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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Biomanufacturing

Aleph Farms Debuts Commercial Production Platform for Cultivated Steak, Starts Construction of Its ‘BioFarm’

Today, Aleph Farms announced a platform for the commercial production of its cultivated beef steak. The company says this platform will allow it to eventually produce meat grown from cells of a living cow affordably at scale, putting its cultivated steak at price parity with factory farmed meat.

The new production process is the first part of a phased build-out of what Aleph Farms is calling its BioFarm, a pilot plant the company intends to have fully operational by 2022.

“One of the big challenges of cultivated meat is the ability to produce large quantities efficiently at a cost that can compete with conventional meat industry pricing, without compromising on quality,” said Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, in today’s press release. “We have developed five technological building blocks unique to Aleph Farms that are put into a large-scale production process, all patented by the company.”

The company has created a prototype of beef steak produced through its new commercial production platform and will debut it via a virtual cooking demonstration at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit on November 20th.

With its new process, Aleph says it is trying to emulate the tissue regeneration process of meat produced through traditional animal farming, only outside of the animal’s body and under controlled conditions. The company also is growing whole meat (rather than minced) by using a plant-based matrix that mimics that extra-cellular matrix founds in animals.

This announcement is another indication of how the cultivated meat market is transitioning into a new phase as companies like Aleph and Matrix Meats lay the groundwork for a more scaled production of cultivated meat produced from animal cells. This development of lower-cost production is a necessary step if lab-grown meat is to ever to become a widely consumed alternative to traditional, animal-farmed meat products.

While some skeptics like Pat Brown say that these companies will never be able to get production to the point where prices will be at parity with traditional meat, others, like Josh Tetrick, say that day will definitely come, even if it takes us a decade or more before we’re buying a piece of cultivated meat at the local fast food joint.

And with today’s news by Aleph, it looks like we may have taken another step forward towards into a more sustainable, alt-protein future.

ADIO Invests $41M to Improve Farming on Land, at Sea, and in Space

The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) announced today it will invest AED 152 million (~$41 million USD) across three ag tech companies to develop new ag tech innovations on land, at sea, and in space. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, ADIO has partnered with U.S.-based Nanoracks, India-based FreshToHome, and UAE-based Pure Harvest for the initiatives. 

ADIO said in today’s press release that the new partnerships will promote more innovation in ag tech specifically as it relates to food security challenges. One major issue highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic is the fragility of the global food system. In response, various countries, including Singapore, China, and those in the European Union, are fostering innovation at the government level in an effort to improve local food production, build more traceability into the supply chain, and establish more trust between consumers and food producers.

In the United Arab Emirates, one regionally specific challenge is growing more food in a desert climate, in which the ag industry deals with minimal water supply, non-arable land, and climate change issues like drought and rising temperatures. ADIO’s investments are in companies that can both assist in solving these regional challenges and address the issue of food security on a global scale.

Hence, space farming. Nanoracks, one of ADIO’s three new partners, uses the International Space Station and is building the first-ever space research program for ag tech. Its StarLab Space Farming Center in Abu Dhabi will research facility focused on food production both in space and in “equally extreme climates on Earth.” (Spoon readers will recognize Nanoracks as the company that made the Zero G oven, capable of baking cookies in space.)

ADIO’s FreshToHome partnership, meanwhile, will expand the latter’s operational and processing capabilities across land and sea in the UAE. FreshToHome operates an e-commerce platform for fresh produce and controls every point along the supply chain. ADIO said in today’s release that the partnership will also focus on innovations for fish farming and cold chain technology.

Finally, Pure Harvest will use the new partnership to advance its technology and processes for produce grown in controlled environments. That includes more artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, and machines optimized for desert temperatures. The company will also advance work on its commercial-scale algae bioreactor facility to grow Omega-3 fatty acids.

The new partnerships are part of ADIO’s AgTech Incentive Programme, which the Abu Dhabi Government’s Ghadan 21 Accelerator Programme established in 2019. Previous investments from the AgTech Incentive Programme include the $100 million (USD) investment ADIO made in April across four companies: AeroFarms, Madar Farms, Responsive Drip Irrigation, and RNZ.

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.

SKS 2020: What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business?

If you keep an eye and ear to food tech, you’ll know there’s been a significant uptick in interest (and investment) for cell-based meat products. But what can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? 

That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type. 

