Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Uma, welcome to the business for good podcast,

Uma Valeti: Paul, welcome to

Paul Shapiro: upload foods at epic. I am honored. It is an epic visit. You and I have known each other for a long time, but the first time I tried the upside poultry was seven years ago when it was not upside, it was Memphis meets the duck. I had an experience where I, I felt like I had been like blindfolded and had a hood put on.

I was brought through like a labyrinth and brought to a backroom. Then the hood removed and then I got this duck and I, I was very sworn to secrecy about it, and today I, seven years later, got to try multiple iterations of the cultivated chicken, which was absolutely phenomenal. And we will share photos of that on the website at business for good podcast.com.

But it was great. It was really good. So tell me, what's the difference between the duck I had seven years ago and the chicken I had today?

Uma Valeti: they're more similar than different. The idea of growing meat from animal cells. Was something that [00:01:00] was more of a vision back then with duck being a very early proof of science and what you tasted today is well beyond proof of science.

It's proof of scale to the degree that we are at scale at this point at Epic, which is a million fold larger than anything 10 years ago. And it's also a proof of growth for an industry that was desperate. To make an impact with an idea. And here it is, I think showing what that path of going from nearly everybody saying that the work we are doing was impossible.

And would not have any meaningful traction or investments behind it to we're now sitting in a [00:02:00] building that occupies nearly two blocks, surrounded by glass walls, where you're walking in and you're looking at everything behind you that shows where the meat is being made. And the analogy is we were in the dark seven years ago.

We were literally like you described in a very remote warehouse that was abandoned. And was actually the set for a, a movie that was made into a haunted house movie. And that is the only place we could afford to go put up a research facility. And you felt like you're walking through all of these tortuous chambers in the darkness because they were in the dark in that building.

And there was about a Walmart and a McDonald's and here we are sitting right in the middle of Emeryville. Right next to public market where some of the best food is served and [00:03:00] surrounded by coffee shops. And the idea is we put a meat production facility in the heart of a bustling neighborhood. So we could show to our own self and also people in the community that, yeah, meat.

Production could be just next door to you. You could come and walk your dog, get your cup of coffee and come in, knock on the door and see where it's made. That's what you've experienced today.

Paul Shapiro: So let's talk about the past before we talk about the present here, because you and I have known each other for a long time, long before, much longer than upside foods or Memphis meats or even crevy foods, which was the name prior to Memphis meats existed.

So anybody who has read the book queen meat, which I'm honored you have a copy of it here, but anybody who's read it. Knows your story, but just for those who haven't, why'd you do this? Like, what, what, you know, you had a very successful career as a cardiologist. You could have just kept on doing that and made a very good living doing so.

So, why [00:04:00] try to do this? You know, nobody else was trying to commercialize it at the time and you thought, oh, this is a good idea. Why?

Uma Valeti: because I felt it was worth pursuing and I felt it was, A problem that spoke to a cause I deeply believed in, and it moved me. The cause moved me. And, the cause really here is we love to protect our choices.

And at the same time, we have lived for thousands of years in trying to protect our choice by turning a blind eye to the cost of the choice we make. And very simply growing up in a, I grew up in India. my mom taught physics in college. My dad's a veterinarian, farming family. I milked cows and I was around animals all the time growing up.

I had pets and I loved eating meat. And every Sunday is when we ate meat. And I looked forward to Sunday so much because we would go to market and buy mutton, [00:05:00] lamb, goat, chickens. And my mom was a fantastic cook. And I just, you know, craved for Sunday the whole week. You know, one day I went to my friend's birthday party next door neighbor and in the front of the house, we were having fun, music, dance.

Laughing. And then I walked to the back of the house and that's where they were slaughtering animals. And it was a, it was really hard for me as a 12 year old kid to come up directly face to face with that duality of how meat comes to the table, where there was intense happiness in the front celebrating a birthday.

And then intense sadness and suffering in the back with the death day. And, I talked to it in the back of my mind because the choice of eating meat and my love for meat was so much more as a kid and I let it go.

Paul Shapiro: So I know that you had a deep passion for animal welfare and still do, but the question that [00:06:00] I'm really wondering is why this, like you were funding at that time, before you started this company, you were funding research into what was then being called in vitro meat.

And you're even cultured me and you were funding research. But at some point you decided rather than just funding a lab in Minneapolis, that you were going to move to California and actually start a company. There was zero companies on the planet trying to commercialize this. And I remember talking to you and I said, Hey, why don't you just pay somebody else to do this?

Like, why do it yourself? Like, you know, you're not a businessman, you're a cardiologist. So why don't you pay somebody who has. you know, some experience running a company to go do this and you thought that you should be the one to do it. I'm grateful that you ignored my, advice, because obviously I turned out to be wrong.

But why were you the one to do it?

Uma Valeti: It didn't have to be me to do it. I was not planning to do it. I was very happy practicing cardiology and I was very happy starting medical device companies and working with patients, treating them when they had heart attacks, resuscitating them when they were, you know, in cardiac arrest.

And I had it. An [00:07:00] incredible,position where there's nothing more satisfying than saving someone's life. Literally, nothing comes close to it, and I loved it, and I did not want to start, this field or the company in the field. So what I did was try to encourage a lot of people to start companies in this field.

