🥗 The App That's Changing How We Eat 🔍📲

🥗 What's REALLY In Your Food? The App Exposing It All 🔍

This week on Thirsty Thursdays, I sit down with Galen Karlan-Mason, founder & CEO of GreenChoice — a public benefit food health intelligence company that has analyzed over 1 million foods across the US using science, data, and AI! 🌎💡

Watch on YouTube!

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• 🍎 GreenChoice scores every food across 4 dimensions: Nutritional Quality, Processing Level, Ingredient Safety & Climate Footprint
• 📱 The app is 100% FREE — download "Green Choice Food Scanner" in your app store right now
• 🛒 Over 70% of grocery store foods are ultra-processed or contain a harmful ingredient — you deserve to know what you're eating!
• 💊 60% of US adults have a diet-related disease — most of which are preventable through food choices
• 🏛️ 22 states have now restricted SNAP benefits from being used to purchase soda and candy — a seismic shift for the F&B industry
• 💰 For every $1 spent on healthy food benefits, studies show $3 in healthcare savings
• 🌿 About ⅓ of global greenhouse gas emissions are tied to our food system — every purchase is a vote
• 🧪 GreenChoice's science advisory board ensures zero brand influence on scores — brands cannot pay to change their ratings
• 🔄 The platform is helping retailers, healthcare systems, and consumers align around food as medicine
• 📊 GreenChoice tracks over 150 million data points and 1,000+ dietary, health & sustainability attributes

💬 Galen's message: "Times of not knowing what's in our food are behind us. People want to know what they're buying is safe for themselves and their families."

👇 Drop a comment: What app do YOU use to check what's in your food?

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Host Jessie Ott's Profile on LinkedIn

Transcript

Galen Karlan-Mason (00:00)
You can build an app, I can build an app that looks like GreenChoice in probably a couple days with Claude Code.

Jessie Ott (00:05)
I've been hearing

that lately. Yeah.

Galen Karlan-Mason (00:08)
but I'd say it's mostly BS, right? So the problem is you end up with a black box system that has really very little accountability to an evidence-based approach to evaluating foods. You don't really know how it's evaluating it. It hallucinates, gets information wrong all the time.

Jessie Ott (00:10)
Yeah, you can swear on here.

Galen Karlan-Mason (00:25)
We founded the business as a public benefit company,

We have a conflict of interest policy that prevents any brands from paying to change their scores or influence their scores.

if you want access to the app, it's as simple as just going to your app store, downloading GreenChoice Food Scanner,

It's probably one of the only food scanners out there that's completely free and evidence-based.

Jessie Ott (01:14)
There we go. Hello everybody. Welcome to Thursday Thursdays. My name is Jessie Ott and this week I have an exciting guest, Galen Karlan-Mason, founder and CEO of GreenChoice. Welcome, Galen.

Galen Karlan-Mason (01:26)
Thank you for having me, Jessie

Jessie Ott (01:28)
Yeah, I'm so excited. So Galen isn't is necessarily in the in the beverage business, which is a lot of my concentration, but I'm all in on food and bev beverage innovation and so I have had some people from the food industry, you know, on the podcast just because you guys are doing some really incredible things and I think it's important for people to to know about it. So where are you calling from, Galen?

Galen Karlan-Mason (01:48)
I'm in San Diego, downtown San Diego.

Jessie Ott (01:50)
Nice.

I've never been to San Diego.

Galen Karlan-Mason (01:52)
It's a nice place to visit, I would highly encourage it. I'm originally from the East Coast. I grew up in Vermont, but San Diego called me out a couple years ago and yeah, it's a beautiful place.

Jessie Ott (02:04)
I've heard. I've I've heard it's amazing. Yeah, I I am calling from the Lake Mary House, which is just outside of Orlando, Florida.

Galen Karlan-Mason (02:06)
Yeah, what about you? Where are you out of?

Cool, opposite sides of the country.

Jessie Ott (02:15)
completely opposite sides of the country. Yeah, for sure. ⁓ but it's also really nice here.

Galen Karlan-Mason (02:21)
It's awesome.

Jessie Ott (02:22)
Yeah. So you're from Vermont, where did you start after high school?

Galen Karlan-Mason (02:26)
I went to Brandeis University in basically the suburbs of Boston and played soccer there. That's really what brought me. I'd been a competitive athlete most of my life and soccer was really my sport. ⁓ Well, different positions through time. I'd say center mid, like center holding mid, the number eight.

Jessie Ott (02:33)
Okay.

Position.

huh.

