Podcasts

As cofounder of Clara Foods and Perfect Day, and now the Executive Director of New Harvest, Isha Datar has been working at the forefront of the cellular agriculture industry for a good part of the past decade.

Because of this, she’s the perfect first subject-matter expert to interview in Red to Green’s new podcast season on consumer acceptance of alt proteins.

In this interview, Red to Green’s Marina Schmidt goes deep with Datar into so many of the important issues facing the industry as new products built around cellular agriculture make their way from the labs to the consumer’s plate.

Some highlights from this in-depth conversation:

Consumer education about these products: How these new products are positioned to consumers is one of the biggest questions facing this industry today. In the interview, Datar recognizes how early the market is and that consumers will take time to form opinions about these new and sophisticated products. She also emphasizes how important storytelling, transparency and accountability will be for the industry to get it right.

Datar: “…How do we actually tell that story when it is so complex? It’s complex because there’s a lot of data that needs to back it up. It’s complex in that people are going to want to know how the product is made and have little detailed questions about it.

Like,  was that initial cell sourced ethically,  what was the life of the animal? You know, all of these little things that go so deep that you could never tell that whole story on a package and it will never be satisfying on a package. So we’re already tasked with, how do we tell this complex story of like the whole reason why we want to grow food from cells and that why you should participate in it by consuming these products.

I think there’s a lot of room for creativity and I don’t want to,  set us on a path that is unnecessary, kind of like the one where we should be doing all market research all the time. Because I think the bigger problem is about transparency. Another kind of factor is,  how much measurement do we want to do?  There’s a storytelling element, but then there’s also a self-governance element where, we want to hold ourselves accountable.”

The tension between IP protection and branding: Datar discusses how a conversation about branding will be integrally tied to the intellectual property developed by many of these new startups, but recognizes there’s a danger of over-westernization of the product framing, since so many startups are initially building products for advanced western economies.

Datar: “It’s worrying because everything we’ve talked about so far are nuggets and burgers, which are like hyper Western foods.  It would be really sad to see a lot of culinary traditions turn into burgers and nuggets. And so IP  protection really factors into what do we want, like the global adoption of cell ag to be, how do we really integrate cell ag into the world and solving global problems rather than how do we get the most people to eat a food?”

What the industry should be investing in today to scale: Datar believes the cell ag industry has underinvested in infrastructure for companies to scale up and sees an opportunity for service providers to fill this need.

Datar: “…my big thesis is that this industry, lacks infrastructure and infrastructure is public infrastructure that everybody can benefit from. And so if I had $50 million, I would build a pilot plant facility where several culture meat companies could use it to do their scale-up research to test how to get from a hundred-liter bioreactor to a thousand liter bioreactors before they start building their own facilities because it’s really expensive to do that type of research.”

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch the full interview below as well as read the transcript of the entire conversation below.

This podcast is produced by Red to Green, who The Spoon is partnering with this season as they look at how the industry will promote and create consumer acceptance of cell cultured meat and other alt proteins.

Marina Schmidt

Isha. It’s fantastic to be talking to you again about consumer acceptance.

Isha Datar

You too, Marina, what a treat!

Marina Schmidt

How come that we were talking about this?

Isha Datar

Yes, it’s a good question. So yeah, we don’t really participate in these consumer acceptance conversations, but we do witness them. And so I could not pass up the opportunity to offer some unsolicited commentary about what I think we should be doing with consumer acceptance as someone who doesn’t really have a hand in it.

Marina Schmidt

So before we get deep into this, let’s do some groundwork, like, what is the current industry consensus on this whole naming topic? Like the nomenclature, should we be calling it cultivated, cell-cultured, cultured? What is now the right thing to do right now?

Isha Datar

I don’t think there is a consensus. I think there’s a lot of people saying that their words are the consensus, but I don’t think there, I don’t think there is a consensus, and I, I don’t think we should be surprised about that in the field, as this field matures, there’s going to be times when we come together and times when we differentiate.

And I think it’s still a little bit unknown where the coming together and the differentiation happens when it comes to terminology. and that’s because I think there’s lots of different types of terminology. There’s the terminology on the front of the package, the branded terminology, there is the product category, there’s the name that’s going to be on the back of the product, and the ingredients label.

