Business for Good Podcast Paul Shapiro

When you think about cultivated meat, Thailand isn’t exactly the first country that comes to mind. Sure, you may think about the US, Netherlands, Israel, and Singapore. But the Southeast Asian kingdom is where Israeli cultivated meat juggernaut Aleph Farms recently announced its first commercial factory will be. 
Having just received Israel’s first regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat—and the world’s first regulatory approval for cultivated beef in particular—Aleph Farms CEO Didier Toubia discusses his company’s rollout strategy with me in this conversation. As you’ll hear, Aleph wants to start by selling limited quantities in Israel within 2024, but the company intends to operate its first plant in Thailand with what Didier calls an “asset light” pilot facility capable of producing 1,000 tons a year. For those of you who aren’t mathletes, that’s about two million pounds of finished cultivated meat product—”finished” meaning finished goods that are a hybrid of animal cells and plant-based ingredients as well.
Of course, two million pounds is a vast quantity compared to the volume of cultivated meat that’s been produced thus far, but it’s not even a rounding error in Asia’s meat demand, let alone global meat demand. So how long will it be before Didier thinks the cultivated meat sector will make a real dent in animal meat demand? You can hear his answer in this episode!
Despite negative headlines surrounding the space lately, Didier claims he’s more optimistic than ever before about his prospects for success, and that he’s still fighting to have $1 billion in revenue within the next 10 years. You can hear him explain why he thinks that’s realistic in this conversation. 
Discussed in this episode
This episode is the fifth in a multi-part podcast series on cultivated meat. The previous four episodes include Eat Just, Fork & Good, Mosa Meat, and New Harvest.
We discussed Aleph Farms and the impact of the 10/7 Hamas massacre in Israel in our recent episode with Kitchen CEO Jonathan Berger.
Aleph Farms’ recent announcement to move to set up shop in Thailand, partnering with Fermbox Bio.
Didier attended The Better Meat Co.’s Night Under the Fermenters.
The global meat market is worth about $1.5 trillion.
Didier’s recent Fast Company op-ed explaining his regret about cultivated meat timeline predictions.
More about Didier Toubia
Didier Toubia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms. He’s a Food Engineer and Biologist who led two medical device companies and co-invented over 40 patent families; Co-Founder and CEO of IceCure – went public in 2010, and CEO of NLT Spine – acquired by SeaSpine in 2016. He was trained at AgroSup in Dijon, France, and was awarded with a specialized masters degree from ESCP Business School. Didier holds a joint Executive MBA degree from the Kellogg and Recanati business schools, USA and Israel.

When the New York Times recently ran an opinion column declaring the infant fatality of the cultivated meat industry, Isha Datar, CEO of New Harvest, was quoted as saying of the sector, “this is a bubble that is going to pop.”
Given that New Harvest is intended to promote and advance the field, what did Isha mean by this? She expounded on that thought in a 2,000-word commentary asserting that while she disagrees with the columnist’s conclusion that cultivated meat can never become a viable reality, she believes that the sector has been plagued by “exaggerations, lies, and broken promises.”
In this episode, Isha and I talk about what she’s referring to, the difference she sees between cellular agriculture via precision fermentation (e.g., Perfect Day and EVERY) and cellular agriculture aimed at producing actual animal meat (e.g., Eat Just and Mosa Meat), whether cultivated meat is more like flying cars (a far future technology) or electric cars from 15 years ago (not yet ready, but realistically possible), what pathway forward she sees toward actually fulfilling the promise to end the factory farming of animals. 
Discussed in this episode
Isha’s first appearance in 2020 on this show, Episode 42
Our recent episodes in this podcast series on cultivated meat with Eat Just, Fork & Good, and Mosa Meat.
New Harvest’s thoughts on the recent NY Times opinion column on cultivated meat
The EU’s FEASTS program: Fostering European Cellular Agriculture for Sustainable Transition Solution
The Tufts University Institute for Cellular Agriculture
Isha recommends reading The Generosity Network by Jennifer McCrea
More about Isha Datar
Isha has been pioneering cellular agriculture since 2009, driven by a passion to see transformative technology create a better world. In 2010, Isha published "Possibilities for an in-vitro meat production system" in Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies; thus began her quest to establish the field of cell ag. 
Isha became Executive Director of New Harvest in 2013. She co-founded Muufri (now Perfect Day) and Clara Foods in 2014, and soon after passed her founding equity to New Harvest in full to establish the first endowment for cell ag research. In 2015 she named the field "cellular agriculture" - officially creating a category for agriculture products produced from cell cultures rather than whole plants or animals. She is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and also served as a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. 
Isha has a BSc. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Alberta and a Masters in Biotechnology from the University of Toronto.

In 2013, Dr. Mark Post shocked the world when he debuted the world’s first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. 
A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth? 
When his burger was debuted, a grand total of zero companies existed to commercialize what would come to be called cultivated meat, no serious investment dollars had flowed into cultivated meat research, yet hopes were high that such meat would be on the market within a decade.
In this episode, Mark offers why he thinks his timeline predictions in 2013 were proven too optimistic, what he thinks the biggest hurdles to success were and are, and what inventions still must be made to give cultivated meat a shot at making a dent in the number of animals used for food.
Discussed in this episode
Mark recommends reading the journal Nature Food.
Paul’s book Clean Meat tells Mark’s tale, and is coming out as an updated paperback edition on April 9, 2024!
More about Mark Post
Dr. Mark Post, MD/PhD, has had several appointments as assistant professor at Utrecht University, Harvard University, as associate professor at Dartmouth college, and as full professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and Maastricht University. He currently holds the chair of the Physiology Department at Maastricht University. He is visiting professor at Harvard, University of Modena and faculty at Singularity University. 
His main research interest is the engineering of tissues for medical applications and for food. The medical applications focus on the construction of blood vessels that can be used as grafts for coronary artery bypass grafting. Tissue engineering for Food has lead to the development of cultured beef from bovine skeletal muscle stem cells in an effort to transform the traditional meat production through livestock. 
Dr Post co-authored 165 papers in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and received during his career over 50 million dollars in funding and awards from different sources including government, charity and industry. He presented the world’s first hamburger from cultured beef in the August 2013 and is working on improvements and scaling up the production of cultured meat. 
He received the World Technology Award from AAAS/Times/Forbes for invention with the biggest potential for environmental impact. Dr Post is CSO and co-founder of MosaMeat and of Qorium, two companies that aim to commercialize meat and leather applications of tissue engineering. He is CEO of Cell2Tissue, which is a developer of technologies in tissue engineering for consumer and health applications.

