Welcome to Pluripotent — it’s Thursday, July 9th, and it’s come to my attention that not only is Gayle King self-isolating in one of Oprah’s guest houses, but Oprah apparently has her own damn avocado orchard. What an icon. As ever, news tips can be patched through to me via direct message, also feel free to follow me over at @chasepurdy.
NEW YORK — It’s been a full seven months since my last sit-down with Josh Tetrick, the CEO of JUST. So it was really great to catch-up with him this week thanks to programming put on by The Battery in San Francisco.
Tetrick and I chatted about Billion Dollar Burger, building a regulatory pathway for cultured meat, the impact of Covid-19 on his nascent industry, JUST’s off-site pilot production facility, and more. I thought it’d be fun to share some of that conversation. What follows are bits and pieces of our chat, which have been edited slightly, in some cases, for brevity and clarity.
On building regulatory pathways and the potential timeline.
"That regulatory path looks at two dimensions. It looks at, one, what can we call it. And the second regulatory element is even more important: Is it safe?
Now, we believe it is safe. Other companies that are doing this that have made a ton of progress also believe it is safe. It's up to us to show regulators data. Right? Not just to say it's safe, but to show analytical data, to show all the relevant food safety data, sequencing data, etc. And then we and other companies work directly with the regulators to create that path."
"I think it is more likely than not that there will be a regulatory path somewhere before the end of this year. But I do want to distinguish what a full-scale takeover launch is. When we say launch, we're talking one, two, three restaurants."
To better understand the kinds of data cultured meat startups are providing regulators around the world, a good place to start would be the public comments that Memphis Meats submitted to the US government back in December 2018. It’s in that document that readers will be able to get a clearer idea of the potential hazards and risk-based controls regulators are looking for when they set out to build new regulatory systems.
How Covid-19 has impacted the development of regulations.
"I think initially when Covid hit, it put more focus [by regulators] on, ‘How can we think about regulations as it relates to importing food around Covid.’
I think some of those distractions are going away, and now regulators are starting to focus a bit more on what does this mean structurally, long-term for my country, for the kind of food policy that we want. And I think what we're seeing now from regulators is an acceleration; more intentional and that it's more critical to national policy and how do we figure out a way to do this.”
Tetrick added that he believes, in the long-run, Covid-19 “will mean the acceleration of cell-cultured meat technology.” That jives with some of the news that I pointed out here last week regarding regulatory movement in China and Japan.
Asked to rank the top three places in the world that would likely adopt a regulatory pathway first, Tetrick listed: (1) Singapore, (2) the US, and (3) Israel.
The price of JUST’s cultured meat.
Back in October 2019, Tetrick told me that the cost of his company’s pure cell-cultured chicken nuggets sat at about $50 per nugget.
"We're probably about 10-15% less expensive than that chicken nuggets quote that we gave previously."
For those who are just as bad at math as me, we’re talking nuggets that are now around $44 to $45 a pop. One thing to keep in mind: If that is indeed the cost of a pure cultured meat nugget, the cost could drop drastically if JUST opts to introduce a hybrid product first, a nugget comprised of a substantial percentage of plant-based material.
On JUST’s off-site pilot production facility.
Tetrick says his company is currently working with 1,000-liter bioreactors. And in terms of how many restaurants a company could service with a bioreactor of that size, he estimates between five and twenty. For a more widespread expansion, the company will have to scale up to 5,000-liter, 10,000-liter, and 100,000-liter bioreactors.
“And the limiting steps to doing that is capital, and also technology. One of the biggest challenges is that when you move from the lab to a 1,000-liter bioreactor, the process isn't exactly portable. There are a number of changes that need to happen."
“You need folks who are really strong on cell-line development and process engineering. Distinct skills and you need both.”
The structure of future cultured meat distribution system.
As Covid-19 has swept across the US, it’s sickened more than 35,000 meatpacking workers. The virus has temporarily shutdown some meatpacking plants, and has inspired CEOs of major meat companies to sound alarms around shortages and prices.
