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.

Niya recommends reading Man’s Search for Meaning, which she re-reads annually.

Business for Good Podcast Episode 134 - Niyati Gupta, CEO of Fork & Good

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Nia, welcome to the business for good podcast. Thanks,

Niyati Gupta: Paul. It's good to be here.

Paul Shapiro: I am so glad to be talking with you. Congratulations on your tasting that you had recently. I saw just a few weeks ago, you were serving up a conventional and hybrid pork products in Davos. So that looked pretty awesome. Tell me what happened with that and what were you actually serving?

Niyati Gupta: Oh, it was, it was really fun. so I'm the CEO and co founder of Fork and Good, and we are cultivating both beef and pork. And this was, one of the products that we have where we're blending cultivated meat cells together with conventionally raised pork. And we were testing, we did double blind taste test.

Of the blend versus a hundred percent conventional pork. And so I didn't even know which was which we put a blue sticker and a yellow sticker. And there were 40 people of all walks of life, like students, investors, [00:01:00] professors. And one guy in Switzerland who walked into an Irish pub hoping for a beer and then participated in a historic cultivated meat tasting.

Paul Shapiro: He got something a little bit more expensive than beer.

Niyati Gupta: He did. He did. and I asked everybody, like, who thought blue was the blend? and about 50 percent of the hands went up. And then I asked who thought yellow was the blend. And then another 50 percent went off. I said, who has no idea? And they're just guessing.

And another 50 percent of hands went up. and I asked what people preferred. They preferred blue and blue was the blend.

Paul Shapiro: So what, so the blend to my recollection, it was 30 percent cells you had cultivated that were big cells. And they were mixed with not with plant based material, but with conventional pork.

And then the other one was solely pork. But I think you did have one that was also plant based plus cultivated cells, right? We

Niyati Gupta: did. So there were certain people of, you know, who are vegetarian or vegan. And for those customers, we did [00:02:00] a over 50 percent pork cell. with less than 8 percent pea protein mix.

Paul Shapiro: if it's over, if it's about 50 percent pork cells and 8 percent pea protein, what's the rest oil? What, where's the other, okay, cool. Nice. Well, congratulations. So, you know, I wish that I could have tasted this myself. I have like a personal, I guess I should say I have a self perception as somebody who likes to try all of these novel products the first time they come out.

So I hope that I get to visit your pilot plant in New Jersey sometime and try this, but let's just start from the beginning because you did this big thing recently, but it's not like you guys are a new company. I mean, you founded this Thing like six years ago, and you already had been running your own startup, even prior to fork and good in the hydroponic space, but then you decided you wanted to throw your hat into the cultivated meat ring.

So why did you do it? And what have you been doing for the last six years?

Niyati Gupta: it, it wasn't my decision. I was bullied into it by the four gotchas.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. And so [00:03:00] that'd be, that'd be Andres and his father, Gabor. So For those of you who have read the book, Queen Meat, they're the founders of also Modern Meadow, the, the, leather company that is profiled in the book.

But all right, so they buoyed you mercilessly and ruthlessly and unethically into this. How did they do it?

Niyati Gupta: Essentially, I had had an entire career in conventional agriculture and spent a decade and a half on like regular farming. And I got to a point where I was advising clients like the Ministry of Agriculture in Nigeria on how to set up feedlots.

Great for productivity, terrible for sustainability and public health. So I became interested in innovation, was working in this, on this hydroponics farming business. Modern Meadow, the first company in the space, as you mentioned, had done amazing things to get the idea out there, proved that they could make something that tasted good and had the right nutrition, but it was the price of gold, right?

And they had spent five years doing [00:04:00] research, were much too expensive and were contemplating whether to continue this or not. And our first interaction was me saying, don't do it. This is going to be guilt free meat for the 1%. Thank you so much. And to their credit, you know, they took a bunch of different advice and decided to wind down the cultivated cell section of their business.

And modern meadow is now precision fermentation. What's happening is Gabor and I started problem solving and comparing cell culture to animals. And we ended up co authoring a patent and just a methodology that we thought could be far more efficient than conventional tissue engineering. And that one thing led to the other, and we got really excited about the possibility of creating something more efficient than livestock.

And that's the point where I was bullied into moving into New York and starting another company around this.