Galen Karlan-Mason (02:52)
But I played center back and on the wing and always kind of enjoyed being a player that could play different positions and fill different roles. So I went to Brandeis, was recruited to play soccer there. Saw it as an opportunity to get a great education and use sport to do that. Played soccer, ended up walking onto the track team. I'd run track as a senior in high school and so ran track as well as a two sport.

Jessie Ott (02:58)
Positions.

Galen Karlan-Mason (03:15)
varsity athlete my freshman year and then decided that was a little bit too much and stuck with soccer. Yeah, exactly stuck with soccer. But but not not track. Did four years there. I went and studied abroad in Peru and lived in Lima for about a year where I also played soccer for a university there and played a little bit of semi pro and then returned.

Jessie Ott (03:19)
A lot.

cool.

Nice.

Galen Karlan-Mason (03:39)
finished up my degree and went and got my MBA. And part of the reason that I went to get my MBA is while I was in Peru, I started a nonprofit called Golasos that was focused on youth empowerment through soccer. So essentially taking some of the issues and topics that weren't being addressed in the local school system and creating a curriculum that used like the format of a soccer practice.

Jessie Ott (03:54)
Nice.

Galen Karlan-Mason (04:05)
to engage youth in thinking and challenges around healthy living and goal setting and gender equality and just topics that my friends and peers in Peru felt like were important and I had observed like challenges around. And so I started that program with a Peruvian teammate of mine, went back to the States to finish up school.

It quickly failed. It was very humbling. We never really had a sustainable business model. And that was really hard that I wasn't there for sure.

Jessie Ott (04:36)
Well, it's hard that you're not there too.

Galen Karlan-Mason (04:40)
We probably could have made it work longer had I stuck around. My goal was to come home, I'd be able to fundraise, he would run the local operations. It didn't really pan out that way. But when you don't have a business model that is inherently self-sustaining, I think you're just naturally in a place where you're on this fundraising treadmill that is a difficult one to be on. So I was pretty interested in how you could use business for good.

and how you could use capitalism to affect positive changes in the world. you know, I grew up son of two hippies in Vermont, both one, my dad was an educator professor of environmental studies and my mom was a therapist. And so neither of them were from corporate America and neither of them were, you know, really in on capitalism. I think, you know, they had really prioritized values.

and like impact in their life and had made intentional decisions, know, like when, when fork in the road could make more money doing X, but could stick with Y and have greater impact, they had chosen Y. And so that was pretty core to me and my ethos. But I just having that experience and also finding business really fascinating felt like, know, I think business can actually be an incredible agent for change. And we live in a capitalist world. So can I like work with work?

Can I play this game in a way that helps me also live the life that I want to live, afford my family to do so, and then also affect positive change in the world? So that was a pretty formative experience that ultimately led me back to school where I got my MBA, also at Brandeis at the international business school there. And that is where I started GreenChoice. And that was a handful of years ago.

Jessie Ott (06:15)
Wow. So that is a long

a minute ago. I see that you have a lot of ⁓ like I I looked on LinkedIn and there's a you're involved in a lot of things that you're still doing presently today.

Galen Karlan-Mason (06:25)
Yeah, I stay pretty busy. GreenChoice is my core focus. for listeners who aren't familiar with what GreenChoice is or does, it's a public benefit food health intelligence company. What that means is we study food's health impacts and we use the data and that research and insights that we capture about those foods health impacts to support retail healthcare and technology partners.

and their customers in finding foods that meet their health needs. And we power different experiences, but ultimately it's all about creating personalized nutritional guidance, supporting retailers and healthcare partners with regulatory compliance because the regulatory landscape as it relates to food and health policy is changing quick, and supporting healthy food dollars and benefits going to folks in need and going to the foods that help.

them address those needs. So that's our work. And we've analyzed over a million foods and counting. I say foods, but for listeners who are thinking, well, does this include beverages, this includes beverages as well, not alcoholic. But when I say foods, I'm referring to food and beverage, both branded and unbranded, over a million skews and counting that we've analyzed across the US. It is a lot. It's been ⁓ we've been I started the business about seven years ago.

Jessie Ott (07:35)
It's a lot.

And so how long has that been?

Seven years ago. Okay. And so what was your aha moment, you know, getting your MBA that this is the direction that you wanted to go in?

Galen Karlan-Mason (07:51)
So.

There was a class that prompted me to come up with a business idea, which ultimately birthed GreenChoice. But there was things also going on in my life at that time that made this really natural, made it far more authentic than just an idea that I come up with some classmates. It's actually an interesting, ⁓ I'm biased. I find it a little bit of an interesting moment because it wasn't straightforward.

Jessie Ott (08:09)
Right.

