This is the transcript of a talk by Mark Kulsdom, founder of Dutch Weed Burger, at the third Brand The Change Live event in Amsterdam. Mark shares his journey from animal rights activist to food entrepreneur, inspiring the people he was once fighting to join the vegan movement.
Watch the full event here ⬇
The Dutch Weed Burger has been around for about seven years now. We are Amsterdam based and for those who don’t know about the Dutch Weed Burger, no, we are not using marijuana in our food. We are using seaweed but every time I say Dutch Weed Burger it raises an eyebrow and without knowing it, people are actually interested in vegan food, which is quite something.
A caged mink
This is a mink. This is where my engagement into the world around me started. I saw this picture around 20 years ago when a friend showed it to me. I was studying history and I got pretty upset with all the multinationals ruining, destroying and polluting et cetera and a friend of mine says “Hey Mark, you are so upset with all the injustice in the world, what about the animals?” and I said “What about the animals?” He said there are millions of them and 3000 of them dying every second and hardly anybody was standing up for them. That kind of made sense because I knew what injustice was and now somebody opened a door in my brain, opening up a whole new level. That quite changed my life because I wanted to do something and one of my best friends also wanted to do something.
We had a very small crew doing a lot of different things in Amsterdam. First we went to do demonstrations at McDonalds and later we had one of the famous international animal rights gatherings at the Overtoom when it had just started and it was a really cool weekend. I was a marketer for the animals. I had an idea and I wanted other people to buy the idea or to at least think about it. But the problem is that when you are a marketer for animals, the only thing you get is smacked in the face by the police and often you don’t get paid. In the late nineties, if you wanted to do something, you could either join Greenpeace and handout leaflets or go on rubber boats. There were no social companies or social enterprises and there was nothing like sustainability. There was no internet.
“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”
I still believe what Noam Chomsky said is true that most people that live around us have no idea what’s going on and they don’t have an idea that they don’t have an idea. Which is tough because there are changes to be made. We all see that ecosystems are de-stabilizing and the next phase will be their collapse and we will be in big trouble. The thing that I learnt twenty years ago, thank god that now it’s on the front of newspapers like The Guardian, is that the fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions live and die on a production line. When I first heard about it I was angry and pissed off. At that same demo there was this guy from the fur shop and he came out and we stood in-front of him. We didn’t touch him because we had principles of veganism. So Dutch Weed Burger is a vegan company because obviously when you feel this was about animals, the first thing you do is you stop eating them. When you are out in the streets standing up for them, the first thing you do is you go to another person that sells its products. What I realized after doing this for about five to six years and having spent six months in prison in Copenhagen for freeing mink from mink farms in three different places in Denmark, is that I never want to go to prison again. Unfortunately, during the last attempt we got arrested by the Danish Special Police in the middle of the night and we were sentenced to six months, which was really boring.
So when I got out, I started working for the film industry behind the scenes driving around people, actresses, helping around on crew and when YouTube came alive around 2005 there was a new job: Camera Journalist. I thought “You know what? I’m going to learn how to do this myself.” Which I did and started working for a new printer and a couple of other organizations. So I learnt how to make videos by myself as a one-man crew and traveled a little bit around the world. It was the best job I’ve ever had because now I’m an entrepreneur and it’s really tough and I’m stressed out, I have no money in the bank but I’m making an impact so that’s good. I’m making impact with this ‘broodje’ (sandwich) (I think product is such a stupid name.)
So I have a broodje and it’s really nice. We combined three Dutch innovations in food technology on food production when we went to the market in 2012. We had microalgae in the bun, which is a powder that people in sports use in their boxes to put in shakes (Chlorella spirulina). The cool thing about the micro-algae is that we eat fish because we need fatty acids from the fish but the fish gets the fatty acids from the micro-algae. So now we have bread that has the micro-algae directly in it so we can let the fish swim free because they are part of an intricate ecosystem in the water. The burger patty is made from soy protein. In 2011 there was a company called Oh Yeah, which made a product called Bator. Many people must know it from Vegetarian Butcher where you can tell a meat eater he’s eating chicken and he will believe it and after that you can tell him he is eating bean protein. We thought that was good because it’s a transition era and you want transition food so you want people to have the same experiences they have had for hundreds of years but you have changed a few of the ingredients so that the food is more sustainable than what we are doing now. When we started we heard about seaweed from a professor from the University Wageningen and he brought out these big seaweed leaves and he said “this is the protein source of the future” which I thought was really cool.
Harvested seaweed
What people think about vegetarian food is that they are always worried about how they will get their calcium, iron and protein. Now we had seaweed, which was legit and we had a professor calling it the protein of the future. So we decided to build a concept so full of nutrients that whenever someone comes up to us and asks “how do I get my protein?” We can tell them there are more proteins than in chicken. “How do I get my fatty acids?” It’s in the bun. We wanted to be ahead of the people who were looking for little reasons not to change (from meat to a more sustainable alternative.) and when I took off my balaclava it was way more fun too. All of a sudden we had a product we gave to people. They loved it, they smiled and we smiled back at them. It was way better than when I was in front of that guy at the fur shop and the interaction is much better with the weed burger. We are looking at eating meat and eating animals, not so much from an ethical but a planetary perspective. My brother who has known for twenty years why he should become a vegetarian stopped eating meat last year because he has two children and knows what he is contributing to. I use the term ‘hockey stick’ because it’s not about the revenue we’re making but the change that’s coming in the whole transition towards eating plant-based foods.
