☀️Jessica Appelgren: Senior VP, Comms and Marketing at Palmetto
From creativity to curiosity, a career driven by mission and impact
In This Edition
Creativity drives change and innovation
Storytelling and narrative are powerful tools
Empathy and curiosity are key skills for great communicators
About Jessica
Jessica Appelgren is a climate communications and marketing expert, currently serving as Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Palmetto, a technology company offering clean energy and home electrification solutions. With over two decades of experience in sustainability communications, Jessica brings deep expertise in scaling mission-driven companies and transformative technologies.
Previously, Jessica oversaw marketing and communications for the project portfolio at X, The Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X), where she focused on advancing breakthrough climate technologies. Before X, she spent seven years as Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Impossible Foods, helping grow the company from early stage to its current market leader position in plant-based meat and sustainable food technology.
Jessica spends as much time as she can running, hiking, surfing and skiing with her family, and lives in Oakland, CA
What sparked the path into your field?
I grew up in an area of California that was rapidly developing, and my parents were both involved in smart development and land conservation. They taught me to advocate for the planet. My mom was a lawyer and my father focused on community by preserving public lands as a civil servant and later Mayor and County Supervisor. We grew up surrounded by orange groves. This gave me a lifelong love of food, the environment and helping people.
I started my career in journalism, but I found myself gravitating towards advocacy work. When I got a job in marketing at a landscape architecture and urban planning company, I fell in love with messaging and storytelling around sustainability and never looked back.
What is a value that drives you personally and professionally?
Creativity. It's the spark that creates change, the force behind great technology and great companies, and it's what makes life interesting and beautiful. When you see it, you know it, and feel it and others do too. It brings people together and makes work joyous.
I feel very lucky that I have worked in climate change over my career because the constraints climate change puts on us demand creativity, and some of the most ingenious designers and thinkers I have been lucky to work with were inspired by these same constraints and problems.
I also appreciate the talent it takes to create a compelling narrative, from written to visual. It’s an art to develop communications that make people inclined to care. Design motivates me for its ability to move people. I believe it’s an under leveraged storytelling capability especially in climate.
In my current role leading communications and marketing at Palmetto, a clean energy company that began 15 years ago in solar but now has evolved to whole home electrification I am getting the opportunity to completely relaunch the brand with an entirely new visual language that will hopefully entice consumers to think about energy and their home in a new way. Creativity is always a risk though - what is new is not always immediately welcome.
As you look back, is there a pivotal project that's shaped your career or inspired you?
I have always been interested in the power younger generations have in shaping society. I took this on fully at Impossible Foods while I was leading communications in the early years after we launched through a project called "Kids Rule." It was a sales, marketing and thought leadership campaign intended to get kids eating meat from plants, thinking about the impact of their food choices, and ultimately feeling empowered by the impact they could collectively have through their own choices and by influencing their parents’ choices.
Because we saw every burger sold from us (and not one made from a cow) as a win for the planet, the more we sold, the closer we’d get to our mission of ending climate change by removing animals from the food system (the food system contributes roughly ⅓ the world’s greenhouse gasses). Working with kids’ natural instincts to protect nature and save animals felt like an organic way to grow the future market.
The work began with an Insights Report we commissioned in 2019 asking 1,000 people throughout the United States about their attitudes towards plant-based meat. The survey showed huge differences among age groups. Young people are far more likely to eat plant-based meat than older generations. Environmental concerns had also moved into the top three reasons for consuming plant-based meat, especially among Gen Z and Millennials.
In the spring of 2021, we partnered with an independent, third party research and consulting firm to hear from kids directly on the topic of climate change. The survey asked 1,200 nationally representative kids ages 5-18 years old about their knowledge of climate change, biodiversity, and animal agriculture’s impact on the environment. We launched this study in conjunction with the news that Impossible Foods had secured Child Nutrition Labels for the Impossible Burger, a milestone for entering the K-12 market. The news kicked off our K-12 pilot programs in states around the country.
In 2022 we also launched a four-lesson curriculum program for K-12 schools focused on sustainability and plant-based eating. The curriculum was designed to be interactive and hands-on, incorporating topics like biodiversity and environmental impact. It also aimed to connect children to the food system and the planet. The program included videos of local farmers talking to students about different plants, highlighting the connection between what they eat and where it comes from. We partnered with a nonprofit that trained K-12 science teachers throughout the US to co-develop the curriculum ensuring its applicability for the classroom.
When we eventually began to focus the business even more directly on kid-focused product lines, the Impossible Foods chicken nuggets and later Wild Nuggies”shaped like endangered species were the first products that beat the animal version in blind taste tests and are still best sellers today.
I recently joined the board of The Charlie Cart project, a food education nonprofit, to continue this kind of advocacy! Lots of fun ahead there.
What are the skills needed for great communicators?
Curiosity. If you ask a lot of questions with humility, you learn quickly about what’s important and can better contextualize for audiences.
Empathy. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and you’ll be able to create bridges. You can’t fake it.
What's a hack or habit that grounds you in life and/or work?
I’m a proud member of the 5:45am club. Every morning I either run or workout with a group of mom friends, and I’d be utterly lost without that time. It’s physical, it’s social and it reminds me every morning that I can tackle hard challenges before the day’s real challenges begin!
Thank you Brooke Kruger for nominating Jessica. Thank you for tuning into this edition. I’m always grateful for your support growing this community of caring communicators and connectors. If you enjoyed this article, give it a heart, consider sharing it with a friend or posting a learning on LinkedIn. Signing off. — Julia