Paul Shapiro: Well, they're very, they're very persuasive. I remember in 2014. So a decade ago, I was at [00:05:00] modern meadow in Brooklyn and like the Brooklyn army terminal where it was at the time. And I, I thought I was just touring and I was actually with, Isha Dattar, who's the head of new harvest and also, Ryan Pandya, who was a co founder of perfect day.

And served as the CEO until recently, but it was back. It was a decade ago and we were touring it and out of the blue without forewarning Andrus pulled out these little, chips of like steak that he had grown. And he started showing us videos of all these like billionaires who he had served it to, and this is the only people who had eaten it was like Sergey Brin.

No, it wasn't Sergey Brin. Who was it? I forget. It was like the people who. He was giving them for free, but he was doing it to try to procure investment basically, from these, phenomenally wealthy people. And then he asked us these three mere mortals sitting there in front of him, do you want to try a bite?

And I was, you know, I knew I got first. I want to be a good guest. He's like offering me something. But, you know, I've been a long time vegan and here he is offering me like actual beef that he had grown. [00:06:00] And I just said yes. And I ate it. And so did so did Ryan and we all enjoyed it. It wasn't that much. It was kind of like, Kind of reminded me like of eating a potato chip that was made out of meat.

It wasn't

Niyati Gupta: like, yeah, I remember that. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: yeah, but anyway, it was very generous of them. Very cool. but then as you mentioned, they wound down that portion of the business

Niyati Gupta: at that time, that one chip you ate was probably a hundred dollars.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. I think he mentioned that to me actually. and yeah, that's very generous.

but you know, a hundred dollars is a lot of money for a chip needless to say. but you know, Could be, could have been much worse than that. You know, you got, you know, if you had gone back a few years, I mean, the, the Mark Postberger that was debuted in 2013 cost over 300, 000 us dollars. So, you know, well, you know, that's not, not that bad, but I, I, I owe Andres a hundred bucks, I guess.

But anyway, so, so they bully you into starting this company. And the idea is that you're going to be able to do something differently, right? That you're going to be able to do something. This is now in [00:07:00] 2018. So, you know, meet just and, Memphis meets, which is now upside foods. These companies were already founded, already doing things, but you thought that you had a better way to make cultivated meat.

So what's different, like maybe not even what you were thinking then, but today in 2024, what's different about forking good that you're doing compared to other companies in the space?

Niyati Gupta: I think the biggest difference is the philosophy. Like, are you going in like looking at tissue engineering and these amazing breakthroughs and trying to make each of them bigger and cheaper, or are you looking at like first principles of livestock and what livestock are doing?

And so everything we've done has been around, well, livestock efficiency is based around feed conversion. What's the feed conversion of cells? Right. And in the past, we just assume that cell culture was more efficient because you're not needing to grow eyes and spinal cord and all the rest of it. and you're taking a few weeks as opposed to years.

It's not right. So just because [00:08:00] you're not growing the whole animal doesn't mean that cell culture is more efficient. But I found is that when you are growing cells outside of livestock, they're taking 10 or 20 times more feet. And that means it doesn't matter how big you get. You're always going to be more expensive, and this applies also to the climate impact portion.

Because if you're taking about 40 percent of carbon emissions from animals are coming from feedstock. So if you're 10 xing or 20 xing that you now have a more carbon intensive meat. So what we were looking at was, is there a way that cells can be more efficient? And we did several. Things to the buyer process.

so we didn't use stem cells for one. we started where feed conversion was the highest. So mammals, beef and pork, where we had the best chance of beating the feed conversion. We then didn't use scaffolds, right? So we grow these cells in three dimensional clusters and we have a patent issued for that.

we then apply [00:09:00] the first principles thinking also to the manufacturing. So we're not using farmer grade, you know, stirred tank, fire reactors, We're again thinking about, well, how do we get this incredibly high yield of cells in a small space and have cheap enough capex for this to make sense for this to match the cost of conventional meat.

So it's just from every step of the way comparing it to farming. And really streamlining, now in our pilot facility, we have done the math and we are now at three or four calories of feedstock in for one calorie of meat out. So for reference, that's four times more efficient than a pig. And five times more efficient than a cow.

It doesn't mean we'll keep her yet, but we really are confident. Like I now have the conviction that we will be.

