Wood-Fed Meat? Marc Chevrel and Arbiom Say Bring it On
by Paul Shapiro | November 15, 2020
Meat from a cow who’s eaten an entirely grass-based diet is typically called “grass-fed meat.” So when you’re making plant-based meat with wood as your feedstock, is it called “wood-fed meat”?
No matter what you call it, Arbiom has raised about $30 million to produce it.
Arbiom CEO Marc Chevrel is taking wood and subjecting it to a yeast-based fermentation that allows him to, within just one week, produce a high-protein food which can be used both for human and animal purposes. Just think about how long it takes to raise an animal for food, yet Marc harvests his protein in just one week.
Right now, billions of wild fish are killed and fed to farmed fish, farmed land animals like pigs, and to our pets in dog and cat food. What if Marc’s yeast could replace the need for all those fish to be taken from the sea? Even more, he’s turned his wood-fed yeast into plant-based meat which he asserts is quite tasty, and he says, very affordable.
So, is wood-fed meat the future of sustainable protein? Marc Chevrel thinks so. Enjoy this episode and you the judge.
Discussed in this episode
Feedstuffs: “Arbiom achieves milestone in scale-up of 'wood-to-food' technology”
The Spoon: “The Latest Ingredient For Alt-Protein? Wood.”
Food Ingredients: “Arbiom’s alternative protein product has ‘lowest impact on climate change’”
More about Marc Chevrel of Arbiom:
Marc Chevrel has been a manager in industrial fields for more than 20 years, with a varied experience in energy, chemistry, manufacturing, engineering and services. He was the head of the regional office for industrial environment in Northern France before working for the French Energy Regulatory Commission as head of the electricity markets. He then joined the nuclear engineering and manufacturing company Areva, where he held various management roles, including leader of industrial business units with a work force of several thousand people, and sales of about 1 billion dollars.
Marc has a wealth of international experience and he has worked and lived in four countries (France, Germany, Japan and the USA). Marc is a graduate from both École Normale Supérieure and Mines ParisTech and holds master’s degrees in mathematics and engineering.
business for good podcast episode 53 - marc chevrel
Wood-Fed Meat? Marc Chevrel and Arbiom Say Bring it On
Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Business for Good podcast to show where we spotlight companies making money by making the world a better place. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, and if you share a passion for using commerce to solve many of the world's most pressing problems, then this is the show for you. Welcome friends to the 53rd episode of the Business for Good podcast.
If you haven't yet listened to the last episode with Aaron Brantley on election security, I highly recommend it given the extremely strange times that we are living in. Yes, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election. But with the president who is trying to cast doubt on the ballots casted without providing any evidence of any fraud whatsoever.
The last episode will help you understand more about how ballots are counted and how protected our electoral system actually is. But enough about the last episode because just like the nation is moving on to a new administration, we are moving on to a new topic. Yet that topic is actually not all that new.
For regular listeners of the. [00:01:00] Because this episode, we will be talking all about sustainable protein. However, normally when you think about alternatives to animal protein, you may think about soy or wheat or pee. That's pretty much what nearly all the plant-based meats are made out of for the most part.
But rbm is a startup that has raised nearly 30 million so far to make alt protein. Wood. You heard that right, my friend. Our guest on this episode, Arion, C E O, mark Chevre, is taking wood and subjecting it to a yeast based fermentation that allows him to, within just one week, produce a high protein food, which can be used both for human and animal purposes.
Think about just how long it takes to raise an animal for food. Yet Mark harvests his protein in. One week right now, billions of wild fish are killed and fed to farmed fish, farmed land animals like pigs, and to our pets in their dog and cat food. But what if Mark's yeast [00:02:00] could replace the need for all those fish to be taken from the sea even more?
He's turned his wood fed yeast into plant-based meat, which he asserts is quite tasty, and he says also quite affordable. So is wood fed yeast, the future of sustainable protein. Mark Chall certainly thinks so, and I'll let him tell you why. Mark Chevre, welcome to the Business for Good podcast. Good to hear.
