Creating a Cultivated Meat Community: Anita Broellechs and Alex Shirazi

Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Business for Good podcast to show where we spotlight companies making money by making the world a better place. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, and if you share a passion for using commerce to solve many of the world's most pressing problems, than this is the show for you. Hello friends, and welcome to a very special episode of The Business for Good podcast.

Just why is it so special? Well, it is our first ever episode taped before a live audience that's. Episode 77 was taped on stage at the cultured Meet symposium in San Francisco before a live audience, and now you get to be part of it from the comfort of your own home. Jim or car or wherever you're listening to this episode and what an episode it is.

I always really admire when people with a passion, even if they lack experience, get on the field and start playing. And that is exactly what Anita Brox and Alex Sroi have done, and wow, do I admire these two? This is a story of two people who, despite not having experience in the cultivated [00:01:00] meat space, felt so strongly about building a community around it that they started their own podcast.

Called the Cultured Meat and Future Food Show. They started their own conference, the Cultured Meat Symposium, and now they're working on a children's book about cultivated meat together as well. As a reminder, Alex and Anita didn't have any podcasting experience. They didn't have conference organizing experience, they didn't have book ready experience yet they teamed up and are succeeding wildly with all of them a hundred podcast episodes in and four successful conferences down.

Anita and Alex have learned a lot during these past four years, and they've even gotten married during that time and they just couldn't be a nicer couple too. In this episode, we discuss their experiences, what working together has been like on their relationship, whether they're more boish or bearish on the cultivated meat space.

Now after four years and more. We also discuss Anita dive into entrepreneurship herself with her new Fermentation Startup Ball, Letic Foods. So enjoy this episode with two people who I greatly admire and who've done an enormous amount of good to promote the [00:02:00] cellular agriculture space and build community within it.

Thanks so much. Great to be with both of you. Let's give these guys a round of applause for organizing yet another exciting conference, I presume for nearly everybody in the room. It is certainly for me. This is the first in person conference we've been to since the pandemic began, so we're grateful to you for bringing some semb of normalcy to us.

Back, I don't think semb is a, is a word, but some semblance of normalcy back to us. So thank you for. It's great to

Alex Shirazi: be back and, and I was jokingly gonna say that the last in-person conference I might have been to was CMS 19, but I don't think

that's

Anita Broellochs: great. Yes. And it's great to have Paul back. I think Paul actually does deserve like some sort of medal because he's the only person who has been in all for cms.

Except for Alex, Maybe Brian Sylvester? No, he has three. I talked. Oh, he has three.

Alex Shirazi: Oh,

Paul Shapiro: okay. Brian, what a what a fake. Okay, well, cool. I, I, I'll take the medal and, and the trophy and the ribbon, whatever you guys are gonna do, but, so welcome to the 77th episode of the Business for Good [00:03:00] Podcast. It's great to be with both of you here.

The business that you all are running, The Cultured Meat Symposium is part of this interesting empire that you all have built over the last four years because you all. Four years ago, we're not entrepreneurs in the space. You weren't investors in the space, you weren't scientists in the space. You were just two people who were dating.

You were not married at that time. Now you are. But you were dating at the time and you had this interest in this topic and you thought, Ah, let's start a podcast on this. And nobody was doing any podcast on the topic. What led you to want to do something like that together?

Alex Shirazi: Together, or apart? I'll start by saying it was, it was originally.

Ideated at a, I think it was a Google office. One of our team members, Yuri, who's in the AV room right now, works at Google. We would get together with Cyrus and Yuri and Anita, and we would just go into conference rooms maybe once a month and we would start thinking about different ideas to execute. And we had some pretty [00:04:00] wild ideas from software apps to.

Do it yourself, sovi machines to Bluetooth speakers that would be in your shower. And this is before the days of Alexa. So we actually would get together once a month and come up with a lot of kind of crazy ideas that would be just fun to execute. And then one day I need a thought like, Hey, have you guys heard of cultured meat?

