David Yeung, Founder and CEO of Green Monday Group

In this episode of Talks at GS, David Yeung, founder and CEO of Green Monday Group, discusses his entrepreneurial journey leading a plant-based business and how he empowers consumers to make sustainable food choices.

On connecting food with sustainability: “If you want to move the needle, try to shift behavior, the number one thing is how do we shift the culture? In Asia in particular, plant-based diet and vegetarianism are highly associated with religion…but not so much with climate change. So when I went to the drawing board [at the start of the business], it wasn't just going to be a product. It wasn't just going to be a shop, a restaurant, or a movement. We need all of the above because we need to shift the culture. We need to shift the experience. So movement, experience, products, solutions, alternatives – all that became the blueprint of Green Monday. I was very specific that we were not just creating a single-dimension company, but a multifaceted one.”

On challenges and learnings from his entrepreneurial journey: “We are not here just to sell plant-based pork or plant-based protein. We are here to sell change - we are fundamentally changing people's mindsets, behaviors and diets, and people have a super strong and deep emotional relationship with food so that is often where the challenge lies… My learnings would be to ‘fail forward’ and ‘learn from the errors’. In fact, error, in some sense, is very valuable data. Cultivate the mindset that if there's a setback, solve it, learn from it, overcome it, and be super resilient.”
 

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The episode was recorded on April 28, 2021.