Since both Bollag and Kolbeck have founded cell-based meat companies (HigherSteaks is working on bacon and pork belly, Wild Type on salmon), they had a ton to say — more than can realistically be packed into a few hundred words.

Kolbeck summarized his advice by pointing to three things companies can think about: taste, affordability, and building the kind of story around the product that will attract your average consumer. For example, when we reach that far-off day where cell-based seafood is available at your local Publix, its branding might explain to shoppers that it contains zero mercury or antibiotics, or that it’s a more sustainable solution to wild-caught seafood from our oceans (which are overfished).

“The role of brands will be important to differentiate and distinguish between companies,” he said.

I say “far-off day” because no one is going to stroll into Publix tomorrow, or even next year, expecting to find cell-based meat and seafoods. All panelists agreed the timeframe for that reality is years away.

Part of the reason for that is the cost required to produce cell-based proteins. Bollag mentioned media — the liquid that gets fed to cells to make them grow — as one challenge. Growing those cell in bioreactors at scale is another massive hurdle, as is developing the scaffolding to give products the correct meat-like texture.

One thing that could address all of those tasks and challenges isn’t even a technology. It’s simply the concept of not doing everything in-house. A company that develops its own media, builds its own bioreactors, and simultaneously tries to navigate the regulatory challenges for cell-based meat is going to be slow in reaching commercialization. “Developing the IP yourself is not the most efficient way to do that,” said Kolbeck. Frank was even more to the point: “Cell-based [meat] companies cannot develop all the IP themselves.”

That presents a real opportunity for many kinds of businesses to get involved in the growth of cell-based meat, from those building bioreactors to companies developing cheaper serums to lawyers with expertise in the regulatory realm. All of those individuals and companies working together can help accelerate the timeline between now and when cell-based protein products reach our grocery store shelves. Only then can the planet and the population start to reap the widespread benefits of cell-based meat as an option.

In Texas, BioBQ is Betting on Brisket as the Next Big Thing for Cell-Based Meat

What’s next for lab-grown meat? Brisket and jerky, apparently. Thanks to an Austin, Texas-based company called BioBQ, cell-based versions of both those meats are in the works, furthering the possibilities of the kinds of proteins that can be grown in a lab versus slaughtering an animal.

Those meat choices, says cofounder and CEO Katie Kam, make sense because of her company’s location, Texas being something of a superpower when it comes to brisket. Over a recent Zoom chat, Kam and fellow cofounder Janet Zoldan said they aim to have a brisket prototype in two years. The company is actively seeking funding right now.

Kam founded BioBQ at the end of 2018. In the fall of 2019, she brought Zoldan onboard as cofounder. “I thought her research in biomedical engineering could be applied to help with the development of cell-based meat,” Kam said.

Like other lab-grown meats, BioBQ uses cells rather than the actual animal to create meat alternatives. It grows the fat, muscle and collagen cells — all components that make up a brisket — using scaffolding technology to create the layers and marbling we associate with brisket.

What makes something like brisket potentially more challenging that other types of lab-grown meat is achieving that layered structure. For that, Kam says they use a patented technology to produce prototypes of intact sheets of cells that can be stacked together. “With each sheet about two to four cell layers thick, they are working on obtaining the thickness and layered structure consumers expect for jerky and brisket,” she says.

The other major challenge for BioBQ is finding a media for growing the cells that does not use fetal bovine serum (FBS) or anything else that comes from an animal. Since FBS is harvested from bovine fetuses in pregnant cows, its use as a medium for cell-based proteins is extremely controversial (not to mention, expensive). Kam, a longtime vegan, emphasized that BioBQ does not use FBS and that the company is looking for an alternative.

Finding that alternative will help BioBQ drive down the cost of producing cell-based meat as well as make the overall process for creating protein more efficient. Bigger picture, Kam imagines a food industry that relies less on the lengthy and expensive process of raising an animal, slaughtering it, and shipping it to cities. Instead, much of our protein will be produced in labs in cities and therefore much closer to the consumer.

Plenty of others share that vision, if recent activity in the cell-based protein space is any indication. Cellular agriculture startup IntegriCulture, in particular, is working to eliminate animal-based serums like FBS through its CultNet system. Elsewhere, Mosa Meat, known for creating the world’s first lab-grown hamburger, just raised $55 million. Mission Barns is making cell-based bacon, and in Australia, a company called Vow is taste-testing cultured kangaroo and other less-common meats.