And I'll let you take it from there.

Paul Shapiro: Anita, how had you even heard of cultured meat at this point? This is like back in 2017. What was it that you, did you know about the Mark Post Burger or like what

Anita Broellochs: was. Right. I think it was definitely an article about the Mark Post burger. And then, because I grew up on a farm in Germany and I became vegetarian very early on because my parents took me to the slaughter, I think when I was five years old of our cows.

And then I really was confused about what's happening and I decided I'm going to stop eating animals. And I just never questioned it from then. And then when I saw the mark Post burger, I thought, This is so cool. Like all the people around me, they want to eat [00:05:00] meat, but I don't want the animals to die.

Maybe this is a solution. So that's when I started to look into cultured meat.

Paul Shapiro: Wow. Okay. Well what a world that has now come about because now all of us are here because you are meeting in that room and now we have this great conference that we've been coming to. So for those of you who don't know, so not only is Anita a vegetarian, but she makes the best spread.

My wife and I went to their house recently and the we, the first thing when we got in the car, when we left, she said, I need to up my game because they had this spread of food, like ORFs. It was like artwork. It was unbelievable. I felt bad eating. It was like cubes of watermelon and unbelievable spreads of vegan cheese.

It was it put my wife who was a vegan cookbook author to Shame, and so she felt like she needs to do better because of you.

Alex Shirazi: We cannot forget that. Just egg al omelets. I, I don't forget that. It was really cool. Which, and I think you called Josh Tedrick, like after you ate it and we had a conversation with him about,

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, well he has now been invoked in this at least, so that was a lot of fun.

Okay, [00:06:00] so you guys then, you're doing a podcast. At what point are you thinking, Hey, we actually wanna start a conference? Because, you know, most of these conferences are put on by conference organizing companies, right? These companies that, that's all they do, they just put on conferences around the world.

It's a very lucrative business opportunity actually, Or these high value conferences where people in the industry, Employers pay. And so you have these like, you know, four figure tickets that people are buying and you thought, Well, let's just do a conference. You don't have any conference organizing experience, I presume.

Why?

Anita Broellochs: I think so first we actually, we got in that, when we were in this room, we first decided let's create a culture meet company. And then we like started to plan, okay, what do we need to do? And then we figured out like we don't really have too much knowledge in this space. And also we don't know anyone else who's working on that.

So we are like the only, the five of us. And. We don't know anything about this. And then we decided maybe it's not the best idea to start a company right away. Maybe we should get connected to some people first. And then we didn't know, okay, what's the best way to get connected to people? And then we had the idea of the podcast.

So we reached out actually to you, I [00:07:00] think one of the first people. And we were so excited that you replied to our email. And that's just how it grew.

Alex Shirazi: I was just gonna say, we might have also emailed Mark Post's University email because it's just like public online and he didn't respond. We,

Paul Shapiro: we, well, he may have had more to do at that time than I did, so I, I give him the pass on that.

But I do remember getting the email and I was like, Oh, that's cool. They're gonna start this. That's exciting. And then we did our first of, I think we've now done two episodes together. I'm glad to be a repeat guest on the show. I hope to be like the Tom Brady of the show though. I wanna come back and repeat and I think he's like at six or seven now actually.

So we'll see what we can do.

Alex Shirazi: We're almost at episode 100 and so it's, it's actually crazy to to think of how many episodes have actually kind of come out. And so let just

Paul Shapiro: ask you, you are put on conferences together. You are also. Doing a podcast together and we're gonna try other projects that you're doing together.

I just gotta keep it real, like how is this on your marriage? [00:08:00] I mean, this is

Anita Broellochs: hard. I did receive a text like a couple minutes ago from Alex saying, We need to be friends on the podcast , and we need to say the same things. I mean, it's challenging sometimes, but it's also a lot of. It's more fun than like trouble.

