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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

The DFA CoLab Accelerator Is Now Taking Applications for All Things Dairy Tech

Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) announced this week that applications are open for its 2021 accelerator program, newly renamed the DFA CoLab Accelerator. Any early-stage food product company working in some portion of the dairy supply chain is welcome to apply, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The DFA, a decades-old cooperative of U.S. dairy farms, has run the accelerator program for the last five years, using it as a way for startups to get a foothold in agtech and for the dairy industry to keep an ear to the ground when it comes to new technologies and processes. The solutions that come out of this program showcase just how much milage the food industry could actually get out of dairy products. The 2020 cohort, unveiled last May, included, among others, a company that makes sustainable fashion from excess milk and one brewing up premium alcoholic spirits from whey.

“On the food front, the sky is really the limit as long as one of the main ingredients is dairy,” Doug Dresslaer, director of innovation at DFA, said in this week’s press release. 

To that end, the 2021 program is looking for early-stage companies that are “dairy-focused or dairy-based” and using “applications or technologies related to any portion of the dairy value chain.” Some areas include supply chain optimization, traceability, data management, herd health management, and sustainability. 

The 90-day program will be a mix of virtual and onsite training that takes place from April through June, 2021. Participants get mentorship opportunities with DFA executives as well as training around business development, finance, product development, brand building, supply chain logistics, and several other areas of running a business. 

Applications are open through December 29, 2020.

The Food Tech Show: Lab-Grown Meat vs. The Internet

Happy Friday!

Heading out early for the final weekend before election day? Listen to The Food Tech Show podcast on your way!

In this week’s editor roundtable episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about whether lab-grown meat can scale like the Internet, Ordermark’s massive new funding round earmarked to help them build out their ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant strategy, Coca Cola’s acquisition of a coffee robot startup, and whether or not the term “veggie burger” has a future in Europe.

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just play directly below.

Deep Branch Secures €2.5M to Scale Up Production of Novel Protein Using CO2 Inputs

Alternative protein company Deep Branch has secured €2.5 million (~$2.9 million USD) in new funding from the European Investment Council (EIC) Accelerator to scale up production of the company’s novel, single-cell protein called Proton. The funding will be used to build a production facility in the Netherlands that the company hopes will be operational by Q2 of next year, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

The announcement comes just months after Deep Branch secured government funding from the UK through an organization called the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), which funded nine projects to the tune of $30 million to help advance zero-emission farming and greater food sovereignty within the UK.

One of those projects is REACT-FIRST, which is a consortium centered around Deep Branch’s technology that creates protein using CO2 inputs from industrial emissions. Deep Branch, which has developed an animal feed formula using its novel single-cell protein that has a nutritional profile similar to that of fishmeal, was working with nine other partners as part of REACT-FIRST to create a sustainable protein research and production value chain.

With today’s news, Deep Branch is expanding to mainland Europe as part of an effort to accelerate the scaling of production for the company’s novel protein. The new funding will help the company build out a production facility at the Netherlands-based Brightlands Chemelot Campus, a European hub focused on providing space and infrastructure for circular chemistry and chemical processes. The new facility will, according to the release, “enable Deep Branch to scale up increasing production to enable animal feed manufacturers to expedite performance testing of the new protein.”

“Brightlands Chemelot Campus is the ideal location for our Scale-Up Centre, and there is a clear alignment between our goals and the facility’s overall ambitions for CO2 recycling and sustainable hydrogen use,”said Deep Branch CEO Peter Rowe in the release. “The industrial site gives us the ability to scale up quickly and has room for a large-scale production facility as well as the raw materials to create Proton. We have access to everything we need.”

Deep Branch will be working with feed producers BioMar and AB Agri as part of the scale up and optimization.

“Setting up the pilot plant represents an important next step in finding the perfect recipe for Proton that meets the requirements of feed producers,” said Rowe.

Deep Branch is one of a small cohort of new startups that have launched over the past few years focused on developing protein using a process called gas fermentation. (Check out Spoon Plus report on the topic here.) Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods and NovoNutrients. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

Lab-Grown Meat is Scaling Like the Internet

This guest post originally appeared on Medium, and has been reprinted here with permission.