Some of the companies in the cultivated meat space are betting that massive stainless steel cultivators—think 100,000L to 250,000L—are the path to commercialization. Niya Gupta, CEO of Fork and Good, is thinking smaller. 
She argues that there may be a more realistic path using a larger number of smaller tanks, void of the impellers that agitate the more conventionally used reactors in the sector. 
Founded in 2018, the company was spun out of Modern Meadow, the first-ever cultivated animal product company which is now focused on materials like leather rather than meat. Having raised more than $20M in its first six years, Fork and Good just held its first-ever tasting of the animal cells they’re growing, and as you’ll hear in this conversation, it was a real success. 
Does Niya think that the cultivated meat industry can make up one percent of the conventional meat industry’s volume within the next decade? Listen to her insights in this episode for the answer to that question!
Discussed in this episode
Niya recommends reading Man’s Search for Meaning, which she re-reads annually.
Paul mentions that a quote from Man’s Search for Meaning was read by the officiant at his wedding. That quote follows: “The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Niya also recommends reading Radical Candor and Mindset.
Modern Meadow is profiled in Clean Meat, including the new (2024) paperback edition.
More about Niyati Gupta
Niya Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, a cultivated meat company addressing the high costs of the industry with a novel and patented approach in cell culture that produces meat more efficiently than cows and pigs. Niya was also the CEO of Comcrop, a vertical farming startup in Singapore selling greens into major supermarkets. Prior to this she had spent more than 10 years in food and conventional agriculture businesses, including at McKinsey and Syngenta. She holds an MBA and MPAID from Harvard, and an Economics BA from Yale.

If you listened to the last episode, you already know that there’s an updated paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out April 9, 2024. I announced in that episode that, aligning with that release, this show will be devoted for a couple months exclusively to interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat space, many of whom are profiled in the book. 
And there’s perhaps no person in the cultivated meat sector who’s generated more headlines than Josh Tetrick, CEO of both Eat Just and Good Meat. Along with people like Mark Post and Uma Valeti, both of whom will also be guests in this podcast series, Josh was one of the first entrepreneurs to devote resources to trying to commercialize cultivated meat. And his company, Good Meat, indeed was the first company ever to win regulatory approval anywhere—in Singapore—and start selling real meat grown without animal cells. 
In the new paperback edition of Clean Meat I detail the process of that Singaporean regulatory approval and the world’s first historic cultivated meat sale. And while Good Meat has gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and garner US regulatory approval as well, the company admittedly hasn’t yet achieved the goals it set out for itself in the early days. 
In the recent New York Times obituary for cultivated meat, the author Joe Fassler writes, “The book ‘Clean Meat’ describes Mr. Tetrick looking at factory drawings and saying, ‘By 2025, we’ll build the first of these facilities,’ and by 2030, ‘we’re the world’s largest meat company.’”
Today, in 2024, Good Meat no longer has an aspiration of a 2025 major cultivated meat plant, and the idea of being the world’s largest meat company by 2030 seems relatively  unlikely. But as you’ll hear in this interview, Josh Tetrick remains cautiously optimistic about a future for the cultivated meat industry, despite negative headlines that are, at least for the time being, dampening some investors’ enthusiasm for the space.
In this episode, Josh and I have a frank discussion about the cultivated meat sector, how it may be able to scale, what the economics could look like, whether Josh thinks it’s realistic to make a dent in total animal meat demand, and more. 
Long-time listeners of the show will remember that Josh also was a guest on this podcast way back in 2019 on Episode 23. In that conversation, we discussed how he remains resilient in the face of adversity. I recommend going back and listening to that inspirational episode for sure, and I’m glad to have Josh back on the show to offer his point of view of where things stand in the movement to divorce meat production from animal slaughter today.
Discussed in this episode
Josh recommends reading Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Our 2019 episode with Josh, Episode 23.
A 2013 Washington Post obituary for electric cars. 
More about Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is CEO & co-founder of Eat Just, Inc., a food technology company with a mission to build a healthier, safer and more sustainable food system in our lifetimes. 
The company's expertise, from functionalizing plant proteins to culturing animal cells, is powered by a world-class team of scientists and chefs spanning more than a dozen research disciplines. Eat Just created one of America’s fastest-growing egg brands, which is made entirely of plants, and the world’s first-to-market meat made from animal cells instead of slaughtered livestock. 
Prior to founding Eat Just, Tetrick led a United Nations business initiative in Kenya and worked for both former President Clinton and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. As a Fulbright Scholar, Tetrick taught schoolchildren in Nigeria and South Africa and is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Michigan Law School. 
Tetrick has been named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business,” Inc.’s “35 Under 35” and Fortune’s

I’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold. 
Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on the issue that’s animated my life for the past 30 years: how to wean humanity off our animal-centered diets. The extraordinary suffering of the literally trillions of animals who we farm and kill for food has plagued me for more than three decades, and alleviating some of their suffering is the cause to which I’ve devoted my entire career.