And I, haven’t seen a really, really good kind of separation of what all those terms should be and how those should be addressed and which ones require coming together and which ones don’t. so I think there’s a couple of layers of detail around the naming thing that haven’t been sorted out. It’s been kind of summarized into.

We need to come up with a name that everyone loves, but  I’m not sure that thinking is the right thinking to solve the problems that we want to solve.

Marina Schmidt

So let’s take a step back and look at what has happened in the cultivated meat field. Since our last talked in, let’s say June 2020. So you’re really plugged in into what’s happening. What were the highlights of what has been going on in the field?

Isha Datar

Yeah. And I’m like, what, what happened? At least we were in a pandemic. So it was maybe limited, but actually, lots of things happened. I mean, what comes to mind because I was so immersed in it was our safety initiative. That really took off between June and about now which was coming together of 50 cultured meat companies to work on describing the cultured meat manufacturing process and describing the safety considerations against that manufacturing process. So that was a big thing, but another huge thing which was tied into that was, well not tied into it, but simultaneous, was the Singapore regulatory approval of Eat Just’s chicken nugget product.

And then in addition to that, I think we’ve seen a lot of news coming from all over the place of more investment going into the field and people beginning to build pilot plants. And so I consider that to be a really big milestone for the field because we’re now really considering the scale and are truly on the cusp of figuring out the scale issues, in our space.

Oh, and also more related to the topic of this podcast. I’ve seen so many more studies about naming in the last maybe month or two than I have ever in history. So that is becoming a very, very live conversation, probably very much related to the regulatory approval.

Marina Schmidt

Do you feel that the topic of nomenclature is already talked about enough like it’s chewed through?

Isha Datar

Oh yes, that’s a great question. I think the topic has been chewed through with one lens,   but it has not been chewed through enough lenses. I mean, that, it seems like everyone is addressing this topic of nomenclatures with the same tools of let’s do market research and let’s do market research on you know, population demographics, representative of the whole population. And so there’s a lot of assumptions built into that already. And I think one of the assumptions is, this is a product for every person who eats food. And the second one is that market research is the way forward for a product like this. And this podcast is where I’d like to like,  maybe poke some holes in that thesis and suggest that maybe this product is so transformative, that market research is not the way to go. And that market research is actually pulling in way too much inspiration from how the existing food industry does business.

And instead, we should release ourselves from the expectations that’s how new foods enter the world and try something completely creativity-driven. So I think, on one hand,  we’re being informed by what consumers say, but consumers always just recycle past experiences.

And, there is always an appetite for new experiences and I’m sure someone would argue with me quite deeply on that, but I, I think there is a lot of creativity to be had here that does not come from consumer data. And then the second point is, I’m not so sure that companies should be not targeting their audience from the beginning.

And so,  what my strategy would be, and it’s easy for me to talk about this because I don’t have a company. But my strategy would be to figure out who are the early adopters who are going to be really excited to eat my product that I’m making and amplify that to the world and put out into the world “I ate Isha’s burgers and absolutely love them,” and tweet about it and like really evangelize the product from the voice of the consumer. And I haven’t seen that kind of segmentation happen so far. 

Marina Schmidt

How has the view on consumer acceptance developed in the field of cultured meat or overall cellular agriculture?

Isha Datar
I think the field of consumer acceptance, it developed in a weird way. And what I mean by that is, to me, the question of consumer acceptance is absolutely a question for industry to own because they are the ones on the line selling the product, you know, driving market share.  All their interests are aligned for that to happen.

And so for me,  as a nonprofit that focuses a lot on the academic side of things, when we’re thinking about naming, we’re thinking about what are the search terms and keywords that could bring up publications? So that’s why we kind of stayed away from what would be on packages because the audience that we are serving is a scientific population, because we want to see more scientists and researchers enter the field  So I think the fields naming thing started a little bit differently because that initial debate did not originate from the industry. And it has now turned into industry kind of doing more and more data to test now these old terms that no one is using anymore, but in this like due diligence way.

So it, so in some way, the stage was set that we need to be doing these, these like large scale surveys as a way to create data that informs what the naming is. But of course, a survey is, is only kind of reflecting what consumers think they want. So I don’t really know how, how useful it is.