Paul Shapiro: And so maybe a good way to put it then would be fork and good is more farming and less pharma. But I want to ask

Niyati Gupta: you

Paul Shapiro: about these bioreactors because you've [00:10:00] stated now and in news articles that you don't use stirred tank reactors, which is what pretty much everybody else uses.

So what's agitating your, your media then, if it's not impellers, what are you doing?

Niyati Gupta: And so part of the reason we had to invent different bioreactors was not just because the existing ones were expensive, but if we did use an impeller, like, think about what I just described. three D clusters of cells growing incredibly high yields.

So you end up with a very viscous solution. Now imagine putting blades in there and then just rotating that blade really fast. You're going to destroy all of those beautiful cells that are growing. So we had to come up with a really gentle mixing technique and I can't reveal it publicly because, you know, we're actually in the middle of patenting so yeah, but it's.

With a partner, when we have an exclusive partnership for it, and it's a, it's a different mixing device and then the tanks are just tanks, right? So there, there's nothing hugely different [00:11:00] about like a perfusion tank, that you, it can be off the shelf, but it's more that we've put it together in a unique way.

And because we have this gentle mixing and we don't have scaffolds, it allows us to do continuous harvest. And that's kind of the key. So continuous, continuous harvesting means instead of growing up the cells and then stopping the process and then harvesting it once in a batch, you can kind of have a tap and keep harvesting the cells while this batch keeps growing.

So you can have a much smaller vessel for a lot more cells.

Paul Shapiro: That's cool. So, you know, if you look at, of course, fungi fermentation is very different from animal cell culture. But if you look at what corn Q. U. O. R. N. is doing in the U. K. You know, there's by far the most advanced of the mycelial fermentation companies out there, and they don't have them powers and their reactors.

They use air basically air bubbles to agitate [00:12:00] and you. They also run a continuous process, so it's a permanent bleed and a permanent feed, so to speak. So and so that process enables them to get down to conventional meat prices. In fact, I was in London in 2023. I went into KFC and I was shocked to see on the menu that a corn chicken patty was basically about the same price as a regular KFC chicken patty.

It wasn't identical, but it was close enough that it, it appeared to me to be pretty close to price parity. and that was, that was

Niyati Gupta: idea. Very similar. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: very impressive. And you know, these folks have a different idea from from you in that they have these huge reactors. Like, I think what I've read, at least, is that you are planning to use 1000 liter reactors as opposed to these gigantic ones.

Whereas corns are each. They have several 150, 000 liter reactors going. But is that still your plan to try to assemble cool. a number of 1, 000 liter reactors, as opposed to having a corn style, 150, 000 liter tank or what he just just talked about where they want to have like a quarter million liters going at once.

[00:13:00] Is that still the work?

Niyati Gupta: Yeah, 1, 000, 10, 000, but no more than that. So there's definitely economies of scale, but. I think that you have to think about this a little bit like a craft brewery, right? So it's not about how big your tanks are. It's about how do you spread labor across the amount of yield? How do you spread CapEx across the amount of yield?

And for us right now, it's just important to de risk. So there's a lot of questions on scale. So the reason we're thinking about 1000 today is Working good is thinking about what's the smallest facility we can build and still prove that the payback period makes sense and then unlock this cheaper cost of capital.

so it's, it's a little bit opposite, right? Where some people are trying to do the biggest possible to prove the scale by making a lot of payments. but we believe that as long as you have shown the customer traction, you just need [00:14:00] to have the smallest possible facility that still gets you that payback period.

And by the way, meat processing is not profitable. Their payback periods are between 10 to 13 years. So proving that you could do this and you know, under three would be a huge really big deal in just me processing overall,

Paul Shapiro: and for those who weren't initiated, you know, by payback period, we're talking about is how long does it take for you to make enough profit that you pay off the initial capital investment in this plant or an internal rate of return?

and there's different ways, you know, I talked with Josh Tetrick earlier in this series. About this, and he was looking at it, not so much as an IRR or an internal rate of return as to how to pay the plant off, but how to produce enough return for the investor that even if you do have a double digit year IRR, like you were talking about, at least the valuation of the company is high enough that the investor who, who funded the capital expenditures could get in their return.