It’s easy to think that there’s hype in lab-grown meat. Just another Silicon Valley utopian tech. The idea of growing meat without animals is everywhere and very distant at the same time. Now a global trend, 80 startups work on lab-grown meat worldwide in one way or another… Four years ago there were two. Consumer interest is also evolving rapidly — the #plantbased market is growing quickly, soon it will be 10% of the meat market. Lab-grown meat has been thoroughly covered in the news, on magazine covers and in books.

Let’s take a look at decoding some questions from the news and announcements. As novelty or mainstream product, when will this meat come to market? Will it ever reach its promise of selling as cheaply as other meat in the deli case?

Look at the forces driving Cellular Agriculture (cellAg) and we will see that lab-grown meat will be a part of everyday life in a surprisingly short time.

Last fall I plotted some of the lab-grown meat stories onto a pricing plot since the dawn of time (2013):

The red dots are pricing statements and estimates for a serving of lab-grown meat through last summer. The slope shows a price drop that is faster than some of the most powerful technologies that we have seen.

The blue line is the famed Moore’s Law , the cost of a transistor over a period of 12 years, — the classic impactful technology. Moore’s Law unleashed infoTech and the internet, e-commerce, facial recognition, smart phones, Amazon, Netflix, targeted advertising, the efficient and global dissemination of cat pictures.

The Green line is the cost of sequencing a human genome over the same period of time, compiled by the National Institutes of Health. The first human genome sequence was perhaps $300M. Last year I bought my own 20x covered genome sequence for $800 (it was on holiday special). Billions are being spent on mobilizing sequencing for personal healthcare, monitoring the environment, testing food safety and detecting COVID-19. Although not a consumer product by and large, sequencing is so cheap as to be just under the surface of our daily lives.

This curve is why Memphis Meats was an easy investment for me four years ago and why investors often jump in since. There is sixty-five years of cell culture research by a few million researchers worldwide as well as a global network of manufacturing experience all ready to jump in. Cell Science has spring loaded lab-grown meat. Overall, most biotech products have economics that start slow for each product but drop by log pricing over time. This is a fundamental upon which analysts at McKinsey have dubbed The Bio Revolution.

The slope of the pricing curve is steeper than transistors: cost has dropped 6000 times since Mark Post’s burger reveal 7 years ago. The red line fitting lab-grown meat cost crosses the $50/serving mark in 2021. This curve is not scientific and each company has its own internal pricing curve; the cost may already have dropped below $50/serving in some companies.

This year, just on time, a flurry announcements of product releases have come out. The biggest fans will be able to go out and buy lab-grown meat:

This first round of product releases wont be replacing the deli cut chicken breast and hot dogs in your grocery. Impossible Burgers were made with a simpler process but the first release in a few restaurants and were said to cost the company $100 a patty. These product releases will not be profitable, but today a pound pack of Impossible Burger costs $9.99 at Safeway. At the current rate of innovation, the next future of meat could be here in the next few years.

The Impossible Burger has had a cost drop of several hundred fold at least since its prototype days.

Moore’s Law is not a law. Each step along the curve will require new insights and new discovery. Like Moore’s Law, the “Shigeta’s Law” price of lab-grown meat will hit a physical law — how fast or how many times a cell can divide — how small a space can they grow in? How quickly can manufacturing and infrastructure be built out? How pure does the sugar in the media have to be to grow the cells? We aren’t there yet and the next innovations will be about manufacturing at very high scale and some of the unplumbed depths of cell biology.

To date, a lot of the drop has been in reagents and simple scaling tech. Today most meat is grown without Fetal Bovine Serum, but still relies on growth factors which are isolated from fermentation. Mosa Meats recently announced drastically lowering the cost of FBS free media. Other efforts around the globe will have to pursue scaling manufacturing and processing the cells.

And what about the hype? Not all of these companies will be around to see the public take their first bite of cellAg Burger. The Clean Meat startup explosion is a lot like the emergence of car companies. In 1900 the first American combustion engine automobile companies appeared. By 1910 the count had exploded to 266. Most of the companies were merged or died off until 3 companies dominated the market by the 1960s.