And I think we really need to mix it up. So an example of mixing it up is Wild Type did a really interesting kind of naming survey recently. And instead of just surveying people, they actually looked at what were the appearances of these names and various social media platforms like Tumblr and Twitter and so on, which I thought was just interesting because it is really reflecting on a real-world, “What are people talking about right now?” I think this is the kind of creative thinking we need to be working with How are you going to get your products to people, maybe your product is not going to be available in the store and maybe it’s actually purchased online. In which case you want to see a certain type of virality online, and you should be thinking about terms that work better there.

So, there’s a lot of room for growth and, and bifurcation, in how we arrive at these names.

Marina Schmidt

Well, with other novel food products, we’ve seen quite a tricky path to adoption, like soy, for example, and even organic soy still has quite a hard time with certain consumer groups or have associated ones with problems in the environment, et cetera. And it’s, it’s tricky because once opinions are formed they’re hard to move, especially public opinions.

I think in the industry, there are some people who would say we don’t really need to worry about consumer acceptance because once people actually get to taste it, they’ll be like, oh, this is awesome.

And they will just go with it. On the other hand, there are other people who say, well, actually this isn’t guaranteed. There may be demonstrations against it. There may be a rise of conspiracy theories and fake news and all of these self-proclaimed health gurus who are gonna tell you all about it.

So where on the scale are you, and how much do you feel is the active education of consumers and good branding essential for the success of the whole industry?

Isha Datar

I mean, they are paramount to the success of the whole industry. And to go back to your point about soy and people changing their mind. I think people actually do change their mind quite a lot, especially across generations and time.  We had a speaker, the food historian Nadia Berenstein at our conference in 2018, I think.

And she gave a talk on margarine, which is one of the first kind of animal product replacements. You know, a replacement for butter that is made without animals.  She talked about how the history of margarine’s adoption is up, down, up, down, up, down.  Sometimes, actually, very few times was that up down related to anything intentional by sellers of margarine.

And instead, it was things like a famous person eating it and having a quote. I think it was like a first lady being like, “Oh, I love margarine.” And that changed the adoption of it.  We do kind of get thrown into the world of uncontrollable factors, deciding the up and down sales and marketing of, of the product. So I wouldn’t make, I think we shouldn’t put too much pressure on ourselves that, if we don’t launch the marketing, right, it could all fail.

I think, worse than that are things like if safety is not correct, it could all fail. If people feel lied to, it could all fail. And then there’s a second part of your question, which was about education.

So, so here I’ll, I’ll walk it back to our safety initiative a little bit. So as we did the safety initiative, we realized that. existing policy and existing governance and so on.

And safety demonstration does not actually capture the benefits of cell ag. The mission that I believe is uniting, you know, all 80 something over a hundred companies in this space right now, which is that we move away from using animals in food products that we could create food products that are more sustainable and more controllable, and,  have fewer externalizations to society that are negative, such as epidemic viruses, et cetera, et cetera.

And those benefits are not going to be captured by any existing policy. Like those benefits are entirely our story to tell. And,  how do we actually tell that story when it is so complex? It’s complex because there’s a lot of data that needs to back it up. It’s complex in that people are going to want to know how the product is made and have little detailed questions about it.

Like,  was that initial cell sourced ethically,  what was the life of the animal? You know, all of these little things that go so deep that you could never tell that whole story on a package and it will never be satisfying on a package. So we’re already tasked with, how do we tell this complex story of like the whole reason why we want to grow food from cells and that why you should participate in it by consuming these products.

I think there’s a lot of room for creativity and I don’t want to,  set us on a path that is unnecessary, kind of like the one where we should be doing all market research all the time. Cause I, I think the bigger problem is about transparency. Another kind of factor is,  how much measurement do we want to do?  There’s a storytelling element, but then there’s also a self-governance element where, we want to hold ourselves accountable.

How do we do that? Who is the governing body that holds this field accountable? And I think these are all questions that need to be asked essentially within the next two years or so because once a product is on the market, it’s going to be really hard to reel those products back into a self-governing structure.

And it’ll just be like a free for all. And we’ll try and govern retroactively and it’ll be really crazy and messy. There’s a lot of things that need to be solved. And I think New Harvest could have a role in solving those things, especially in terms of equipping policymakers with the data and understanding to think about these things, but at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to, you know, we are a mission-driven industry today. We may not be a mission-driven industry forever, but since we are one today, how can we rally together, create accountability structures for ourselves and like make sure that we are actually moving towards a future where we don’t need to consume animals for food.