At least,

Niyati Gupta: That approach makes a lot of sense [00:15:00] because they've gone for, raising a lot of money at high valuations. and so we are on the other end of the spectrum where we haven't raised a lot of money and we've been very capital efficient. And so we, that allows us to be able to go for this approach.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. And so I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fork and good has raised like 22 million to date. Is that correct? And let me ask you, yeah, I'm sorry. Closer to 23. 23. Okay. Got it. Thank you. okay. So let's talk then about money because you know, you said, it was about a year ago and you had raised that 23 million or so.

and you said that hopefully that would help you get through the regulatory approval and small scale restaurant launches, you know, we're a year later. So where does it stand? Where are you on regulatory approval? You obviously did the launch in Davos, not yet small scale restaurants, cause you don't have approval to sell, but where are we in terms of that cycle for, for.

Niyati Gupta: So when we had raised our series a, it was to submit regulatory and to set up a pilot [00:16:00] facility. So we knew our science was working. We had the prototype, but we had to prove that the manufacturing was working at scale and this continuous harvest could happen. And these new bioreactors were actually working.

so we have done that, and then on regulatory, you know, we're going back and forth with the FDA. we submitted at the end of, last year, and the process has changed slightly. So now we are basically having back and forth Zoom meetings with the FDA to talk through each part of our submission. So we'll see, like, it's, it's just unpredictable, right?

We think the, the first couple of companies took about 13 months to get to approval. now the FDA and USDA know a lot more, they're asking a lot more questions, but also there's been a leadership change. So. It's, it's uncertain at that part. You can't control. I mean, all I can say is that they've been fairly cooperative [00:17:00] and responsive so far and not raised any red flags on any part of our process.

So, so I feel confident and I wish I had a better handle on what the timing was and could say, cause you and every customer and prospective customer, cause obviously we can't sell. and every, investor wants to know when. Okay. and I would love to be able to say like. It's just going to be at this time, right?

on, and that's not possible at the moment. hopefully in the next year or two.

Paul Shapiro: So let's talk about that issue that you raised Nia about when, so, you know, if you look, this is an industry, it's still very young. Right. Like the first of these companies was founded toward the end of 2015, which is Memphis beats again, now upside foods.

and so we're not even a decade in to the efforts to commercialize this, which, you know, if you look at the trajectory of like electric cars a decade in, you know, they were nowhere, right. People were writing the obituaries for like cars a decade in actually. and today people are [00:18:00] writing the obituaries for cultivated meat.

Article after articles come out, whether usually from one or two reporters in different outlets, you know, but it's mainly Bloomberg and another reporter who is published for a variety of places, including recently in the New York Times, writing essentially the obituary. And what they're saying is, you know, there's no cultivated me being sold anywhere anymore, not in Singapore or Washington, D.

C. Or San Francisco,

Niyati Gupta: which are three places where it's been

Paul Shapiro: served. The two, two, two of the best funded companies, upside foods and eat just have paused their, major plant construction efforts because of lack of funding, investors seem to be interested in other things, at least at this time when it comes to cultivated meat.

So what do you think is going on? people are writing the obituaries. What do you say?

Niyati Gupta: well, I think. There's there's a couple of there's so much you just said there, right? so the question is, what is going on that these people are pushing back or being so negative? Like, is that the question?

Paul Shapiro: Well, yeah, let me [00:19:00] rephrase it then.

So there are many people who are pushing back in that there's a backlash and they're trying to ban the sale of it, right? So, like, you have some people like these journalists who say this cannot work, right? Right. You have some journalists who say this cannot technologically work. It is a pipe dream. Then you have others who are saying, Hey, we need to ban the sale of this, presumably because they think it can work, right?

Like they wouldn't be trying to pass laws throughout the state, throughout the states and in the Congress and in Europe, if they thought this was never going to work anyway. but I'm mainly asking your response to those critics, not who want to ban the sale, but to the critics who say. This just can't happen technologically.

You just can't actually do this. Like you've now been working at this for six years. Is there anything that you have seen that leads you to think maybe we were wrong? Maybe it can't be done.

Niyati Gupta: No, I don't think so. so in food and in tech, there are so many politics and everyone has their own opinion and everyone has their own agenda.

And now we're at the intersection of food and environment [00:20:00] and people are being let down. There were expectations that were set up and those expectations were not met, right? And so I think there was this push to make it real, to make that aspiration real, to be in market, that race to be there. And there wasn't necessarily that pathway, that parallel pathway of bioprocess being solved, the CapEx being solved.