Galen Karlan-Mason (08:17)
You know, was in this class, it was a business communications class and they said, we're going to do shark tank style pitches and you should come up with a business idea, you know, build out the model with your group and you've been assigned this group. Figure out an idea, build out the model, present it and it's a competition. You know, the best idea is going to win. And I think I ended up back home in Vermont for, you know, weekend, early weekend in this process. And I'm talking to my dad. As I mentioned, my dad was at

He's an environmentalist. He was environmental studies professor teaching people how to be middle school, high school science teachers, but really passionate about our choices adding up when it comes to the environment and sustainability and doing something good in the world. And you vote with your dollars, you shut the lights off when you leave the room, you recycle. You know, he's an early adopter of everything EV or electric that you could adopt. I mean, he's literally got an electric chainsaw. So, you know, like

If he can move off fossil fuels, he's done it. you know, sitting in the living room with him and brainstorming ideas for this and I was just kind of like, it would be so cool if I could just point my phone at anything in this room and immediately understand its impact. And I was ⁓ studying sustainability within my MBA at that time. And so there's this term life cycle assessment. And for those who don't know that

what an LCA is, it's essentially looking at the, from cradle, from the birth of a product's raw inputs, the glass for the bottle, the raw ingredients to create the drink inside, to the end of life, how that bottle gets recycled, what happens to the contents if it's not all consumed. Like that full life cycle and every step in between along the supply chain and...

the ⁓ transportation costs, you can quantify that.

Jessie Ott (10:01)
That is so interesting to me because it's something I

think about every day. Because you have a soda or you have a water, you you throw in your bottle away. And for me, it's like my mom my mom was r owned a redemption center where she would go and pick up cans because in Iowa you got five cents. So to for college kids, that's beer money, right? And and so I'm yeah, as I've lived outside of Iowa and other places, they don't do that. And I'm like, this is so

Galen Karlan-Mason (10:06)
Mmm.

cool.

Mm.

Jessie Ott (10:27)
Like I would I would so much love to understand the sustainability because they're saying they don't recycle. And so what are we doing it for? And why are people why are people not believing it? And you know, it's just it's it's it's a huge issue for me personally that I I wanna better understand because I I don't understand it. I don't know the cycle. So that would be that would have been so interesting.

Galen Karlan-Mason (10:48)
Most of

us don't, most of us don't. And even those folks that are extremely informed, it's confusing and complicated and you're dealing with a lot of data. And yet at the same time, it's an opportunity when we go into the grocery store, when we consume in general, we have choice. We are lucky. If you live in America, you have quite a bit of choice.

Depending on your socioeconomic status, the money you got in your wallet, that choice varies. But even folks that are low income have more choice than many populations do in other parts of the world. And so this is a blessing, also a curse. It gives us a lot of power to make good choices or better choices for our health or for our family. Choice can be a beautiful thing. It can also be totally overwhelming. So I say that to say, imagine if you could...

We live in a world where 70 % or so of global deforestation is tied to our food system and agriculture. About a third of global greenhouse gas emissions is tied to our food system. So this is like a sector that has outsized impact on kind of the quality of life that we will live a decade, two decades, a hundred years from now.

the viability of this planet for our kids and their kids. And we get to do something about it in the food industry. And consumers can do something about it every time they go to the grocery store, every time they decide what they're going to put on their plate, which is three times a day. it is, as far as impact areas, one of those areas that we can have really outsized impact when it comes to voting with our dollars for like, forget this lofty idea of greenhouse gas emissions. It's about like quality of life.

and sustainability of our ability to live and exist in harmony and happiness and having our needs met. It's like the difference between do you have water that you can drink? Do you have clean air you can breathe? Can you go outside and have a temperate climate that you can exist in? Or are you living in a constant state of fear of extreme wildfire or disasters or hurricanes, cetera? That's what we're talking about when we talk about climate change or sustainability.

I'm in that living room with my dad. I'm like, it'd be so cool if I could just point my phone at anything and understand this. Like give me a simple score, help me understand, like give me some insights. If I wanna learn more, allow me to understand more about where this product came from, what's its impact, its carbon footprint, its impact on the future viability of this planet, et cetera.

That was kind of the seed for GreenChoice. fast forward, yeah, that was a different, yeah, then okay, one thing to come up with the idea, but then how do you execute this, right? It's a whole other beast.

Jessie Ott (13:16)
Cool idea. That's overwhelming to think about.

How do you execute it? But I would love to go

⁓ my Samsung T V, like, okay, what's this carbon ⁓ footprint? You know, lit my Lenovo screen. That would be so cool.