I talked to lots of scientists, I talked to people that had done research in this field in their smaller laboratories. And I joined a nonprofit started by Jason Matheny, and, he's an incredible visionary, by the way. And,I thought I could help him encourage more people to start companies in this space.

And all of that, all of those efforts failed. And I was talking about this with my wife and, and, and, and two kids. And I was talking about this and I was frustrated that no one was starting companies in the space because this was an idea that should be tested in the real world. And they finally said, you've been talking about this for years, so why are you not doing it?

And that was, that was the wake up call. I think that was my [00:08:00] blind side. And when my wife and kids said, dad, why are you not doing it? And my wife said, look, if you do it, I'll support you. That became both like a wake up call for me and also permission to go and take this risk. And at that point, I had no idea if anybody would care about it.

I cared about it deeply because I've seen. I obviously grew up as a kid and I didn't, I didn't like the animal welfare, animal cruelty involved, but as I started practicing cardiology and as I started learning more about how meat comes to the table, the enormous footprint of meat, the environmental impacts, and also the opportunity to continue to make meat healthier and better, it felt like a triple threat, like we could solve issues related to kindness and cruelty, we could solve issues related to environment if we were successful, right?

We could solve issues of where meat could become healthier. I felt like this was something worth going after. And that was it.

Paul Shapiro: So you had your family support. You thought nobody else will do this. And let me echo your sentiments about Jason [00:09:00] Matheny, who is also, I think, a brilliant guy and a former guest on this podcast.

We will link to his episode on here. He had a good joke when he was on here that he said in the past, when you ask him, you You know, when will cultivated meat be on the market in a meaningful way? Like in big box grocery store shelves and on fast food menus. And he, his joke was, well, it's, it's five years away and I'm not sure if those years are consecutive.

So, we'll, we'll get into that. Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll get into that and see whether you think that he's right about that or not. But. what's, you know, the journey that you were on was a dramatic one. Like you started this company and you started garnering lots of really positive media attention, sort of raising a lot of money.

You were on magazine covers. You were being heralded as the guy who was gonna create a world without slaughter. You fast forward seven years. And now the headlines are the opposite, right? You have all these people writing obituaries for this industry saying that it's it's not that they think it's a, you know, a bad thing to do.

It's just that they think it's an impossible thing to do, right? Of course, there are critics who think it's a bad thing to do what we can talk about them too. [00:10:00] But the newspaper journalists who are writing these opinion columns are basically saying, This is a fool's errand. It cannot be done. You say that's not true.

It can be done and we're doing it. So why are they wrong?

Uma Valeti: Because we're doing it. We are in the arena. You just ate the most incredible variety of cultivated meat all in one sitting ever.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, it was great. It was multiple different types of chicken. So I had the chicken dumplings. I had the chicken, on its own as a naked product.

I had a lettuce cup. I had the. Excuse me. chicken in a variety of ways. It was really beautiful. But let me just take, let me just rephrase their criticism. Their criticism is not that it's not physically impossible to make the product, but that you can't scale it in a way that will ever be economically viable and could never make a dent in the number of animals who are raised for food, right?

That is never going to become 5, 10 percent of the meat industry's volume. But obviously you wouldn't be doing this. If you thought that was true, [00:11:00] then you would think I'd go do something else with your life. So what is it that they don't know that you do that says this? Look what's sitting behind us.

These multi thousand liter fermentation or cultivation vessels that can be scaled and you say it can be done. Why?

Uma Valeti: Well, because I believe it can be done, we believe it can be done, we are the ones that have the track record of having done it, moved things from when people said they were impossible to do, that the science would never work, that it would never taste good, or that it would never get regulatory approval.

Now those are three things I just told you, that the skeptics that we had seven years ago are coming at us viciously saying the science was never going to work. They were also saying it was never going to taste good. And they were saying it was never going to get regulatory approval. Now, those are disheartening things to hear, but those are all behind us.

Now, no one's talking about that because, Hey, science works. It tastes good. Both the FDA and USDA have given [00:12:00] multiple approvals for the products from cultivated companies. So what's next? It is. The proof of scale that is the next chapter we are laser focused on showing that this industry has fundamentally no barriers on the scientific or engineering side to be able to go to scale.

It is for us to prove it how long it's going to take whether it's going to be possible or not we might have disagreements but I see that the field has already moved from being impossible to possible and now from possible to inevitable is the journey to scale and it is fair to have critics on this and skeptics on it.

But the reason I disagree with them is because this is the skeptics or the critics or the journalists who wrote the articles. They may have spent a day in their lives or a week in their lives, or maybe six weeks in their life looking at this. We've been in the arena for seven years, living this every single night and day, making products, scaling products.

And between last year and [00:13:00] this year, we can make products at a thousand X scale than what we were doing last January. So I'm living it. Our team is living it.

Paul Shapiro: A thousand X scale, meaning a thousand times more product or a thousand times cheaper?

Uma Valeti: Thousand times more product volume and I'd say compared to the last product that the small scale product that we have on the market, we are already on a path to lower the cost by at least 10 to 50 X at this point, and we know that there's still a little bit of distance to go, but I can see very clearly that if there's a few more things on the engineering and scale up that we can do that, we will be in the striking distance.

