ProVeg: Kickstarting for Good impact incubator looks for innovative solutions to make food systems more sustainable
06 Jun 2024 | ProVeg
We sat down with ProVeg experts Prakrit Sachdeva, impact program manager, and Che Green, research and impact consultant, to discuss the organization’s initiative Kickstarting for Good, made possible alongside Vegan Hacktivists. The incubator program aims to inspire the launching of new animal advocacy initiatives to improve contemporary food systems. Sachdeva and Green share industry insights about where AI use in this space is headed, as well as tips for potential participants who want to grab this opportunity.
Hi, everyone.
This is Milana for Nutrition Insight.
Today I'm joined by two representatives of the international organization Proveeg.
My name is Chey Green.
I've been in the food system transformation.
A movement, if you will, for the better part of 25 years.
I ran a nonprofit called Funnalytics for most of that time.
I am a consultant with Kickstarting for Good and Proveg to help them both identify high impact ideas and help them evaluate those ideas as they come through the code the Kickstarting for Good application process.
So that is my role on the team, and I work closely with Prakreet.
Great, thank you, sir.
I'm Prakrit.
I'm part of Proveg and I'm the manager of the incubation program called Kickstarting for Good.
I've been involved with food, I think my whole life through passion and through our business and in hospitality, and then that resulted into my personal interest in how we eat and into ethics.
And that drove me into entrepreneurship, where I was in IT, but I wanted to do something in food tech and in animal advocacy, and that's why I'm here.
When it comes to Pro Veg, Pro Veg is a food awareness organization.
Our mission is to replace 50% of animal products, globally with plant-based and cultivated foods by 2040.
This is the mission of Proveeg and it does through a lot of different work.
It focuses more on five areas.
One is food innovation, corporate and industrial engagement, policy and advocacy, movement, building, which is, for example, what Kickstarting for Good does, and public engagement and media.
When we talk about Kickstarting for Good, it's the world's first incubator and accelerator program that is focused on helping and supporting nonprofits and impact initiatives in the food system and animal advocacy space.
Thanks and since you're, since you brought up the initiative that Nutrition Insights recently reported on, could you also, discuss some of the AI solutions to improve food systems, and, and what key metrics for success, the participants should keep in mind.
Sure, yeah, thank you for that question.
Overall, sort of the reason that we're focused on AI to begin with is because we realize that it's both an important area.
It's also somewhat neglected by animal advocacy people and those interested in food system transformation.
And so that's an area that we think is quite important, but also a lot of sort of a lot of unanswered questions remain in the AI space.
And so we're trying to help sort of build the infrastructure for that in animal advocacy.
Ultimately, the metric for success for any successful project that goes through Kickstarter for Good really is that food system transformation, and Procy just referred to the goal of removing 50% of animals from this food system by 2040.
That really is the metric, and how we get there can be a few different ways.
So AI can help us with consumer advocacy and persuading.
People to adopt alternative proteins and plant-based diets, but it can also help with things like on-farm transition.
So for instance, AI can help us with things like in-ovo egg sexing to reduce the number of male chicks that are killed in the industry, for instance, and that's part of that removing animals from the food system by 2040.
And so there are a number of different sort of at an Overall level, it's about the importance and neglectedness and tractability of both farmed animals and AI in the food system.
And then at the more sort of minor level or the personal change level, it's about how to get more people to adopt alternative diets and how to reduce animals in the food system.
So those would be our key metrics for success for anyone joining the program.
Anything from regret on these questions regarding key metrics for potential participants?
I, I think like Cha already mentioned, I think these metrics are very important to us and also things like neglectedness, tractability, and importance.
So we really want to focus on aspects that are neglected in this space, what is that has been missing, what is things that are not being worked on.
So, for example, anybody who is thinking of, for example, applying with their own idea, this is something that we wish for them to consider.
Then again, tractability and importance, like how likely it is that the success of this idea would be tractable, and also importance, like, are there other projects that should be considered for.
These are a few aspects that we consider when we are judging their idea.
When it comes to the applicant themselves, of course, motivation is a big one.
You know, I think having just that fire within someone, is, the biggest thing that I would love to see.
And an applicant, and I'm sure Jay would agree to, but then also comes, when it comes to AI projects, their knowledge on AI systems, their knowledge on what's, what are the recent developments, because of course, AI is an area that has been developing at a crazy speed.
So I think these few things and combined with other aspects of what makes a nonprofit founder really good or not what makes a founder of an impact initiative really successful, these combined is what we are looking for somebody who wants to join Kickstarter and for good.
And, and just to add to that, you know, I'm sorry, Malana, but the appropriate referred to those terms, you know, importance, neglect and disintractability.
Anybody who's familiar with the effective altruism movement will recognize those terms, and we do bring a lot of that framework to Kickstarting for good.
And so we want We're looking for projects that have measurable results, something that we can actually track what the impact of that project is, and then if it works , scale it up and actually roll it out either to other regions or the other target audiences.
So very much an EA sort of framework or approach to our overall applicant selection.
And are there any challenges you anticipate in implementing such solutions in the animal advocacy space in particular, and how do you plan to address them?
I think one thing that when I was talking about this with Jay and I, it's a good point that he brought it up, is that on a macro level, sometimes even the experts don't know where AI is headed or where the developments are headed.
So, of course, for us as a movement, it's also really sometimes hard.
To anticipate that, you know, what are the latest trends or what are the latest developments that we should follow up on.
I think this is something that we really need to be very active on and also be careful, always that just not, rely on the latest trends that have been followed up by other movements and really make sure that we do our own research.