There was little first mover advantage: Ford was an early entrant (1903), General Motors (1908), and Chrysler was decades past the startup peak. (1928).

So yes there is hype — the same sort of hype that the automobile created. Small companies claiming too much and flaming out. But make no mistake, Animal Free, lab-grown, Cultured Meat is coming sooner than you think.

Food Tech News: Fried Chicken-Scented Face Masks, Halloween Robot Delivers Candy

Hormel and Jack in the Box give away scented masks

If you love the smell of chicken and bacon, now you have the option to inhale these scents all day. To promote new product launches, Hormel and Jack in the Box are giving away free scented face masks. Jack in the Box will soon launch a new plant-based UnChicken Sandwich and is giving out free fried chicken-scented face masks to celebrate. To promote the launch of its Black Label Bacon, Hormel is giving away “breathable bacon” face masks.

Photo from PR Newswire

Reece’s to deliver candy bars through robotic door

This year’s Halloween will likely be sans trick-or-treating, but Reese’s brand came up with a festive solution to distribute its peanut butter chocolate cups despite the circumstances. The brand created a robot door that travels through neighborhoods via remote control, and will release smoke and play a Halloween soundtrack. To receive a king-size Reese’s peanut butter cup from the door, one must simply approach the robot and say “trick-or-treat”. To determine where the robot door will stop this Halloween season, you can pitch your request on Reese’s Instagram page.

$30K food and agribusiness prize for MIT and RaboBank competition

MIT and Rabobank are hosting IGNITE, a virtual kick-off on November 9th for its food and agribusiness competition. The 6th annual Rabobank-MIT Food & Agribusiness competition aims to support student innovators in the food tech and agriculture space based in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Winners of the competition will receive $30K USD, access to industry mentorship, and other resources. The kickoff event is free to sign-up for, and the applications for the competition are due in January.

Prime Roots launches plant-based meats and meals at Whole Foods

Producers of vegan, koji-based meat products, Prime Roots will be debuting its meat alternative products and prepared meals in Whole Foods next week. Koji is a type of fungus that gives Prime Root’s chicken, bacon, and beef a meaty texture and umami flavor. Some of the company’s plant-based prepared meals include bacon mac and cheese, Hawaiian shoyu chicken, and beef shepherd’s pie. The company’s products will be available starting on October 27th in Bay Area Whole Foods.

Aleph Farms’ “Aleph Zero” Program Aims to Grow Cell-Based Steaks in Space

Aleph Farms, announced its new “Aleph Zero” program today, which aims to bring the production of cell-based meat into outer space to help humans become “multiplanetary.”

Aleph’s lab-grown, slaughter-free approach to creating meat could mean that astronauts may one day could create their own steaks and other protein on long-haul missions far away from any natural resources.

Based on the press release, there isn’t a lot of, err, meat on the bones of this announcement. The company just says that it “is securing strategic partnerships with technology companies and space agencies for long term collaborative research and development contracts” to integrate Aleph Farms’ technology into space programs.

It should be noted, however, that Aleph’s meat has already been to space. Last year the company successfully grew small-scale muscle tissue aboard the International Space Station.

For something that is literally a giant vacuum, space is getting increasingly crowded with food tech. NASA is researching how to grow chile peppers in space, we learned in March that romaine lettuce grown in space was safe to eat, the Zero G oven lets astronauts bake cookies in space, and last year a Japanese consortium launched its Space Food X initiative to feed people in space.

Working on feeding people in space may seem less pressing than feeding those in need here on Earth. But as Aleph points out in its release, if food can be created in micro-gravity and far away from natural resources up in space, those innovations can help us feed people living in extreme conditions here on Earth.

Impossible Is Prototyping a Plant-Based Milk Product

At a press conference today, Impossible Foods revealed a prototype for a plant-based milk alternative as part of its ambitious plans to eliminate animal protein from the food supply chain. The product will be called Impossible Milk and will look and function just like cow’s milk. 

To illustrate the differences, Impossible showed its prototype off alongside other alternative milks at the press conference, even mixing it with a cup of coffee to demonstrate how it does not curdle as other plant-based milks do.