Of premium meat prices in the next chapter.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, where are we right now? Like if somebody had hundreds of millions of dollars to give to you or to invest in your company, are you ready to scale? Or does more research still need to be done in order to prepare for a commercial scale up? Like would that money be best used for more research right now?

Or would it be used to go start [00:14:00] buying 100, 000 or 200, 000 liter bioreactors?

Uma Valeti: look, I think people may disagree on this. What is very clear, to me is there's a significant amount of science that's been solved. There is a moderate amount of engineering scale up that has been done, and there is more to do on both, but less on science, more on scale up and engineering, only because that's the stage where the industry is.

If I just say the no more science improvements, do we have a product that people will fall in love with that tastes good and that can compete head to head with conventional meat? I feel the science is already there for that.

Paul Shapiro: I can attest to that myself. I just saw it and tasted it. And I mean, I spend a lot of time around both animal based meat and plant based meat and fungi based meat.

And I don't need to even taste it in order to know which is which I can smell it. I don't even need to see it. I literally walk in a room and I can know whether the people are cooking plant based or animal based meat. It's [00:15:00] very evident to me. And as your chef was cooking up this chicken, I didn't need to look at it.

I could tell the smell was actual animal meat. It was very clear to me. Now, I don't know what it costs to make that chicken, but I can tell you it seemed categorically different to me. And you know, will the plant based people get there with a flavor houses get there? I don't know. I would love for them to, it'd be wonderful.

It'd be great. but so far to me, plant based just seemed like something that is a meat substitute, which maybe people will be happy to eat meat substitutes. That would be lovely. I would be thrilled to make up things a lot easier actually. but for people who want the so called real thing, this seemed to me to be categorically different.

So I can personally attest like, yeah, there is a product there. Okay. The question is, you know, you're saying that product is there, people will like it. but can you produce it for anything that is, you know, going to be comparable to the price of even plant based meat today, which is still much more expensive than animal based meat?

Uma Valeti: Yeah, look, I think that's what I was saying. The point is, I don't think there's much more science that needs to be done to get viable products onto the market. [00:16:00] We could always do more science to make the product better, flavorful, more texture. So that's the, the line I was trying to draw. On the scale up side, on the engineering side, the largest scaled up production of cultivated meat in the world is happening right behind you behind these glass walls, right?

These are cultivators that are three consecutive cultivators right next to each other that are 2000 liters or more are continuously been producing for the last 12 to 18 months. And, and I want, what we have here is going from the smallest while all the way to 2000 liter volume, which is for the, for the listeners, it's like.

You know, it's about 16 feet tall and this scale, if we continue to manufacture just at the scale. And continue to drive down the cost of ingredients that we need to buy to make the meat. I think there'll be a nice niche premium meat business. It won't make a dent as much [00:17:00] as a commercial meat. And you're saying

Paul Shapiro: you could have positive margins on, on that, that you could sell it and make money.

Uma Valeti: Because there's premium pricing associated with it and volume purchasing associated with it. And COGS continued to come down. But it's not going to be meaningful enough to make it done. And that I agree with. And it's not even a point of, difference. We agree that this is not going to make it done. But the reason this step is a must have to build a scaffolding for the scaled up engineering plant is we can debug a lot of those things, taking the first cell all the way to a, a chicken or a beef on the table.

The process is something that is very scalable. And the idea is, when we do this at Epic fully end to end, for 12 to 18 months continuously, We're now going to start expanding it by 10x more. So this 2, 000 liters will become at least 20, 000 liters or larger. And I think that's enough to show demonstration that this can go to scale and start showing pricing for a consumer.[00:18:00]

Would start in the industry, seeing a path to profitability. That's what we're trying to prove now.

Paul Shapiro: What is scale to you? Like, what is a commercially viable operation? 20, 000 liters, a hundred thousand liters, 200, 000 liters, a million liters.

Uma Valeti: I don't think that's the right way to look at it. It's the volumetric productivity that comes out of a certain volume.

So if you've got a highly productive 20, 000 liters. And the very poorly productive 200, 000 liters, the same amount of chicken is coming from both of them. So I don't think I want to venture a bet on that. So how many tens of 000 seems to be a good number to think about

Paul Shapiro: how many millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds of final product is commercial scale for you.

I'll give you an example. When Josh Tetrick from GoodMe was on this show a few episodes ago. He said that his goal was to build a commercial factory that would produce 30 million pounds of product a year. It was a hybridized product. So not 30 million pounds of animal cells. I don't know what, I don't know what the proportion was, but you know, 30 million pounds of final product that presumably the majority of it was animal cells.

In fact, he did say the majority [00:19:00] was animal cells. Is that what you're thinking for commercial production? 30 million pounds of product.

Uma Valeti: Again, this is one of those things that to me, it doesn't matter. What I'm seeing is the following. When we prove this technology works at a scale where you're producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of millions of pounds, that is enough to go to 100 restaurants or retail outlet.

You have shown proof of commercial viable scale because what remains after that is to be able to put those production facilities in various zip codes. And what I'd like to show is whether it's 20 million pounds or 10 million or 50 million pounds that you would make better margins. Then what a conventional meat producer is making right now because they are running on razor thin margins.

So if their net margin is 2%, 5%, if we show that this is better than that, it'll just open up the opportunity for a lot of people to participate in it. And my conviction on this is it'll at least be two to three times better than what a conventional meat producer is going to be having to bear at [00:20:00] that scale of 100 million pounds.