Alex Shirazi: And I think I could speak for everyone on the team that the first year we actually put on cms, CMS in 2018, that seemed like just a totally different animal than, you know, what we figured out in 2019 and then what we transitioned to online for 2020 and 2021. So less

Paul Shapiro: stress now than before. Now that you're getting the hang of

Alex Shirazi: it.

I would different, a lot different

Paul Shapiro: stress. Okay. I mean, I don't wanna good stress, I don't wanna touch any sore topics here, but is this, is there domestic disharmony as a result of this?

Alex Shirazi: Oh, not necessarily between Anita and I, but I think it's you and Cyrus. Well, yeah. and Cyrus is, is really leading everything with operations, insurance contracts and, and everything like that.[00:09:00]

I think difference stress in that, and I don't mean that in a bad way, whereas like before we were really getting together and think. Okay. How are we gonna manage like the coffee at a, at a conference, right?

Anita Broellochs: Yeah. All of us had zero event experience, pretty much.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Well let's get down to the cultivated meet of the matter then.

So, you know, in four years of running this conference, a lot has happened. A lot has changed. But some things have remained the same. Still zero grams of cultivated meat have been sold in the United States and nearly anywhere else in the world, which I think many people four years ago would not have predicted in this space.

Maybe some would be that, you know, would've thought that, but I, I know I didn't think that, and we've been proven wrong. So if you look back and you could go talk to Alex and Anita in 2018 and tell them. That's the case that four years later there still was zero grams of the product sold. Do you think you would've been incredulous?

Do you think you would've thought, Oh, that's too pessimistic? Like what, what would you have thought when you look at the state of the industry today? Cause you know, there's hundreds of millions of dollars more in the space today than back then. There's way more companies, way more investor interest. But in some cases, you know, you [00:10:00] just, you don't see commercialization.

So not really in some, in nearly all cases. So what would you have thought back?

Anita Broellochs: Right. So I'm actually very amazed on how far we've come because, So when I first got interested in culture meat, I was, at that time I was still in a lab back in Germany and I was working in a group that was doing muscle tissue engineering for medical purposes, right?

And. The professor that I was working for, he was actually vegetarian himself, so I thought I need to talk to him about it because he's definitely going to love then. And then I had a meeting with him and I got into the room and he prepared like a pile of that many like research papers for me. And he like put it in front of me and he said, These are all the reasons why this is a really terrible idea and we don't need to like talk about it too much more.

And I'm like, Oh, okay. . I don't know what to do. I think now, I mean today we were tasting cultured sushi. I think it's pretty impressive how far we've come in only four years because I'm

Alex Shirazi: impressed. Yeah, and I mean, to Anita's point, I think maybe Graham's [00:11:00] sold. That hasn't changed, but Graham's served at the Cultured me symposium.

has gone up tremendously. Infinitely actually. Yeah. But you know, I was just chatting with Brian Spears of New Age meets, and I remember that as we were planning the first cms, I met with him at a coffee shop and he's like, Yeah, I think we're gonna go into Indie Bio. Right? And I just spoke with him and their team.

I think over 30 now, and they are doing amazing things. And so I think that's just one example of the many different companies that have done things that I, If you were to tell me that these companies would do so much in three, four years, including the better Meco, I would've said, Ah, I don't know about that.

So

Paul Shapiro: you'd say now you are today, four years on more bullish on the space than you were when you started? 100%, yes. So let's say you'd been on that last panel. And you were investors in the space and you're interested in helping to remove animals from the food industry, and you essentially have a few options, right?

So you can invest in plant-based companies, you can [00:12:00] invest in cultivated companies, you can invest in fungi companies. And you have a limited amount of money to invest, would you put it all into cultivated? Would you put some of it into some of the others? Would you put all of it into others? Like where would you put your money?

So when this conference blows up and you're making a huge amount of profit and you wanna put it all back in the industry, where are you gonna put that money?