Though the milk won’t be available to customers at any point in the near future, It is part of Impossible’s plan to diversify its products to include a range of plant-based alternative proteins. The company is also working on alternatives to chicken and steak, and CEO Pat Brown told MIT Technology Review that Impossible is on a mission to “completely replace the world’s most destructive technology by far, which is the use of animals, by 2035.”

“We will succeed or fail based on whether we build a complete technology platform that creates all the foods we get today from animals,” he added.

To help realize that lofty goal, Impossible also said at the press conference that it intends to double the size of its R&D team over the next year and launched the “Impossible Investigator” project to entice scientists to join the team.

Today’s news follows Impossible’s just-announced expansion onto retail store shelves in Hong Kong and Singapore. And overall, 2020 has been a busy year for the company. It raised another $200 million in August, expanded distribution of its products to Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and other food retailers, and launched a direct-to-consumer e-commerce store. 

The company’s ambitions to branch out from faux beef into dairy, fish, poultry, and other areas of alt protein comes as the entire sector is seeing enormous growth and investment. Impossible’s chief rival Beyond hasn’t exactly rested on its laurels this year, either, having also expanded its product line, launched its own D2C store, and launched products at retail stores in China.

One area we won’t see Impossible branch into, at least for now: cell-based meat. Pat Brown didn’t waffle about at SKS last week when he said the idea of commercially produced meat from a lab was never going to happen. Of course, the company could always change its stance. For now, though, expect Impossible ton continue its focus on plant-based proteins for the foreseeable future.

Eat Just and Impossible Foods Both Made Major Expansions to Asia This Week

Two alt-protein heavyweights in the U.S. took major steps this week in their expansions across Asia, underscoring the growing demand (and need) for alternatives to animal protein in that region.

At the tail-end of yesterday, San Francisco-based food tech company Eat Just announced a partnership with a consortium led by food investment fund Proterra to expand JUST Egg across Asia. Via the partnership, Eat Just will build its first production facility in Asia.

The consortium will invest up to $100 million and Eat Just will invest up to $20 million to build the production facility in Singapore. According to the press release from Eat Just, the factory will “generate thousands of metric tons of protein.” From this deal will also come the subsidiary Eat Just Asia, which will serve JUST egg manufacturing and distribution partners across the region. 

The new production facility is the largest of its kind in Singapore and will serve a growing demand for plant-based protein in Asia. Eat Just’s flagship plant-based egg product is already available in South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The company also mentioned, via the aforementioned press release, a “yet-to-be-announced” partnership in mainland China, where it already sells products via e-commerce. 

Eat Just and Proterra are also in talks to expand commercial production of cell-based meat, which Eat Just is already in the midst of developing.

Also at the end of yesterday, Impossible Foods announced that its plant-based meat products will be available in retail stores for the first time in Asia. Impossible’s Beef product is now available at 200 grocery stores across Hong Kong and Singapore. 

In Hong Kong, consumers can buy Impossible products at 100 ParknShop locations and ParknShop subsidiaries, as well as for delivery online at parknshop.com. Customers in Singapore can find the company’s plant-based beef at 100 FairPrice stores and on grocery e-commerce platform RedMart.

Impossible debuted in the Asian market at restaurants in 2018, but this week’s news marks the first time the company’s products will be available to home chefs.

But while Impossible may be expanding its plant-based empire, one area we shouldn’t expect to see the company branch into is cell-based meat. In fact, when asked about cell-based meat at last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Impossible CEO Pat Brown flatly said, “It’s never going to be a thing.” Brown called it “irreversibly expensive” and added that meat grown in a lab would never be a commercial endeavor.

Eat Just doesn’t share the same view. Company founder and CEO Josh Tetrick, who was also at SKS, shared his views on the eventual reality of cell-based meat and gave us a rough timeline and included steps his company and others have to take in order to go from prototype to retail shelves with cell-based meat. It won’t be soon. Tetrick said “north of 15 years” for cell-based meat, and others have cited similar timeframes.

Were cell-based meat to become a commercial reality, Asia is an obvious region to aim for. Increasing urbanization and population growth, particularly in Southeast Asia, has led to a growing demand for animal proteins. This demand has consequences both for the environment and for human health.