I would agree with the kind of volumetric projection of true dent to be made in the conventional meat industry. If we can show that a 20 to 50 million pound plant can operate and show a profitable balance sheet there, I think lots of people will come rushing into the industry, but that's the opportunity we're going after in the next five years.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. I'm eager to talk about those next five years, but you said something twice that I just wanted to let you emphasize because one of the criticisms has been, you know, upside foods has this epic plant, but these big bioreactors aren't really being used. You just said twice of these last 12 to 18 months have been in continuous use.

So do I just want to give you the opportunity to clarify this? Why is there a misunderstanding about this?

Uma Valeti: Well, Look, here's the way I look at it. You know, there is. That enormous promise of a simple idea we're [00:21:00] bringing to the world. And the simple idea is you can grow meat from animal cells. Because you're fundamentally depending on the nature of these cells to continue to multiply, whether they're inside an animal or outside an animal.

It's a very simple idea. The massive externalities of the impact of that idea are tremendous. Just think about it. If this idea lives in the world, that means with doubling of meat production in the next 30 years, we don't have to add another hundred billion animals on this planet. And that can come from a combination of cultivated meat and plant based,meats, right?

It also does not have the level of environmental impact that conventional meat has. And we can start thinking about maybe improving meat's health. So the idea has massive externality. So what does that create? It creates at the same time an enormous hope. And also every single time thing we do as a leader of the industry, we [00:22:00] do get enormous amounts of scrutiny now and also enormous amounts of like attention.

And we've been trying to balance that continuously to say, look, we want to put proof of science, proof of taste, proof of regulatory approval, proof of safety in front of you. And we're doing our best to communicate that with as many people as possible. And let's say if you and I had a conversation that was bounded for 30 minutes.

And I said this twice to you, but you didn't pick up on the nuance and you didn't pick up on the detail and did not ask me back the question, then I would not have a chance to clarify. This has happened time and again with some of the, the, the reporters that came in, where I would tell them just like I told you, what you just ate here came from small scale production and what you just ate here came from the production that you're seeing right behind me.

They have my voice on record saying this. But the nuance was missed and what they thought was the small scale product they ate came from the large ones, the [00:23:00] cultivators that are behind me. So, for example, you ate four products today. Of them, three of them came from the large 2, 000 liter cultivators that are right behind you.

And one of them came from a very small cultivator, which is about two liters. But you gave me a chance to clarify it again. Now, when the reporters were trying to write it, we said, guys, When you ate it, this is what Umar said, or maybe you didn't ask the question, but we'll clarify it now, but they were not willing to actually take the clarification and decided to go ahead and write it.

Paul Shapiro: Right. Cause it's a pretty salacious story to think, you know, that this is like a, like one of the fake villages, right? That they, what do they call the Patokom villages? You know what I'm talking about? That's right. Yeah. I forget what it's called. I forget how to pronounce it in Russia, I think, or is it German?

I can't remember. But anyway, anyway, the point is. you know, it's a salacious story to think that that is being done and, you know, just You know, to be clear, like what you're saying is that is totally false that these 2000 liter [00:24:00] reactors are in continuous use. They're making products that I ate today and that it works.

Uma Valeti: Yes. So that's the, so the differentiation is the following. There are some products that are on the market and the products that are not in the market. So what you ate is products coming into the market. Yeah. The future products that will be released into the market for the next set of approvals. So that, again, is a nuance in the detail.

So here's what happened. When we tried to clarify that, the reporters came and said, Oh, that's another story. We want to write a separate story about the future products. I'm like, but, but, but we're not, we're not done yet. We're just getting started. We are showing the world this is possible. There's a long way to go.

We want to tell the full story. But the, the, the, the conflict of interest to point out here is the following. The people in the industry and the people at Upside are the ones in the arena trying to fight every [00:25:00] single day to overcome hurdles that are being thrown at us because this is a completely new field built, being built from the ground up and granted.

We could continue to do a better job of communicating it. I totally agree. As we get better and better at it, what I'm also expecting on the other side is people to take the time to understand the details and the nuance and ask the clarifying questions and put the full context out in front. And I think this is not different from any other field.

You can have a, a group that can be either advocates, They could be people that are, could be armchair quarterbacks, or they could be ambulance chasers. And I think we have a very similar thing happening because you can have fair journalists. There's a fair number of people that are really great journalists.

And then you can have fair weather journalists who will just write stuff. Because that's a good line. Fair journalists and fair weather journalists. Yeah, because when you're, Think about this field. There's a lot of hope. Lots of journalists want to write [00:26:00] about it. But there's a few that realize that if they write a salacious story, they'll still get the same clickbaits.

So that's fair weather journalists. And that could be fake journalists also. So there's three types of journalism going on right now.

Paul Shapiro: That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think also there are some journalists who, personally don't like food technology and they are sympathetic to the cause. Of wanting to move away from factory farming of animals and, may even be vegetarian oriented themselves, you know, if not fully vegetarian, but think that it's a good thing to do, but they are more like what they would perceive as kind of natural foodists.