And so that, that’s my big thesis that I want to put out in this podcast is like the real sets of timeliness around this thing. Like it is a hundred percent related to consumer acceptance because consumer acceptance is not just about marketing. It is about transparency and self-governance and accountability.

Marina Schmidt

So Isha do you think branding is going to become even more important in the future or what’s your take on that?

And did you see anything develop in terms of IP being opened up?

Isha Datar

So I’ve been thinking, a lot about branding recently because I spend a lot of time thinking about IP in, in this space. And just to be kind of clear and out there, I would like to see a world in which cellular agriculture does not rely on a lot of IP protection because I think that for us to achieve our greater goals of change we want to see in the world that IP protection could actually stand in the way of that.

And an example is, you know, what if the most amazing product is marketed in the worst way, like that is a huge missed opportunity because it’s excluded other, kind of marketing, of a product and technology that could be incredibly transformative. So when I think about branding and marketing, I am reminded of the smiling curve, which is kind of like a business management thing.

And really it’s a curve of value-adding where on the top of one side of the curve is value through R & D and IP protection. On the other top of the curve is value-added through brand and marketing. And at the bottom of the curve is like, just manufacturing. And I would love to see a norm develop in the field where we see more and more companies excited to differentiate by brand and marketing and add value through brand and marketing rather than through IP protection.

Because I think at the end of the day there’s going to be a lot of brands. There’s going to be a lot of markets, like different target markets to serve. And there’s a lot of ways that we can really get products to people in with, with creativity and like a lot of product differentiation. Like the person who’s interested in holistic foods and healthy foods compared to the person who’s interested in like high tech, precision, like fitness, you know, Different, but similar.

And I think that IP protection is actually a potential threat to the change you want to see in the world. So,  I don’t know how companies feel about this, but in my vision of the future, I would love to see a world where companies all over the world could use the technology to create products that are relevant to the people surrounding them.

So, you know, how do you create products that are culturally relevant in African countries? How do you create products that are culturally relevant in India? In other Southeast Asia, they’re all going to be different. And with too much IP protection, we might find ourselves in this like deep westernization of food globally.

And I mean, it’s worrying because everything we’ve talked about so far are nuggets and burgers, which are like hyper Western foods.  It would be really sad to see a lot of culinary traditions turn into burgers and nuggets. And so IP  protection really factors into what do we want, like the global adoption of cell ag to be, how do we really integrate cell ag into the world and solving global problems rather than how do we get the most people to eat a food? So yeah, branding is top of mind because I think it’s kind of this counterpart to IP.

So it’s very complicated. But we kind of need to unpack it because, at the end of the day, a lot of the investors see IP as the only way to protect their investment. So,  maybe the thought leadership needs to happen amongst investor groups rather than the companies.

So I don’t know, I haven’t really thought it through entirely because I think it’s a pretty complex thing. I don’t know what the solution looks like. I think it’s a solution that would have to be co-created with people who really understand all of this stuff and a lot of different players.

Marina Schmidt

And when you were talking to a lot of the companies in the field recently over the past month, what was your impression? How important do they see consumer acceptance? Are they actively working on this? Is this on their plate more at the top priorities?

Isha Datar

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’ve begun a, I want to say ritual, but I shouldn’t call it a ritual. I’ve begun a thing of just undergoing what I guess I’d call a listening campaign, where we have these one-on-one conversations with leaders in the field and ask them, ”what are your concerns?” Like what could a group like new harvest do?

How can we be most useful? And in talking to so many different players, it’s amazing what the themes are. Like they come back with themes that are really related to this podcast. So, you know, naming is a big issue and there seems to be a lot of different opinions about it.

Like,  what is the study? What is the study design in finding that name, know who are the target markets and why don’t we pursue something totally radical, and creative to get our name out there and like an example of something radical and creative, which probably goes against what your marketing data would show is, you know, Soylent calling their product Soylent. You know, the way Soylent entered the world was kind of like,  a Reddit forum type of community, like a very online community that was playing with their Soylent food.

And they were like putting different proportions of different this much protein this much, you know, they were really involved with the food production on their end and like toying with it. And they’re, I don’t want to say it’s a culinary aspect, but it is kind of a culinary aspect.

And that vibrant community was like the starter culture for Soylent becoming popular.

