the absolute apex of quality food was imported American beef and American chicken and American milk, and it was filled with hormones and antibiotics, and I was consuming a ton of that. That was what was considered giving your children the best. It was U.S. It wasn't from China, and it was considered also, let's be honest, it was a status thing as well. It was like, Well, it's from the U.S. and it's more expensive and I'm going to give my children this. This is the best. It was so funny. I was reading an interview with Francis Moore Le Petit, the famous, of course, activist, and she's one of my dearest
Elizabeth: [00:13:04] Small planet diet, of course.
Sonalie: [00:13:02] She was saying, people don't remember. But in the late seventies in the United States, you couldn't buy fresh herbs at a grocery store and you people weren't cutting up onions and putting it in their food. They were using onion powder. Here in Asia, we had a lot of fresh food that was Chinese at the wet markets. But if you were making Western food, there wasn't that much stuff. So it's not that my parents were making bad choices, they were making the best choices they thought they had and we did grow up eating lots of Chinese food. So I ate a lot of fresh Chinese kale and bok choy and tong joy and all the different choys. It means dark green vegetable. It's sort of like cruciferous veg in Chinese, and I love that. But when we were making Western food, we were buying Western ingredients and there wasn't, just food culture. We are so privileged today.
Elizabeth: [00:14:01] One of the reasons I'm fascinated by what you did with your own health is because this was a while ago and you were really young. Nowadays it's not that crazy to hear somebody say, well, yeah, nobody can diagnose me properly, and I'm going to remove this from my diet, and I'm going to stop eating that and I'm going to eat organic. But 12 years ago, it just wasn't happening in the same way. It wasn't a thing and you were young. It's kind of like everything else you do. It's like you just dig in and figure it out, which is kind of a nice metaphor in the sense of what you've done with Green Queen, what you did for yourself.
Sonalie: [00:14:41] Thank you for making that connection. I didn't think about it that way before, but it is true that I'm a lifelong digger and I think I was born asking my mother why I'm pretty sure she found it. I always joke like, I'm so lucky she's my mother because she's the right mother for me, and she never found me annoying or too much. But I definitely asked a lot of questions. Even in school, I always said to my teachers, But why? But why? But why? I'm sure I drove them absolutely mental. Remember, this is in the age where you didn't have Google, and I'm telling you, Google did change my life because suddenly I could just do my own research. That was the golden age, the dawn and the golden age of, like the beginning of Facebook, right? That was when I was at university in the U.S Facebook was just starting and we were at one of the schools where they gave us. We were one of the test schools, so we had access to it even before the world. So I suddenly had this tool where I could research, because before that, you'd have to go to a library and do research and use things like LexisNexis if your school had a membership. So research was hard. There was a barrier to it. Actually, it's funny that you bring up the digging because I'm always a little bit shocked by how few people do research today when it's so easy to do research. Of course, now I say to people, Oh, my mom really trusted doctors, but did she even have a choice? Where was she getting different info?
Elizabeth: [00:16:27] Not, not really. I mean, and that's a major difference between now and then. Although a lot of people still trust doctors, and most doctors still don't look at lifestyle or nutrition.
Sonalie: [00:16:38] Or any of that at that point must be made as you just did and that hasn't changed. But what I'm saying is, if you want to know things, I think we've prioritized certain things in education and in culture, but we're really deprioritizing curiosity. The joy of going into a research hole and just digging, and I still do that every day. So if no one's doing any more research and digging, life will get less interesting.
Elizabeth: [00:17:18] It will get less human.
Sonalie: [00:17:20] Definitely less human. So it all does come back to that. Then you wanted to know how to come back to your question. So I was going to these food shows and I was fascinated by the people I was meeting and the discourse as I was hearing from some of these entrepreneurs and what I was tasting. When I first figured out that I had been lied to. This is early on like when I was 19, 20 and I figured out that I'd been lied to about the food I was eating and the products I was using and the pollution that was just enveloping me from the paint on my walls to the the floor cleaner I was using to the shampoo in my bathroom. You know, to what was in my fridge. I felt like, wait when other people found out how much they've been lied to. There is going to be an uprising, which of course, is what happened. That's very similar to how I felt when I encountered all these alternative food products. I thought, Well, you know, when people figure out that you can actually eat all these products without costing an animal's life and having all the emissions, etc, etc, there's going to be a revolution. So that's when I decided that at Green Queen. That's when I started feeling like, OK, green queen needs to become more newsy, less lifestyle. The Green Queen needs to start looking beyond Hong Kong. It needs to be a voice in Asia for these topics. So that's when I wrote that article that seems so, so long ago. But it was this article I wrote, which was like, these seven companies are revolutionizing food, and it was impossible beyond at the time. Hampton Creek now eats just New Wave Foods, New Harvest, and I think I included Soylent in there because it seemed pretty revolutionary at the time and that's where it all started. Then I just started kind of paying attention to all these companies, and I believe we were really the first media in Asia to start talking about all this stuff. Just before the pandemic, I made the decision that I wanted to start covering the industry globally because I felt like no one was doing it the way I wanted to read it.