And now those companies are going and doing that. those are two companies. There's 150 companies, you know, maybe, maybe a few fewer now, but everyone has their different way of doing things. And like, I don't, I'm not a scientist, but what I've learned is you need to be really step wise with establishing this repeatable bio process.

And biology is more complicated than software. But at the same time, we've made amazing progress, right? So the industry, it was said that they could not reduce the cost of the media or get [00:21:00] rid of fetal bovine serum, right? That's now table stakes. I think everybody has gotten rid of fetal bovine serum.

There was this whole question mark around growth factors. Growth factors are in the sense now, cause they're produced recombinantly. This is just on the media. So the media costs have gone from hundreds of dollars to now, I think a couple of dollars or even, you know, 50 cents or 20 cents for some companies.

So that's been a massive improvement. People have been using tools like CRISPR, to really strategically edit cells and they have amazing cell lines that are working. So there's so many parts of this industry that are working. There's delicious prototypes that have gone market. There's customers that are showing that they want to buy this stuff.

I don't think anybody said that it was, would be at the scale of meat. By five years from now, but somehow that expectation was out there. And I also believe that maybe people have thought about being visionary and pitching [00:22:00] and doing sort of investor conversation to journalists in the same way. Right.

and. Those are different audiences, or

Paul Shapiro: maybe they presumed that investors were reading stories that journalists were writing, but you mentioned until we get to the scale of meat. Needless to say, that is very far off. But what about just the scale of plant based meat plant based meat today? It's not even 1 percent of the total animal meat market by volume or by dollar.

But volume is what we really care about from a sustainable perspective, of course. Mhm. And so even though it's not yet 1 percent of the meat market, it is ubiquitous. You can get it in every big box grocery store, many fast food menus. it's not abnormal to be at the airport and you know, you get plant based meat at some restaurant.

So what do you think it'll take in terms of resources and time cultivated meat to get there?

Niyati Gupta: I come back to this craft brewery model, right? Like think about how many tanks craft beer takes. but nobody worries [00:23:00] about like running out of steel for craft breweries. And the reason is that one can work well and highly profitably.

Right. and so my thing has always been, why can't we just make one good craft brewery? Prove it. That's what Fork and Good, that's what we're trying to do. and if that works well, then scale is not really the question. Right. Right. and yes, it's physical again. It's not software. It's not about flipping, the switch of a button and it's, it's still building and building takes time, but I think absolutely we could get to 1, 5, 10, 20 percent of the industry.

Right now, I don't know within

Paul Shapiro: what time frame you think,

Niyati Gupta: within the next decade for sure,

Paul Shapiro: right? So, so just so that I am comprehending what you're saying, because it's a very bold claim within the next decade. So let's say by, you know, 2034. You think we'll be at 1%, 5%. Obviously nobody can [00:24:00] predict, nobody can predict the future.

I'm just playing the game just 'cause it's a fun game to play. Like if you, you know, if we're, if we're talking in 20, 34 is cultivated meat, 1, 5, 10, 20% of the meat market, what do you think?

Niyati Gupta: Mm. Do you think about it?

2024 2034 1

Paul Shapiro: percent 1%. Okay. It's interesting. Like, if you think about, you know, the, you know, in the United States, there's over a hundred billion pounds of meat that is produced every single year. So 1 billion pounds would be at about 1 percent then let's say. And, you know, the biggest of these plants that people were talking about, like from upside or eat just or believer meats, they're talking about tens of millions of pounds.

Yeah. So, you know, that's still a far away from a billion, right? so you need, you know, you need a lot of money. You need a lot of companies doing this. It's going to take many companies.

Niyati Gupta: And those numbers when projected are, those are still aspirational numbers. They're not being produced today. Right.

Paul Shapiro: Yes.

Yeah. Right. Those are, yeah. Thank you for clarifying that when they're talking [00:25:00] about tens of millions of pounds, that's what they're projecting. Not, not what they are capable of today, of course. Yeah, okay. Well, that's

Niyati Gupta: so hard to predict. Paul is just like nobody, like the, we don't know when it will take off.

Right. And so once you do have that highly profitable craft brewery, once you do find that fit of like, well, this, this just works so well in this function, or it just works so well in this, yeah. Sausage mixed with conventional meat, or it just it turns out people really care about ethics. Like, you know, this is this is really taking off in this segment of the market.