Galen Karlan-Mason (13:34)
I think it's like

the power of being aware of that and making that information accessible is tremendous because we are so inundated with information at all times. we've never been, when it comes to our food system, it's unique in that we used to be very connected to where our food came from. We used to grow it, we used to hunt it, and we've slowly drifted away from the source, the origin.

Jessie Ott (13:45)
Yeah.

Yes.

Galen Karlan-Mason (13:57)
And there are folks in communities and communities that are investing in local agriculture and farming and kind of bringing that connection back. But for many Americans and many folks around the world, like we're disconnected from the farms and where our food comes from. We don't see it really until it shows up in packages in our grocery store. And for many of us, we're not even preparing it that often. You know, we're eating quick convenience foods or we're getting it out. And so

To be disconnected from it, I think just because there's so much information that we're navigating every day in our lives and social media and the news, we forget to care about it. And when we forget to care about something that's so impactful on society and our health, and we can talk about food's impact on our health and really the pain that society is in right now, because we are living through a national health epidemic.

extremely concerning. But we forget about it. And when we forget about it, then we're not thinking intentionally about those choices that we're making. And so to be able to bring that information and make it accessible so it's not exhausting, it doesn't require a PhD trying to navigate through that research, was a really exciting idea. Now, it ultimately turned into really a focus on food because

As I started talking to folks, what I found was people were already really asking these questions in a consistent way when it came to their food. And we're already feeling that level of overwhelm in the grocery store where you have more choice than almost anywhere else. You 30,000 products in the average store. You go into any aisle, you've got hundreds or thousands of choices to choose from. I would imagine most listeners, you're nodding your head. We've all been in an aisle at one time, you know, wanting to like...

Jessie Ott (15:32)
Mm.

Galen Karlan-Mason (15:40)
thinking about, okay, what's actually good for me or what does that claim mean? Or just like, this is overwhelming. And when you get overwhelmed, you kind of often just say, well, well, screw it. Or you make the best choice you can, but was that really the best choice? So that's what shifted us to food. And to just bring this all together, I came back with this idea, super excited, pitched my group, hey, we should do this. Let's focus on food.

Jessie Ott (15:51)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Galen Karlan-Mason (16:07)
We can have a score. It'll tell you that how healthy and sustainable a product is. We can make it really simple. One to 100 will be color coded. Like I think I had some of these ideas. I came back to them. They're like, sounds really hard. I was like, well, we don't have to, we don't, we don't have to design. We don't actually have to make it. We don't have to design it yet. We just need to like figure out what the business model is and make it compelling and present it. They're like, I don't know. It sounds like a lot of work. I think we could just like rock with.

this other, you know, one or two of these other ideas that are a little more straightforward, conventional. And I got out voted and they, you know, I couldn't tell you, I don't remember what we ended up pitching, but I, it didn't, but I was, I was hooked. I was really into that idea and fascinated by like just the complexity of the problem. curious is the data out there? Is there a way that we could bring experts, bring the PhDs, bring the nutrition scientists,

Jessie Ott (16:36)
Mm.

That's funny.

Galen Karlan-Mason (17:00)
to the table and then use modern data science and programming to be able to automate essentially this research that any one of these experts would be doing on a one-to-one basis and do it one to many and make it easy to make these choices when you're in the store or at home thinking about what you might get. And I'd say one other pivotal moment, because you asked me like, what's the pivotal moment? I had this...

I had the makings of this idea and this concept and I went and talked to a professor of mine who was teaching a class in sustainability at the business school. And I shared with him what I was thinking about. And he, in short, was like, I don't think you can do it. Like, I don't think you can get the data. You know, it's a cool idea, but I don't think you get the data. And...

being the young naive.

graduate student that I was, I took that as challenge.

Jessie Ott (17:50)
Yeah. Probably the best thing that ever happened.

Galen Karlan-Mason (17:52)
And...

left that meeting with like a burning conviction to prove him wrong.

I've been on that journey for the last seven years. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (18:01)
Ever since. ⁓

So how did you find the data? What was your next steps after that?

Galen Karlan-Mason (18:06)
This is funny. I mean, you're taking me down memory lane. I haven't really shared these stories in a while.

