On paper, Elaine Paik’s resume might not look all that linear: After more than 20 years in various finance roles at Colgate-Palmolive, including global treasurer, she took over as CFO at Juul Labs Inc., the electronic cigarette company that faced regulatory challenges. Now, she’s been CFO of plant-based meat company Impossible Foods since December 2023.
Toothpaste to e-cigs to plant-based meat? Well, well, well. But in her own telling, there’s a through line that makes her current post feel all but inevitable.
Her time at Colgate-Palmolive gave her a master class on how to “look at consumer business from a global perspective,” Paik told CFO Brew. Juul, meanwhile, she saw as “a mission-driven business. For Juul, it’s about harm reduction for a billion adult smokers around the world.” Add those together, and, in Paik’s eyes, you’ve got Impossible Foods, a mission-oriented company with a global reach.
“There’s common themes, as you can see, with all the companies I’ve worked with,” she said. “Impossible is a really good fit, both from a mission perspective, but also from a business opportunity perspective.”
Her first day. That eagerness about company fit is a large part of what made Paik’s first day at the new gig seamless.
“I was fortunate to be able to get onboarded at Redwood City, [California,] which is where the company is headquartered,” she said, which meant she got to meet most people face to face. “The company had a really good onboarding program to give me a really good overview,” she continued, not only “on the system tools that I need for to do my job,” but also, and perhaps most crucially, “the key values and resources” she’d need from a company culture standpoint.
“Then I got to really learn about the informal network through my first day there, like having conversations, not just with my team, but also with my peers [and] cross-functional business partners,” Paik explained.
That also included a cohort most CFOs don’t brush shoulders with too often: scientists. On her first day, and into the early days of her job, Paik said it was crucial part of the onboarding process to learn what Impossible’s scientists do, “as well as learning about how they interact with the finance team.”
From there, she launched into the activity that dominated her first 30 days at the company: a series of listening tours. She’d listen with an ear for personal goals and aspirations to see where she could help propel them forward in the company.
News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
The benefits of that listening tour soon came to fruition. Knowing how different departments worked and what they prioritized helped Paik become a more strategic leader. “A lot of what [CFOs] do is pretty industry agnostic. All companies alike track performance. All companies plan their business,” she said, but that’s not the case when it comes to providing strategic insights. For that, you need industry-specific knowledge, Paik noted.
“The whole informal network, the listening tour that I had in my early days with Impossible really helped me understand how decisions are being made. Who are the influencers?” she explained.
Impossible Foods is simultaneously a food company, a consumer business, and, to some degree, a tech company because of the food tech “spearheaded by our scientists,” Paik noted, but unlike Apple or Microsoft, “we need to earn the consumer, we need to attract them and retain them,” since there’s not necessarily a built-in demographic for plant-based meat.
To that end, Paik sees taste as the company’s “competitive advantage,” so knowing “who are the drivers and who exemplifies those advantages” in the early days of her tenure “has been really helpful.”
New definitions. While her current role feels like “a really good balance of your typical sort of operational CFO role versus a strategic CFO,” it’s that strategic part that really interests Paik—and her background gives her a unique POV on the state of the consumer.
“Consumer behavior is very much driven by the macroeconomic environment,” she said, noting the intense influence of inflation in recent years. “From a strategy perspective, there is really more thinking about how we address some of the consumer needs as well as barriers.”
At Impossible Foods, she sees a two-part answer to doing just that: value and effective pricing. Consumers need to get some bang for their buck, aka value (and that’s where the aforementioned emphasis on taste comes in), but they also need to not spend too many bucks in the process.
“That’s why the company has done a really, really good job at continuously looking at reducing the cost of producing our products and being able to deliver at a price point that is accessible to our consumer,” she added.