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Better Meat Co

August 2, 2024

How a Non-Scientist & Former Lobbyist Started a Future Food Company (Podcast)

Paul Shapiro had spent most of his career as a lobbyist, working for organizations like The Humane Society. While he found his work advocating for animal welfare extremely gratifying, around 2016, he started to reevaluate.

He started thinking he could effect change in a way that he couldn’t as a lobbyist by helping to build one of these new technologies that could make animal agriculture—in other words, raising cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals for human consumption—obsolete.

So he decided to write a book. Paul had never published a book before, but he had done plenty of writing. Op-eds, columns, and other pieces as a lobbyist. And because he was so early to the topic and pitched a book no one had written before, it didn’t take long before a publisher became interested.

While writing the book Clean Meat—the first to focus on the nascent cultivated meat industry—he spent a lot of time talking to folks on the front lines of the future food industry. It was during this time he had a realization.

“What I learned was these people were mere mortals like myself,” said Shapiro on the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. “I thought if you were going to start your own company, you had to have some kind of special skillset that commoners like myself lacked. It was at that point that I decided that instead of writing about these people who I thought were going to solve this problem that had been animating my life for the past couple of decades, I would become one myself.”

In this episode of The Spoon Podcast, Shapiro talks about their journey to start The Better Meat Co., his decision to pursue hybrid meat solutions instead of technologies like cultivated meat, his first big win with Purdue, and his company’s eventual transition to developing mycoprotein based products.

You can listen by clicking play below, or you can download it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

July 28, 2020

Better Meat Co Raises $8.1 Million For Plant-Based Ingredient Enhancers

Plant-based ingredients startup Better Meat Co. announced today they have raised an $8.1 million seed round. The new funding round was led by Greenlight Capital and Green Circle Foodtech Ventures. Johnsonville, the maker of Johnsonville Sausages, also participated alongside alt-protein investment fund Level VC. This brings the total funding for Better Meat Co. to $9.7 million.

Better Meat Co. describes itself as a business-to-business ingredients company. They sell plant-based ingredients to food companies that then incorporate them into meat products. The plant-based ingredients typically account for anywhere between 25 to 50 percent of the ingredients in these blended products.

“We offer a range of ingredients to major meat companies,” Better Meat Co. CEO Paul Shapiro told The Spoon. “We enable them to use fewer animals and more plants.”

According to Shapiro, the ingredients aren’t just a way to replace meat with lower-cost fillers, but instead to improve the overall nutritional value and enhance the flavor.

“What we offer are meat enhancers,” said Shapiro. “We’re going to improve the yield. We’re going to improve the mouthfeel.”

As mentioned, the company also aims to improve the overall nutritional value of the products. Adding these ingredients can reduce the sodium or cholesterol compared to a 100 percent meat-based offering. The ingredients also round out a diet by adding more vegetables, something Better Meat customers like Perdue like to tout.

While plant-based ingredients enhancers for products like chicken nuggets may not be as sexy as, say, the Impossible Whopper or a futuristic vision of meat grown in bioreactors, Better Meat Co. and its products are a recognition that we aren’t going to be a post-animal food world anytime soon and we’d better figure out a way to transition.

CEO Shapiro put his company’s products into context by pointing to the electric vehicle market.

“What we offer is not necessarily a totally electric hybrid like the Tesla, but instead a technology that allows for the major meat makers to hybridize their products.”

In short, while Better Meat Co.’s technology is more Prius than Tesla, the company still serves an important role by acting as a bridge to help big CPGs transition over time to a more sustainable, plant-based future.

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