If you follow the world of cultivated meat, you probably know that a few companies have gotten historic regulatory approval and have sold some limited quantities of product both in the US and Singapore. But earlier this year, Meatly—a company founded only in 2021 and with just a few million British pounds in their pocket—succeeded in getting regulatory approval to start selling its cultivated chicken meat…in pet food.

Around the time his son was born in 2011, Beni Nofech saw a video that changed his life. After listening to an argument about the need to move away from the view that animals are mere commodities for humanity to use however we like, Beni adopted a vegan diet and soon found himself attending animal movement and alt-protein conferences.

In this episode, Oshi CEO Ofek Ron talks about his journey from being an animal advocate working at a nonprofit vegan advocacy organization to taking the leap to start his own alt-protein company.

In this conversation with Omni CEO Dr. Guy Sandelowsky, we talk about everything from who the audience is for animal-free pet food, why non-vegetarians would choose to feed their pets vegetarian, what the future may hold, and more.

Maisie Ganzler has never worked at an animal welfare charity nor an alt-protein company. Yet she’s in the upper echelon of effectiveness when it comes to reducing the suffering of farmed animals.

In this episode, PoLoPo CEO Maya Sapir-Mir and I chat about her work as a plant biologist, how she teamed up with a vegan scientist to co-found this company, her passion for using bioengineering to help save the planet, and of course, how she plans to use the humble potato to displace some of the need for chickens in our food industry.

In this conversation, Bruce and I focus on the state of the plant-based and cultivated meat industries today, why he believes the critics are misguided, whether China will lead this race, how to respond to the new cultivated meat bans like those newly passed in Florida and Alabama, and critically: what it will take for alt-protein to no longer be alt.

In this conversation, Orbillion CEO Patricia Bubner and I chat about what makes them different from other cultivated meat startups, her work as a plant and fungal biologist prior to her career in mammalian cell culture, what she thinks are the best ways to scale, why she thinks she was successful in fundraising during a funding famine, and more.

In this conversation, you’ll hear Uma elaborate on how the technology has gone from being decried as impossible to now possible, and what remains to be seen is whether it will now go from possible to inevitable.

As you’ll hear in this conversation, Avant Meats is already animal component-free in its feedstock for its fish cells, and it’s cultivating inside a 250L bioreactor to generate the material for its public tastings. Now headquartered in Singapore, the company intends to grow there and eventually branch throughout Asia, a project for which it’s currently fundraising.

In this conversation, Lou lays out his vision for a future BlueNalu factory with multiple 100,000 liter cultivators churning out some of the priciest oceanic delicacies. And because of this high price point, Lou thinks that his economic model is among the most attractive out there.

When you think about cultivated meat, Thailand isn’t exactly the first country that comes to mind. Sure, you may think about the US, Netherlands, Israel, and Singapore. But the Southeast Asian kingdom is where Israeli cultivated meat juggernaut Aleph Farms recently announced its first commercial factory will be.

In 2013, Dr. Mark Post shocked the world when he debuted the world’s first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth?

Niya Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, a cultivated meat company addressing the high costs of the industry with a novel and patented approach in cell culture that produces meat more efficiently than cows and pigs.

In this episode, Josh and I have a frank discussion about the cultivated meat sector, how it may be able to scale, what the economics could look like, whether Josh thinks it’s realistic to make a dent in total animal meat demand, and more.

I’m excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there’s a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that’s coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold.

Profiled by Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens, Garden for Wildlife has raised $5 million from investors (primarily its founder, the National Wildlife Federation) and is already bringing in an annual revenue of $1 million. The company is also crowdfunding now, meaning for an investment as low as $250, you can own shares in this startup.

Robert Yaman, the Founder and Executive Director of Innovate Animal Ag, spent his entire career in Silicon Valley. He started as an engineer at Google, and later moved into food tech, most recently running operations at a startup developing cell-cultivated animal fat as a food ingredient.

As you’ll hear in this interview, Jason shifted from his work on cultivated meat toward national security as he became convinced that technology can vastly improve both human and animal welfare, and that the only real threat to technological advancement is an apocalyptic catastrophe like a synthetic virus or asteroid.

In this episode, Jim discusses Emulate’s technology, its promise to slash the number of animals used for testing while delivering safe drugs to market more quickly, who opposes their efforts, and where this is all leading us.