Ep. 183 - Taste, Price, and the Future of Food: Bruce Friedrich’s Mission to Remake Meat
Show Notes
If you’ve been reading food and ag tech headlines lately, you might think alternative meat is collapsing. Startups shutting down, layoffs, funding drying up…doom everywhere.
Our guest on this episode thinks that reaction says more about how humans misunderstand technological revolutions than it does about the future of food.
I’m talking with Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute and author of the new book Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—and Our Future. Bruce argues that history shows us something uncomfortable but important: most people don’t change their behavior because of ethics; they change when something better comes along.
In this episode, we dig into why taste and price matter more than values, why $3 billion in cultivated meat investment may barely scratch the surface of what’s needed, which governments are treating alternative protein as a national security issue, and why today’s failures should be expected rather than a sign of futility.
This is a wide-ranging, candid conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and what it will actually take to transform humanity’s favorite food.
Discussed in this episode
Bruce was our guest on Episode 142 as well.
Bruce references the good work of NECTAR putting alt-meat products to the test.
Bruce also endorses Food Systems Innovations and Food Solutions Action.
Paul discusses seeing Quorn in a London KFC selling essentially at price parity with chicken.
Bruce suggests subscribing to GFI’s newsletters.
The Pessimists Archive chronicles the moral panics and technophobia of yore.
Get to Know bruce friedrich
Bruce Friedrich is founder & president of the Good Food Institute, a global network of nonprofit science-focused think tanks, with operations in India, Israel, Brazil, APAC, Europe, and the United States. GFI works on alternative protein policy, science, and corporate engagement - to accelerate the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity. Charity evaluator Giving Green finds that GFI is one of the top five non-profits for climate change mitigation - a status GFI has retained for the past four years.
Publishers Weekly included Bruce’s new book Meat on its list of the 10 best new releases in science, writing: “This packed account makes food science feel like an urgent and essential undertaking.”
The book has also earned endorsements from father of synthetic biology Prof. George Church (“an engaging treatise on using science to make meat far more efficiently… includes fascinating observations in every chapter”); The Ministry for the Future author Kim Stanley Robinson (“The topic is crucial, and Friedrich’s presentation is clear, persuasive, and entertaining”); Nobel laureate in economics Michael Kremer (Meat “contributes to an important and timely global conversation”); primatologist Jane Goodall (“Please read this book: it is engaging, informative, and gives us hope for a kinder future”); and more.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello friend, and welcome to episode 183 of the business for good podcast. Before we get into it, I am also now starting each episode with a wild fact that might surprise you. And so here is this episode's wild fact. Did you know that there are more vegetarians in India than there are people in the United States? That's right, the vegetarian population of India alone is larger than the entire US population. All right, now let's get into it. This is a special episode. Since not only have I personally known this guest for literally 30 years. That's right, we met first in 1996 but he's someone I respect very much. If you've been reading food and ag, tech headlines lately, you might think that alternative meat is collapsing. Startups are shutting down. They're doing layoffs. Funding is drying up, Doom everywhere. Our guest on this episode, though, thinks that reaction says more about how humans misunderstand technological revolutions than it does about the future of food. I'm talking on this episode with Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute and author of the brand new book out right now, meet how the next agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favorite food and our future. Bruce argues that history shows us something uncomfortable but important, that most people don't change their behavior because of ethics. They change when something better comes along. In this episode, we dig into why taste and price matter more than values, why $3 billion in cultivated meat investment may barely scratch the surface of what's needed, which governments are treating alternative protein as a national security issue, and why today's failures should be expected, rather than are a sign of futility. This is a wide ranging, candid conversation about what's working what isn't, and what it will actually take to transform humanity's favorite food.
Paul Shapiro 2:18
Bruce, welcome back to the business for good podcast,
Speaker 1 2:21
I am delighted to be here, Paul, thank you so much for having him back. It's a very
Paul Shapiro 2:24
hallowed position to be in, to be a repeat guest on this show. There are only a couple people who have had that venerable, esteemed distinction. So congratulations one more time, and you're going to be like the Tom Brady of business for good
Speaker 1 2:37
I really am grateful. I love the podcast. I think you do a you do a phenomenal job. And so important to highlight all of these people who are using business for good. It's it's really laudable. Well, that's
Paul Shapiro 2:49
generous of you, and you certainly are promoting many businesses that are doing good, including in your very new book, which is coming out right as this podcast drops. It's called meat, how the next agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favorite food and our future. You can get it@meatbook.org or anywhere the books are sold from Amazon on down. So I have read it because you generously sent me an advanced copy. I read it word for word, and I really liked it, but I'll tell you, probably my favorite part was the blurbs you have. Like, it's like scores of blurbs, and certainly, dozens. I don't know if it scores, but it's blurbs after blurbs. After blurbs. Of all these very famous people, the best one, though, is by the Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten, who I love reading gene in the Washington Post, but he has a really good line. I'm going to read it. This is his blurb. Normally, blurbs are not really worthy of even mentioning. But he starts it out. He says, years ago, Bruce Friedrich took me to dinner to persuade me that a plant based meat is just as succulent as beef and is the inevitable future of hot cuisine. We did a blind taste test. His contention fell apart miserably, and I joyfully wrote about it in The Washington Post. I am now convinced that he wrote this new book entirely to prove to me that I was a blind, ignorant, cynical and arrogant fool who understood nothing about alternative meats and their potential. So I just read it, he is right, all right. So I doubt that you really think that gene is an arrogant, cynical fool. But what changed? What do you think changed his mind that went from saying, actually, this tastes like like dog food, to him saying, Actually, I think I was wrong.