Alex Shirazi: Did you say limited or

Paul Shapiro: unlimited ? No. Give a limited amount of money, sadly. What would you be predicting is gonna be the best way? To, Of course, I'm not saying that they can't be complimentary, I'm just saying, you know, maybe you divided half and half between two of them.

I don't know. But what would you say you would bet on for the most likely ways to reduce the number of animals used for food?

Alex Shirazi: I'll take this one. In the early days it was really interesting because we saw companies coming out saying like, I'm doing, we are gonna be creating beef muscle, or we're gonna be creating.

Pork fat or you know, we are gonna be creating, you know, X, Y, and Z. And I think now, and especially with the amount of companies that are in the space now, speakers that have been on even this stage here [00:13:00] today, we're starting to see more companies evolve that are specifically focusing on specific aspects of supporting the industry.

And so I think that supporting the industry is something that we are gonna see that these companies are, are gonna actually get a lot bigger. I think also the amount of money that has gone into a lot of these companies is really insane thinking that, you know, the entire industry didn't even have a 100 million in investment, whereas now individual companies have 100 million plus.

I don't have the answer for like exactly what kind of company, but I think a company that's supporting the industry in some way, shape, or form.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. What about you An. Would you invest in more than cultivated meat, or would you put it all in cultivated meat? I think

Anita Broellochs: I would evenly distribute it between all categories, , because I do think so.

If it was for me, like I think I, I mean I'm vegan, so I would be totally fine on a plant based diet, but I just realize, I mean, there's just so [00:14:00] many people in this world that. Will always, no matter what, they will not like to eat something vegan. Even sometimes I, I made the experience, I, I bake a cake and I bring it to a party and people eat it, and then like, they're like, Oh, it's so tasty.

Can have a second slice. And then somebody will mention like, Is this vegan cake? And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, it's vegan. And they're like, Eh, I know I'm good. I don't want another slice. And I think it's just like, I don't know what it is because I don't understand it personally because to me it doesn't make sense.

But I just know so many people in my like friends and family circles that just will no matter what, I will always be like, No, I need my meat and it needs to come from an animal and it needs to be meat. So I think culture meat is really the best shot to really. Have meat because it is meat, right? It's from an animal.

So that argument doesn't make sense anymore to say, Oh, it needs to come from animal because it, It is an animal, right? So it's animal cells. So that's why I think culture at meat is definitely important. But I do think the vegan community is growing and growing too. So I think we do need more vegan and plant based options too.

Paul Shapiro: You're going King Solomon, split that baby right down the middle? [00:15:00] Yes. Okay. Yeah, you just reminded me of one of my favorite jokes, which is somebody says, Here, you wanna try this apple? And they say, Yeah, sure. That's good. By the way, it's vegan. They said, I knew it tasted funny. . Okay, so I asked Larissa Zimber off the author of Technically Food earlier in the day, and I'll ask you now the same question.

Plant-based meat has been in the market for decades. In fact, the very first recipe for plant-based meat ever recorded in human history was more than a thousand years ago, a thousand years ago, in ancient China. The first patent on plant-based meat was filed in 1899 by John Harvey Kellogg, guests of Kelloggs, and was granted, and now you have a force, hundreds of more patents in this space.

You have huge amounts of money going into it. Really big companies, big IPOs and so on, and yet plant-based meat is still not at 1% of the total volume of meat. The number of animals who are being raised for food continues to rise both in the US and around the world, and in the places where it'll matter the most, like China and India and so on.

Meat demand is only going up, not down. So my question for you is this, [00:16:00] with huge amounts of money going into plant-based meat, and it still is not 1% of US volume of meat sold. When do you think cultivated meat will comprise 1%? Cause the whole purpose of this entire endeavor, of course, is to try to create a more sustainable food supply that's less reliant on animals and more reliant on either sales or fungi or plants.

And so then the question is, when do you predict cultivated meat will reach not just commercial sales, but actually get to 1% of the total meat market? I don't think

Alex Shirazi: it needs to. That's not really the answer I think a lot of people want to hear, but I think the idea is that we need to change the meat that we're eating.