Excepting, perhaps, the kangaroo, many of these cell-based meats are easier to produce than brisket, but Kam and Zoldan welcome the challenge.

“Everybody’s telling us we chose the more difficult avenue to tackle,” Zoldan said during our chat. “But I feel that our technology is more uniquely posed to answer [that] specific challenge.”

Zoldan adds that while the pandemic may have impacted BioBQ’s ability to get back into the lab, it has also highlighted why we need alternative sources of protein and “how important it is to control what we eat.” Stories of COVID-19 outbreaks in meat-packing facilities as well as other ethical issues at those facilities has called into question our reliance on traditional protein sources. “If we really can engineer the food that we eat, we can make it healthier,” said Zoldan.

BioBQ is still a ways off from getting its product onto consumers’ plates. A major priority for the company right now is getting funding to further develop its prototype, which the company hopes to have in the next couple of years.

Singapore’s Shiok Meats Raises $12.6M in Series A Funding

Cell-based seafood maker Shiok Meats announced today it has raised $12.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Aqua-Spark, an investment fund focused on sustainable aquaculture. SEEDS Capital, Real Tech Fund, Irongrey, and several others also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. This brings Shiok Meats’ total funding so far to $20.2 million.

Shiok Meats said it will put the new funds towards building its commercial pilot plant, from which the company plans to launch its minced shrimp product in 2022. 

Shrimp is one of the most widely consumed seafood types in the world. For now, at least, Shiok Meats says it is the only company in the world creating a cell-based version that’s grown outside the animal. The company’s process involves isolating stem cells from the shrimp then growing them inside nutrient-rich bioreactors. 

It joins a growing list of cell-based protein producers that have raised funds over the last year, including Blue Nalu, Good Catch, and Wild Type.

For all of these companies, price remains a major hurdle to getting products to market: cell-based protein is simply an expensive process right now that makes it impossible to get products to price parity with traditional seafood offerings. On its own website, Shiok meats notes that a limited production scale is in part responsible for the high costs of its cell-based shrimp. Scaling up production will help the company bring down costs.

Shiok recently partnered with IntegriCulture to use the latter’s CultNet System to create shrimp cell cultures. Doing so brings down the overall cost of cell-based shrimp production, since it doesn’t require expensive animal serums normally used for the process. 

Shiok did a first public taste testing of cell-based shrimp dumplings last year, to positive reviews. The rest of us will have to wait a little longer. The company’s initial products will be frozen cell-based shrimp meat for dumplings and other shrimp-based dishes. In the coming years, the company also plans to launch shrimp flavoring pastes and powders, fully formed 3D shrimp, and cell-based lobster and crab products.

An AWS For Protein? Scaling Bio-Manufacturing Platforms To Build Out The Next Generation of Food

But if you want to making a next-gen protein, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to raise millions of dollars in venture funding to build out your own bio-manufacturing factory.

Why? In large part because the platforms for creating fermented or cultured food products products at scale haven’t existed to the same degree that as in other spaces.

However, according to FTW Ventures lead investor Brian Frank, that may soon change. Like me, Frank comes from the world of computer tech where so many startups from the past two decades were built upon the terra firma of technology platforms in cloud computing (AWS), mobile apps (Apple) and social media (Facebook).

So, naturally, when we sat down recently to talk about the launch of his recent fund, I wanted to ask him about who are the platform builders in the world of alt-protein.

He said they are coming.

“In the bio-manufacturing space, we have had that for pharma and therapeutics, we’ve had co-manufacturing, but for food, it really hasn’t existed. And so we’re now getting to the stage where if I’m Perfect Day, and the reason that I raise a ton of money is because I need to build up my own factory because no one’s offering me services or capabilities to build this on top of their platform.

“However, the future that we see is that you can create a platform where people can ride on top of your technology, or you can create the way to allow people to make designer goods so that things can be tailored towards a specific need,” Frank said.

Frank sees these new platforms serving as a couple different roles, the first of which is in accelerating design. Much in the same way a processor design company like ARM Holdings helped an entire industry of computing companies build semiconductors around their intellectual property, new companies with IP and design expertise in key pillars of future food can be used to accelerate design in new ways.

Frank gave Geltor – a company in which he was an early investor – as an example around which a company can leverage in designing new core food components rather than starting from scratch.