Speaker 1 4:17
I think he probably still thinks that the products are not good enough, but gene really is a case in point about the need for the book. So gene is a deeply ethical human being. He cares about global hunger and climate change. He wrote one of the most beautiful cover stories for The Washington Post magazine that I think anybody has ever written. So just a note about gene he, I believe, is the only person ever to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for long form feature writing. He is just a beautiful writer. He cares deeply about animal protection, and yet anybody who follows Him. Knows that he writes about eating meat kind of constantly. He absolutely loves meat. He is sort of a gourmand, and he is incredibly excited about the idea of plant based meat and cultivated meat that competes on taste. He's actually one of these people who you know in the book, I make the case that the vast majority of people are not going to pay more and they're not going to sacrifice on taste. People want for the products to shoot up the S curve of adoption. They need to compete on both price and taste for gene. That's not true. He's happy to pay more, but he's not willing to sacrifice on taste, even if it means living in misalignment with an awful lot of his ethical principles. So basically, what he told me about the book is that it convinced him that this is possible. So I spend a lot of time in chapters six, seven and 11, talking about where we are now versus where we were 10 years ago, talking about, I interviewed about 30 plant based scientists and 30 cultivated meat scientists. You know, I started with the question is taste and price parity for plant based meat, for the plant based scientists, cultivated meat for the cultivated meat scientists. Is this possible? What will it take? How much would it cost? Questions like that, and I report on their answers in chapter six, which is about cultivated meat, chapter seven, which is about plant based meat, and chapter 11, which answers the question, essentially, when will we have plant based and cultivated meat at taste and price parity, and Gene thought I was convincing that although he doesn't like the products now, we haven't put a lot of effort, scientific effort, into getting to taste parody, and he came away convinced that we can get there. I was particularly gratified your intro was hilarious about your favorite part of the book was the parts that I did not write. But I was I was really incredibly gratified that the father of synthetic biology, George Church, who is a professor at Harvard Medical School, Professor of genetics, and he said that he thought I was convincing that science was up to the task of plant based and cultivated meat. He also said that he thought there were fascinating observations in every chapter, which is also nice. And the deputy editor of Nature Biotechnology also wrote an endorsement. And she also said that she thought I was convincing that science is up to the task. So that's basically what Gene was saying.
Paul Shapiro 7:36
There Got it. Thank you. You know, obviously I'm a highly biased source, but I too, found it convincing. But for those of people who haven't yet read the book, your basic argument is that for many decades, advocates for plant based eating have talked about the reasons for their advocacy, which are generally, it's better for animal welfare, it's better for your health, and it's better for the environment. And your argument is that none of those three things actually motivate most people's food choices. Most people's food choices are not motivated by animal welfare, healthy environment ethics. They're motivated by taste and price, right, just as you just alluded to. And so the question then becomes, if people don't view that plant based foods today taste better than meat, let's say, Take forget about plant based meat. Let's say, you know, bean and rice, burritos, lentil soup, hummus wraps, things that, frankly, I like eating, but most of humanity would rather eat meat. Most people, as soon as they have some money in their pocket, stop eating lentils and start eating meat instead. Your argument is, well, we have to actually try to create something that tastes like meat in order for people to switch away from it. I want to get into that because you're saying you think it's possible. You note in the book Bruce that there's like $3 billion of investment in the last decade, really, less than a decade, that have gone into cultivated meat, or real meat grown without animals. That sounds like a gargantuan amount of money, you would think, well, for $3 billion surely we would have some products on supermarket shelves right now when, of course, in any meaningful sense of the word, we don't you argue, though, that $3 billion isn't as much as it might seem to the way person. What do you mean?
Speaker 1 9:14
I mean it's, uh, it's $3 billion spread out over a decade. So the first funding for a startup, cultivated meat company was for upside foods, which was then called Memphis meats. It was $120,000 in October of 2015 and then they raised a, I think, like $3.15 million in February of 2016 that was their seed round. And over the last decade, it's been a total of about $3 billion spread across roughly 150 companies that have raised some money. And so in the book, I point out that if you want to develop a new drug, the average cost is going to be about $2 billion and that's if you already have. Your Merck or your Novo Nordisk, your massive pharmaceutical company, it's still going to take you $2 billion to develop a drug. Or, if you're looking at EV you're manufacturing EVs, one EV battery factory costs more than $3 billion generally about four to $6 billion for one EV battery factory, and that $3 billion in addition to being spread over 150 companies, it's spread over a decade, and it's for everything. It's for office space rentals, it's for lawyers and incorporation. It's for administrative staff. It's for literally everything, not just R and D. So it really isn't that much money. I haven't talked to anybody who is a scientist who thinks that $3 billion gets you where you need to go when there are I mean, like I try in the book not to shrink from the fact that this is going to be challenging. I mean, the Endeavor is basically take what we know about tissue engineering, apply it to food so food grade production facilities, food grade cell culture, media, et cetera, and scale up. That's easy to say. It's super challenging, and nobody has done it yet. So it's really, it's just not that much money.
Paul Shapiro 11:22
Yeah, I think, you know, it sounds like a lot of money when you divide it over, you know, 100 or 150 companies that have existed, it certainly makes it far less. But let me ask you, like, if I gave you a truth serum and I went back to 20, let's say 15, or, let's say 2016, 10 years ago, when the you were starting the Good Food Institute, and I gave you a truth serum, and I told you, okay, Bruce, you and I are going to be talking in 2026 $3 billion will have been pumped into these, what we would have called Clean meat companies at the time. Do you think that they'll be selling in restaurants and grocery stores by that point? What do you think that Bruce of 2016 would have said, not knowing what you know now, but knowing what you knew then.
