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Dominique: Hello and welcome to Green Champions.

Christy: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

Dominique: This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Dominique.

Christy: And I'm Christy.

Dominique: Today, Christy and I are pretty excited to be speaking with Andrew Shakman, the CEO of Leanpath, which is on a mission to make food waste prevention every day practice. So today we're talking about sustainability from a food waste prevention lens.

Thanks for joining us today, Andrew.

Andrew: Happy to be here.

Christy: So Andrew, we are gonna kick it off with an important question. but I think that you are a first Green Champion's guest with their own IMDb page. So, were you a child actor, Andrew?

  Why Storytelling Is the Most Powerful Tool for Change

Andrew: Oh, gosh, that's so long ago. I don't know if I can remember. Yeah. Little bit of acting when I was very little. Yes, and [00:01:00] certainly I feel like storytelling has been part of my journey all the way through.

Christy: Yeah, I know it was storytelling, but I had to just poke you a little bit with the child acting, that's just fun and super unique. But what was it that drew you to that field, if you will? Like, what did you like about storytelling? And at one point you thought you were gonna be a film producer in Hollywood.

Andrew: Yeah. You know, I think stories, first of all, I have always been someone who can be moved pretty dramatically by a great story. And so from that I've come to believe that stories are one of the best ways to drive change. And so I think if you can master storytelling, you can enact a lot of progress in the world.

And so the question of course is how do you do that and in a way that is authentic and emotionally compelling. And so I was interested in that from the onset in how do you actually create stories that drive change. I didn't know exactly where that would lead me, but that was I believe the substance of my essay applying to film school was something along those lines.

Dominique: Yeah. And it sounds [00:02:00] like impact has kind of always been something that's been important to you. Do you maybe know where that came from for you or what was the spark that you realized that you could do something that had an impact?

Andrew: So, the word impact, I would say is probably a newer word for me, you know, not new in terms of a decade, but if you go back to the very early formative years, right? I think I was very focused on finding meaning And I think that leads pretty quickly to the concept of impact that you wanna do work or I wanted to do work that had meaning and made a difference.

And I remember being very frustrated when I was, you know, a teenager that I wanted to be out doing real things, and I felt like I wasn't doing real things yet. And so I was in a rush to get to that place and it wasn't something that was necessarily about the environment or anything related to do with, you know, social equity. Or I didn't have those kinds of points of awareness at that [00:03:00] point, but I was really drawn to doing something that mattered. And I think I had good role models. My father's a preventive medicine specialist and had dedicated his life to helping people live healthier lives. And so I'd seen that as a role model and I was eager to find my own path and having that meaning.

Dominique: That's amazing. I can relate to having, I also have parents that have like mission driven work. And when you see it that way, you're just like, well, this is great. Why would I do it any other way?

The "Prevention" seed: Growing up in a mission-driven home

Andrew: Yeah. Well, it takes a little while to get there though, right? There's that point where you're a teenager and the first thing you do is reject everything that your parents are doing and going, "They couldn't possibly know what they're doing. They've got to be wrong." And then there's some point where you realize, oh, maybe they actually had a little bit of it right?

And then you realize they are me and I am them, right, in so many ways. So, maybe not a hundred percent, right, but we know that are massively influential on who we are. And so yeah, I saw my dad really pioneer things. He, in the 1970s wrote books, one was called, 'Poison-Proof Your Body: Food, Pollution, and Your Health.'

And at the time the idea of those things coming together, [00:04:00] food pollution and your health in the 1970s was actually a very innovative thought and the idea that a physician would care about food and diet, nutrition. To this day we're talking about how medical education doesn't include those elements that to the degree that it should.

So I watched my dad innovate in those areas and connect dots and work in a prevention space. I always had a lot of pride, or was very proud of him in the work that he did, in the way he blazed new trails. And I also saw that blazing new trails was hard and that it's not an easy road. But that was all somewhere that was all in the soup of my upbringing and somewhere in my consciousness.

Dominique: Yeah, it's not lost on me that you had an influence that was focused on prevention and was kind of entrepreneurial. So those things seem to be through lines into who you are too.

Andrew: It took me a decade into Leanpath to realize that, oh, prevention. Prevention, interesting. Prevention of food waste, preventive medicine, they're related. 

From Film School to the Early Internet

Christy: Well, [00:05:00] Andrew, how did you pivot to technology? Because even prior to Leanpath, there was a connection to technology through your storytelling and MFA through your degree, how did you get to technology?

