Matias Muchnick, NotCo | Changing an Entire Food Industry, and Disruptive Marketing

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

Today I spoke with Matías Muchnick, cofounder and CEO of NotCo, a company that uses artificial intelligence to replicate animal products with combinations of plants. NotCo has formed partnerships with global brands such as Burger King, Starbucks, Papa Johns, and Kraft Heinz. To date, they have raised +$400M from investors such as Jeff Bezos, Kaszek Ventures, Tiger Global, and General Catalyst.

Youtube Timestamps*

[1:15]- Opening and Welcome

How did Matías arrive at the fascinating world of startups?

Matías started going to therapy very young, and he has spoken many times about how hard it is to build a company, and how it is not at all as glamorous as it is often made out to be.

What is Matías’s support system for those difficult moments? What has he learned about how to face those moments that could be useful for other founders?

[12:52]- Food Industry

The food industry has a bad reputation, full of scandals and even conspiracy theories. Just Google Monsanto or watch documentaries such as Cowspiracy.

Is the food industry as evil as it seems, or is there something more that people outside it do not understand, according to Matías?

It is such an opaque industry that, as a consumer, it is hard to tell which food is good and which is bad, which makes it complicated to reward or punish a company.

Why is it so hard to know what we are eating? What is the technological limitation that the food industry has not been able to solve, and that NotCo has?

One of Matías’s guiding questions has been “can we keep eating what we like, but in a sustainable way?”.

Given that food and mass-market consumer companies are multimillion-dollar companies and have great engineers and scientists on their teams, why have they not been able to solve this challenge?

[19:52]- Technology and Vision

Matías has said: “It is like digitizing the world of food, creating dimensions of data to understand what we eat, what a piece of meat is, and why we like one piece versus another.”

How did they arrive at the idea of digitizing the world of food?

For most people, NotCo is a food brand, not a technology company.

Why did they start as a food business, if from the beginning their vision was to create a platform for the food industry?

Matías is skeptical of the idea that the food industry will radically change its production methods and adopt technology like NotCo’s only out of good intentions.

How does NotCo’s technology change the food industry’s profit and loss?
Although it is still early in NotCo’s B2B platform business, what would the company have to be doing over the next 3 years for Matías to turn down any sale opportunity and go for a public listing (IPO)?

NotCo’s evolution from being a food company to one that builds technology for large food manufacturers is quite drastic.

What has that process been like for Matías and the company?

[51:52]- How to Build a Brand

What have been Matías’s biggest lessons on how to do marketing and build a brand that stands out amid so much noise?

Karim, Matias’s partner, mentioned that one of Matías’s superpowers is his good taste for recognizing when a brand is good and when it is not.

Could Matías take us into NotCo’s meeting room when they do a launch and share how he arrives at such creative ideas? Does he have a formula or framework?