Speaker 1 12:03
Well, I mean, one thing I will note is that in 2019, or 2020 when believer meats and upside foods both closed rounds at like four to $500 million my expectation was that they would continue to make progress and continue to raise money. So I do think there was a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The fact that money stopped flowing to these companies required that the companies get significantly more lean and scale back, and a lot of their goals and expectations had to be curbed quite a bit. So it seems to me, Well, I think obviously we would be further along than we are now. If the sort of venture capital enthusiasm had been followed by mainstream bank enthusiasm and loans as well as additional venture capital enthusiasm. If you look at something like the Beyond Meat valuation, which people look at now and think is kind of insane, but if you look at how quickly Beyond Meat, once it launched the beyond burger in 2016 and if you look at the scale, the degree to which its sales went up in 2017 2018 2019 if it had continued that trajectory, it would have gotten to a place where it earned that valuation, I think, in about three years. And so investors were expecting that to continue. And what turned out to be true is that improving the products and bringing down the costs was a lot harder than expected, and then I think also just a lot of the capital dried up. I don't know what I would have thought for sure in 2016 about $3 billion I know that in 2015 I would have thought it was a fool's errand, as I talk about in the book GFI. When we first started working on it, at the end of 2015 going into 2016 we didn't have any expectation that cultivated meat was, you know, which we were then calling in vitro meat or Lacroix meat. We didn't have any expectation that that was going to be a meaningful commercial exercise anytime soon. The original vision of the organization that products are going to need to compete on price and taste. Basically, it builds from renewable energy and electric vehicles. You need to eliminate the green premium. The world over time is going to consume more energy. The world over time is going to drive more miles. The world over time is going to eat more meat. So we need renewable energy, we need electric vehicles, and we need to make meat in this new and better way, and it's going to need to compete on prices. Taste. That was the idea from the beginning. And we misunderstood the nature of the challenge with regard to plant based meat. We thought it was going to be easier than it turned out to be. We really thought it was sort of a culinary endeavor, and we just needed a lot more companies like impossible and beyond. And we misunderstood, at the very outset, what was happening with cultivated meat. We thought it was like four years, if ever, that cultivated meat was going to be commercialized, and it was really uma valletti, and then Liz Specht GFI, first senior scientist, who went on to become our Vice President for Science and Technology and is now working at DARPA. It was her analysis, working with the folks at upside foods and a bunch of her mentors from her PhD and other scientists, that convinced us that cultivated meat could actually be commercially viable in a reasonable timeframe. And that conviction just grows and grows the more we dive into it and over time, and the more we talk to top tissue engineering and biomedical engineering and biotechnology scientists.
Paul Shapiro 16:08
Yeah, I hear you on all of that. I do think that at least i If I could give myself a truth serum. I think a decade ago, when I was thinking about starting to write this book that became queen meat, I would have been surprised to see how little cultivated meat is being sold 10 years on. That would have been surprising to me. Now, I always thought it was a major challenge, and I take a pretty cautious tone in the book about the possibility that it may not work at all. At the same time, billions of dollars have been spent trying to advance plant based meat, and it still is not at taste and price parity for the most part, and so I wouldn't expect that billions on cultivated could do the same.
Speaker 1 16:45
One thing that I, as you know, dive into in the book is the degree to which I'm not sure that's true that billions of dollars have been spent on plant based meat. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not true that billions of dollars have been spent on plant based meat. You don't think
Paul Shapiro 17:00
that beyond an impossible collectively have raised a billion dollars.
Speaker 1 17:04
I don't think they've spent billions of dollars. Impossible has actually raised, I think, $2 billion so I guess you're right to a degree, but they're also a lot of that is spent on marketing and production. And I mean, they are, they are a significant food company, okay,
Paul Shapiro 17:21
fair point. So you're saying billions of dollars on R and D, right? I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1 17:25
Well, I mean, even like, I mean, the challenge is R D and scaling, right? The R D gets you to taste parity. The scaling gets you to price parity, if you are simultaneously running pretty significantly sized company, churning out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product every year. I guess part of that is going to feed into scaling. But the main point I wanted to make is that most of the companies in the plant based meat realm are not putting any money into research and development. They oftentimes don't have CTO Chief Science officers or chief technology officers. So I do think you're not going to solve a problem that you're not trying to solve if you're looking at cultivated meat. Everybody, like all of the companies, are focused on basically the same thing. We need to hit the marketplace and compete with industrial animal meat. On the plant based meat side, a lot of the companies are really just focused on competing with one another, which I think is unfortunate. And a lot of the companies that came along and said we are the next impossible, weren't they were the next garden burger posing as the next impossible. And sometimes it we, you know, it even got worse than that. Sometimes they would say, but unlike impossible, you know, we're using clean labels, and we're using, you know, quinoa or something that costs five times as much as soy. So, yeah, I mean, I dive into this and sort of give some stories along those lines in the book.
Paul Shapiro 18:49
Indeed, you know, one thing that is not lost on me as somebody who spends my career in the mycoprotein space is, if you look at, you know, the only successful mycoprotein company, which is corn, Q, U, O, R, N. It was literally decades of R D before they ever commercialized, right? Like they started working on that in the 1960s and didn't commercialize it until, you know, like the late 90s, 2000 era, it's now, of course, it wasn't billions of dollars being spent on R and D, but, and it took a long time, but it was decades of research. Okay, that brings me then to this following question that I have for you. Your argument is that, essentially, we need something that's indistinguishable, that on wine taste tests, people cannot tell the difference between the product that we hope they'll purchase and the incumbent animal based product. And let me just pressure test that for you and see what you think of this argument. You know, when you and I were born, the per capita demand for beef was a lot higher than it is now, and per capita demand for chicken was a lot lower than it is now, and that is switched during your and my lifetimes, the Americans on average, eat way more chicken than we did for. 50 years ago and way, way less beef than we did 50 years ago. It's not that people switched from beef to chicken because they thought chicken tasted like beef. They didn't eat chicken and think, Oh, this is indistinguishable. They primarily switch because it's cheaper and they perceive it as being healthier, right? I would imagine that most people even think that beef tastes better than chicken. That'd be my guess. And so in this case, you had a product that you know maybe doesn't match on taste. It's not indistinguishable. Maybe it doesn't even provide as good of a taste, but it's cheaper and it's perceived as being healthier. Is it possible, then that there is some type of an animal free product that could come out which could meet that same standard? It tastes good enough, but is substantially cheaper that people might be willing to switch to it rather than eating, let's say chicken or beef or pork.
