When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.
And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.
I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.
Congratulations on your move. Tell us a little about your journey before you got to Shiru.
I have a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Maryland, and then I was a postdoctoral fellow for several years.
And at the end of my postdocs, I was thinking about what to do. A fairly traditional route for folks with my training is the biopharma industry, and that was not particularly compelling to me at the time. I wanted to do something that was meaningful. So I was very fortunate in that I was put in touch with Pat Brown who had just founded Impossible in 2011
For me, that was the first time that I could put climate change, food security, and animal welfare all in one sentence. And it was really eye-opening and very compelling for me. It was a vision Pat had at the time with a very small team of people, so I joined because it was really so refreshing and such a different way of thinking about the problem.
What attracted you to the opportunity at Shiru?
I’m excited to be joining Shiru because I think we really need a way to rethink ingredients. Even for companies like Impossible, for them to make the next game-changing product, you really need access to ingredients that will not carry whatever other sentiments of the plants they’re extracted from, or be limited in the type of functionality like soy proteins. So I think for technical reasons, ingredients are going to bring the next big change to plant-based foods, and I’m very, very excited about Shiru doing that.
Talk about that transition from Impossible, an early stage, vertically integrated plant-based meat company which essentially built the entire ingredient list for their consumer products, to Shiru, which is a B2B company building novel ingredients for other plant-based meat companies, who in turn build consumer-facing products.
At the time (at Impossible), we were really trying to extract every different thing, every different protein so we could to play with it, understand what it does, and formulate a product with it. Ultimately, I think when you see the reality of what it takes to commercialize a product, it is very difficult for a single company to be vertically integrated for each one of these ingredients. Because the mission is not to create one SKU for plant-based meat or whatever other product a company is making. You want to be able to make a variety of different products for the economic viability of the company itself.
This is one of the reasons I find Shiru to be very interesting and fascinating because instead of trying to do it like that, you’re saying ‘we’ll create the toolkit’, right? And not only is it going to be a viable business model for Shiru, but it’s also going to help the entire community.
My understanding of Shiru is that you’re building alternative protein building blocks, but you’re not trying to create animal identical ones like you might see like with some other precision fermentation-focused companies. It’s actually looking within plants and looking for functional equivalency rather an exact equivalence with an animal protein. That’s an interesting switch for you.
Shiru is trying to create an ingredient toolkit coming from natural sources. Not just plants, it could be algae, it could be fungi, or other sources of proteins, but all naturally occurring sequences. And like you said, not looking for the exact one to one match. It’s an orthogonal way to think about the problem in a scientific way, because ultimately what you care about is the way the protein behaves. What is the texture, appearance, flavor, or whatever other aspects of the protein you are trying to create – can this protein do the same thing? As long as you’re satisfied that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s exactly the same protein or not.
One of the differentiation pitches I think I’ve heard from Shiru is this idea of building a massive database of potential plant-based protein ingredients. You’re using machine learning or AI to mine that. Talk about that. Is that is that a new thing for you?
A typical traditional approach is to say, ‘here are all sorts of plant proteins – soybeans, peas, what have you – let’s look at what these proteins can do for us? And then you find that it’s very limited. So now we have to find other sources of protein.
I think what Shiru is doing very intelligently is really leveraging validated tools from AI and machine learning and, I don’t want to get too technical, but using the sort of tools that are available for language modeling. So in a way that you might translate from one language to another, for example, using tools that have been developed for those types of things and applying that to proteins to really understand if I have a protein that looks like this, what are their proteins are going to look like that? So they’ve been able to utilize millions of protein sequences available in the public domain and use these machine learning tools to really find these matches. That’s why the library can be billions and billions, 10s or hundreds. And that’s unique, right?
It seems a lot more efficient. If you’re spending all this time trying to get an exact match to get an animal identical protein, it’s a very finite target you’re kind of aiming at. Whereas if you’re looking for functional equivalency, you have a much wider swath and I think it could accelerate time to market, correct?
Yes, And that’s why for a young company so early in their lifecycle, they already have targets. For a company with a team of forty or so people, to be at a stage where you have targets waiting to take into commercialization, is fantastic.
And because I believe that access to these types of ingredients will really create the next game-changing plant-based foods, for me it makes sense as the logical next step. I spent all this time kind of understanding the whole landscape of plant-based foods, helping to create them at Impossible. I was leading the initiative for strategic ingredients at Impossible before I left. And now to say, ‘Okay, actually here’s a completely different way of thinking about it.’
Does Shiru have a wet lab?
Yes, they do have a wet lab. I think the team is about 10 people in the lab right now. They have robotics set up to help do the rapid high throughput screening.
From a process perspective, like they’re you’re using algorithms to look through this huge dataset, sift through it, come up with promising candidates, and then you then move things into the lab?
Yes, and I think ultimately you would set up your platform for you to feed everything back the output from the wet lab right back into your learning.
What are you looking to accomplish over the next year?
I think in the very near term, really to absorb everything that’s going on at Shiru, but really to help commercialize their first few targets that are already in the works. That will be a great thing for Shiru, because it brings a lot of credibility to what they’re doing and brings in revenue which we can invest back into R&D, which is really the heart of the company. So I think that that’s just the beginning. And, you know, for all the reasons we talked about, very excited about how it’s gonna take off and really revolutionize the way we’re thinking about it.
Tell us a bit about Shiru recruiting you.
Shiru approach to me once my profile changed on LinkedIn. I was committed to teaching the entire year, so I took on advisory roles in several companies. In retrospect, I was very fortunate. I wasn’t going in too blind. I had the time to really talk to several folks and companies and really take a step back and look at what’s going on out there to understand what should be the next thing I want to do. So I’m glad I have that opportunity. I think Jasmine is an exceptional leader. You’ve talked to her. The team is wonderful. They have a great board. The board is also full of people with a lot of experience. So I think it’s going to be fantastic
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
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