It's not that we need to replace the meat that we're eating with something like Impossible Foods in a plant-based form or cultured meat. I think what we need to do is kind of stop eating as much meat. And maybe if we wanna have a, a luxury experience, go out for [00:17:00] a cultured meat steak from Ella Farms or Burger from Moosa Meat.

And so I think that how we need to think about things is that we should be changing the way we eat. And I always hear this idea of the name is escaping me, but meatless Monday, and I think Meatless Monday actually sounds like a terrible idea. It should actually be like meat full Monday where the only day of the week you eat meat is Monday.

I think it's not that we'll be replacing one to one. I think we'll see a lot of new foods come into the market, hopefully that we start changing our diets like that.

Paul Shapiro: What do you think, Anita? Do you want to read the question also?

Anita Broellochs: Well, I don't know when it's like how long it's going to take, but I know that everybody that I know that's working in this industry is definitely working as hard as they can to make it happen as soon as possible.

I don't know how to put a number of years or months, or.

Paul Shapiro: It could also be a hybrid approach as you know, how do you define cultivated meat? You know, people like Brian Spears of New H Meats will say you don't need [00:18:00] that much of the meat to be animal cells, that you can actually have majority plant based and have a small portion of a be cultivated animal

Alex Shirazi: cells.

I was just gonna say, I, I do think of just egg in, in this example, right? Because I think just egg is, is a product that is better than the actual egg. And once you have that option to either get an egg or get just egg, like the liquid, just egg. I think that we can easily get to 1% of all eggs. I don't think it's there yet, but I know it's in the, in the millions sold.

But I think if you look at that, it's something that it's better, it's more convenient. Sure. Right now it's more expensive, but hopefully that won't be the case in the future. Well,

Paul Shapiro: I do wanna ask you, because the conference is called cms, which is convenient because every name anybody calls it begins with a C, right?

Whether it's Queen meat, cultivated meat, cultured me, cell based me, it always begins with a C. Like nobody's proposed any name that isn't C based, it seems. But the Good Food Institute recently did this survey where they found that three quarters of the companies in the space are using. Cultivated now, [00:19:00] and there's been a, a wide shift, according to their survey of the CEOs in this space too, cultivated away from cultured.

And it seems like there's not much desire or appetite for cell based. So are we gonna have in 2022 the Cultivated meat symposium or will this remain the cultured meat symposium? I

Anita Broellochs: think it will. Remain a cultured meat symposium, but people can call it whatever they want. I think we even had a post ourselves where we called it the Cultivated Meat Symposium.

Paul Shapiro: Wow, okay. But why going on to cultured when it seems like people were moving toward Right.

Anita Broellochs: I don't know. I think it just started with it. But actually the Good Food Institute did ask us in the beginning to change our podcast name from Culture Meat and Future Food Podcast to Clean Meat and Future Food podcast.

So I'm glad we didn't do that because now we would have to change it again . So,

Alex Shirazi: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, if we did change it to Clean Meat Symposium, then we, we would be changing it. But we didn't change it because we saw that cultured meat was what most [00:20:00] people internationally recognized it as. And clean meat not only didn't translate well to different languages, but also didn't sit well with the meat industry.

And I have to bring up clean meat, even though it's, you know, it's at this term that we're not using these days is because, you know, cultured meat is working for us and now we actually have a lot more data and the data that we have. Differs from the Good Food Institute data and so cultivated meat does not form better on our data.

But with that being said, you know, we'll call it Cultivated Meat Symposium.

Anita Broellochs: Yeah. We even printed stickers that said, I love cultivated meat and stickers that say I love cultured meat. Wow. So I, I mean, we don't really have a strong opinion about the, the name. If

Alex Shirazi: we did kind of go based off of the data that we have, like this would be called the Synthetic Meat Symposium, ,

Paul Shapiro: I don't know why who, who you're pulling on this.

It must be just be detractors who want the industry to.

