“If We All Ate Seven Meals a Week without Meat, Our Carbon Footprint Would Change Immeasurably”

restaurants & retail

“If We All Ate Seven Meals a Week without Meat, Our Carbon Footprint Would Change Immeasurably”

Why Now, A Resonance Test Podcast, 1: Ayr Muir

January 15, 2020
by Megan WelkerKen Gordon
ayrhero

Pull up a seat, sit down, and prepare to devour the first course of Why Now, a production of EPAM Continuum’s Resonance Test podcast. Why Now, which is hosted by our Megan Welker, explores the relationship between cultural trends and disruptive innovations.

Our first topic: the rise of alternative proteins. You can’t go out for a meal today without bumping into Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods somewhere on the menu. Why are meat-based meats seeing all this competition? To dig into the context, we asked Ayr Muir, Founder and CEO of Clover Food Lab, the Boston-based vegetarian food chain that’s been hawking Impossible meatball sandwiches since 2017: Why now? Muir was refreshingly open in his responses. “We're in the food industry, and I think it's the most dishonest industry,” he said, adding that “It's a space where there's a lot of opportunity for creating real relationships. I think you have to start with trust to do that.” In the process, we learned what goes into Impossible meatballs and what they do for his business, the value of publicizing one’s mistakes, and the ways in which our food choices today are really about “voting for a certain future.” Curious to learn more? Listen to Why Now—now.

Why Now, A Resonance Test Podcast, 1: Ayr Muir
filed in: restaurants & retail

About the Author

  • Megan Welker
    Megan Welker
    SENIOR INNOVATION CONSULTANT

    Megan is a design strategist who tells human-centered stories and creates experiences tailored to life’s simple desires. Megan identifies human motivations, translates them into insights, and answers the important question of “So what now?” She lives between the deep messy world of qualitative research and the structured broad world of quantitative testing. She has stepped into the shoes of interesting strangers across the world, with the one guiding principle of finding their truth. When she is not curiously dissecting the world around her, she is an opera singer. If you ask her to sing, she’ll probably do it.

    Prior to EPAM Continuum, Megan was a consumer market strategist and product design engineer for P&G. She worked to improve retention and career satisfaction of Millennial as well as minority employees. She improved global brand sentiment through analysis of Gillette’s digital content and communication strategy and uncovered insight into consumer preferences and behaviors

  • Ken Gordon
    Ken Gordon
    Chief Communications Specialist

    Ken makes EPAM Continuum’s work visible to the necessary people. He creates superlative content, works with colleagues to do the same, and employs social networks to share it widely.

    A card-carrying humanist, Ken co-founded QuickMuse, the improvisational writing website, and JEDLAB, the Jewish education community. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, the New York Times, and many other pubs.

    Ken has an English degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MA in English from the State University of New York at Albany. He framed both diplomas long ago, but can’t seem to find them now—a fact he considers all-too-human.