Thank. Yeah, really glad to be talking with you. I've been reading a lot about your company and glad to have you on the show. Um, you are doing something, mark that is really fascinating. Um, many people are trying to figure out all these types of ways of making protein, um, and doing cool things with protein from things like peas or wheat or soy.
But you talk about walking through a forest and being inspired by seeing a mushroom on a decaying piece of. What's inspirational about that to you and what's it relevant to? Why, why is that relevant to what you're doing at Arbi
Marc Chevrel: Wood is usually not thought of [00:03:00] as material for, for food. It doesn't belong to the food chain.
And, but that's true that if you walk through a forest, we'll see mushrooms growing on, uh, on trees and uh, and actually trees are all life trees and, and wood can be a very good substrate, uh, to, to. All kind of food. And, uh, that's what the inspiration came from, you know, to do that. But I would say at large scale and, uh, to make wood today a non-food plant, uh, go into the food chain and seeds, food is so, uh, abundant over the world and basically everywhere, uh, on the world.
It's, it's a great way to, to be able to offer. Feed and food solutions everywhere
Paul Shapiro: in the world. So when did this idea come to you, mark, that you might be able to use wood as some type of a substrate eventually, to just grow protein that would be edible by humans and, and by animals as well. When, when did, when did you start thinking about this?
Well,
Marc Chevrel: at RM we, we started working, you know, on the [00:04:00] wood ation, uh, business, trying to make, uh, things outta wood, this grain bioeconomy of the, uh, 2010s. At some point, we realized that it was really important to focus on application as well. Instead of going, you know, into the, uh, biochemicals where, you know, some kind of, uh, of purity and which can be costly and uh, and difficult.
We said, well, actually, we're coming from the biological space. Let, let's stay in the biological space and just use the, the wood for feed and food applications. That's how we decided you to focus on this. Coming from the. I would say from, from the wood vaccination world.
Paul Shapiro: So what was your background that you were interested in wood vaccination in the first place?
Mark? Personally, I'm an engineer
Marc Chevrel: by training. I work first in the energy field. Something where, uh, little bit different since it's was, uh, nuclear field, but was also interested in all kinds of, uh, [00:05:00] of ways of making energy. And uh, and Wooda was also a part of this where I started also getting interested in, you know, how can you, um, Make some energy, either electricity or fuels from, uh, from biomass.
And we're just looking at this, uh, I would say from, um, just because I wanted to, to understand how, how we've, at some point I, the opportunity, you know, to, to work for ar discover this company. And I said, well, that's exactly the kind of thing that's, um, interesting, you know, Using wood, which is so readily, uh, available on, on earth to do
Paul Shapiro: something very useful.
Okay, so, uh, mark, let's chat about what you're actually doing with this wood then, because you know, some people who hear this, they think, oh, like wood-based food. What are you doing to make the wood edible? But that's not really what you're doing, right? We're not eating wood. If we start to eat rbm products, tell us, what are you doing?
So you, you get some wood and then what happens? Well, that's exactly
Marc Chevrel: what the, I would say what the mushrooms are, are in, you know, we, we, we [00:06:00] take the wood and that will be the, the raw material, and we're going to, uh, break it down in small pieces. We're going to hydrolyze the wood if we talk, uh, technically and the substrate we, we get coming from the, and the hemis of the, of the wood, what we're doing then to use to grow our microorganisms.
Right now we're using a yeast, but all the microorganisms can be. Uh, can be contemplated as well. And so we grow the yeast on our woody substrates. At the end, we collect, we dry, and that's our, uh, product. So people are not eating wood, uh, as you said, whether they're eating yeast
Paul Shapiro: fed on wood. And so the idea is that you can do this more cheaply than if you were buying conventional substrates for the yeast.
Is that right?
Marc Chevrel: Yes. That's the idea. But it's also. Mostly the, uh, the sustainability aspect that's driving us here.