“The idea of Geltor as a platform is the idea that they can make proteins, collagen and gelatin to service any number of different needs because they’ve shown they can do it for a couple different categories: in cosmetics, in nutraceuticals, and very soon, you know, in food,” Frank said.

He also pointed to a second group of companies that are starting to serve as infrastructure platforms that new food innovators can leverage as they look bring their products to market at scale. He gave Culture Biosciences – one of the Spoon’s Food Tech 25 for 2020 – as an example.

“Culture Biosciences is basically building out multiplex strain (yeast or bacteria) development rigs that are automated and analyzed,” said Frank. And so if I have a specific need of a strain to do X, they can multiplex and run a bunch of different tests to find the stream that works best. And then they can hand that back to you and say, Here you go, here’s that stream that you wanted that does x and does x at the highest volume or rate.”

Frank and I talked about a whole host of other topics, including the evolution of the future protein space into three areas of innovation, as well as the innovation happening in food packaging. If you’d like to see my entire interview with Frank, Spoon Plus subscribers can just click below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, just go here.

Australian Company Vow Is Taste Testing Cell-based Kangaroo and Other Cultured Meats

Cell-based meat may be some time away from the grocery aisle, but that hasn’t stopped companies all over the world from trying to raise animal protein without the actual animal. Think cell-based beef, pork, and seafood, and, now, kangaroo and alpaca. 

The latter two on that list come courtesy of a Sydney, Austraila-based company called Vow, which today announced a recent “culinary demonstration” of its “multi-species meat platform.” Working with Australian chefs Neil Perry Corey Costelloe, Vow in August held a recent event showing off six of its cell-based meat types: goat, pork kangaroo, rabbit, lamb, and alpaca. All dishes came from Vow’s cell library (more on that below).

On its website, Vow says it takes just six weeks to get from animal cell to plated product. The company first takes and nourishes the animal cells, which grow in cultivators and form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if growing inside the animal.  

There are a couple things that set Vow apart from other companies working in the cell-based meat space. First is the sheer selection of meat Vow aims to eventually offer the buying public. Kangaroo and alpaca are unconventional enough when it comes to cultured meat, but Vow has also name-dropped zebra, yak, and other animals in the past. 

This isn’t just a gimmick to grow weird meat for the “wow” factor. Speaking recently to Food Navigator, Vow’s co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Tim Noakesmith pointed to the “uncanny valley” problem meat alternatives can encounter: that giving people a product they are used to but with a slight variation (e.g., texture, aftertaste) will garner a negative reaction.

“If we offer them something new, a new meat via a new format and give them a completely different experience, there won’t be this prior comparison [or the instinct to reject the new experience],” he told Food Navigator.

True to that idea, Vow keeps a “cell library” of different cells its scoured from all corners of the earth, which is the other factor setting it apart from others in the cultured meat space. The company says there are “hundreds upon hundreds of possible combinations” for future meat.

Vow co-founder and CEO George Peppou said in today’s press release that the recent taste testing event represented a milestone that “demonstrates we can grow the cells of any animal, not just those we can farm.”

Thus far, Integriculture’s cell-based foie gras and BlueNalu’s crustaceans are about as exotic as it’s gotten for cultured meat. So Vow’s recent unveiling of its new dishes is definitely a milestone for the cell-baed meat sector, which has raised around $290 million so far in 2020.

Vow says it is currently hiring chefs, food scientists, and sensory experts to help develop new products. For now, the company is focused on markets in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Mission Barns to Run Curbside Taste Tests for Its Cell-Based Bacon

Bacon lovers, take note. Berkeley, CA-based Mission Barns plans to run curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon product outside San Francisco and Oakland restaurants in August (h/t Food Navigator).

Mission Barns gets its product by combining cell-cultured pork fat grown in bioreactors with plant-based protein. To do that, the company isolates cells from the animal, in this case the pig, and puts them in a warm cultivator where they grow just as they would inside the animal. Cells are then fattened and the tissue is harvested to create the “meat” portion of Mission Barns products.

On its website, Mission Barns says its process for creating “meat” is more sustainable than conventional livestock farming in terms of land and water use as well as greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also more humane, since the animal doesn’t actually have to be slaughtered to get the cells. 

As with all meat alternatives, though, taste is what will ultimately convert many consumers. To that end, Mission Barns is looking for “bacon lovers, experts, and aficionados” for this upcoming taste test, which is the first ever from the company. Potential “tasting consultants” must fill out an application. Once accepted, participants can sample the bacon in exchange for providing feedback to Mission Barns.