Andrew: Yeah, so Christy, I went to film school and I thought that I'd be a motion picture producer or a studio executive, and my goal was to tell stories that had meaning and impact to use the more modern way of framing that. And what I realized, I was doing this in the mid nineties and I realized that this internet thing might be important and that storytelling might be moving that direction. And so I took a pretty quick turn away from working in Hollywood where I was just at the very beginning of a journey to instead look at how stories could be told on the internet. And it was engrossing, fascinating. Initially, these were in many cases brand stories because that's where we had the ability to have a business and be able to fund what we were doing, but also experimenting.

We built something called Story Web that [00:06:00] was sort of the first online entertainment guide. It was sort of the Siskel and Ebert of online original entertainment content in 1995 or 96. And so very much in an experimental mode of trying to understand how story was moving there. Ended up being the case that we built a business that became a first generation digital marketing company and we happened to end up telling stories for a lot of food brands. And that was sort of the beginning of that technology and food journey. But it was B2C in the communication, B2B in terms of who our clients were.

But we were ultimately crafting stories and messages for consumers and for brands like Cap'n Crunch and Quaker Oatmeal and Molson Breweries and various Nestle products. And it was a very interesting challenge to figure out how to bring those stories into that internet space. You know, questions that maybe hadn't been considered before.

Like if you put Cap'n Crunch in a video game, how does he behave? What happens when someone punches him? Is he gracious about it? Does he, you know, does he lose his temper? So those kinds of [00:07:00] questions we had to figure out. And so I had this background in tech and food, and that was the precursor to the work in Leanpath. And of course I also created a bit of karmic debt by selling pre-sweetened cereal to children, which I have been working through over time.

How Food Brands Changed Everything 

Dominique: Well, I think it's notable too that you just told some stories about like food brands, and that's not where everyone would first go with some of this work that you were doing. How did you connect to the food brands because this feels like a big turning point in your story of going down the food path?

Andrew: So there's always some serendipity and non-linearity in the journey. And this was serendipitous and non-linear for me. It happened that in this digital marketing business that I was involved in at the very dawn of the internet with one of my good friends from high school. We happened to find ourselves working with food brands. It's one of those things where you get a phone call, it's the very beginning, imagine late 94', early 95', 1995, right? And we were one of the [00:08:00] first digital marketing companies in the US or Canada. And we would get calls from these giant brands that would call up and say, "Hey, we think we might need this internet page, and we hear you might be able to build that."

And so we were just answering the phone and as it turned out, some of our early assignments had to do with food and beverage. And once you start down a path you end up building expertise that then ultimately brings you more work often in that vertical. And so food was one of our areas of focus, and then we also did some work in financial services and had some depth there as well.

And so it was a bit of a lucky turn. But I have always found food to be incredibly engaging. I mean, I love to eat, I think food's fascinating. And as I've come to learn over time, it's, you know, of course also one of the most important issues when we think about the environment and opportunity for change. And that came to me later, but certainly food, it just seemed like a fun place to work.

And also when I go back long ago when I was a [00:09:00] kid and was a child actor and my brother was a child actor, yeah, I remember there were commercials. My brother was a child pitchman for Hillshire Farm hotdog. And you know, like, I remember being around like all of this, you know, sort of the storytelling around food from an early age. And again, I shudder at some of the things that were being sold. But all of that was felt very familiar to me and helping those brands come to life in a new medium.

Dominique: I selfishly love hearing people just gush about food. What is fascinating about food for you? Like you mentioned just that it is a space that kind of like lit you up. Why do you care so much and why do you commit so much of your work to the value of food?

Andrew: So I'll jump ahead a little bit on that because, I mean, I had this sort of, I think, innate interest, but I hadn't developed a consciousness around it until later. And initially on the journey with Leanpath, there was awareness about wasted money and that food in the garbage was money in the garbage, and that that was a problem and that that should be solved. And that was really [00:10:00] responding to a dislike for waste. That was another thing that I got from my dad who is one of the most frugal, efficient, non-wasters you could possibly imagine. And so I grew up with this ethic that you don't waste things you take.

You know, things are precious, these resources are precious, you've gotta handle them that way. And so that was the initial intrigue for me around food waste was just ick, we're throwing away food, that feels bad and it's money in the garbage and wasted money, both are bad things. It was a journey though, where we started to teach people about food waste that led me to understand the environmental and social consequences, and that was when my depth of commitment just really took root. And when I realized that up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions were related in some way to food that we produced and wasted and that you had a massive percentage of the global population that struggled with food insecurity. And that [00:11:00] if we were going to feed 10 billion people by 2050, we were going to have to land convert the rest of the Amazon effectively creating even more destructive feedback loops or we could just not waste a third of the food we produce.