Speaker 1 20:47
I mean, maybe, but I will say that's been what people have been trying to do for more than 50 years,
Paul Shapiro 20:56
but nobody has yet. You make the point in the book that nobody's disproved the price and taste argument, because nobody has gotten there yet. Nobody is undercutting chicken on price, or really even beef on price for the most part. What you're saying is people have been trying to do this for 50 years, but it hasn't happened. There's not some plant based meat that's out there that's substantially cheaper than animal based meat, to my knowledge, at least.
Speaker 1 21:18
I mean, like, I think you're so if your thesis is, could we have a plant based meat that's cheaper, but not as good, and it would displace animal meat? Is that the question?
Paul Shapiro 21:30
Well, yeah, and the question that is the question, but that also seems to be exactly what happened with chicken displacing beef.
Speaker 1 21:38
Got it? Yeah. I mean, it's certainly the case that there are some grocery stores in Europe that are selling plant based meats that my understanding is are not very good. They're selling them for less than meat, and they are selling quite well. So that would validate that thesis to some degree. And I think the same, you know, the same is true in the other direction, people like Gene Weingarten, and I think a lot of people, if you had plant based meat that was just as delicious, even if it cost more. I mean, it's, it's my strong impression that Impossible Foods is doing better than any of the other plant based meat companies. And Impossible Foods also on the so the nectar project, which is a project of food solutions, food systems innovations, did taste tests with all the plant based meats. And impossible really ran the table in terms of having most of the best products, but all of them cost a lot more than what they're replacing, but there are an awful lot of people who are very happy to pay a little bit more for the animal welfare benefits, environmental benefits, other benefits, as long as they don't have to sacrifice on taste. But that is going to hit a pretty hard ceiling. So even looking at beef consumption in the United States, it's still 38 kilograms a year in the United States. So that's 80 pounds a year
Paul Shapiro 23:12
for some of the US, and from a kilos, that's my type of conversation. That's good.
Unknown Speaker 23:17
It's our world in data that I'm looking at
Paul Shapiro 23:20
for switching. I think, I think, I think it's our patriotic duty to switch to metric. But, yeah, you see an argument that people still eat a lot of beef, but admittedly it's a lot less right.
Speaker 1 23:29
Yes, yeah, no, I agree with that. And I think hitting a good product that is less expensive gets you part of the way there. My guess is that an excellent product that is more expensive gets you even further, but neither of them comes anywhere near solving the problem. It's a little bit like saying, you know, like, if we improve bike lanes, somebody might have argued that nobody's ever going to bike instead of driving. And when I started biking in Washington, DC, circa 1990 1991 I was the only one out there. Now they have really great bike lanes, and there are lots of people out there, and that's true all over the place, but there's still a lot more cars. It's just a little bit better than it would have been without the excellent bike lanes. You can make a similar argument about public transit. You can make a lot of similar arguments. You know a great bullet train is going to decrease air travel. It's not going to eliminate air travel, but it will decrease it. We really do. I think need products that compete on price and taste in the same way that we need renewable energy that is always available competes on price is linked into the grid. We need electric vehicles that compete on price and have a strong and fast charging infrastructure and so on, but definitely in favor of all of the above, I think products that compete on price or taste are moving us in the right direction, for sure.
Paul Shapiro 24:54
Yeah, well, I'll give you a focus group, example of one, and it's a good focus group. Because it's blind, right? So my dog, Eddie, does not like plant based meat. He will not eat almost any plant based meat out there. However, he loves impossible burgers. And I thought, you know, here, like, this dog doesn't know. I didn't tell him it was impossible, right? He just ate it. He loves it. And I thought, well, it must be the heme, because that's the main difference, right? Like that's the only big difference. They must smell the heme and really like it. So then I was surprised to see him drooling when my wife Tony was air frying impossible chicken nuggets, which have no heme because there's no human beef. There's no heme in the impossible chicken nuggets, and he loves them. So whatever impossible is doing is working. And I always think like they should not spend money on focus groups. They should just send product to me, and I'll see if Eddie will eat it, because that is the test, and he loves impossible products. I don't know what it is, but they're doing something to make the food taste really, really excellent.
Speaker 1 25:51
I mean, you know, nectar, nectar had, I think, like six products which were clearly best in class. And I think, like, 80% of meat eaters liked them as much as the product that they were in competition with. Four of them were impossible products, the nugget, the burger, I think the hot dog, and maybe the grounds, I can't remember, but yeah. I mean, you know, you get what you pay for. And impossible has put a lot more money into R and D than any other company.