The company also told Food Navigator that it is testing new products with other food companies, including “one of the largest pork producers in the world.” 

Mission Barns has competition in the bacon realm from Higher Steaks, a UK-based startup that recently announced its lab-grown prototypes for bacon and pork belly. 

Overall, cell-based meat companies have received quite a bit of funding since the pandemic started surfacing some of the uglier realities of the conventional meat industry. New Age Meats recently raised an additional $2 million for its plant-based pork, while Integriculture nabbed $7.4 million in May and BlueNalu garnered $20 million in February.

This investment activity isn’t likely to slow. For the entire alternative protein category, investment has already surpassed the $1 billion mark, with more than $290 million of that going towards cell-based meat, according to a recent report from FAIRR.

Price parity still being an issue, it will be a while yet before consumers start actually bringing home the cell-based bacon. Mission Barns upcoming taste test should tell us more about how devoted bacon fans will react to cell-based versions of their favorite meat. 

New Age Meats Raises Another $2M for Cell-Based Pork

Cultivated meat startup New Age Meats (NAM) announced today it has raised a $2 million seed extension round led by TechU Ventures. The round follows the NAM’s $2.7 million seed round from earlier this year and brings the company’s total funding to $5 million.

The Berkeley, CA company is currently developing a cell-based pork sausage and says the new funds will go towards this development. In particular, that includes bringing the price point of its product down. 

NAM will also use the funds to further build out its Food Science department, which it says is focused on getting the key attributes — taste, smell, texture, etc. — of its cell-based pork as close to the real thing as possible. On that note, the company held a taste test for its pork back in 2018 and received largely positive reviews. 

Another key element to NAM’s methods is its use of automation to optimize bioreactors and essentially grow its meat faster. Part of the new funding will go towards implementing more of this automation, as well as robotics, to speed up both the research and development processes. 

Investment in cell-based meat has already reached over $1 billion in 2020 so far, which is almost double what it was for all of 2019. Cell-based meat makes up a small-but-significant portion of that investment, and NAM’s seed extension follows funding news from BlueNalu, Integriculture, and others. 

Though the company didn’t provide a timeframe, NAM said today it plans to eventually build out a pilot facility, scale product development and production, and bring its first products to market.

Geltor Raises $91 Million To Accelerate Time to Market for Biomanufactured Products

Geltor, which helps CPG brands in a variety of verticals such as cosmetics and food, is looking to scale up its biodesign capability to help these companies find more sustainable, animal-free alternatives for food and cosmetic items while also accelerating their time to market.

“We do two things,” CEO Alex Lorestani told the Spoon. “Building a portfolio of ingredients that can help brands right now, for products they’re building in the next six to 12 months. And then partner with folks that are thinking about solutions that they’d be bringing out in the next, you know, two, three years.”

Most biomanufactured products usually take a really long time to design and bring to market. Vaccines are a good example of this, where half a decade is considered fast to develop a highly scaled product with millions of units.

“Historically biotechnology has been really good at delivering on the timescale of pharmaceutical products, like many years, and that just doesn’t work for consumer product companies,” said Lorestani. “Their development cycles are fundamentally different.”

According to Lorestani, Geltor will invest the money largely in new people. “The number one thing that we invest in are the folks that develop technologies that can help us serve more and more customers with more sustainable ingredients,” he said. “We want to be able to do that faster and for more customers. That’s what we’re using the capital for.”

Geltor is part of a nascent group of companies such as Gingko Bioworks (and its spinout Motif Foodworks) that are raising significant amounts of funding to build the capability to rapidly develop engineered microbial ingredients and scale the biomanufacturing of products built around these ingredients. The transition from an industrial-centered food manufacturing to one which utilizes fermentation and other biomanufacturing processes will take time, but investors seem bullish as they start to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies.

I asked Lorestani where he thought biomanufacturing was in its development and he pointed to the early days of another science discipline which is a foundation for much of today’s industrial-based food manufacturing.

“It’s like 1900 in chemistry,” he said. “I think that we’re at the very early stages. It’s going to be 100 year cycle for biology to really become and lead as the way that supply chains and lots of other things, get get built and delivered.”

Spoon Plus subscribers can see my full interview with Alex Lorestani in the video below. 

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.