Alex Shirazi: It's really anybody who is interested in finding, If somebody is doing a search to [00:21:00] find cultured meat or cultivated meat, and they're not in the industry, what do they call it? What do they think about it as? Mm-hmm. . It's not cultivated meat. It's usually cultured meat or sell cultured meat.

Maybe that's because the name has stuck around, but if you ask a lot of folks, like for example, Ira of an Alan, and you know, she'll tell you that the names have changed. You know, so many times over the next, like, you know, 10, 20 over the last like 10, 20, 30 years. And so, you know, we'll probably see different names.

Now we're getting to a point where U S D A and FDA is getting more involved, so it is more important to kind of sit well with a name. And I, and I love the example Bruce Fricks gives about the alligator pair, which was the former name of, of the avocado. But I don't think that's the, the big issue now. I think we do need to fight for what cultured meat is and, and is not, you know, we'll call it cultivated meat and we'll try to avoid the, use the name lab grown meat, but even lab grown meat is, is something where a lot more [00:22:00] people recognize, not about consumer perception, about positive or negative, but a lot of more people do recognize it.

So I think we'll probably just use the name that most people recognize until it's, it's hopefully just called.

Paul Shapiro: I do agree with that in that nobody calls ice artificial ice anymore, right? As we've talked about before, like there was an ice industry, a natural ice industry for hundreds of years where ice was harvested from lakes, and then all of a sudden you had the advent of industrial refrigeration and that original ice was called artificial ice, and that's what they thought it was.

It was human made ice, and so it was artificial. Now we all have artificial ice makers in our homes. We call 'em freezers. We don't think there's anything unnatural about it at all, and I think eventually it will just be meat and that's, that's where we'll go. I do want to ask just a quick pivot here because Anita, you are identified on our screen up here as the founder and CEO of Beic Food.

So you are dipping your toe now, not just into something that [00:23:00] you said you didn't know about podcasting. And conference organizing, but also into entrepreneurship and starting your own company, which I understand is a fermentation based company. So I'm eager to hear what is ball foods and what are you doing there?

Anita Broellochs: Right. So as I mentioned in the beginning, we always, like four years, four or five years ago, we did get in that room together and we said we're going to create a cultured meat company. So I always did have the idea of a company, but. I guess just things happen and then it didn't become an actual company.

We created CMS and a podcast and everything. Like life got busy and, but I still am the back of my head. I was always thinking about like if I created a company, what could that be in this space? And as we just learned more and more and more about this space, I just feel like, okay, I don't just want to create another culture meat company anymore.

Just didn't feel right. And so now with oleic foods and we're creating recombinant proteins, so we're actually creating meat protein. So it's not that we're not creating the actual animal [00:24:00] cells, we're not culturing the animal cells cuz I did learn there's a lot of challenges with that. So we're creating recombinant meat protein that can be.

Used for as an ingredient pretty much for different applications.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. Are you able to divulge what species or what types of animal proteins you are seeking to ferment here? Not yet. Okay. All right. Well, I'm really looking forward to learning more about it. I know that's a, a really interesting thing that I know companies like Bond, Pet Foods are doing something similar to that as well.

I don't know if you are right. Yeah.

Anita Broellochs: Similar. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: similar, but you're better right. Of. Very cool. I really look forward to that. So for people who aren't necessarily familiar, what that means, you wanna tell 'em like, So you are not doing fermentation to get the biomass here. You're actually using. Your own microbes in order to create real animal proteins that don't involve an initial biopsy at all,

Anita Broellochs: right?

That's correct. So pretty much we're inserting the dna, the genetic code for the proteins that we're trying to create into microorganisms. That will then pretty much be like miniature factories creating our [00:25:00] protein, and then we can purify it from there and we'll have like a protein isolate. So the results is just protein, so it's not actual animal cells in there, and the organism that we're using will also not be in the final product.

So the product is pretty much just protein. So it's similar to what Perfect Day is doing or clear foods, but for meat.