Those are challenges plant-based proteins can address, too, hence the quickly rising number of companies in Asia, from Omnipork to Black Sheep Foods and now Eat Just and Impossible. While we wait for cell-based proteins over the long terms, we can expect both demand for and production of plant-based products to continue rising in Asia and beyond.

V2food Raises $55M for its Plant-Based Meat

Australian plant-based meat maker V2foods has raised a $55 million ($77M Australian) Series B round of funding, according to Bloomberg. The round features new equity investment from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Tamasek Holdings, and brings the total amount raised by V2foods to roughly $80 million USD ($113M Australian).

Like others in the plant-based meat space, V2foods makes a ground and patty version of its plant-based beef product. The company first came on our radar last year when it provided the “beef” for Hungry Jack’s (Australia’s version of Burger King) Rebel Whopper.

According to Bloomberg, V2foods plans to use its new funds to help the company establish a foothold in Asia. It’s certainly not the only company looking to do so. Beyond Meat has made a number of deals this year to get its plant-based products in China including building two production facilities over there. Impossible Foods has called Asia “core to [its] business.” and Green Monday, which owns the plant-based Omnipork, recently raised $70 million and got its alt-pork products on McDonald’s menus across Hong Kong and Macau.

While Asia may be crowded, Australia has been less so. As we wrote last year:

Right now the Australian alternative protein market is pretty sleepy. Beyond Meat and Moving Mountains are available Down Under, but the region doesn’t have many companies actually developing their own plant-based meat products. So v2food has a clear runway to become the biggest local alternative protein brand.

In Sept. of this year, V2foods signed a deal that put its products in 600 Woolworths stores across the country.

SKS 2020: Why Singapore Is Fast-Becoming Food Tech’s New Superpower

That Singapore is a fast-rising superpower in food tech is something that’s become apparent over the last several months. And yesterday, during a SKS 2020 panel on the Asian food tech landscape, the city-state came up in conversation again as an enormously important location to watch when it comes to food innovation and investment.

“If I had to place my bet I would place it on Singapore,” said Michal Klar, an angel investor who also writes the Future Food Now newsletter. Joining him on the panel were Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites and Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf, and together, the group unpacked some of the reasons why so much food tech innovation is coming out of Singapore right now.

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

At the same time, that reliance on imports for the majority of its foods may actually help Singapore innovate on food tech faster for the short term. Since so much of the city-state’s food comes from outside its own borders, Singapore lacks some of the constraints other countries face when it comes to getting pushback by established players.

Alternative protein is a good example. Here in the U.S., both plant- and cell-based meat companies must go toe-to-toe with Big Meat producers and lobbyists over labeling of their products, shelf placement, and other issues. By contrast, Klar suggested that because Singapore’s meat supply is imported there’s nobody to push back on new developments and regulations happening in the city-state around alternative forms of meat. That, Klar reasoned, is one of the reasons Singapore is home to Asia’s best-funded cell-base meat startup, Shiok Meats, as well as a number of other up and coming players.  

Indoor agriculture/vertical farming is another area that could potentially thrive because of a lack of existing incumbents. Last year, local farms produced just 14 percent of leafy vegetables consumed by Singaporeans, so there’s little in the way of traditional agriculture to disrupt. At SKS, Leung noted that Singapore’s “highly urbanized” environment makes it an ideal setting for high-tech innovations in indoor farming. We’ve seen this in recent months with companies like SinGrow, which is growing a proprietary breed of strawberries in its vertical farm, and ag tech accelerators like GROW. Leung also flagged aquaculture as a sector to watch in Singapore.

Both Klar and Leung also pointed to Singapore’s regulatory environment as a reason for the city-states speedy growth in food tech innovation. There is only one agency in Singapore that regulates foods, said Klar. In other words, when companies prepare for the phase in which they must get government approval for their products, there’s no doubt or confusion as to who they must go to. This could speed up the process of regulatory approval, which in turn would mean a faster time to market for many companies. 

The above factors are just a smattering of reasons for Singapore food tech’s continued growth, and over the next several months we will continue to see new advances in ag tech, alt protein, packaging, and other areas of the food supply chain emerge.