Paul Shapiro 26:21
Yes, I don't doubt that for a second. Okay, you mentioned things like transportation and other types of the other parts of the economy that we want to switch you know, you and I are in concert that you know, virtually every time that a category of animal exploitation has been ended, it has been ended not by humane sentiment, not by environmental concern, but really because of technology. You write compellingly and speak compellingly about how horses ultimately were displaced by cars. And interestingly, I learned recently that actually bicycles put a big dent in the horse market even before cars came out as well. Whaling was largely ended by the invention of kerosene for that displaced whale oil and eventually, electricity. We used to write letters with goose quills. Now, then we switched to fountain pens, not because anybody cared about geese, but because fountain pens were just a lot better. We used to have our mail carried by carrier pigeons, and messages, you know, more were carrier pigeons. Then that got shifted to telegraphs. And the list goes on and on and on, of so many times when an act of animal liberation, a whole category of animal exploitation was ended and was by technology, really almost void of humane sentiment at all. Now that brings up the question for me, which is as follows, it's actually quite rare that animal exploitation has been rendered obsolete by a new technology that created a mimicry, right? It's not like Ford invented a mechanical horse that just carried your carriage faster, or fake pigeons that flew faster, or synthetic quills that were more durable than goose quills, right? New inventions that have liberated animals, not always, but most of the time, seem to be just a superior way of doing the same thing, of transporting us or sending messages or writing, et cetera. Does this suggest to you even further than maybe mimicry isn't that and it's not very high bar mimicry. Maybe there is something that is just better in some way, right? Is it mimicry that is needed? Or do you think that chickens and cows might go the way of horses and, you know, Goose quill pens, because something better has been invented?
Speaker 1 28:20
Well, I mean, I think the fact, like, if you look at antimicrobial resistance, the top two causes of antimicrobial resistance are the use of antibacterial the use of antibiotics in animal for meat production and the use of antibiotics for human beings To treat sickness. About 70% of global antibiotics are fed to farm animals. That's going up and up and up every single year. Who has been screaming about the end of working antibiotics as a result of these two causes since at least 1999 and physicians have been talking about it since the introduction of antibiotics into farm animal production in the late 1940s early 1950s so I do think it is a superior production practice that could have massive benefits in terms of human health if we phase out antibiotics by using plant based and cultivated meat. Similarly as I talk about in the book, the USDA has 100 drugs, including ivermectin and penicillin and ractopamine and amoxicillin and many other drugs that the USDA considers that to be, you know, considers there to be safe levels of these drugs in the meat supply. So it is a significantly safer, healthier product that obviously has massive advantages for climate, for biodiversity, for pandemic, risk, for hunger and malnutrition, but also, yes, at the end of the day, the final product, one of the things Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, is fond of talking about, is that we didn't domesticate. Chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, turkeys. We didn't domesticate these animals because they had the tastiest flesh. We domesticated them because they were the easiest to domesticate. So if you get to parity with the meats that people are familiar with and like right now, sure it certainly makes sense that you could make an even better, you know, beef, pork, chicken, etc, and you could keep going to a range of other meats that it turns out people really love. I do think it's a reasonable initial goal, though, to create those same products, but without all of the external costs as well as, hey, it's a massive economic opportunity, and it's a huge food security and food self sufficiency opportunity. And that's why, if we were having this conversation seven years ago, no government was putting any money, and hadn't in about 15 years put any money into plant based meat or cultivated meat, R and D. Now, every major government that spends money on agriculture or biotechnology is funding work on these technologies, and it's really for economic competitiveness and food security reasons. And I think if we were to, you know, go to these governments and say, Actually, we want to design a whole new better food, maybe they would fund it. But it still feels to me like reasonable that you get to parody and then keep going, rather than shoot for something off to the side. But I'm, you know, I'm happy with all of it. I'm a fan of all of the above,
Paul Shapiro 31:31
for sure. Yeah, the question that I wonder is, when you talk about initially, is that setting the bar too high, right? Like these governments might also be funding, you know, let's say they're funding some new crop that they want to get into, or something like that, right there. They might be interested in funding some new protein out there. And I'm not saying this is true. I'm just wondering if it is true that taste parity is a very high standard, and it may be that you can get to undercutting the economics sooner on that, in a way that helps. Now, I agree it's better to do both, of course, of course, it's better to do both. But I'm just wondering that, and I don't want to belabor the point, but you bring up governments, Bruce, and you know, I want to ask you, like, is there a government out there that you think is particularly noteworthy on this. You write in the book about how Singapore and Israel, for example, are real leaders on this alternative protein space. It's interesting that two of the smallest countries in the world are leading this. You make this argument that, you know, look, yeah, there. It's great for animals. It's great for the environment and climate and so on. And you are, you deride the United Nations for not even talking about this issue appropriately. So just like a lot of the environmental groups don't, but you go further and say it's actually a national security issue that the governments of the world ought to be focusing on this not merely because it is good for the environment or not merely because it is good for antimicrobial resistance, but it's in their own country's national security, that they should be doing it. So what countries out there do you think are taking this seriously and should be emulated by others?