And so as you start to look at those things and you realize the centrality of food to food security, climate, water, resources, land conversion, biodiversity, and the financial impact, I started to realize this is a nexus issue, that when you work on food, you have massive impact. And when you step back, it's not shocking right, because when you think about what is the greatest sort of interface between people and nature, well, agriculture, right? We have cultivated this massive point of connectivity where we have amended our environment. And so it's not shocking when you think about it that this is a key relationship, but it's one that I think we haven't spent a lot of time thinking about until recently. And even in the [00:12:00] climate movement, so much of that is focused on energy and some other factors, non-food factors, non-ag factors, and that's changing. But for me, when I finally put all those pieces together, I said, this is such an important topic and it's worth deep commitment.

Christy: Was that the impetus to starting Leanpath, that realization, Andrew? Parts of it were shortly thereafter to some degree, but what was that transition into that?

Andrew: So the sequence of events, Christy, was that first, the thought was let's try to help people pull dollars out of the garbage by preventing food waste. And when we started on that, it was a real struggle to get people to care. And it was, you know, I joke that the first years of Leanpath's journey were indeed a lean path.

It was hard get people to want to spend money on solutions in this realm.

The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Analogy

Andrew: And so what I had to do was go out and try to build context for what we were doing, and that required me to, I'll use a food analogy, bake a four layer cake. The first [00:13:00] layer at the bottom was to get people to understand why food waste mattered, and why they should care about it.

And then the next layer up was to understand that the best solution to food waste was prevention, source reduction of food waste versus say, composting or donation or incineration or other techniques.

And then if you got there where you believed food waste was a problem and you understood that prevention was the best approach, then we had to get them to understand that measurement was indeed the root to prevention. That by measuring, that's how you came to know if you were improving or not improving and how to fix the problem. And then finally, if you got there, you then could have a conversation around automation of measurement as a mechanism that was necessary to ingrain and hardwire these activities.

So I was busy out there with my four layer cake trying to explain all this and what I found immediately was that the first layer was where the conversation was happening and people just didn't understand food waste. I'd have [00:14:00] discussions where people would say, "Why do I care? Why do I care if it's in the garbage?" "Why should I measure it? It's already wasted. How will that help me?" Or, "I'm composting it so I don't need to worry about this", or whatever the discussion was.

So that's when the depth of commitment developed, Christy, to your question, which was going out and just explaining this. And there's that classic framing that if you really want to understand something, first, someone shows it to you, then you do it yourself. But to really know it, you must teach it. And so when I became a teacher of this, you know, my commitment level just deepened and deepened.

Dominique: I really love how thorough you are as a person in terms of like just from hearing your perspective on the problem has been from like, understanding it from so many sides. And I think that's just like notable and obviously why you've built something so like incredible, so impactful, so well thought through.

And I kind of wanna go back a little bit because I know next time we're gonna get into Leanpath a bit more and all the amazing things that Leanpath has been able to do. But you also [00:15:00] are someone who seems like kind of a natural problem solver, like a natural sponge. When you're put somewhere, you're very curious about maybe like asking why, but also being open to just learning. Is that just like innate to who you are? Did you foster that in any particular way throughout maybe professional experiences or like in school?

Andrew: So, at some point not long ago, I had to reflect on what is my purpose in life, and I boiled it down to that my purpose is to solve consequential puzzles that make a difference for my family and my community, that they have real meaning that those puzzles matter, they're consequential. And so that's where I ended up.

I don't know that early on I knew that that's what I was doing, but I have always enjoyed understanding how things work. And I know when I was a very little kid, I was obsessed with construction equipment and just understanding how things were built. And my mom would take me to construction sites after they closed at night and I would sit on the equipment and, you know, and then I'd learn all the names.

Dominique: You're [00:16:00] outing your mom for trespassing.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, there was a construction guy who saw my interest and said, "Oh, at the end of my shift, you can sit in the vehicle and I'll help you operate. I said, "Oh, that's great. You're driving a backhoe loader." And I don't know, I was like four years old.

And he was like, "I drive a skip loader." And I was like, "No, you drive a backhoe loader." He's like, "No, I drive a skip loader." He takes out whatever his credential was and it's like, 'I am a backhoe loader operator.' So, I, you know, I was maybe annoying in that regard, but I was really interested in just understanding how things were built and I think over time, you find, I think that self-awareness as you get deeper into your journey. And I can now look back and I can see that that meaning around puzzle solving and themes of building, learning, connecting with people. And so those things have been constant themes in my life. I wish I could say I had great clarity at the onset. I did have a wonderful educational journey and was given some amazing opportunities, which I am deeply grateful for, including going to [00:17:00] a boarding school.

It was a real life changer for me and obviously college and grad school, that made a huge difference.

Dominique: What'd you study in college and grad school?

Andrew: I studied theater in undergrad, so.

Dominique: This gets better and better the more you tell your story, Andrew. I love it.