Paul Shapiro: So, so tell me more about that, mark. Because, you know, to the average person, they hear, okay, you're gonna go feed [00:07:00] wood to yeast. It doesn't sound that sustainable, right? It sounds like you're going out and cutting down a bunch of trees so that you can make yeast.
Uh, but what are you actually doing
Marc Chevrel: when you are in the, in the business of exploiting wood? You'll do that sustainably, you know, if you. You don't want to coal wood and then end up with, uh, with nothing. Um, it's actually usually the, uh, you are going to deforest an area for, uh, crop culture or for raising land.
If you want to, uh, exploit the wood, you want to have a forest and to replace the forest by, by new trees. Uh, so that's what happens usually when you are, um, exporting with the, the pop and paper industry has been doing for. So you can, uh, absolutely use wood in a sustainable, uh, way and actually make the forest grow thanks to, to your actions.
You're actually going to replace some, uh, with our technology, I would say some, uh, crop ingredients [00:08:00] with, uh, ingredients coming from, from mood. So coming from
Paul Shapiro: forest. And so are you using trees that have been cut down for this purpose, or are you using like the waste products from paper milling and the pulp there?
Like what type of wood are you feeding to these yeast? So
Marc Chevrel: we can basically use any kind of, uh, of wood, uh, that's available. Our goal is to use mainly wood that's already available and typically from some meals. So they will have a lot of sodas or, um, other wood products that they usually. Burn after in the process.
And here we offer, I would say, a better, uh, visualization of this food, but it'll always depend on, uh, you know, where you are, where you stand, what is your supply, uh, available. When you install an oven plan somewhere, one of the first things to do is to see what kind of wood supply do you have around and what is, what is available or what makes sense to.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. So tell me, [00:09:00] mark, does it matter, I mean, you said that you can use pretty much any microorganism or are you using a specific kind of yeast to, is this a genetically engineered strain of yeast that you're using?
Marc Chevrel: So, no, uh, we really don't want to have engineered, uh, yeast. So what we've done is, uh, we have a proprietary use that we've evolved, uh, I would say, uh, naturally by doing several, I would say iterations in, um, with the different substrate.
And that's also a way for us to, to, to be sure that our product can be sold in all markets. Cause you know that GMOs has different receptions, let's call it that way in, in different countries.
To have a natural product.
Paul Shapiro: So tell me about the yeast then, because you know, the wood seems to be like the headline, right? That you're using wood to create protein that's edible, but the protein is yeast. Um, how much protein is in the yeast and what type of amino acid profile is there and how does that compare to some of the [00:10:00] proteins that we're using right now for human food, like I was mentioning, like soy or wheat, or.
We
Marc Chevrel: have a typically, uh, 55 to 60, uh, protein content, crude protein in our, uh, uh, in our product, which compares favorably to soybean meal, which is the, the, I would say the , the ubiquitous and the typical protein ingredients we'll find on the, on the market and is being part of the Kingdom of Jeru. It's not, uh, an animal, it's not a plant.
It's. Its own, I would say, uh, kingdom. And the I said profile is actually intermediate between what you would find in soybean meal and what you would find in, um, in fish meal. Which is usually, usually considered as the reference in terms of quality for feed
Paul Shapiro: applications. Okay, so what are you doing it with?
It, with it then Mark? So have you started selling this product already? So
Marc Chevrel: we're, uh, in the process of, uh, [00:11:00] customer in the middle of our, um, demonstration program where we're going to. Show that technically our product can be scaled up in, uh, industrial facilities, uh, before building our first, uh, commercial plant, but also, uh, validating commercially the product with, uh, potential customers.
What we've done is, uh, a whole range of, um, uh, animal trials with fish, uh, pets swine, which are the, the three markets we're targeting first, and they've shown that our product has a great, uh, digestibility. Can replace without any problem, uh, you know, the traditional protein sources and that is perfectly safe to, uh, to use.