Speaker 1 33:08
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely the case that wherever we are, I mean, a little bit in Europe, we'll talk to governments about climate benefits, biodiversity benefits, global health benefits. But really in the United States, food security, national security, economic competitiveness, all of that is bipartisan, and I was really pleased that the fore of my book is written by Caitlin Welsh. Caitlin Welsh spent about a decade at the Department of State in the National Security Council, working on global food and water security, first under President Obama, and then throughout the entire first Trump term. Now she's Director of Food global food and water security, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the top think tanks in the world for national security, and she is talking about alternative proteins being something that the US government should lean in on in the same way that it prioritizes things like advanced chips for artificial intelligence and biopharma. And we're finding the same sort of thing. And it's not an accident that Singapore and Israel were the first and early leaders on these technologies. They import most of their food. So the idea that you can produce a food with the something you can produce meat with a tiny fraction of the resources relative to industrial animal meat if you grow that meat directly, or if you figure out how to mimic the meat experience using plants, that's going to be very appealing to countries that would like to move in the direction of food self sufficiency. If you look at something like cultivated meat over the last the top 20 patent holders new patents in the last five years, eight of them are in China, and again, that has to do with food self sufficiency. China, when they joined the World Trade Organization, they were food self sufficient. Every year since, as they have gotten wealthier, Chinese citizens. Have eaten more meat, and that means they're importing the vast majority of Brazilian soy exports go to China. They're the number one feed crop importer, most of that is for farmed fish and pigs and chickens, and they're the world's number one meat importer. So they're really leaning in on plant based and cultivated meat, just as a way to be food self sufficient. And President Xi has talked about achieving food self sufficiency on the wings of food technology, which I thought was a very pretty way of putting it. And then after China at eight, you've got the US, Korea and Israel, each of which are come in, have three of the top 20 patent holders over the last five years. I was just in Korea, like a couple of months ago, and I spoke at their world food tech conference. And it was pretty fascinating. The president sent a speech that was read by the agricultural Minister, the Speaker of the Parliament spoke, the Speaker of the National Assembly spoke, the person who heads AI for the entire government spoke, and they all talked about alternative proteins, explicitly about plant based and cultivated meat. It was just a day and a half conference, and I had an hour, so I gave a 20 minute presentation, and then was on a panel for 40 minutes, and afterwards, they were just raving about wanting Korea to be a leader on plant based and cultivated meat. They all talked about the technologies. The head of AI for Korea talked about how, obviously, Korea is not going to be in the top two countries for developing AI, but they can be number one for developing AI, focused on food technology. And he also mentioned plant based and cultivated meat. And then one of the most interesting moments was Gerhard Schroeder, speaking, the former chancellor of Germany. And he spoke about plant based and cultivated meat, he named, dropped the, you know, those technologies by name, probably half a dozen times each, and he proposed cooperation between Korea and Germany focused on pilot cultivated meat, pilot plants. So that, combined with a bunch of other visits, we went to the National Food and a research a research lab that's funded by the government. They have 20 researchers doing full time on plant based and cultivated meat, and they welcomed us and the president of the Korea Food Research Institute, that's what it is, kfri. And they had a big banner that said, Korea Food Research Institute and good food Institute. And the president of the Institute spoke, and 20 researchers who are all full time on plant based and cultivated meat, were there, and we had a couple of hours together talking about food technology, and Korea as a global leader on plant based meat and cultivated meat. And again, that's food security. Korea imports. Gosh, I think it's like 70% of their food is imported. Again, because they're a relatively small country, but affluent, which means they have a high meat intake, relatively speaking, and they want to shift toward food self sufficiency and not be so dependent on imports.
Paul Shapiro 38:09
That's all very inspiring. I'm really glad to hear it. You've named some of the good news from various governments around the world, especially in Asia, that are doing things that seem encouraging. On this front it's hard though to go, you know, even a week right now without some doom and gloom headline right about the alternative protein space, whether it's cultivated meat startups that are going under, plant based meat companies doing layoffs are going under. But you point out in the book Bruce, you're a glass half full type of guy. And you know, you point out that the vast majority of the vehicle startups around the year 1900 also went under, and that Ford was an exception. We all know about Ford because it succeeded, but there were many, many competitors who went under. So let me ask you, for people reading these doom and gloom headlines today, give us the Bruce Friedrich version. What are you most excited about? Let's say in the United States, about the alternative meat system, food system right now? What do you think are good signs that could if somebody is inspired by what you just said about these governments, what about in the private sector? What do you think is happening
Speaker 1 39:12
that's good? Oh, well, I was just gonna, I mean, I was gonna start by saying the basis centers for sustainable protein which are focused on alternative proteins. One of them is at NC State. They are just on fire. The tufts, University Center for cellular agriculture, also just amazing what they are accomplishing. And they just got $2.1 million from the Massachusetts government mass tech and the person who chose the tufts proposal was talking about how they only approve 8% of proposals, and just how incredibly strong the tufts proposal was really interesting and exciting work across plant based and cultivated meat, happening at UCLA, at Berkeley, at Stanford, at UC Davis, Illinois. I The State of Illinois and the state of California and the state of Massachusetts all funding a lot of very encouraging work in this space. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is, if we were to flash back 10 years, there were no conferences happening on alternative proteins. Through the end of 2016 there were a total of 10 cultivated meat patents. There have been more than 1000 in the nine years after that, peer review science papers on cultivated meat through the end of 2016 there were four ever in 2024 there were 160 in that year alone. And there are bright spots on the private sector side as well as you know, most of meat just raised $17 million most of meat is a company that was founded by Mark post, who, in August 2013 cooked up a burger for more than $300,000 funded by Sergey Brin. In their press release, they said the burger cost is down 99.999% from the burger that Mark cooked up not quite 13 years ago, blue Nalu just raised $11 million media costs are down more than 99.9% relative to the pharma benchmark, and I could go country by country. A few months ago, the science advisory board to the German agricultural ministry, a 350 page report about how Germany should lean in on alternative proteins. It covered everything we would recommend, and quite a lot more. We're seeing similar enthusiasm from the UK government, which has funded north of 100 million 100 million pounds in alternative proteins for research centers and R and D through the biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Center, could go to Japan, could go to Denmark, could go to the Netherlands. 60 million euros for cultivated meat, and on and on and on. And I will say to a person, the 30 people and cultivated meat. The 30 people in plant based meat, one of the things they were stressing is that, yes, these companies were overvalued five years ago. They are undervalued now. And all of these folks are talking about how, and they've just never been more optimistic, year by year, that the first principles around plant based meat and cultivated meat, which is to say, if it takes nine calories of feed to get one calorie from a chicken, 10 to 11 calories into a cow, I mean, into a pig or a fish, farmed fish, to get one calorie back out, as well as fewer stages of production, which is why these why alternative proteins are good. From a food systems resilience Vantage there are no scientific roadblocks that have been discovered so far. I was just at the tufts annual tufts cellular agriculture conference, David Kaplan, who was tufts Chair of their biomedical engineering department, just you know, one of the top minds in Biomedical Engineering, certainly in the US, probably in the world, and he said just year by year, he's amazed by the things nobody had even thought might be discovered that get discovered, and how much progress we've made in the last three to five years. So I think we will see more startups fail, not because the science is bad, but because, as you mentioned, most startups fail, and it's just chapter eight. I sort of dive into a bunch of examples, including, in the first 10 years of the car industry, 500 companies being founded and failing. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University at the time, saying that cars will never be anything more than a play thing for the idle rich in 1985 the CEO of Apple Computer saying computers are never going to have a use case in the home the.com bubble. When the NASDAQ lost 80% of its value, more than half of dot coms went up in smoke. Apple lost 95% of its value from $213 to less than $6 a share. And the sort of, you know, media response, the expert response, was brutal. Who's ever going to want to buy pet supplies online? Of course, these companies were never going to succeed. You know, when is this Jeff? You know, Jeff Bezos guy? When is he ever going to turn a profit? So the human mind is just not very good at looking at our current reality and imagining a future reality that's different. Which was a big part of why I wrote the book, was to say, you know, here is the reality as I see it. It's not inevitable. We could fail. One of the things that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talk about in abundance is all of the inventions that are waiting to be discovered with the book. It's basically a sort of clarion call to say, we need to put in the effort, we need to put in the resources, if we put in the effort, if we put in the resources, the scientific evidence. The best scientific evidence, and the best scientific minds say, Absolutely, we can make this happen, but it's not self executing, certainly not.