The next step was a lot of research on my own. And then with a peer of mine in the MBA program, a friend who was interested in working on this with me, who had a background in data science. And we started just looking at what data and information was out there. And thinking from first principles like,

If I wanted to understand the food's health impacts, how could I do that? What exists today? What tools or apps already exist? How are they approaching it? What research is available? What information on these products is available? Okay, so every item's got a nutrition facts panel, it's got an ingredients list. We're already trying to decipher that. There's research out there on what ingredients, like individual ingredients, health impacts. There's research out there on...

you know, what nutrients we should limit, what nutrients we should encourage in our diet, what nutrients we're short on. There's public guidance, you know, coming from the, whether it's the US dietary guidelines or Harvard's Healthy Plate or the World Health Organization on like, on what we should be getting in our diet. Like, can we take this and build rules and algorithms to analyze a product's nutrient profile and ingredient list and claims and decipher them and, you know, make

make a determination of the food's health benefits or risks and distill that into a score. And so you just kind of little by little. actually, we started with eggs. In hindsight, it's so silly. were still really, sustainability was a big piece of our focus at that time. And it's really evolved to health. And I will say most of our work is in food health intelligence and health insights.

Jessie Ott (19:36)
Mm.

Galen Karlan-Mason (19:49)
Guidance around chronic conditions and because that's where the markets taken us We can talk more about that if you want But you sustainability is still a piece of what we do. We still model carbon footprint and water footprint of items we have ⁓ a Climate impact score that that combines the carbon and water footprint profiles of those items in the context of what options are out there and and it's it's an input into our overall score when when we power a Food screen score, which is what we call the score

Jessie Ott (19:53)
Yeah, that makes sense.

Galen Karlan-Mason (20:17)
And right now we assess items for four dimensions. We look at nutritional quality, we look at processing level, we look at ingredient safety, we look at climate footprint. And so it's one of four inputs that go into that overall score. And each one of those areas gets its own score so that you can click into and learn more about it.

Jessie Ott (20:30)
Wow. So

and so the four of them are they like each each has twenty five points and they combine into a hundred?

Galen Karlan-Mason (20:40)
Yeah, that's it.

So for our green score is a composite score. So it's an average of the four. ⁓ yeah. We, partners though can actually, it's fully modular. Those sub scores are standalone scores that you could use if you wanted. So you don't have to use all four. But yeah, when we work with, say a retailer who wants to bring the green score into the store, like they're generally bringing the full score. And then you as a user,

Jessie Ott (20:46)
Average of the five.

Galen Karlan-Mason (21:06)
in an app experience, a digital experience, through a QR code on shelf, can learn what each of those sub-scores are and click in and see why did this item get a low processing score? Why is it so processed? What does it contain? Are there ingredient safety concerns? What's the nutrient quality of this item? So you can click in. If you want more information, it's accessible. if you're fast, if you're moving fast, if you're short on time, you've got a single

score color-coded traffic light style like green, yellow, orange, red that you can use to compare options very, very quickly on the aisle. And that's a piece of what we do. The scoring is a piece of what we do because early on what we found was Maslow's hierarchy of needs really takes effect when you're shopping, when you're making food decisions. So you're shopping with budget, what can you actually afford?

Jessie Ott (21:36)
That's interesting.

Galen Karlan-Mason (21:51)
People have different logics there. Some people stretch more on food than other areas, depending on their needs. within that decision set, like, you you've got taste, like, actually want to consume this. Those are obviously two of the largest considerations. But beyond that, before you can vote with your dollars for food that's good for the planet, most people want to know that it's healthy and good for them. Or they're intentionally making a decision for something that's maybe not.

But generally for most decisions, it's, care more about my personal health than the planet's health. It's okay, we're somewhat selfish by nature, it's okay. And before that, we generally, if we have any ingredients that we're allergic to or sensitive to, like we need to make sure this food's not gonna kill us, right? So like I grew up with multiple food allergies. And so my decision set was I'm in the aisle, I'm trying to decide what's, I want cereal.

Jessie Ott (22:23)
Ha ha

Galen Karlan-Mason (22:41)
or I want granola or something for breakfast. And I'm looking at all these choices and first I gotta make sure it's not gonna kill me. Make sure it doesn't contain any ingredients that are actually gonna like hurt me or make me upset. Then I wanna, once I filter out those conflicts, what within that set is a healthier option that I am gonna like the taste of and can afford. And then within that set, is there an option or an opportunity for me to vote with my dollars and get a product that's also

maybe a lower footprint item that's better for the planet. And so it's kind of in that order, Maslow's Hierarchy. And we built the data around that. So first you need to be able to filter by your dietary needs, your allergy preferences or restrictions and like filter by those preferences. So we power a large library of dietary and health attributes.

Jessie Ott (23:14)
Mm, interesting.

Galen Karlan-Mason (23:30)
Like is this item high protein, low sodium, minimally processed, low FODMAP, diabetes friendly, et cetera, and free of artificial colors, free of artificial preservatives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you can build a profile across 70, now 100 plus different preferences as a filter. And in a digital experience, you could scan foods and see if it matches or conflicts in half a second. And then you can see the score.