This is important because destroying the planet affects us all and destroying animals concerns animals but if you have a heart and you open it and you look at a video of a pig dying in boiling bath of water that hurts. But destroying the planet is a much bigger thing and it’s good that people can relate to that and I’m happy that it’s in public debate more. We were on a quest in New York City looking for the best vegan recipe to turn meat eaters into plant eaters using seaweed and micro-algae as special ingredients. As a video maker my thoughts of success were that if a crowd of people saw my video I would consider Dutch Weed Burger a success. When we got back from New York there were all these people asking where they could get the Dutch Weed Burger and I was behind my computer editing the film and Lisette Kreischer (Cofounder) had a background in vegan food and she had been writing vegan cookbooks for a long time, about 10 out in the market (try them out they’re very good.)
The inception of Dutch Weed Burger on a cargo bike
I like to work with the food so we found some old wood on the streets and I got a cargo bike from a friend of mine and we turned it into a little mobile kitchen, which is how Dutch Weed Burger started. We had no money, no business plan and no marketing strategy. We just thought people should eat less animals and more plants and we had a really cool product that worked. A little blink down the rabbit hole, we did a pitch in Amsterdam North and we won about 20,000 euros and we bought a sea container because we wanted a unit that was as big as Pepsi or Redbull or any other big brand to put out at events. It’s 4000 kilos of steel so I would say it’s pretty solid and it really works at festivals, which is where we started the business and chefs at the events would come to us. I remember this one guy from Café Noorderlicht and he told me he was having this problem where he had a meat burger and a vegetarian burger and he just wanted to have one burger that everyone could eat and like. To me that was a really nice idea because it gave a new dimension to the mission we were already on so we started shipping it to restaurants pretty organically and everything grew pretty organically.
“I made a switch from fighting to building the new and inspiring all these big brands to change into what we need.”
I was convinced back then that McDonalds should stop and that they were evil empires we should stop but it was an illusion. Those guys have so much money they’re not going to stop. What they’re doing is that they’re checking out all the little start-ups and scale-ups around the world that have products like us, like Veggie World in Paris. We went there for a couple of years and it’s very busy because vegan food is like an amusement park. Big brands are really looking at us for example in Finland McDonalds is trying out vegan burgers in their own restaurants. They already have vegan restaurants in India because most people don’t eat meat there but it’s a really cool thing. I made a switch from fighting to building the new and inspiring all these big brands to change into what we need. I have a restaurant in Amsterdam we opened in 2017. It’s on the Kinkerstaat and the food is very nice.
Lessons Learnt
This morning I was sitting behind my computer and they asked me to tell them about the lessons I’d learnt and my brain was not working, I thought I would tell the story like I have always told it and then say a few things that I’ve experienced running the business for the last seven years.
The biggest lesson learnt is “Don’t meet up with your bookkeeper the day before you go to Carnaval”. This is a very important lesson especially if there will be numbers and you go more into minus than you thought you would. It made me wonder if it was a good thing that I was going to Carnaval for three days or it was a bad thing. We decided it was a good thing because it was a step back before diving back into it.
The Dutch Weed Burger at a festival
Mark Kulsdom shares his advice for aspiring changemakers
The four things I have had some experience with that I’ll leave you to are:
Let people go at the right time.
Co-founder conflicts are very popular for start-ups. They told me that there’s an 80% possibility if you start with a good friend you’ll hate them in a few years.
Doing things without experience might work magically: I’ve done a few.
Doing things without experience might not work so magically: I’ve done a few of those too.
I’m in the vegan food business and a lot of shit is going on and one of the ways you know you’re in the right field or market is when all the money flows straight into it. Last week I heard that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and other guys invested 80 million in start-ups because they have vegan food and they are going to promote it largely. Not all of these companies are former activists wearing balaclavas going to prison with a wooden bike who thought people should eat more vegan food. They are former Galaxy or Pepsi CEOs who know how to make a big business. Although I still don’t have that much respect for all business, I do have respect for people who are running a business because it’s a hell of a job and it takes a lot of focus.
“For anyone walking around with an idea: if you don’t like the news, go make some of your own.”
If you don’t like the news, go make some of your own.
People always ask me what I studied and I tell them I am a historian. When they ask what I’m doing now I tell them I’m making history. Because that’s actually what I think I am doing. I was in Utrecht there was a new vegan restaurant which is the biggest vegan restaurant in all of Europe and I didn’t know the guy who founded it and he came up to me and said “You inspire me so much with Dutch Weed Burger because you do what you do, I opened a restaurant.” And I thought if the weed burger goes bankrupt in two weeks, we have started something and inspired people. It’s stupid to say that the success of your business is purely financial or how big it grows. Maybe success is doing one small tiny thing and maybe that’s all that you can do. If you do that the best you can, go out and do it and don’t worry about millions and gazillions and all those things that are in all those books. Just start. They were people who said I was never going to make it because my product was too expensive and people didn’t want vegan food but we’re still here seven years in. We’re doing it and I think we have a big influence everywhere.
AUDIENCE Q: Was the brand name, Dutch Weed Burger, part of a brand strategy to connect the burger to a well known part of dutch culture -softdrugs?
We were going to New York and we knew about the seaweed and I thought it would be a cool idea to buy a hotdog car and push it across the Brooklyn Bridge and then sell weed burgers somewhere in the centre of New York although that never happened. We found these guys who had a food-truck make a vegan special for us with seaweed and that’s the one we gave out. Before we went, we were unsure of what to say. “This is the new vegetarian seaweed burger coming to you from the Netherlands?” No one was going to stop for that.one day I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought “Weed Burger! Of course!” When you go abroad from Amsterdam everyone asks if you smoke weed every day. So we thought it would be cool and Lisette said we were just going to put Dutch in front because there’s a certain type of quality to it. It’s a strong name and a four word name is also strong.