Andrew: I was never an actor though, or not a good one. I was more of a director and I wrote about plays, so think of it kind of like an English degree, reading plays and writing, you know, sort of critical analysis of those plays. I enjoyed that and that was puzzle solving and analysis and taking things apart, but also understanding motivation and character and theme and story structure and those sorts of things. And so that's what I studied undergrad. And then, in grad school, I got a master's in Fine Arts in motion picture producing, which is really the hybridization of the business side of film and the creative side.

So it's not directing, it's not writing, it's the process of conceiving of stories that should be told, finding them, bringing them together with the right artists to tell [00:18:00] those stories in the right markets to find the right financing, to put all of that together in a way that works.

Christy: I think, Andrew, you touched on this, but one of the things that I admire about you is how you mentor others, how you model behavior. Was there a person in your life that was a mentor to you? Who would you say, I really appreciate this person and they influenced my life greatly.

Who would that be?

Andrew: Well first, Christy, it's very kind of you to see that in me and my view has always been that I'm learning from everyone around me. And so I think mentorship is a multi-directional process. But when I look at formative experience, of course our parents are so central in that. But going one rung beyond that, when I went to boarding school, I had one teacher who was a very important figure in my life who had been, think ultimately he taught in high school for probably 65 years of his life and, you know, lived there [00:19:00] and it was his passion. And I learned a lot about ethics and morality and political philosophy and life and a whole bunch of things about myself through my interaction with him.

And so that's one mentor that stands out.

Leadership lessons learned from training "problem horses" 

Andrew: But I was also mentored interestingly by horses, like I did a lot of horse riding and horse training and things like that, and at a point in my life in high school. And I will share, horses are great teachers. They are not necessarily aware that they're doing that, but they require great patience and progress is incremental, but it happens.

And when you bring that patience and spend the time, there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction over a long period of time of seeing that development. So, you know, certainly many people have been important mentors to me and colleagues, peers, teachers, parents, these wonderful majestic animals I've worked with.

Yeah, I mean, you can find growth in almost any endeavor.

Christy: I love that. I didn't know that, I [00:20:00] hadn't thought about that, but there are so many people who do talk about significance of horses and, you know, treatment and PTSD, things like that. And so it's really interesting answer, Andrew, I like that. 

Andrew: Well, I didn't know that that would come up today. It's not something I, I talk about a lot, but it truly is a study in patience. And 'cause if you think you're gonna hop on a horse and force anything to happen, like you're the one who's gonna learn a lesson very quickly, so. 

Dominique: Well said. 

Andrew: These animals are big and they have a lot of opportunity to exercise their choices. And so it's very much about building and understanding a communication. And there was a point in time where I had a job and I was working with five problem horses. And every day my job was to ride these five horses.

You know, they had their own issues. So it was just like moving from one to the next to the next and slowly but surely you, you know, you work on this and you work on that, and things get better.

Christy: That's amazing. Yeah. I'm kind of speechless on that one because I, I could see that the five different situations. Talk about [00:21:00] adaptability, you know? 

Andrew: I think it's just you got to kind of have to roll with it, but it, when I needed a summer job, so let's, you know, it wasn't philosophical at the time. When I look back, I can see it, right? And I knew I was learning from the interaction with these animals, but, you know, there's a definitely a respect, a huge respect that I have for them.

Dominique: Yeah. And I also think that sounds like it could be poetic in terms of like relationship building too, and thinking about that. So, yeah, I think a lot of our conversation today, Andrew, was kind of poetic, kind of philosophical. We got to talk about like our meaning and the way you think about your impact.

We talked about the impact of our parents and the fact that your dad also is in kind of a prevention space, and how that might have influenced you, but you took your own spin on it. And we have had a comedian, an ex comedian on, but we've never had a child actor. So you hold a special place I hope we have no other child actors, honestly. This is perfect. 

Andrew: I'm honored to have represented.

Dominique: I'm excited next time to get more into Leanpath and more of like your entrepreneurial [00:22:00] journey, but thank you so much for sharing who you are and how you got here and how you think about things. It's so interesting and I think it also speaks volumes to how you've built something that is powerful with storytelling, integrates technology and is really solving a problem, and it is very cool for someone whose mission is to solve consequential problems. You're doing a great job with your life's mission. 

Andrew: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the questions and the opportunity to talk about it.

Dominique: How can people connect with you or continue learning more about you?

Andrew: Leanpath.com is the best place. There's a lot about food waste there. And LinkedIn. I'm quickly findable on LinkedIn as Andrew Shackman.

Christy: Excellent. Well, thank you. Well, each guest brings a different approach to sustainability, and we're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others because climate action takes many forms.

Dominique: As always, you can find our episodes to support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review in you're a podcast platform. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn and Instagram @greenchampionspod. [00:23:00] Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll be listening to the next part of Andrew's story in our next episode.