And they would ask questions like, why can't you just eat Vietnam rice burritos and lentil soup? Why do you need meat at all? Right. And I think for those people, that category of journalists does often Almost, root against the any type of biotechnological application to food, whether it's this or anything else now, that's enough, you know, we don't need to go into the state of journalism, but I do want to ask you about what you said, and you said in five years, that'll be it.

Now, [00:27:00] your CEO, Amy Chen told food dive that she believes that you're going to be on supermarket shelves by the year 2030. So about five years from now or so, right? and I want to ask you. When did you think, I mean, I presume you agree with your own, with your own executive, but in terms of getting to a place where plant based meat is today, meaning in every major grocery store, basically, so not just on a hundred restaurants menus, but you can go to Costco and buy it.

You can go to Walmart and buy it. When do you think cultivated meat will be at the place where plant based meat is today? So still keep in mind, plant based meat is still, you know, a rounding error in the total meat industry, right? Like plant based meat is, maybe at most 1 percent of the dollar volume of the meat industry in the United States.

It's probably not even 1 percent of the poundage volume. And so, you know, it's a very tiny portion of plant based meat. But you know, it's still hundreds of millions of pounds of product, right? Yeah. So when do you think that that will be the case for cultivated meat? That there'll be products with animal cells that can reach that point?

Five years, [00:28:00] 10 years, 20 years? Yes.

Uma Valeti: I will answer the question, but I'm going to ask you a question before I answer the question. Okay. So you're asking me. Do I have a crystal ball? No, no, no. That'll tell you when cultivated meat will have the same level as plant-based. And let's say if Amy put the steak in the ground and said it's 2030.

And if I say yes, well she, and by well, to be fair finish, she,

Paul Shapiro: she, she said it'll be on, on supermarket shelf. She didn't say the same as plant-based meat. But anyway. Okay.

Uma Valeti: Oh, okay. So, okay. On Super Mark. And, for instance, let's say if we miss it by a year, doesn't mean that any was lying.

Paul Shapiro: Well, nobody's accusing anybody or certainly I'm not accusing anybody of lying, right?

This is not about, you know, that you happen to know the answer and are purposefully saying something. As I told Isha Vittar in my interview with her, I think it's absolutely impossible that anybody in this space who made a projection that turned out not to be true somehow thought that they were purposefully saying something they knew to be untrue.

Obviously, you know, when Mark Post said in 2013 that he thought within 10 years, he, you know, [00:29:00] he issued the first. Cultivated burger, and he said he thinks this is going to be in the market within 10 years and it turned out to be wrong I don't think mark purposefully thought that was wrong Obviously he thought it was right and it turned out, you know I guess it was on the market in some senses, but not in the way that he was really projecting.

I don't think so no, I you're I I want to let me offer the the question again with the caveat that you are not predicting the Future that you are not guaranteeing anything to happen. If you just had to guess knowing what you know You are the CEO of the most advanced company in this space, where is the most money, the oldest company and the first company in the space, presumably you're the most informed person of anybody of 8 billion people on the planet to answer this question.

So if you had to make an informed guess of when you think cultivated meat will not only just be on the market in a meaningful way, but when it will actually be where plant based meat is today. Meaning, you know, any major grocery store would carry it. How long away do you think that might be?[00:30:00]

Uma Valeti: Cultivated meat to have a significant presence in the grocery stores like plant based meats. I think we're talking about 2030 to 2035, I would think is the range, I would predict. And here's why. plant based foods and plant based meats have been around for decades, if not more. And cultivated meat has not even been alive for even a decade.

This idea has been around for seven or eight years, but seriously being worked on since 2016 when we got the first 3 million. And half of our lifetime since then has been during COVID. And we're building not just the biology of it, but also the physical infrastructure, the scale, the engineering, and all of it amidst You know, an environment that has completely changed the whole, no one predicted a global pandemic when we were making predictions that we'll be on the market by 2021 or 2022.

Now, what here we are, we are on the market, we missed it by a year and we are at the receiving end of having, you know, [00:31:00] exaggerated or told lies. That's the reason I asked you the question because I will back up Amy and say, yes, this is what our goal is, this is what our prediction is. And who knows if the world doesn't change and we keep getting the investments we are looking at, absolutely.

I do think we'll challenge the exactly how EVs started off in 2003. But by 2023, they have 1 percent of the global market share, but the significant amount of global mindshare, that's what I'd like to see for cultivated meat in the next 10 years. So by 2035, I want us to solidly have a 1 percent market share.

Of meat in the United States or, you know, outside the United States, but majority of the mindshare for people saying, this is how meat could come to the world in the coming decades.

Paul Shapiro: Right. And interestingly about EVs, as you mentioned, because, you know, I was looking at a [00:32:00] 2013 Washington post column that was declaring EVs debt, that this was a fool's errand.

And, and, you know, now a decade later, of course, everybody believes they're inevitable, right? Or, or if not inevitable, they've been offering me a huge portion of the future. Yeah. And so, and it's, even if they're only 1 percent of the, of the market, you have entire states like California that have said, we're going to ban the sale of new vehicles with internal combustion engines.

You've got companies, right? Like GM or saying at some point we're going to phase out the production of these. And, you know, so that would be the equivalent of, you know, Tyson foods saying, okay, even if a small portion of our meat is cultivated, You know, by the year 20 X, 2050 or whatever it's going to be, where it's only going to be slaughter free, which would be, a pretty amazing thing to happen.