Marina Schmidt

In between just because maybe some listeners don’t know about it, Soylent is a meal replacement drink. And as far as I am informed, I think the most successful worldwide, the most sold one, and actually the guy, the CEO, I think he is full-on into completely replacing all of one’s meals with Soylent, like just eradicate food, unless it’s really just for enjoyment.

So it’s quite, it’s quite advanced in its opinion. So,

Isha Datar

Yeah, but what I, what I loved about Soylent is that there are lots of meal replacements out there Boost and Ensure and all those things. But, Soylent is not a meal replacement for if you’re trying to go on a diet. Or if you’re in the hospital and need to gain weight.

Soylent is just simply for I’m too tired to care about what I’m eating and I want to,  get perfect nutrition as quickly as possible. And there is a huge market for it.  It probably is a market that kind of resembles,  the first adopters of cell-cultured meat products. And how do you really rally a community around your product rather than,  be out there in the world, selling meat on the meat product shelves in the same way.

So, and I mean, Soylent, there’s no way that Soylent would ever come back on a consumer survey as the number one, the number one pick. So that’s an example of like really targeted marketing and this idea of entering your product marketing with like an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset, which is something we talk about at New Harvest all the time, you know, a scarcity mindset is how do we get the most people to eat this product. An abundance mindset is how do we make sure the people who love it eat this product and the people who won’t love it, won’t eat the product.  That’s what we need to be driving forward with over the next few years because if you can please that group, everyone will come afterward in a different way.

But I feel like I went off track and you asked me a different question. Is that possible?

Marina Schmidt

No, I absolutely love it. I’m digging it.

Actually, I really liked the point that you had regarding the community topic. So it’s quite interesting. A lot of companies say they have a community like a deco store around my corner has a poster with “join our community and type in your email.” Right?  that’s not a  community.

That’s not a community because the sign of a community is when the individuals who are part of it are not just connected to the company but are interconnected amongst each other. So I really like this idea of cultivated meat companies getting involved in the community building and getting ambassadors onboard, getting influential people who have a following to also feel like they’re part of it.

And we see that a lot with plant-based companies now getting investments from people like Oprah and that just moves the public opinion towards it. How important do you see this influencer topic?

Isha Datar

So to me, influencer is not my personal style. Like that’s, that’s not what would convince me that something is cool because to me that’s like old, that’s old fashioned marketing. That’s like, this is a paid spokesperson type of thing. But I think the idea of a real online community, like the Soylent community, is so compelling because there are so many layers of credibility.

The more people you have interacting with your product and manipulating your product and like talking about it. And so an example of, what I would love to see in this world is something that looks kind of like the New York Times cooking app, which you could argue maybe is not a community of people using the cooking app.

But when I look at a recipe, I can see the star rating and I open up the recipe and look at all the comments before I cook the product because, or so I cook the recipe because the commentary is way more valuable than the actual recipe itself. The commentary is, is this recipe good? And how do I make it good?

And what are the little minor adjustments that I need to make to do it? And you see people talking about like, Oh yeah, this needs salt. Yeah. I agreed with the person above and I added salt. That to me is an awesome way for these products to actually go from version 1.0, to 2.0 to 3.0 is to have a really rich community of people interacting with the product, cooking it.

Because that is what real buy-in is, is like you’re so bought into the product that you’re consuming it and you’re cooking it.

And you want to share that with the world.  I love that you brought up that definition of community because we had been actually thinking a lot about that definition of community, especially last year wondering,  is our donor base a community? Like they all interact with us, but do they interact with one another?

So yeah, I love that you wanted to go down that path. I actually hadn’t thought about it all that much, but I do think it’s a really, a really, really cool way to think about this. To quickly come back to the influencer topic,  I, I find it interesting that you say that well it wouldn’t really convince you that’s right, because it would be for more for like the general audience.

Marina Schmidt

I think the ones that follow the celebrities on Instagram So I find that influencer marketing. In the old school way of buying the promotion. Yeah, that’s, that’s maybe not, not as interesting as actually getting authentic interest and authentic commitment.

And because with cultivated meat, we have a very unusual case  This is not like your next app or the next kitchen gadget. It’s something that can have such an impressive effect on the future generations and sustainability, ethics, pandemic risks, like so many positive reasons that I think it could be possible to get really big names to promote it without even having this financial drive.