Jessie Ott (23:38)
Yeah, that's a lot.

Well.

Galen Karlan-Mason (23:59)
And then within the score, it's primarily driven by health. It's got a sustainability component as well you can click into and we'll show you healthy swaps available to you. If there are higher scoring alternatives where you're shopping and all of those recommended alternatives are always filtered to your preferences, right? Because no sense in showing you a healthier swap if it's going to kill you or it doesn't meet your diet. So that's how that was the logic of the app. That's now expanded to essentially like the logic of our

Jessie Ott (24:19)
Right.

Galen Karlan-Mason (24:25)
food intelligence and our database. so we've now, as I mentioned, analyzed over a million foods across those. We're tracking over 150 million data points, over a thousand different dietary health and sustainability attributes, also scoring those foods, health impacts. And all of that becomes available to our partners who will either license the data, the attributes and scores, or use

or software to integrate it seamlessly into the shopping experience in a retail environment or into their mobile app.

Jessie Ott (24:59)
Okay, so like a Win Dixie, for example, is somebody you'd be would be a retailer that you'd be talking with or Aldi or whomever. And they they subscribe or collect the data and either integrate it into their app or they they encourage their shoppers to use your app or how how how does that work?

Galen Karlan-Mason (25:06)
Yeah.

Whomever.

So we,

so the way the business works is we provide data licenses to partners. Those partners can be retailers who are using it to like enrich their product catalog, enrich their e-commerce listings, add filters on their website or their app, or tags in store to make healthy shopping easy in store. We also provide that data to technology and healthcare partners. They're using it for slightly different reasons. So like on the healthcare side,

Jessie Ott (25:37)
Okay.

Galen Karlan-Mason (25:45)
to guide medically tailored grocery allowances, like healthy food benefits. So we're in day where health care has finally realized that nutrition is the greatest preventative medicine that exists. mean, 60 % of US adults have a diet-related disease. It means it's totally preventable. For most of our chronic conditions in this country, preventable. And can be prevented or cured, reversed,

by shifts in dietary patterns. And so now you're starting to see more and more a model of food prescriptions. So it started with produce RX. Are you familiar with this term? Okay, fascinating stuff. This is some of the most exciting.

Jessie Ott (26:26)
No.

Galen Karlan-Mason (26:30)
I'm reluctant to say innovation because, but it is, it's an innovation in a business model, right? So what is happening is you have food RX, which is food prescriptions. So a health plan will actually give you money or a community health center or maybe a state program through Medicare Advantage, soon through Medicaid and certain examples. And you can get a card like you would get like an EBT, like a Snap card.

You can get a card that you can go use to spend on produce at your local grocery store. Because what they're finding is, depending on where you look, for every dollar you spend in healthy food benefits now, it's like $3 in healthcare savings.

Jessie Ott (27:08)
So is that kind of like a food stamp replacement?

Galen Karlan-Mason (27:11)
No, it would be an addition too. Yeah, the funding source is different, right? So you've got SNAP is about $100 billion a year funded by the government. And there's a lot happening in SNAP. Actually, I'm sure if you got listeners that are in the beverage space, they're thinking about this because you now have 22 states that are restricting the use of SNAP.

Jessie Ott (27:13)
In addition to okay.

Galen Karlan-Mason (27:34)
in certain product categories. Sugar sweetened beverages, soda being the most restricted category of any in the grocery store where you can no longer use snap for the first time ever. Because the government is essentially tired of double paying. They're the single biggest, single largest purchaser of groceries in the US. $100 billion on snap, another

Jessie Ott (27:53)
Really.

Galen Karlan-Mason (27:55)
Over 10 billion. think it's about 10 billion dollars on wick. Don't don't quote me on that the hundred billion dollar numbers sound but wick I think it's around you can look that up and so they're the big the largest single pair of groceries in the US they also, you know are funding Medicare and Medicaid and You they are the single largest like the largest single payer of health care expenses in the country and

The most redeemed purchase in Snap historically has been sugar sweetened beverages, like soda. We've estimated around 20 billion, approximately 20 billion of the 100 billion is spent on soda and candy, which are now essentially like these restricted categories for 22 of our 50.

Jessie Ott (28:27)
Interesting. Okay.

Galen Karlan-Mason (28:45)
So significant.

Jessie Ott (28:45)
I think that's that's a smart

that's yeah, it's smart. I get it. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah.