Paul Shapiro: Exciting. All right, well I can't wait to learn more and hear about your big seed round, which I'm sure will be a very massive number. Let me also ask you, so I'm really intrigued by this idea that you, as a married couple, were doing all these projects.

I can assure you that if my wife and I were doing all these projects, it would lead to divorce. So, you know, you have the podcast, you have the conference, now you're starting your own company. Although Alex, I don't think you're involved in that. I hope not. At least

Alex Shirazi: just as a partner, as a, I mean not a business partner, as a, as a husband.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, good. Just keep it that. But you're also now doing a book together, a children's book. So tell me about this. What led you to think, ah, this would be a good use of our time? We're gonna write a children's book. What's it about?

Alex Shirazi: [00:26:00] I guess I'll start with the origin story. It was probably the end of 2018. I was in Berlin at provi and I was getting a, a tour of the provi incubator space and we had just had provi on the cultured Beaten Future Food podcast.

They were explaining the importance of educating children about, well, about why we should not eat animals. That was really interesting to me because at the same time, a lot of the companies had just presented at the conference hosted by Dr. Mark Post in in Morich. A lot of the companies would go on stage and say, You know, this is our research.

We think that this is gonna be a viable option in the next 10 to 15 years. And so I. Chatting with Anita and some of of the other folks that could potentially make this happen. And we thought, Well, who's gonna be making purchasing decisions in the next 10 to 15 years when perhaps these cultured meat products are available?

And those are [00:27:00] today's children. And so the book, which is entitled, Where Do Hot Dogs come from, is a way to kind of educate parents and. Younger children that there are different ways to make food or to make meat. And I don't know if he is still here, but Gabe is might be in the audience. He's our illustrator and, oh, there we go.

He was behind the column, but I also wanna say that it stems a lot from Anita's experience, so I'll pass it off.

Anita Broellochs: Right. So as I mentioned, I grew up on a farm in Germany, and when I decided I was going to be vegetarian, I really didn't even know that's a thing. I didn't even know what a vegetarian was. And then my parents told me, So you're going to be vegetarian.

I'm like, What does that mean? Or like, if you don't eat animal product or if you don't eat meat, you're vegetarian. I'm like, Okay, that's what I'm going to be. So I felt like when I was little, like nobody even, like it wasn't really an option. Nobody educated me about it and everybody just thought I was a crazy little girl like that.

I don't know. They'd still put like meat on my plate all [00:28:00] the time, and they're just like, Why would she not eat that? That's so weird. And I just feel like we have to just tell children that there are alternatives. You can't just like force children to eat meat without sharing with them that there are alternatives to.

Paul Shapiro: When is the book coming out? Will it be available for holiday

Alex Shirazi: gifts in 2021? It will be. So we just hosted a successful Kickstarter, so thank you for any backers. I see a couple in the audience. Thank you for the, the backers of the Kickstarter campaign. And we are now testing out print and I see Gabe , Gabe back there, and it'll actually be ready next month.

So in and actually a couple days we'll start shipping some of the first books

Anita Broellochs: out. Yeah. If anyone is interested in learning more about, it's the URL where you can learn more about it. It's just hotdog.fyi.

Paul Shapiro: So hotdog.fyi. Okay. As we begin to wrap up as listeners of the Business for Good podcast, every episode, there's always two questions that get asked to guests, so I hope you've had time to reconsider.

But first and [00:29:00] foremost, you are up to so many things. For anybody who's thinking, Wow, what a power couple, these guys are so awesome. I wanna be more like them. What resources do you offer? Are you there? Any things that you've read, that you've seen that you've really enjoyed, that you found useful, that you would recommend to other people to guide them in their journeys as they embark on trying to do some good in the world like you all are?

Anita Broellochs: So I listen to a lot of audio books and podcasts that just like inspire me. And Paul's podcast, for example, is a good resource. I think , But generally I just like to listen. Like when I'm doing things, I just have like my headphones and I listen to things.