So we, we really hope that in the next just say 12 months, we'll have also customer trials that will bend be the first, uh, stepping stone to have to have contracts for our commercial facility.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. And where will that commercial facility be? Will be
Marc Chevrel: [00:12:00] opportunistic, I will say as a startup, funding will be, uh, very important.
So if there are some, uh, depending on where we size Subsid is, that could be, uh, interesting to looking really where we are based right now. So it's North America and, and Europe, which would be the, uh, the two locations we're considering right now.
Paul Shapiro: So, mark, let's talk about the sustainability aspect, not just of your feedstock for your yeast then, but also for what you are replacing.
Because you know, right now, if you, uh, look, for example, you mentioned a dog food. There is an enormity. Of meat and other animal products that go into dog food. And it's not really much of a secret anymore that, um, using animal protein compared to non-animal proteins, it just takes a lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, pandemic risk amplification.
And other, uh, concerns relating to animal cruelty and so on. Uh, but you're talking about creating a, basically a dried yeast product that's very high in protein [00:13:00] that you say is comparable to certain types of the gold standards for protein digestibility. And that could be used as a primary ingredient for dog food.
So tell me, is that part of your goal here? To try to displace some of the animal protein that is in the food that's going, whether that's to dogs or to other, Absolutely. And here
Marc Chevrel: will obviously, you know, the, the market will decide and, and the customers will, will decide that you really think that we have with our product a sustainable product that can replace not only the soybean meal, which is questionable also for, because of deforestation we talked about, et cetera, but also some of the, uh, animal proteins be the fish meal or, you know, chicken meal or other, other, uh, animal protein that are being used.
Right.
Paul Shapiro: Animals. Yeah. Because e even if you look at like aquaculture, right? The amount of fish who are caught from the wild to feed these fish, uh, who are captive is pretty enormous. Right. And so are you suggesting that your yeast [00:14:00] could be used as a either a supplement or even a total replacement for those wild caught fish?
Yeah, ab,
Marc Chevrel: absolutely. That's really our goal. And, and I would say we're lucky that this goal is shared by our customers. Uh, our customers are well aware. Their current use of protein, fish meal and soybeans meal is not sustainable. So they're really looking for alternatives. They're really excited when you talk to them about, you know, this, uh, uh, wood to food protein that we're proposing.
Paul Shapiro: That's really, really interesting. So the thing that really caught my eye though, mark, was not even the possibility of using your, um, your wood to food protein for feeding animals, but I know that you recently did some experiments with actually putting it through an extrusion machine to texturize it and see how it might work in terms of plant-based meats.
So, you know, for those who aren't familiar, if you, if you look at nearly all of the plant-based. That is sold, uh, it's coming from either soy, wheat or pea or maybe some combination thereof of those. Now [00:15:00] we've had on the show, uh, in the past, people like Kimberly Lee who are making plant-based meat, not out of plants at all actually, but out of fungi using, uh, Asper Joes or sometimes known as Koji to make meat.
But Mark, you're talking about something altogether new. By using this type of a ye. To make a plant-based meat. So how did that go when you extruded it and how soon before you think there this might be an actual ingredient that plant-based meat makers can utilize? Good question.
Marc Chevrel: So it it, it did very well.
We did that and in February, so we're quite lucky to do it, you know, before COVID 19 would, would strike and, uh, To, to shut down. And, uh, it was a proof of concept and we, we were able ourselves product using recipe where we meal.
We'll give it a try. And, uh, at our, at ar we, we all thought it was, uh, it was [00:16:00] actually great how it, it, we were not trying to have something especially tasty or, or anything. It does have a, a nice taste, uh, according to us. And we're really hoping that other companies, you know, much more in the, in the, um, in the business of doing, uh, recipes.
For, uh, uh, and consumers will, uh, now take Cpro and use it other, one of their, uh, best ingredients for new products.