Or wow, like these companies now have regulation to decarbonize their supply chain. So now, like they have to decarbonize meat. You can't really predict all of these things. Right. And we're in a context where meat is getting more expensive,

Paul Shapiro: right? So if there were one thing that you would hope would happen, what is that one realistic thing?

Is it [00:26:00] government support for the industry, more venture capital for the industry? Is there one particular technological breakthrough that you wish would happen? Like if you could have one wish, what would that be?

Niyati Gupta: It would be around project financing, right? And that might be government support, or it may not.

it may look like just financing for equipment. We don't do a ton of New startup manufacturing anymore. And this isn't an issue just in cultivated meat. It's for anything in climate. We're now needing to hit the physical world. And yet, you know, especially in the U S we're designed very much around sort of service and software banks have unwound, you know, how they used to fund factories.

Right. and so I think really. And people are starting to think about this, but you know, you had this question of what businesses do you wish people would start? And, and I think there's a lot of people, you know, out of academia [00:27:00] coming out with like amazing innovations. So there's a lot of energy around the technology.

There's energy around just venture capital, but there isn't that much in the middle of like, how do we scale up these physical businesses? How do we invest in infrastructure? How do we bridge across private and public to do that?

Paul Shapiro: Well,that's cool. So as you mentioned, every episode, I always ask guests what companies they wish would be started.

So yours, it sounds like it would be some type of a project finance, right? So somebody is going to finance your equipment or maybe the construction or something like that. Okay. Very cool. Let me ask the other question that I always ask every guest on the business for good podcast, which is that. If there were resources that were useful for you, would you share them?

So were there books, speeches, anything that you found useful in your journey as an entrepreneur, that if somebody is looking at you and saying, man, Nia seems pretty cool, I'd like to accomplish what she's done or something like it. What would you suggest to that person?

Niyati Gupta: Oh, wow. well, I would say one of [00:28:00] like the biggest resources also finding just real sponsors and mentors, like especially, you know, being a woman of color in entrepreneurship.

It's just going to be a tougher journey, and there's going to be fewer people that look like you. And so, you know, I went to Harvard Business School and didn't take a single entrepreneurship class because I just didn't think it was for me. so I think finding, just a couple people who, like, really believe in you, is super, super important.

And then books wise, I, I read man search, for meaning every year. Frankel. it's incredibly grounding on just how do, how do you keep meaning at the center of your life and how important meaning is in work than the other two that I like recommending on a growth mindset, like Carol Dweck and radical candor, Kim, Kim Scott.

So both of them are, you know. [00:29:00] Women, highly empathetic. And you need to have that flexible, adaptable mindset and a lot of authenticity, I think, to do something really, really friggin hard. and so, yeah, I, I don't know if I'm a good, advice giver at this point, but I just found that those to be like good touch points and, and resources to, you know, To keep me resilient.

Paul Shapiro: Very nice. Well, we'll link to those in the show notes at business for good podcast. com. And I will mention about man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl, which I also highly recommend. when my wife and I got married five years ago, our friend who officiated the wedding, that was, there was, that book we wanted him to read from, because it was that, I'll include it in the show notes so I don't

I, I hate to paraphrase when I could, yeah. When I could. So I, I would hate to.

Niyati Gupta: Oh, I love that. That's so sweet.

Paul Shapiro: but don't tell my wife that I don't remember our ceremony word for word , but, maybe I could still [00:30:00] do my, my vows. I don't know. But, I really appreciate all that you're doing, Mia, and I will be rooting to for your success and hoping to go to your craft brewery when you have it set up.

Try some of your cultivated meat?

Niyati Gupta: well we're already like, I would say beating some small scale farms. Right, okay. Like this is, this is real, like this brewery is coming, the meat brewery is coming, .

Paul Shapiro: I love it. And by beating then Yeah. Presuming you mean on cost,

Niyati Gupta: I

Paul Shapiro: do mean that. Yeah. Awesome. Very cool.

Awesome. Well, I will bring a hundred dollars bill with me so I don't feel indebted to you as I do to Andres now that you've put it that way. So, well that

Niyati Gupta: do a lot more meat today.

Paul Shapiro: Oh, very good. Maybe instead of a chip, I'll get a whole, a whole burger. We'll see. All right. Well, thanks so much, Nia. It's great what you're doing and I wish for your success.

Niyati Gupta: No worries.