So, okay. So one, so you think, 1 percent maybe by 2035 or so, and, and the significant amount of the mindshare may that come to be, that would be really amazing. It would be an amazing advancement for sure.

Uma Valeti: Yeah, I believe it's possible. I don't think there's barriers for it. I believe that there is an issue of capital.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So let's [00:33:00] talk about that. So you mentioned, you know, we're going to keep getting the investments. It's an issue of capital. Obviously capital is much harder to come by now than it was, let's say in 2021. And in this period of, of great, great, investment coming into this space. You know, back then, you know, you had, you know, at that time beyond meat was valued at 14 billion.

Their market cap was 14 billion today. It's less than half a billion, right? So the valuation for beyond me, you know, they have hundreds of millions of dollars revenue over 300 million of revenue annually. And their market cap is less than half a billion, right? So companies that in, in the startup space that are pre revenue that had these high valuations, it'd be hard to maintain that.

Presumably, I don't know if that's a very, but presumably it'll be hard to maintain. So how much more do you think is needed? Not just for upside, but for companies in this space to get to that level, is it billions of dollars of investment? is it hundreds of millions? Like what's needed to build these facilities with these 20, 000 liters of capacity?

Uma Valeti: that would get you to where you want to go. I don't [00:34:00] have a crystal ball on this one, but I have a pretty clear conviction that in order for us to show value and create value, we've got to put products at a meaningful scale on the market. And the next chapter for cultivated meat, independent of plant based or anything else out there, is to be able to put products of value on the market that a consumer will taste and say, I love the taste, and then understands the story of how that came to the table while preserving choice.

And I think I started this podcast by saying preserving choice of fundamentally what we love to do or love to eat is a fundamental premise of cultivated meat. The benefit or the side effect of it is it also protects life. Not just animal life, but life for the environment around us, the communities around us.

So, when the mission of cultivated meat is realized, of protecting life and protecting choice, that is an incredible value [00:35:00] proposition. And I do think It's upon the industry to communicate this really well and also help other parts of the, the, the, the food economy grow. So plant based meats have an important place in the world and it's unfortunate to see what has happened with some of the companies that had high valuations and then they are facing a tough valuation at this point.

It's really unfortunate, but one of the challenges I think on that side was differentiation was very, very hard. And a number of people could just set up a plant based company overnight and put products of varying qualities. I think that reflected poorly on the ones that were doing a fantastic job.

Because it was easy to do that, the barriers to entry were very low, the safety, the quality, and the certifications and all that, I think, were significantly lower. Cultivated meat will need to be able to learn from those experiences, work with the colleagues in that space, and see the quality of the product we put in the world matters.[00:36:00]

And protecting that quality, creating the, the levels of quality assurance and consumer trust become really important. And I hope the cultivated meat will be able to show that value. And if we do that, we can create an enormous value, much more than what plant based was hoping to create. Because here's why.

The most important thing is cultivated meat stands at this very interesting intersection. It can have products on its own that people can fall in love with. But some of the technologies that are driving cultivated meat can make plant based products taste much better. And some of the technologies that cultivated meat is coming up with could also help the conventional meat industry saying the next investment I'm going to put in a plant or in a community will be a cultivated meat company so they can take part in this.

And not be disrupted in any way. So it brings them together in a very big tent,model.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. do you think that the meat, the conventional meat industry's participation will be imperative here?

Uma Valeti: I believe it [00:37:00] is already happening. So I think it's going to become more and more imperative that people who are sitting on the sidelines start participating in it.

But we had to win that right through proof of scale.

Paul Shapiro: Right. Okay. Yeah, because, you know, interestingly, like Tyson Foods, which if my memory, are they an investor of yours?

Uma Valeti: Tyson and Cargill are both investors.

Paul Shapiro: That's, that's right. So, you know, Tyson was an investor in Beyond Meat also. and then there was, they pulled out right before the IPO where they sold their stake right before the IPO.

And, you know, the question is, you know, are they going to try to capitalize on plant based or they're just going to go to cultivate or they're just going to double down on, on animal based, right? Nobody knows, obviously could be, could be any or south or none of those things. I don't know. but that will be, the real test in, in my view is whether the Tysons, the produce, the JBS is, and so on are going to really throw their hat in the ring.

Because, you know, really what happened was most of those brands launched their own plant based meat lines. And they didn't succeed, you know, Hormel pulled their line, Tyson pulled most of those products that they were doing on their own. Like they tried to get into plant based meat and they failed. and maybe they were putting out the products that you were just [00:38:00] referring to that were not meeting consumer expectations as far as taste or texture is concerned.

I don't know, but hopefully if they get into cultivated, they'll be more successful than they were in plant based for sure. Yeah.

Uma Valeti: I think this is a too large and important opportunity to ignore because it is value additive. It's not taking away from a market they have. The market is increasing in size.

And they will have to make choices of where they will make investments that will pay off in the next decade and the decade after that's also aligned with their community's values, their family's values, and their employees values. And I think this offers stability to preserve the choice of making real meat.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, and interestingly, there seem to be slaughter plant closures every week, right? I mean, I follow this pretty closely and they're big slaughter plant closures every week as demand is contracting right now. And nobody's written the story about the death of the meat industry. You know, it's like a couple of cultivated meat startups go under.