Elizabeth: [00:19:33] Which is actually very true. No one is doing it as comprehensively as you guys cover everything that's happening. It's like, you've got all the news.
Sonalie: [00:19:42] That's really kind. I mean, I will say we can't have all of it anymore, as much as we did even six months ago. Because, you know, six months ago, a year ago, it was like one or two big product launches a week. Now there might be a product launch every day and they're getting smaller and more regional.
Elizabeth: [00:20:03] That's true.
Sonalie: [00:20:04] So now I'm a little bit more judicious as the editor in terms of what we cover because my job as an editor is to decide what we are covering and why is it meaningful and what impact are we looking to have? So in the beginning of the alt protein revolution, it really made sense to cover everything. But now it makes less sense, right? And that's my job. As an editor, I need to evolve, and I've evolved so many times. For example, when Green Queen first started, we still covered meat and seafood and dairy. It's just that we were only advising for grass-fed meat or sustainable seafood or free range eggs and organic eggs. But at around twenty sixteen, I made the decision to cut all of that out. I felt that everything I was reading about animal AG emissions and health and animal rights issues and treatment issues, it just all of it added up and I just felt like my consciousness had been raised. It's a journey I did not start out as a vegan that knew all of this already. So, it's a journey and one must respect people's journeys.
Elizabeth: [00:21:17] When did you go vegan around the same time as when Green Queen started?
Sonalie: [00:21:20] I went more vegetarian then. It's going to be about three or four, three or four years now. Yeah, it was around when I got pregnant. The last five percent slipped out. I actually got physically ill when I was pregnant, when I was around animal foods. So our house had been vegan for years. Very honestly, in the beginning, more for health. I've always eaten vegetables. We've always, I mean, I'm half French, salad on the table every day or greens on the table. Indian, I'm half Indian Indian culture and food culture. I mean, I think we have the most vegetable based recipes of any cooking repertoire in the world. Or so I've read, the French always eat salad. Cantonese culture, so Hong Kong is very much about Cantonese food culture. I mean, you eat dark, leafy greens every day. My mom was always a great cook, so vegetables always tasted great. I love them, so it was always a veg forward house, but it was just the protein got less and less. Of course, the beginning of that journey is that I would make much more careful choices about the animal protein we were eating right. Of course, when you're making work, when you're trying to get very, very, very ethical, which I no longer kind of believe. But when you're trying to do grass fed beef or wild cod seafood or all that, especially here in Hong Kong, where everything is important, it's really expensive. So there was also a cost factor where it was like, Well, it's actually cheaper for us to just eat more veg. I found it pretty easy to give up meat. I never really liked chicken, so that was easy. I found it really easy to give up most seafood. Cheese was hard to give up and still remains hard because I'm half French and we always ate cheese.
Elizabeth: [00:23:12] But there's but there's really good vegan cheese now, and there's even better cheese coming.
Sonalie: [00:23:16] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I got to say what I'm so excited about is precision fermentation dairy. I mean, I just don't understand why everyone isn't just pouring all their money into these companies. I don't know. I don't know if I am more excited about that than I am about cultivated meat. I've been asking investors for like 18 months, why is there not more money going into these companies? Now there's so many more precision fermentation companies, and Perfect Day has really led the way. But I mean, I just think that a home run cheese is genuinely like, it's proven certain cheeses are proven to be addictive, and it really is hard to really replicate parmesan cheese vegan. I mean, I've tried them all. It's not the same thing. There's a mommy. I don't know. Animal milk has a new mommy richness that is special. I mean, that's why there are thousands of cheeses in so many different cultures. So I think if we can give people that, I don't see why someone would not say yes to that. Whereas I can, I don't necessarily agree, but I can empathize with why someone might be. Concerned about cultivated meat or not embracing it.
Elizabeth: [00:24:38] I think it's going to be a while before cultivated meat is embraced.
Sonalie: [00:24:43] I mean, it's going to be a while before we can even get to scale. I mean, I think the industry now is getting a lot of hard questions and very honestly, I think those are extraordinarily important. It's time to move from rah rah rah protein, to hey, right? The industry is growing. What are the things we need to be concerned about? What do we need to talk about?
Elizabeth: [00:25:03] Safety, nutrition?
Sonalie: [00:25:05] Gail, Growth serums.
Elizabeth: [00:25:08] Talk about a little bit like what is going on in Asia with all the proteins, versus the West.