And other than that, I think, There has been research already that has found out that the data and the data sets that are used by major AI labs do consist of biases that are of course biases towards, for example, farmed animals, you know, factory farmed animals.
And so most of these data sets do consider the do have these biases already, and I think this is a big barrier, for us, but I think with time, And with good data sets that maybe we as a movement can provide, we can leverage our, information that we have to change that and also to fight these biases.
I think this is one challenge, and the other challenge would be, of course, constraints of resources that we as a movement have.
I think we are a growing movement, but still sometimes a bit small.
And in terms of time, the amount of people.
And also the amount of funding that there is.
So I think this can be a bit of a challenge, but I see more and more interest in AI, especially more from people who want to start something, people who want to invest or, give out from philanthropy.
So there is more interest, but yeah, I think sometimes constraints regarding time and, funding can be a bit of a hassle.
Yeah, I would just add briefly, I think I agree with everythingrocky just said, but also there's a challenge in terms of getting the advocacies, advocacy organizations and individual advocates to actually utilize the tools, and that's partly the fault of the tools not quite being ready yet.
And so a lot of early experiences that advocates have with the tools is that they bring up a lot of false information they're and we're a very fact driven movement.
We have the facts on our side and so we try to utilize them judiciously and chat GPT and other tools like that do not, you know, provide great factual information.
At the moment anyway, of course they're going to get quite a bit better, but they're not there yet.
And so a lot of the initial experiences that advocates have had have not been great with those tools in terms of improving their advocacy.
And so we need to find ways to make them both relevant to the advocates, to find specific usage scenarios that actually elevate their advocacy as opposed to just creating another thing that they need to learn that doesn't necessarily help them out in their day to day work.
Yeah, I think this is a great point to what Jay was saying, and I think before you even asked us like what are the possible solutions or things maybe that excites us, I think one is definitely the fact that how can we increase the efficiency of the people in the movement, and that is through AI so how can we make sure that we use AI to make us more efficient as a movement.
And I think maybe this, if we can onboard that, especially at this initial stages of AI being developed, I think this can really help us be more productive and be more efficient.
And also do our work better.
So how do you see the role of AI evolving over the coming years in the space that you're working in?
So, do you want to start on this?
Sure.
Again, I think it's hard.
It's such a moving target and such a fast moving target that it's, it's difficult for us to really pinpoint.
And that's actually one of the reasons for Kickstarting for Good to exist, right, is that we don't feel Like we have the expertise or the answers in terms of where AI or other areas are going to go and so we're crowdsourcing to some extent these ideas from people and trying to get other people who have either great ideas or expertise in AI to come up with their own ideas.
In terms of where it's evolving, I do think that those barriers that we challenges that we just talked about are going to be reduced quite quickly, probably over the next 3 to 5 years, and that these tools will become a lot more fact-based and a lot more useful to the individual advocate.
And so I see that mostly around content creation, mostly around sort of figuring out persuasive ways of targeting different audiences, things like that.
Eventually I see AI as we as consumers let AI into our lives more and more.
Some like Google and Google Search knows so much about us.
AI will know more and more about us, and it will actually, on one hand, that's incredibly frightening, and then on the other hand, that is a useful tool for individual outreach for things like behavioral nudges, etc.
Things like that that require more individual.
Is information and knowledge that can frame use AI to then frame a message that really appeals to that individual or helps that individual overcome specific challenges.
Just as an example, if somebody's going becoming vegan and they run into certain challenges around cheese alternatives and they need help, that an AI specific tool might be able to understand them better and provide a solution that's going to be resonates with them and appeals to them.
That's sort of the long term vision, I think, but that's hopefully where we're going is to have advocacy tools that are much more personalized, driven by AI.
Yeah I agree.
No, I completely agree.
I think AI could really help and help us reaching the target audiences and also with the targeted messaging, like what are the things that, they really listen to, what are the things that move them, and that can really help us get the message across.
I think other than that, we, I really hope that AI AI will bring advancements in alternate proteins.
I think of course we also have prove startup incubator that work a lot on alternate proteins, and I think, AI can really help drive faster this innovation that we are looking for, besides that one, area that interests me, and especially that is coming a lot from the AA movement as , it's like the ethics concerning AI.
And when we talk about ethics right now, we talk a lot about, human beings and how it affects us.
I hope this conversation will go a bit broader and we can also talk about other species that are being affected by AI and I think the more and more we will try to bring the topic of ethics into AI.
Hopefully we will bring more and also engage with topics about how we can reduce the harm that we are causing to animals through technologies such as AI.
I think this can hopefully get more attention into what we do.
I think, yeah, I think this is something that also we are excited about.
I'm glad, excuse me, I'm glad Procreate mentioned the alternative protein side of things which I had neglected to mention.
I think that there's huge potential for AI to help us figure out not only novel nutritional profiles, but also things like novel textures, etc.
And overcome some of the barriers that we may have seen with plant-based foods over the last year or two.
Thank you so much, guys.
Really really interesting.
Any final words?
I would just say that we're super excited about the potential for AI to help farmed animals and to help transform the food system.
And so anyone who's interested, if you have good ideas or even just ideas that you think are OK, but want to share them with us and let us determine whether or not they're great for the program, we very much welcome them, and you can see more information at kickstartingforgood.org.
Yeah, yeah, we're, we're really waiting for exciting entrepreneurs who really want to do something, and I think, yeah, it can really help us get there.
So please apply.
Thank you for your time.