Paul Shapiro 45:08
And I would add to your lengthy enumeration of the good news that you see that to me when I look at where there is positive movement, frankly, and I know this is self serving to say, but a lot of it is in mycelium and mycoprotein. I mean, my bacon and prime roots are among the alternative meat brands that are actually growing right now, and the rare fundraising announcements in the space, like better meat, co protein, brewery, modern foods, just as a few examples, seem concentrated in the mycelium corner as well. I was in London not too long ago, and I went to KFC, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that corn Q, U, O, R, N, is on the menu at KFC in London, basically at price parity with the chicken that is being served at KFC. This further affirms my view that mycoprotein is a very promising way to achieve the goals that you're suggesting, and it also shows, you know, in corns case, that you can cost effectively, grow protein based foods in bioreactors at large scale. Now they're not doing animal cell culture, admittedly, it's it's fungi, but still, they're growing fungi and 175,000 liter bioreactors, and they have a business with over 100 SKUs of products that they're selling in KFC and elsewhere from there. So it does seem like the vision that you have may be more real today than what others might imagine. And that brings me then to the question of what ethically this might actually entail if this does come to pass, because you make the case, and I'm in strong agreement that people are far more willing to accept the ethical arguments that are persuasive to somebody like you or myself. Once suitable alternatives arise, that once people actually have what they perceive as a suitable alternative, they become far less resistant to accepting that something may have been ethically questionable. And I was taken by a recent interview, excuse me, it's not recent. I listened to it recently. It's from a couple years ago on the podcast 80,000 hours. And they had on a historian whose name is Christopher Brown, and he is a mediator. And he talked about his specialty is the history of slavery and abolition. And he talked about how future generations are likely to condemn our carnivorous ways and our treatment of farmed animals. And he said that that moral shift will probably be enabled by new technologies that reduce reliance on animal agriculture. And he claims that that's akin to what happened in Britain, where it was easier for Britons to oppose slavery because it wasn't so embedded in their daily lives as it was in the colonies, like in the Caribbean and so on, and that it was much easier for Britons to actually condemn slavery as unethical, as compared to, let's say, people who might have lived in Jamaica or other plantation islands that were satisfying the demand for all the sugar and tea and eventually cotton That was to arise there, and that was a good reminder to me that affirms this point that if you really believe in these arguments about animal welfare and the environment and so on, the best way to let them fall on ears that are not deaf is to create alternatives that make it easier for people to lack the cognitive dissonance that often arises when those arguments are made today.
Speaker 1 48:24
Yeah, I think that's I think that's true. And as you know, in the conclusion of the book, I offer a whole bunch of unsolicited career advice for people who are interested in figuring out they can plug in
Speaker 3 48:35
purchase the book. So it may be somewhat solicited, but I hear you, yeah,
Speaker 1 48:39
fair enough. But in any event, for people who are interested in figuring out the most powerful ways that they can be helpful, that is, in fact, what the conclusion of the book is about. I do want to mention I share your enthusiasm for mycoprotein, absolutely, the fact that it is incredibly high in protein, that it is that that protein is equally bioavailable with meat protein, which is true of soy protein, but not most plant proteins other than soy, none of the common ones for plant based meat other than soy. And mycoprotein is a big part of how we're thinking strategically in India. And I talk in the book, you know, I look at China and India. I look at every place that GFI exists, so including India, and one of our sort of theories in India, India already spends, I think, a couple 100 billion dollars a year on their feeding program, and they have a protein deficiency and to some degree, a micronutrient deficiency issue, more than a calorie deficiency issue. India has more kids who are stunted, more wasting, more malnutrition, I think, than any place else in the world. There's some sub African countries that have higher percentages, but in terms of raw numbers, and we believe that mycoprotein can be both a part of solving that and then the Prime Minister of India, Prime Minister. Narendra Modi, his life mission, his life ambition, is that India is a developed economy. By 2047 they are looking for ways to bring in foreign direct investment. They already produce about 60% of global vaccines. They have an excellent manufacturing workforce. They have an excellent and advanced biotech industry, it is not a stretch at all to see India leaning in on mycoprotein as a part of solving their malnutrition problem. It's just an incredibly inexpensive way of producing high quality protein. Right now, the feeding program is feeding rice. It's mostly rice and wheat, which are both low in protein and low in protein bioavailability. And then it's lentils, which is way lower in protein than mycoprotein, and that protein is not particularly bioavailable. We can shift in this direction. It can help with the rural economy in India. It can help with protein deficiency in India. And India could become the mycoprotein production capital of the world, and be ready to do for alternative meats what China has done for EVs and solar and a lot of the rest of the manufacturing industry. So that's just one way that I'm super bullish on what mycoprotein can do for the world.