But just by the mere fact that by promoting it, they can actually do something positive

Isha Datar

Yes. I mean, actually, as you’re talking, I’m remembering and realizing that our safety initiative was made possible because Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition was one of our kind of funders getting it off the ground. And the characters that he plays are such an amazing example of a really aligned type of persona for this technology,  where it doesn’t feel like someone, you know, it doesn’t feel like a misfit. So, yeah, maybe I should take back what I said a little bit because I have like a picture of that, but there is a lot of creativity in who you, who your influencer is, and who these people are. And I think through Footprint Coalition, RDJ is trying to put forward the idea, like I have this huge audience, how do I get them excited about technology that can change the world?

So yes, you’re absolutely correct. Marina, thank you for bringing it back to that.

Marina Schmidt

Well, we can also look at the plant-based side of things. Have you spotted differences in the communication or something that the cultivated meat companies could learn from plant-based companies? I feel like we always see the same celebrities when it’s related to veganism or vegetarians. It’s come to me to a point where like if that person appears, I, I already automatically think it’s like for a very sub-divided section of the population. And so I would actually say that the cultivated cell culture, whatever you wanna call it, meat industry should not look in that direction and not take an inspiration from the plant-based world because, we don’t want to bring in the baggage of activism and veganism and everyone’s opinions about it because I, you know, I think it’s still at the end of the day, a question if cell-cultured meat is vegan, you know, that’s still open-ended. So if it’s open-ended, let’s not put ourselves into that box from the beginning, and let’s try and think about things completely from scratch. Some people would argue that talking about a product that isn’t yet on the market is a wasted effort. What’s your take on that?

Isha Datar

I probably would be that person. I have been that person that talking about the product is a wasted effort, but I think there are types of conversations about products that are not a wasted effort. And an example of that is this breaking of the paradigm. So, you know, I, for example, was able to eat a steak chip that was made by Modern Meadow who no longer participates in cultured meat anymore.

But,  eating the steak ship was incredible because I had never eaten a potato chip that was not made of potatoes. And it really brought to light the fact that we can really break down the boundaries of what meat is and create these culinary experiences we have never, ever seen before. And I think these are the things that we should be exploring as we consider consumers of products.  What is the first product that will get the most people to try it for the first time?

And I think snack food is an example of something that will really break down the barriers of, yeah, sure. I mean, I can always buy a pack of chips, eat one or two and throw it away. And I don’t, I don’t feel invested in it. Whereas for me, if I was going to the store to buy, uh, you know, a pack of pork chops, like that’s dinner for tonight and like dinner is on the line for tonight.

And if we don’t like it, it is going to be a huge disaster and maybe I’m overthinking it. But I actually do think that way, like, I really don’t want dinner to be a disaster. Um, but a snack is like, come and go bonus and like a really great entry point for example. And so like, these are the things, the kind of conversations that I think are really valuable and important.

I think the questions and conversations that are less valuable are the, would you eat it? And then it’s like, well, what is it? And then you’re describing something that may or may not ever exist. Like it is exactly the same as meat. You know, I would,  I would suggest that it is not exactly the same as meat and maybe we should de-risk the idea that we’re putting something exactly the same as meat, because there are some people who have a very, you know, careful palettes and will say, no, this is not meat. Like it’s 99% close, but it’s not meat. Um, how do we capture that population? I think we capture that population by putting out something that cannot be compared to anything.

Such as a chip or snack food, because then it’s like, do you like this? Or do you not like this? Not, is it the same? Is it not the same? There’s like a tiny, tiny thing that makes a difference, which is all the difference. But if you’re just like, do you, do you enjoy this product for what it is? Lets us differentiate it from the beginning. Then you’re asking a different question that has less of a negative answer.

Marina Schmidt

I like the snack idea. I think snacks are also things that are shared more often, and there’s more potential talk about that and just can imagine somebody just handing over a bag of, uh, cultivated meat chips to a friend or passing it through and everybody being like, Oh, well, okay. I’ll try a little one. In Singapore, it’s, it’s really popular. They have these really popular, salted, egg-flavored fish skin chips. Um, and I had them the other day. I’m like, these are so cool. Like it’s literally chips. Like it’s, it’s like crunchy and everything, but it’s fish, fish skin. And I was like, this would be a very cool cell-cultured food product, which is like, probably easier to create than a filet of fish.