Alex Shirazi: For anybody who is is new to the space, anything from a New Harvest or The Good Food Institute are fantastic places to start, really good resources.

But lately a protein report. I believe it's protein report.org has been a really great resource aggregate of really what is is happening in the space right now.

Anita Broellochs: Right. And one more resource to add for scientific [00:30:00] people in the room. The Mark post conference is the number one, I think, scientific conference in the Netherlands.

Everywhere. So it's going to be virtual actually happening in the end of November.

Paul Shapiro: All right, well, we'll include links to all of those in the show notes for this episode. And finally, I know Anita, their, your answer to this question since you just started your own company to do this. But there's a lot of ideas out there.

There's only so many things that any individual can do, and a lot of the times people in this space have lots of ideas for companies that they wish existed that don't exist, or they wish that somebody would tackle this problem that hasn't yet been tackle. So do you have any thoughts of what you're not doing that you wish somebody else would take up?

Maybe somebody listening to this episode right now who would say, Ah, Alex and Anita think I oughta do this. Maybe I'll start this company. So

Anita Broellochs: I don't know if this is actually possible or like, I don't know too much about it, but I noticed that there are some plant based fish options now where they pretty much take like a melon or like a tomato based, like you can like boil tomatoes and it looks like [00:31:00] sushi.

And I was thinking it would be super cool to genetically engineer like tomato to make it actually produce fish protein and then you can harvest that and then it's like a cold tomato. Fish protein sushi type of thing.

Paul Shapiro: That is really cool. I think that you would make Larissa ember off's blood boil if that happened.

She's like cringing listening to this. I think it would be pretty cool to see. I know that there is already the tomato that can withstand the freezing. The engineered it to have like some fish gene in there is, I don't know. Yeah. Anyway. Well, for any of you would be entrepreneurs or want or bours out there, there you can try making a tomato based sushi that actually has real fish protein.

What about you, Alex?

Alex Shirazi: I think that as we've seen more and more resources in cultured. What is starting to get really exciting and, and I don't think there's quite a forum. On the topic yet is a kind of cultured meat symposium, but instead of cultured meat, it would be about cultured leather products. And I was just speaking to some folks from in vitro labs.

I don't know if there's a large forum dedicated to these [00:32:00] types of material technologies using cellular agriculture yet, but I think that could be interesting.

Paul Shapiro: That would be really cool. In fact, you know, there's some really interesting companies forging real partnerships now with like Stella McCartney and Adidas.

They're doing mys leather, so it's not quite cellular agriculture, but it's. Really cool. And even Pena Techs, which is using upcycle pineapple plant leaves is creating real partnerships and creating weather type products from the pineapple industry. So that would be awesome. I know that there is a, a GFI type organization now.

The materials innovation initiative, which is designed to act like a good food institute for the animal free material space. Maybe they'll be the ones to put on that conference.

Anita Broellochs: Right. And I think there's actually a new podcast that started, I forgot what exactly it's called, or I forgot the person's name who started it too.

Do you.

Alex Shirazi: We'll put that in the show notes too. , but, but the first episode is from the Material Innovation Institute, or in

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, Initiative. Cool. Initiative. Okay. Well, very cool. Well, I know that I speak for everybody who is here at this conference and everybody who's [00:33:00] virtually streaming and everybody who wants to attend this conference, and expressing real gratitude to both of you for being the progenitors of this conference, for sticking with it through not only the pandemic, but now the post pandemic.

And bringing us all together to create a real industry, not just a, a movement of people who are interested in this theoretical challenge, but a real industry where there's real dollars and real companies that. Doing great things and hopefully next year we're gonna have a tenfold increase in the amount of cultivated meat that's being served at CMS 2022

So please give a round of applause to Anita and Alex. Thanks for listening. We hope you found use in this episode. If so, don't keep it to yourself. Please leave us a five star rating on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. And as always, we hope you will be in the business of doing good.