Paul Shapiro 51:19
Cool, yeah. Well, needless to say, I agree. I'm devoting my life to it. But I will tell you one other benefit of mycoprotein that I see, unlike the plant proteins that are used to make alternative meats today, is that it's a whole food, right? Yeah, you don't have to isolate, fractionate, extrude all these things, right? It's a whole food. It's not the equivalent of using, like, the entire pea it's the equivalent of using the entire pea plant, the roots, the leaves and everything, right? Like mycoprotein is the whole biomass. It's not only important for a labeling perspective that it's a whole food that's packed with protein and fiber, but frankly, it's important also from an economic perspective, that every solid that is in that bioreactor is your product, right? But anyway, I have waxed on mycoprotein and many other venues, and don't need to do so here. So let me conclude Bruce by asking you, obviously people should go out and get your book, which they can order anywhere from meatbook.org to anywhere else. Again, the book is meat how the next agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favorite food and our future. But in addition to that, Bruce, what else should people check out? Are there any other resources that you think are useful that you would recommend? Obviously, people should check out good food Institute's website, which is gfi.org but anything that you have been helped or aided by that you think others should check out.
Unknown Speaker 52:36
Well, I mean, I will just say@gfi.org I would suggest that you go to the if you do gfi.org/newsletters
Speaker 1 52:44
look at our newsletters and sign up to those to really plug in. I find the pessimist archive to be incredibly fun and gratifying for just thinking about the tendency of kind of everybody to be down on technology over time. So a bunch of my chapter eight was stuff that I learned about via the pessimists archive. I think the Bezos Earth fund centers, all of them are putting out a lot of really useful on point information that I'm enthusiastic about. I love the work that green queen is doing that. Food Systems innovation is doing for political activity. Obviously, GFI lobbies and is politically active. But food solutions, action, or I'm a board member, is a great organization to get involved with. There really is, I mean, there's a lot happening in the ecosystem. There are a lot of different places that people can plug in, and those are all us examples. There are also examples all over the rest of the world.
Paul Shapiro 53:47
Okay, well, we'll link to those resources at the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast.com, finally, Bruce, what should somebody start? You mentioned a lot of different careers that you hope somebody might go into. But if somebody is sitting there here being inspired by you right now, and they're thinking, I want to go start my own alternative protein company. What do you think they should do? Where should they devote their resources?
Speaker 1 54:10
Yeah, I mean, in both chapter six and in chapter seven. Chapter Six is cultivated meat. Chapter Seven is plant based meat. I point out that one of the things that is most exciting and encouraging on the cultivated meat side is all of the incredible B to B companies that are taking a swing at specific aspects of the cultivated meat production challenge. So at the tufts conference, Tim Olson talking about his new startup. He ran cultivated meat for Merck for six years, and now he has started a B to B cultivated meat company. I also talk about he's an example that I have in the book. And then Natalie Rubio and her team at deco labs, also a B to B company focused on figuring out what is a challenge that most cultivated meat companies a scientific challenge that most cultivated meat companies are experiencing. And can we as a B to B Company, solve it? And there are dozens of examples of bioreactor design companies, sell companies, sell media companies that are focused in a cultivated meat space on B to B when Stephen Finn, who is at City capital, when he was writing about some of the recent failures of companies. The thing he pointed out that I thought was really smart was the number of companies that are trying to do everything. They're trying to be an R and D company and a marketing and sort of plant based meat company or a fermentation company or whatever. And he pointed out those are both really hard things to do. The idea of doing both of them is going to be incredibly difficult. And the reasons to fail, you know, there will be hundreds of reasons to fail, and only one of them would be the tech. The companies that are failing are not failing because the bad tech they're failing for. You know, one of the other plethora of reasons that companies fail. So what is vastly under resourced in plant based meat is companies figuring, you know, doing ingredients, figure out how to make all of the plant based meats better, figure out technologies that are better than twin screw extrusion for creating the texture of plant based meat. There's a lot to be done in the sort of engine on the engineering side, and there's a lot to be done on the ingredient side, like coconut oil is still the oil of choice for replicating saturated fat. It's the oil of choice because it's the best from even worse options. It's also incredibly limited in supply. So tackle the fat challenge. That's one of the things that I love about better beet company. Is that you are unapologetically a B to B company focused on blends. If you were to, you know, that's hard enough, right? That is really flipping hard all by itself, to then say, actually, we're going to develop products and become a marketing company and a product development company and shipping company and everything that comes with also being a company that puts your own products on shelves, just really hard. So the plant based meat, they're just a plethora of options on the plant based meat side in particular that are focused on B to B and not putting a bunch of ingredients together and slapping them on a shelf and thinking that you're going to compete with industrial animal meat. Very, very unlikely.
Paul Shapiro 57:23
Yep, making a startup work is certainly a miracle when you want to reduce the total number of miracles that need to be performed in order to succeed and getting really good at industrial manufacturing, inventing technology and building a brand, are three separate distinct skill sets that are each miraculous to master as a small startup. So with that, Bruce, I want to say thank you. I'm grateful for your leadership in the alternative protein space. And I enjoyed the book meet, and I encourage other people to go out and check it out too. And I hope the book tour is a huge success.
Speaker 1 57:55
Thanks so much, Paul. I really appreciate everything that you're doing for the space, including this podcast, and grateful to that you invited me on to talk about the book. Thank you.
Speaker 2 58:05
Thanks for listening. I hope you found it useful, and if you did, please let the world know. Leave the show a five star rating on your favorite podcast app and share the episode with your friends. Who knows, maybe you'll inspire one of them to be in the business of doing good themselves. You you.