Galen Karlan-Mason (28:49)
It's going to be interesting. It'll be really

interesting to see how, if and how this has impacts public health. I mean, I think like everybody's hoping that it does help and people don't just switch to buying these products with their dollars rather than their SNAP benefits. We will see. We're going to know pretty soon. mean, many of these waivers have already gone into effect in states.

Jessie Ott (29:04)
Mm-hmm.

Galen Karlan-Mason (29:11)
and retailers are being expected to implement them. And if they're not compliant, meaning if they accept SNAP for these restricted categories, they risk losing SNAP.

Jessie Ott (29:24)
Okay. Oof. Yeah.

Galen Karlan-Mason (29:25)
So the repercussion is significant.

Average grocery stores, Snap represents about 20 % of the average grocery stores sales. And so, ⁓ it's significant. And depending on the category, or depending on the region and the store, some stores it's 40%.

Jessie Ott (29:36)
I never knew that. That's incredible.

Wow.

Fire.

Yeah. So now.

Galen Karlan-Mason (29:45)
The store can't go without 20 or 40 % of its revenue. So the risk to non-compliance

is exceptionally high. It's a two-strike policy. First strike, you get a warning, but second strike, you lose snap eligibility for six months and then you can reapply. so that's enough to kill an independent and certainly really hurt a larger retailer.

Jessie Ott (30:07)
Yeah, that sucks. so how do how do I access all this as a consumer? And is there a cost to the to the app?

Galen Karlan-Mason (30:14)
Right, it's a good question. So the app that we offer is totally free to the public. You can go into your app store, search GreenChoice Food Scanner. It's completely free.

It's probably one of the only food scanners out there that's completely free and evidence-based.

And we're in an interesting time where there's never been greater access to information. It's a blessing, also a curse. We see it in the grocery store when it comes to our decisions. We also see it in

you know, the information that permeates social media and the apps that are accessible to us today.

You can build an app, I can build an app that looks like GreenChoice in probably a couple days with Claude Code.

Jessie Ott (30:48)
I've been hearing

that lately. Yeah.

Galen Karlan-Mason (30:51)
but I'd say it's mostly BS, right? So the problem is you end up with a black box system that has really very little accountability to an evidence-based approach to evaluating foods. You don't really know how it's evaluating it. It hallucinates, gets information wrong all the time.

Jessie Ott (30:54)
Yeah, you can swear on here.

Galen Karlan-Mason (31:08)
And so we're seeing this happen and people are so hungry for information, you they're getting duped more often than I wish. So I would say,

I'm certainly a believer in the work that we do.

We founded the business as a public benefit company,

which means that while we do have a responsibility to grow, to our shareholders to grow the business, we also have within our charter an obligation to fulfill our public benefit, which is to help foster a healthy, just and sustainable world through our daily food choices. And so we are accountable within our charter to that mission.

We have an independent science advisory board.

We have a conflict of interest policy that prevents any brands from paying to change their scores or influence their scores.

And so

if you want access to the app, it's as simple as just going to your app store, downloading GreenChoice Food Scanner,

play around with it. I think you'll have a lot of fun. ⁓ You might learn something new and be able to make some more informed choices and find healthy, good foods for you. And then...

Jessie Ott (31:58)
Yeah.

Mm.

Galen Karlan-Mason (32:07)
You know, if you want to access more information about GreenChoice and how we work with businesses and retailers and starting to work with brands, then I'd say our website's the best place. So greenchoice.co.

Jessie Ott (32:17)
And ⁓ I know you gotta go in three minutes, so there's not much time left and I feel like there's so much more to to talk about. But just as an example, and I keep thinking about an Oreo. I don't know why. I haven't had an Oreo in a few years. I'm gluten free, but their gluten free ones to me taste just as good as the regular ones. What is the process of how you you do you go and look at the nutrition label? Like how do you calculate the transportation and like all those costs? Like that's fascinating to me.

Galen Karlan-Mason (32:43)
Yeah, so when we're looking at a food, we're really looking at those four dimensions I mentioned. So nutrition, processing, ingredient safety, and climate footprint. The question on climate footprint is really modeling what do the, there's tremendous data on life cycle inventory. So the footprints of raw commodities and then the footprints of certain processing methods. And so what we're able to do is,

with modern data science and AI, we're able to model a lot of these research data points and this data into assess and estimate the footprint associated with producing, harvesting, producing and getting that Oreo to you. When it comes to the health, we're looking at the nutrient profile, we're looking at the ingredients in it, we're evaluating it for any toxic ingredients, harmful additives, looking at the evidence, the research out there to understand, we're not fear-mongering.