That’s spurred more conversation around what a future cultured meat distribution system might look like (something I discussed here in an earlier post). Will companies build plants to serve smaller-sized local and regional areas? Or, akin to the current meat system’s set up, will cultured-meat startups opt for fewer, larger-scale facilities that service multiple states?
"I think for us it will be more the latter. Our business model for JUST Egg will be similar to our business model for meat. What we do is we separate the higher-end, more technology-driven part of the business from the more traditional, higher-volume, manufacturing and distribution side of the business."
"We focus on making the premium cells in that bioreactor, and then sell that raw meat material to food manufacturers. Those could be medium-sized food manufacturers, larger-scale meat producers. In fact, for some of our agreements for JUST Egg around the world we have right of first refusals for cultured meat."
On a cultural level, should cultured meat companies feel obligated to make the same cuts of meat as are currently available?
"I wouldn't say we have a social responsibility or a cultural responsibility. I would say we have a moral responsibility to achieving that world where the majority of meat, eggs, and milk don't require killing a single animal, that necessarily means that we're going to have to deliver the same or better cultural experience."
He asked me to further unpack a question around whether companies have a social obligation to make the same kinds of meats that show up in recipe books and well-known traditions. I brought up using bones for bone broth, or making ribs for BBQ culture. That prompted Tetrick to expound on his answer by invoking the popularity of chicken wings in the American South.
"It is really hard to make a chicken wing. Not only do you have to nail the meat, but you have to nail the bones and the structure in that particular way. We are a long way from doing that. It's difficult for me to see in the next three, four, five, seven years that any company will be making a product like a chicken wing. But culturally, if we really want to transition the system into a better place, we need to make chicken wings. We need to make pork chops. We need to make things that have resonance in different cultures."
On proving to people the nutritional quality of cultured meat.
Finally, I asked him about cell-cultured meat companies will go about proving to people that cultured meat is the same thing as meat on a nutritional level. Or if he thought people would implicitly trust the manufacturers of cultured meat.
His answer here was really interesting, and he started off by talking about the rise and popularity of the Coca-Cola Company. As an added reference, Tetrick has been reading a lot about Coca-Cola in the last year. In fact, on one of my last reporting trips to San Francisco, we walked through the Mission District one morning and he spent a good deal of that walk talking about how fascinated he was by the beverage company’s ascent to its iconic status.
"Coca-Cola is opaque. It's mysterious. It's flavorings are masked with flavorings. It's a secret recipe that's stored in a vault somewhere in Georgia. That mystery is good for Coca-Cola.
That is not the case with cultured meat.
We need to do the opposite of that. We need to show people how it's made even if it turns maybe 50% of people off. We have to show people how the cell lines develop, we need to show people how the bioreactors are working, we need to take people even inside the bioreactors at some point in time, and we need to be fully forthcoming with not just the macro nutrition — how much fat and how much protein — but a full analytical readout of all the elements of what makes up a nutritional profile."
I want to thank Tetrick for taking the time to sit down with me for that chat — he’s always candid and up for any question, which I appreciate. The conversation generated a fair number of questions and its always fun to field those inquiries.
In other news…
Perfect Day has raised a whopping $300 million to make more animal-free dairy products, reports Fortune.
Europe-based Bell Food Group AG is again investing in Mosa Meat, this time with €5 million ($5.6 million). The startup says it’ll help it get cultured beef to market by 2022.
There’s a new cell-cultured meat company on the block. This one is in Boston, Mass. and it’s called (shocking) Boston Meats, writes one of its co-founders, Christophe Chantre.
Tokyo-based IntegriCulture is now collaborating with Singapore-based Shiok Meats to upscale cultured shrimp and reduce the cost of production, reports Vegconomist.
Covid-19 has infected an estimated 35,000 meatpacking workers, according to reporting at FERN. And the CDC reports 87% of those cases are people of color.
A new UN report says global meat production is expected to drop (pdf) for a second straight year.
That’s all for this week. If you want to chat cell-cultured meat with me, join a discussion I’m having tonight as part of the San Francisco-based Commonwealth Club’s Climate One series. I’ll be chatting (4pm PT / 7pm ET) with Sophie Egan, the author of How to Be a Conscious Eater.