And, you know, like these stories, the obituaries are being written, but when the big slaughters are closing down huge slaughter plants, like nobody's writing, nobody's [00:39:00] written a story about the contraction of the meat industry right now, it's really surprising to me.

Uma Valeti: Well, I think it's really sad to see that within eight months of an entirely new industry getting their first regulatory approvals.

You'll have the journalists come and start writing obituaries without knowing the details, without even having spent time with with our team, and asking the questions. Just going out and writing obituaries. Well, because it. It pays the conflict of interest that is the more salacious the headline, the more clicks there are.

And I wish that there was a little more restraint and also a little more curiosity in understanding why we have this conviction. And we could be wrong. We're admitting that there are areas where some challenges still remain, but at least if they present both sides of it,

Paul Shapiro: yeah. In these cases, they're like the journalist is the judge and the jury, right?

So there, you know, there's, there's no real opportunity in that particular sense to offer something else. Is there, if they haven't, if they have an [00:40:00] outcome or narrative to which they wedded, you know, there's a way to, you know, present the, the evidence in favor of that. Yeah. anyway, okay, with all of that said, there are so many resources that people could utilize if they want to try to do something good in the world, start the round of cultivating a company, maybe they want to come join upside foods, whatever you've been running this company now for nearly a decade, eight years, eight years.

And I presumed that there's a lot that you've learned right in, in that time, and there are many things that you probably didn't know before that you now know. Is there anything, if you were to go back to the 2015 UMA who had just given up cardiology to start this fledgling company that had no money yet, would you tell him any mistakes to avoid making anything that you would like him to have done differently in the last eight years?

Thank you.

Uma Valeti: look, I'm not really good at looking back because I think this whole idea and this field will only [00:41:00] survive and have a chance if you look forward. There are obviously learnings to take away and say, hey, could this have been done more efficiently or effectively? Absolutely, but I do think this field, we have to have a single minded purpose and a focus of looking ahead and not losing sight of the North Star.

So I'd say if I think about 2015 to 2016 to now, If I could have predicted a global pandemic, I would have planned better. I couldn't, I couldn't have predicted a global pandemic. That actually was an important element that slowed down the progress and growth, growth in this industry. Right.

Paul Shapiro: Why? Because people couldn't come into the lab and so they were at home and there's only so much they can do or because you were trying to do construction and you couldn't get the construction workers?

Like, what was the actual slowdown from the pandemic?

Uma Valeti: Yeah. So there's, there's one part of it that couldn't have been predicted, which is, you know, During the pandemic, we could not have people work within each other because of the six feet distance rule, and we're building stuff. This is [00:42:00] hardware, in addition to the biology being worked out, and these are heavy, heavy things, the cultivators are building that we're trying to get to 500 liters and 2, 000 liters, so the large cultivators.

And having people work in a confined space was just not possible. So they had, we had to do a lot of modeling on it and do it in small scale and projecting it to large scale. And so that slowed us down. On the construction side, we were very, very careful. We decided to continue to construct Epic during the pandemic.

We started, we broke ground before the vaccines came and then we opened it. What a year after the vaccines and thankfully we planned it well so we could get the construction done on time, but the supply chain slowdowns of getting things in and trying to commission it and all that did slow us down lowering of costs and cogs because the manufacturers for them also had to get people together was not as fast as I would like.

So yes, we could have been on the market earlier, faster at lower cost. But hey, that's life. So I can't predict much more than the global pandemic is probably the only thing I wish I could have predicted, but otherwise things have gone according to plan. [00:43:00] I could say even the things have gone better than plan because when I started in 2015 or 16, I had no idea if people would care about it.

We were the first company in this space and I didn't know if I look back, there will be anybody now, a hundred and plus hundred to 150 companies later, the best food and ag universities in the world have undergrad and post grad programs to develop talent in this field. Nearly every major country doing research grants to work on this field.

It being in the headlines of every major media articles to say, hey, this is a promise. I wouldn't have been able to predict all of that. So I'd say it went better than expected. So I'm very grateful for it. And the nuance here is, this is the, one of the few times that an idea like this is being championed by people in the real world taking a lot of risks than in the safety of academia.

And the ideas from what people are doing in the real world, like at UpSight and other companies, is what is [00:44:00] driving academia to do more, and that's rarely happened. And there is also this. There's non profits that have started in this space, Good Food Institute, a rockstar non profit organization, that they have been out there saying the way to solve problems is by bringing industry, problem solvers, and academia together, and hats off to Bruce Frederick and his entire team there.

They have been enormously supportive of academia and industry and policy and asking some tough questions for the world to work on. Indeed.

Paul Shapiro: Indeed. yeah, my, my hat's off to Bruce and the whole team at the Good Food Institute for the good work that they're doing. Obviously, GFI has a lot of great resources for people who are interested in this space.

What resources would you recommend? Is there anything that you have found useful in terms of what you have read or seen or heard?

Uma Valeti: Well, I'd say, look, this is a journey that is incredibly,

worthwhile. Meaningful, so I would say people [00:45:00] embarking on any new idea to really ask the question, does this cause move you and does this cause move your team? And I think that's a very important fundamental question to ask and if it does. Then recognize that it's going to be a roller coaster and everybody says it's going to take twice as long and 10 times as hard harder.