That's really important to note. I think there's certain people love to feel afraid. And maybe that's a hot take, but it gets something going. Like it is very motivating when we are in a state of fear. And it's a tactic.

Jessie Ott (33:33)
Right.

It's a tactic. It's a well known tactic

that that's used out there. Yeah, for sure. A hundred percent.

Galen Karlan-Mason (33:51)
And

so I think you need to be mindful there are certain risks in our food system that are notable and you know, there are a lot of harmful additives and there are known toxins and carcinogens in our food supply. That's a fact. also, and also, you know, it's important to understand like the dose makes the poison and you know, just because there's

Jessie Ott (34:07)
That's crazy.

Galen Karlan-Mason (34:18)
an additive or an ingredient in that food that's not good for you doesn't mean that like it's an awful product for you or you can't consume it one time. And so understanding that and that's important for how we score a product, you you can make informed choices, but I'd say be mindful of like anybody out there who's just like if your spidey senses go off say, hey, this person is

seems to be flying a red flag and raising concern. Like I think pause and suspend your belief for a moment to understand like what's their source and does it like past your gut check. And you can use an app like GreenChoice to help navigate that because I would say, you my word to your listeners is that we are very much driven by the science and the evidence and we've got a great team of scientists that do that and we care deeply about our users' health.

and guiding them to healthier choices following the evidence.

Jessie Ott (35:12)
So one quick question in closing, and I you gotta go just like do wheat sources from this company matter that would be different from this w this company that sources wheat from somewhere? Like do you get that granular? Or do you just look at it it says bleached wheat or enriched wheat or whatever? Like, is does that source kind of tie into the score?

Galen Karlan-Mason (35:25)
See ya.

That's a great question. At this stage with our general health score, we do different things on a one-to-one basis with partners, but our general green score and what you'll find in the app, the ingredient source does not change the score. It's the nature of the ingredient itself and what information we have publicly available. I think we're doing some exciting work on that front, looking at heavy metals and microplastics.

Jessie Ott (35:56)
Yeah. Yes.

Microplastics is huge. We have a plastics food in our brains.

Galen Karlan-Mason (36:00)
So yeah, this.

So, you know, I think great question, an area of importance. The data is incomplete. And so for us, it's about we're only gonna release something when we can stand by the data.

Jessie Ott (36:13)
I think it's another Yeah,

that's just a way you can grow and get get I mean that's just like a roadmap thing. But I think that people are gonna be more and more interested in things like that and want mu more and more transparency. I don't see it going the other direction.

Galen Karlan-Mason (36:21)
Yeah.

people.

No, no, it's,

Times of like not knowing or not asking about what's in our food are behind us. You know, it's the question of is the information good? Is the guidance good? That's the bigger, I think, concern these days. But, you know, people want to know and they want to know what they're buying is safe for themselves and for their families. They're expecting brands to take their health seriously. They're expecting new options to be launching as better for you options.

Jessie Ott (36:36)
Yes.

Galen Karlan-Mason (36:56)
I don't see that many products growing in the market today that are worse for you options than conventional players. It's not where the innovation is happening.

Jessie Ott (37:04)
Yeah, I mean I w

as a supplier I would wanna be transparent with you on that, you know, because there's so many companies that are so proud of that because that's that's the basis for, you know, their company and their

Galen Karlan-Mason (37:16)
Yeah. And at the same

time, be honest and make sure your data is good. Because if it's not, or if you're being dishonest, you will get held accountable. You will get called out.

Jessie Ott (37:19)
Yeah.

Right. Have you ever had

anybody improve their ingredients based on the ⁓ the score?

Galen Karlan-Mason (37:32)
I think we're because we've not historically worked directly with brands to support them in that journey. We don't have explicit. I don't have explicit examples. I could share you today, but I would say we've had lots of conversations with brands that are actively engaging with information like that, which we provide and thinking about how do we do better and how do we make sure that we are a better option within our competitive set. And we're excited to see that. Yeah, that's what we want.

Jessie Ott (37:41)
Yeah.

competitive set. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah. I love that.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I don't want to keep you. I mean, we could talk a lot more, but maybe you could come on as new features get launched and we have something you know else we we want to talk about but this I'm fascinated with what you're doing. I love what you're doing. Keep it up. ⁓ stay in touch and ⁓ you know good luck to you and your team. I I absolutely love it. Good job.

Galen Karlan-Mason (38:21)
Thank you, Jessie. I'd

be happy to come back and I appreciate you having this conversation with me.

Jessie Ott (38:25)
Absolutely. All right. I'll let you get back to it. Okay. Bye.

Galen Karlan-Mason (38:27)
Hi, it's a pleasure.

See ya.