Paul Shapiro: So what's the, I mean, if, if this isn't proprietary marketing, what's the doubling time for you Yeast here. Like, how soon can you grow, um, the yeast from when you start the fermentation process to when you're harvesting it and, and having it ready for consumption?
I wouldn't call that
Marc Chevrel: the, the time, but.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah, yeah. I've realized that they're unrelated, that they are o only related, but that they're not the same thing. But how fast can you do it is the real question. I
Marc Chevrel: would say between the, the moment where we start with the, with the wood, the, let's say, call that, I'll call it that way, you know, the travel time of the, uh, molecule, uh, the, starting [00:17:00] from the wood to the dried product we're talking about, uh, typically seven to 10 days.
Um, now it's a continuous process at the end, you know? You have put in, uh, products out, and it doesn't, uh, it doesn't matter, but, uh, but typically between the, the different operation that you have, uh, to do, that's what we're talking about.
Paul Shapiro: Right. So my, my point in asking this Mark is that if, if it's a week, right, so at most it's gonna take a week from beginning to end there.
Uh, whereas if you're looking at, let's say, growing soybeans or growing wheat or growing peas in which you're, you're talking of course about months or growing animals, which might be months or even years, I would imagine this is a pretty efficient process. And so how does that relate to the cost of the product?
Like when your product mark comes out, uh, are the makers of plant-based meats, for example, going to. A new protein that is actually cheaper than soy or pea protein? Well, soy is
Marc Chevrel: extremely cheap, and we could probably argue that probably, uh, soy, uh, uh, soy crops are [00:18:00] not, you know, paying for the, all the externalities there , right?
Sure. Uh, but no, our goal is really to be at par with, um, uh, with fish. So we're talking about, uh, $1,500 per ton, uh, for, uh, for feed, uh, for feed application. You're talking about food applications. The regulations being different, we're, uh, might be a bit higher
Paul Shapiro: than that. So, hey, hey Mark. Sorry to interrupt you.
1500 do US dollars per ton. So that's still less than a dollar a pound, right? You're losing me with the
Marc Chevrel: with pounds.
Paul Shapiro: Ok. But, but just to be clear, what you said was, uh, 1500 US $1,500 US dollars per 2000 pounds, which is a, a ton. Yeah, that's, that's still pretty cheap. No, that's, uh,
Marc Chevrel: super cheap. And I think that's also something that is a differentiator compared, you know, to other novel proteins from what I, uh, have seen that.
To be [00:19:00] in the premium segment if such a pyramid really exist for that, because it might be quite, quite expensive, you know, to do the, the whole uh, uh, the whole development. And really focused also on making sure that we can have something that's cheap enough in order to, to concur the market. Cause we're, uh, aware that, uh, in the end price is a very important component for
Paul Shapiro: our customers.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's obviously everybody cares about sustainability, but if it's not, uh, price competitive, Probably not gonna be sustainable for them as a customer. So, um, have you, uh, mark tell me, um, about your lifecycle analysis then. So, you know, it'd be nice to actually prove with some type of a third party, uh, lifecycle analysis of this is actually more sustainable.
So tell me about that.
Marc Chevrel: We actually in, uh, in the midst, in the administration program, we have a, a funding with the European Union and, um, we're leading the consortium and this consortium, one company, so one, uh, company well versed in, uh, lca, [00:20:00] LCAs and LTA calculation is, uh, studying this. They're still, uh, doing that.
But we had some, uh, very encouraging, uh, innovative results. Uh, I would say showing that, uh, especially in terms of, uh, CO2 emission. Our Cipro product, um, and really cradle to, um, to mill, you know, until you bring it to, to the customers. That's actually very, very well compared to the traditional sources of, uh, of protein, especially, uh, uh, especially.
So we very encouraged by that. And, um, we, we hope to have more specific data to show to our customers, uh, in order to convince them that there, there's a real value also with, uh, in terms of, uh, environmental f.
Paul Shapiro: Okay, cool. So Mark, you mentioned that you're not yet commercialized, but you also said that the company has been around now for, uh, nearly a decade.