LIVEKINDLY Raises $135M to Expand Its Alt-Protein Operations in the U.S.

Alt-protein collective, LIVEKINDLY, told The Wall Street Journal this week that it recently raised an addition $135 million in funding (hat tip to Food Dive). The round was led by Blue Horizon Corporation, with Trustbridge Partners, EQT and Griffith Foods participating. This brings the total amount raised by the LIVEKINDLY collective to $335 million.

LIVEKINDLY was formed in March of this year when Foods United bought vegan media company LIVEKINDLY. The new entity re-branded as LIVEKINDLY CO. Brands in the LIVEKINDLY portfolio include alt-protein companies such as Like Meat, Fry Family and Oumph!, which LIVEKINDLY acquired in June of this year.

LIVEKINDLY is certainly striking while the plant-based iron is hot. In many ways, alternative proteins have had a banner year. Sales of plant-based meats have surged in the U.S. this year as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted inefficiencies and inequalities in our animal-based meat production system.

Plant-based companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have responded with rapid expansion at grocery retail as well as their own direct to consumer channels. Additionally, plant-based food companies like NotCo, Climax Foods, and Better Meat Co. have all raised funding.

The alternative chicken and egg space is getting crowded. Eat Just continues to innovate its plant-based eggs, while both Simulate and Rebellyous offer plant-based chicken nuggets. Though there is still plenty of room left for more competition, especially one with the deep(er) pockets of LIVEKINDLY.

According to The WSJ, LIVEKINDLY plans to use the new funding to expand its products into the U.S. and China. Food Dive reports LIVEKINDLY will also focus on developing new plant-based chicken and eggs.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on the 4 Phases of Bringing Cell-Based Meat to the Masses

When will cell-based meat be available to the masses?

It depends on who you ask. At one SKS 2020 panel this week, participants said maybe 10 years. In another, Impossible CEO Pat Brown more or less said never.

Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just, reckons the timeline is “somewhere north of 15 years.” 

Eat Just, which is best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, is in the process of developing its own cell-based meats, including chicken nuggets and chicken breast. The north-of-15-years timeframe for those and other cell-based meat products comes from an important factor Tetrick pointed out when we chatted this week at SKS: that a successful prototype in a lab does not automatically equal commercial success. 

A lot must happen in between those two endpoints, prototype and commercialization, and during our talk, Tetrick broke the journey down into four distinct phases. These are as applicable to other food businesses as they are to Eat Just.

The first is getting that prototype out of the lab. Launching in a single restaurant is one example. To do this, companies need to have not only developed a prototype, they must also have gotten regulatory approval for their product. Tetrick told me that Eat Just hopes this step happens for his company this year or next.

The second phase moves companies out from a single location and into some restaurants, say 50–100, and perhaps smaller retailers. At the moment, there are no cell-based meat companies with products at this stage.

Phase three is even further off. That’s the point when a company’s products are on food retail shelves across the country, from Whole Foods in San Francisco to Walmart in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Eat Just is currently at this point with its plant-based egg products, which are in more than 17,000 locations in the U.S.

That final phase is what Tetrick calls “the Coca-Cola phase.” The product is available everywhere and at a low cost. He believes this is “the phase that will transform the planet,” meaning it will curb the larger population’s reliance on animal protein. To get to that kind of world, phase four is ultimately where Eat Just and other companies need to be.

Not that getting there will be easy. Tetrick doesn’t agree with Pat Brown’s statement that cell-based meat “is never going to be a thing,” but he does concede that it’s no easy feat. In fact, he equated the process from prototype to ubiquity with scaling a really tall mountain. “[It’s] not confusing what needs to be done, it’s just really hard.” 

That climb, so to speak, will require the right investments in cell line development, media, and bioreactors. It will require “a thoughtful approach” to working with regulators and an effective marketing strategy. It will involve enormous amounts of risk and millions if not billions of dollars.

Ultimately, Tetrick believes companies that can get us through this enormously difficult process will enable the majority of the population to live in a world where eating meat doesn’t necessarily mean slaughtering animals or destroying the planet. For many, getting there will be a mountain worth climbing.