Isha Datar

Um, but it’s very shareable. Like I wanted to buy it for my friends online and just like send it to their houses. Yeah, Isha, is there anything regarding the consumer acceptance that we haven’t touched upon that you find important to talk about?

No, I’ve had a really fun time chatting with you. It’s very hard for me to think of something we didn’t talk about. Well to come to the ending questions, you’ve already answered this one. Maybe, maybe your answer is different. You don’t need to remember your last answer. If you would have 50 million in what businesses would you invest in?

Isha Datar

$50 million?

Marina Schmidt

Yeah.

Isha Datar

Do I have to invest in businesses?

Marina Schmidt

I’ll make an exception.

Isha Datar

This is why I suggest we don’t, I don’t invest that in businesses because there’s a lot of investment in business. And because of the role that I play and what I see in my everyday kind of conversations and so on,  my big thesis is that this industry, lacks infrastructure and infrastructure is public infrastructure that everybody can benefit from.

And so if I had $50 million, I would build a pilot plant facility where several culture meat companies could use it to do their scale-up research to test how to get from a hundred-liter bioreactor to a thousand liter bioreactors before they start building their own facilities because it’s really expensive to do that type of research.

You don’t want to be in that mid-range facility forever. And so to want to build that yourself is like, ah, how do I do it? And I’ve heard that there are not great contract organizations for doing that kind of scale-up work specifically for cell ag. So that’s what I would build is this like facility that is very much tuned to the needs of, of cell ag, where companies can use them to grow out of their kind of early-stage and into their okay, we’re putting products really on the market stage and, and really support that in-between period.

Marina Schmidt

Very interesting. Regarding food, sustainability, or agriculture, what is an unusual opinion that you hold that many people would disagree with?

Isha Datar

Things that people are surprised by is that I still eat all foods.  I don’t know if it’s an unusual opinion, but to say that the sustainability of the world rests on individual purchasing decisions is unfair to consumers.

It goes back to the same thing of like, Oh, we’re using so much energy. You better turn off all the lights in your house. And like, you better not take you better take a five-minute shower instead of, you know, whatever 10-minute shower. And that’s unfair because those are, those are problems that could be solved with policy and innovation and dah, dah, dah, and the right incentives towards the right players.

Like there are much easier ways to solve that than to blame individual human beings for the state of the world when we do not control the state of the world. We control the state of our own tiny little worlds and that’s totally inappropriate. And we’ve seen it time and time again, like, you know, recycling doesn’t solve the problems that we hope it solves.

You know, it makes us feel kind of better. No, it’s not acceptable. And so I kind of eat meat because I want to be the average person and I want to be interacting with these products as an average person. And like I’ve absolutely gone through being vegetarian and being a vegan and all those things. And that’s great and I’m glad that people do it.

And I think it’s awesome that people do it, but yeah, i, I feel like there are people in power that could make that easier for many people and could flip a switch easier than me making a decision at a supermarket. So I don’t know, even if that’s an unpopular opinion, but I think it might be unpopular in my little sphere.

Marina Schmidt

It’s great to hear you talk about that and the most common objection to that is. yeah, but people should still,  look at their consumption patterns and their behavior patterns. And I would say, yeah, they should. But the main lever for change is not within the hands of individual consumers.

I think the influence of consumers is in pushing companies to change, but imagine like all of the efforts and trying to turn off the water quicker when brushing our teeth would go into being active and organizations that keep corporations accountable, it would have a way bigger influence on the bottom line.

So in the last season that we did on plastic alternatives and sustainable food packaging, that was also one of the biggest takeaways. Seeing how corporations are using recycling to actually make everybody feel better about this whole thing and avoid regulation on it, or how BP was inventing the personal carbon footprint to say, well, we are only having a tiny carbon footprint.

It’s actually the personal carbon footprint of all our consumers. That’s their issue that they’re using our products and it’s so upside down. And it’s crazy how it creeps in. As always, there will be information. There will be links to further resources in the show notes on our website, redtogreen.solutions. Isha, how can listeners connect with you?

Isha Datar

They can literally email me at isha@new-harvest.org. They can follow New Harvest on Twitter, we’re @NewHarvestOrg; they can follow me on Twitter @IshaDatar. Check out New Harvest www.new-harvest.org. And our newsletter is probably the best way to be part of our community.

Marina Schmidt

Isha it was a pleasure to have you on again.

Isha Datar

Thank you so much, Marina. This was really fun.