Yeah, but the roller coaster is also going to be 10 times as scary.

Paul Shapiro: So speaking of the roller coaster that you have been on, you know, you announced recently that you're going to pause. The Rubicon facility in Illinois, and instead you're going to build up this facility that we're sitting in here in Emeryville, California.

So what will this facility become? You said there are, you know, you pointed out earlier, there's several 2, 000 liter plus tanks here. So what will there be here? Like, what will this become that you don't need Rubicon for right now?

Uma Valeti: Yeah, look, I think it was one of the best decisions we made in the face of rapidly changing [00:46:00] conditions in front of us.

You meaning capital raising conditions or? Capital raising conditions have changed dramatically in the last 12 months and we were on, on track to be able to start breaking ground and start building in, in,Illinois and we did break ground, we started building, but we did not commit majority of our capital and it's like when you know that you're speeding, but there's a cliff and you just find out there's a cliff and if you don't break and keep driving off it, you'll just go over the cliff and I'm so thankful that our team made the call.

This is not the time to keep driving in that direction. It's important to hit the brakes. And do what Rubicon was supposed to do, which is to show elements of proof of scale. We may not be doing it in such an expansive way, but the core fundamental element proof of scale of doing it at 20, 000 liters or higher is what we wanted to accomplish.

We will do that here with the expansion in California at a significantly lower cost. [00:47:00] Is Illinois on hold or is it canceled? It's on hold right now. We still have the site, we still have the building, but we have not committed majority of the capital for it. Got it. And we will only commit that capital when we do the definitive proof of scale at the next level, which we can do in California.

And I would love to be able to keep building in Illinois. And also have the chance to talk to other parts in the country where we can say, logistically, it's a good place to put a meat production facility. So, we will keep looking at it, but right now we're only focused on showing proof of scale in California.

Paul Shapiro: And scale being 20, 000 liters? Or greater. Or greater. Okay. Exciting. Well, I look forward to coming back here and seeing a 20, 000 liter vessel that I will get to dine from. So it's like, you know, true. Instead of farm to fork, it's like cultivator to fork here

Uma Valeti: at Upside. Well, you read from all these cultivators today.

Yeah, I had cultivator to fork dining. That's

Paul Shapiro: good. Okay, finally, Uma, let me ask you, are there any companies you wish existed that don't? You mentioned there's more than a hundred companies in the cultivated animal sales [00:48:00] space right now, but is there anything that nobody is working on that you wish that somebody would take on or something that maybe some people are working on, but you think it needs more people working on it?

Uma Valeti: Are you specifically talking about cultivated meat or?

Paul Shapiro: You know, actually, however you want to take it. So it could be anything, anything you want to see in the world. Yeah. Cultivated meat or otherwise.

Uma Valeti: Well, there's two different companies I'd like to see in the world. One is a company that is there for people who are on rollercoaster like journeys, especially entrepreneurs and people in startups and what employees in startups go through when they are going through this rollercoaster. the depths of resilience that you have to go into and the ability to withstand all kinds of skeptics And not lose focus on what you're doing.

I think if there was a company that was formed around it, they would do the greatest amount of good because these entrepreneurs from those companies are going after [00:49:00] causes that I think move all of us to be better. And if there is that scaffolding and support structure in a much more organized way, in a much more tangible way, They would do the greatest amount of good.

Okay. That's one company. Great.

Paul Shapiro: And what's the second?

Uma Valeti: the second company is I think related to the state of polarization in the world and not knowing,

so this is still forming in my head because I've seen what's happening in the world in the last two to three years and also seeing, you know, where it's headed. I think

there is a loss of trust, in societies and there's a loss of trust in institutions. And there is a tremendous amount of loss of trust in media and journalism. And if there is a company that can point to bringing that trust back in journalism, in [00:50:00] media, in institutions, completely transparent and calling out conflicts where there are conflicts.

I think it'll be great because I did not know that journalists are one of the lowest, least trusted professions. I did not know that. And that's sad because. I love, I love reading the news. But I need to be able to trust what I'm reading. And I think, somebody forming a company around it that calls the conflicts out and says, okay, well, that's clickbait.

That's real. Like I said, difference between fair journalism and fair weather journalism is a really important, thing and, and most people do not have the, the bully pulpit. Like the media organizations have to be able to hold themselves accountable. And I think a company around that would be fantastic.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Well, you've heard it from two different company ideas. If you're looking to start something, maybe those are your way to make a dent in the world. But for now, Uma will keep on making his dent by building more and more cultivators to try to get to that place where we're going to get cultivated meat [00:51:00] to at least be 1 percent of the meat market.

And then from beyond. So Uma, thanks so much for all you're doing pleasure to be here in Epic with you. And I look forward to being here when it's. Even more epic. Well, thank you for being here, Paul.

Uma Valeti: All right. We're finished on this. And,

Paul Shapiro: yeah, as you can imagine, my view of journalists is quite low, as you can imagine, but I,

Uma Valeti: I don't know, there should be a company around it.

You know, there should be people who would call

Paul Shapiro: the conflicts out. And now I don't think like, you know, what is a conflict? Like sometimes if the conflict is they want to make money, but you know, somebody like, sorry.