Right. So how have you been funding this thing? Well,
Marc Chevrel: we'll, uh, very lucky. We are, uh, we have a family, uh, I would say, let's call that the [00:21:00] reunion of family offices that have been, uh, founding us, uh, for some time. And they're, they've been with us, uh, all the way. Uh, it's been complimented by, uh, by grants.
It's part of a, I think every, every startup, you know, to find grants, subsidies, all kind of a, of how they, they can. But mostly that's, uh, really our, um, our shareholders who are behind us that will believe in what we're doing and they're supporting us.
Paul Shapiro: So how much money have you raised so far? There have been
Marc Chevrel: several.
Um, we can say that in the last, um, three to four years, which are really when we've started to, to, to focus on, uh, this, we have been between 25 and 30
Paul Shapiro: million. So a lot of money to bring in. Um, and, uh, I'll really be looking forward to trying some of that yeast when it comes out on, on the market. I think it could really do a, a lot of good to spare a lot of animals and other resources from being utilized in the food system, both for [00:22:00] humans and, and for animals, for sure.
So, mark, you have now been running this startup for years. Uh, you've raised tens of millions of dollars as, as you mentioned, and I'm sure you've learned a. From this whole process, and I really look forward to the time when your product actually hits the market. It would be really cool to see a new source of sustainable protein available for folks to be utilizing, but for other folks who maybe look at what you're doing and are inspired by it, are there any resources that you would recommend, mark, that have been helpful for you along your own entrepreneurial journey that you would think, Hey, check this out.
It helped.
Marc Chevrel: Honestly for me, I think that will be, you know, curiosity and, uh, something has been invented , you know, in the last, last decade. The worldwide, uh, web has been an incredible resource. You know, just browsing and fighting a lot of, of things that would, uh, give me ideas left and right. I am not so, you know, going for some kind of, [00:23:00] Of books or Rabbit.
I'm, I'm, I'm very curious and I, uh, I like spending some time just research. I think that's not necessarily directly linked to, to what I'm doing, but that's really how I've, um, I've had some, some of my ideas on the inspirations. So that's, uh, now I, I'm saying this would work for, for everybody, but that's, uh, how I've done, uh, uh,
Paul Shapiro: Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Um, yeah, we had a guest on the show one time who had, uh, recommended YouTube as a, uh, as the primary resource for doing research. So e everybody has what, what works for them. Uh, so finally, mark. Are there any companies that you wish that somebody else would start? I'm sure you think about sustainability all the time and how technology can be used to solve some of the, uh, sustainability problems that we as a species are facing.
So you're doing what you're doing by taking, um, you know, wood products and converting them into sustainable [00:24:00] protein for us. Are there other ideas that you wish somebody else might pick up and, and take the, uh, baton with and start. Something
Marc Chevrel: I'm, I'm really, really, uh, uh, interested, uh, in it I think would be a great, uh, advancement for humankind, uh, is, uh, energy storage and especially, you know, electricity storage that's coming from my, uh, former, uh, occupation, you know, in the energy field.
That's really something that, uh, in doing something that's, uh, cheap enough could really disrupted the, the whole, uh, energy business. So obviously, I'm sure you're aware a lot of people are working on. Anyway in all directions. And we probably need that, you know, this flurry of people trying a lot of different things.
But to me, if we're able to, uh, to have a breakthrough here, that would really, really change, uh, the way we're doing things, shoot implications, um, all over the, all over the
Paul Shapiro: world. Energy storage. So maybe you'll have, uh, some great energy storage options for all the solar energy that you're gonna be capturing at [00:25:00] your new fermentation facility that you'll be building soon, right?
Typically. Very good. Well, mark, it's really great to talk to you. I really admire what you're doing and I'll be, uh, rooting for your success as you come closer to bringing Arby's products to market. Thank you very much for the pleasure of talking to you. Yep, it's my pleasure. Mark. Thanks so much. Thank you.
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