Sonalie: [00:25:14] It's the same and different. I think the motivations for certain demographics in Asia are different. They are much more, much more focused on things like food safety. And interestingly enough, that actually is why when they're polled, they're more open to cultivated meat. They are, certain populations are less connected to the agricultural movement, but they are very aware that food scandals are a wash in the industry, and they have lived through food scandals and baby food powder scandals and plastic rice and things like that. I mean, before the pandemic in China, you were looking at over a hundred food scandals a year. One of the reasons why certified organic has found a huge market in China and why certified safe food will always have a market in China and across Asia. So I think you're less connected to the farmers. A lot of times you're less connected to that idea of like a happy cow in a field or a happy chicken in a coop. You're more open to, oh, OK. Well, as long as it tastes good, I'm there. That's a huge factor for Asian consumers, it's got to taste good. I think for Western consumers also, but I think I would say Asian consumers are more picky. They eat a much wider variety of foods every day and their diet has a much wider variety of applications. And so a pack and especially Asian food tech companies almost have a taller order.
Elizabeth: [00:26:59] Wow. That makes sense.
Sonalie: [00:26:60] Burgers and sausages or minced and mince and bangers like that's almost easy, right?
Elizabeth: [00:27:03] No, it's true. If you think about what even like with the cell egg and everything happening here, everyone's trying to do chicken and steak and meatballs, burgers,
Sonalie: [00:27:12] Burgers and nuggets. Whereas, for example, nuggets are a huge part of Asian food. I think a lot of interesting innovation is going to come out of here. I'd say Asians are almost closer to their food culture than they are to the egg story, whereas what I find with Europeans is they're less familiar with deep traditional food culture, but very familiar with the farmer's story. I guess these are gross generalizations. Less caveat, but that is my observation as someone who covers all these markets and sees and also like I've lived in the United States, I've lived in Europe, I am half European, I'm half Indian, I've lived in Asia, so I have spent time in all these different places. So I've observed it's very very different.
Elizabeth: [00:28:07] When you say it's time to start asking hard questions about cultivated meat versus kind of cheerleading. Do you find it because you've been in this pretty much the whole ride with, I mean, since cultivated meats have really been there? Do you feel like it was kind of like rah rah rah? And now all of a sudden it is like just you personally or do you feel like that's where the whole everyone that's looking at this is?
Sonalie: [00:28:34] I think that it's very, very normal and well deserved for an industry when it's first starting to be rah rah rah like I don't think that it is truly a revolutionary industry. I think that what a company like Impossible Foods has done is to literally engineer a patty that is indistinguishable from meat for so many people and allows that to be replaced. I do think that's revolutionary. Whatever your thoughts may be on the ingredients and the processes. So I think that is well deserved, that there was a huge kind of, wow, this is amazing. I also think it's really important to have those forces in the beginning of a movement because you need to bring in investment and consumer interest and education and awareness building, and you need to have momentum and that happened in Moore. I mean, I think it happened way faster than I thought it would. But obviously, the pandemic was a real kind of catalyzing of that. Without the pandemic, I think it might have taken an extra year, but here we are. You can't swing an arm without hitting a new plant based entrepreneur, plant based meat entrepreneur and I think that deserves the rah rah that it got and that it gets. However, it's just a bit like if you look at evolution through a human life like that was when we were babies and babies are super cute and super lovely and just want to love them and protect them. Then your baby gets older and you need to start saying, Hey, now, wait a minute, we need to discipline you. We need to put limitations on what you can do and etc. So I think we're starting to enter that phase. I mean, people can yada yada yada whatever they want. But the day that there is cultivated chicken on the shelf that is cheaper than animal chicken that did not cost an animal its life that did not require cruelty, antibiotics, hormones, assuming we get the rest of it right, right? Like nutrition and the scaffolding and all of that. I mean, give me a break. You think people are not going to choose it?
Elizabeth: [00:30:59] Of course they are.
Sonalie: [00:31:00] I mean, let's stop kidding ourselves.
Elizabeth: [00:31:03] That's the end of animal agriculture. Once that happens, that's when it starts just disappearing. Because why would you choose animal agriculture over that? But we're still a long way away. But the fact that now it's become a possibility right, it's there. That's pretty awesome.
Sonalie: [00:31:21] Yeah. Who are we kidding? I mean, most people make decisions based on price and taste.
Elizabeth: [00:31:28] We're looking at a much better future. You know, once all this actually falls into place.
Sonalie: [00:31:34] Right. I think it's a hybrid future, they'll be fermented stuff and they'll be plant based stuff and they'll be just whole food stuff.
Elizabeth: [00:31:40] Yeah, I agree. This has been awesome. It is so great to have you on the show.
Sonalie: [00:31:45] Thank you so much.
Elizabeth: [00:31:55] To learn more about Sonalie and to learn more about Green Queen, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com We will have links to everything we're on Facebook and Instagram, @Species'Unite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website and click Become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana, Porky, Bethany Jones and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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