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Eat Just

May 25, 2022

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Lines Up Partners to Scale Up Cultivated Meat Production

The great cultivated meat scale-up has begun. Or, at the very least, the game plan for one of the industry’s most high-visibility players is finally coming into view.

That startup is Eat Just, Inc., which has announced two significant partnerships for its Good Meat group, the company’s cultivated meat division, over the past week. The first partnership, announced last week, is with food/ag conglomerate ADM, which will partner with Eat Just to optimize the growth factors and nutrients in the cell culture growth media. According to the announcement, the two will work together to create a growth medium “for quality, cost and volume.”

The second partnership, announced today, is with ABEC, a biomanufacturing engineering and services company, to build out Good Meat’s manufacturing facilities. The multi-year agreement will see ABEC “design, manufacture, install and commission the largest known bioreactors for avian and mammalian cell culture.”

According to the announcement, the deal is for the production of ten 250,000-liter bioreactors, which will form the foundation for GOOD Meat’s large-scale cultivated meat facility. The production complex, which will be located in the United States, will have the capacity to produce up to 30 million pounds of cultivated meat. The new facility will initially produce chicken and beef products and have a nationwide distribution footprint.

While 30 million pounds sounds like a lot, it represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the aggregate meat consumption in the US. Still, it’s not nothing. The planned production represents a significant leap over any other announced production capacity (Upside’s pilot plant, announced last year, will eventually have a capacity of 400 thousand pounds of meat per year).

Some may dismiss these efforts as hardly making a dent in overall meat consumption but Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick and others have made it clear that the effort to scale up this industry will take decades, not years. These efforts to produce cell-cultivated meat at this scale will undoubtedly provide lessons for an industry collectively looking to figure out the science and technology of doing something that’s never been done before.

 

December 15, 2021

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Granted Regulatory Approval to Sell New Cultivated Chicken Products in Singapore

Today Eat Just announced its GOOD Meat division has received the regulatory go-ahead to sell new types of cultivated chicken products in Singapore. The company will debut one of the new formats, a chicken breast, at the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach next week.

The green light comes just over a year after the company received the world’s first approval to sell cultivated meat from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. Soon after, GOOD Meat set a milestone by making the first commercial sale of cultivated chicken at 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore.

As part of the announcement, GOOD Meat also committed to increased investment in its cultivated meat production capacity in Singapore over the next two years. The company said the design and manufacturing of vessels and systems that will increase its cultivated meat production capacity are already underway, and they hope to have the new infrastructure operational within the next two years. Eat Just’s cultivated meat division also committed to growing its team in Singapore across manufacturing, science, and engineering as the company moves towards scaling up its production.

The latest regulatory approval is another example of Singapore’s aggressive push into alternative proteins and cultivated meat. The effort is part of the island nation’s “30 By 30” food sovereignty initiative to scale up its capability and capacity to produce 30 percent of its food supply by 2030. And it’s not just Eat Just; other future food companies such as Perfect Day and Avant Meats are investing in building out innovation centers in the country.

Compared to Singapore, the US government has been comparatively slow to foster the next generation of alternative proteins, but that looks to be changing. In October, the USDA announced a $10 million grant award to Tufts to create an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence, which followed a $3.5 million grant to UC Davis to establish a training and research program by the National Science Foundation. At the same time, in September, the USDA began to solicit input about what it should call cultivated meat products, a signal that it is progressing towards regulatory approval of the products.

August 31, 2021

Eat Just Partners with Qatar Free Zones to Bring Cultured Meat Facility to the MENA Region

Eat Just announced today that it has partnered with Doha Venture Capital (DVC) and Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA) to build a cultured meat facility in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region.

The new facility will be located in the Umm Alhoul Free Zone in Qatar, and will at first house Eat Just’s cultured meat division, GOOD Meat. Eventually, the facility will accommodate Eat Just’s plant-based egg brand JUST Egg as well. In addition to those brands, the facility will also conduct research and development, engineering, and business development.

According to the press announcement, the Qatar Free Zones Authority and Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health have indicated that they will grant regulatory approval for GOOD Meat’s cultured chicken “very soon” and have formally granted an expert license for the cell-based meat. If Qatar does come through with this approval, it would be the second region in the world to approve the sale of cultured meat, following Singapore’s decision to do so in December of last year.

Gaining regulatory approval in more countries around the world is obviously a key milestone that needs to be reached in order for cultured meat to gain any sort of traction. Cell-based meat startups around the world have raised a ton of money over the past year, and the technology is rapidly maturing. But all the funding and the best technology in the world doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t allowed to sell your product.

While there are skeptics that doubt cell-based meat will ever be able to economically scale, a number of startups have made moves that aim to bring it to market. After two drastic price reductions this year, the production price of Israel-based Future Meat’s cell-based chicken is now $4 for 110g (check out our recent podcast interview with Future Meat Founder and CSO Yaakov Nahmias for more). Here in the U.S. Memphis Meats re-branded to the more consumer-friendly UPSIDE Foods and announced a partnership with the Altier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco.

Eat Just has definitely pushed its way to the front of the cultured meat pack, however. It is the first company to ever commercially sell its cultured meat, and now it will have large-scale production facilities in both Singapore and Qatar.

August 21, 2021

Food Tech News: Scented Water, Kabocha Squash Milk, and Robot Delivery at Ohio State

Welcome to the weekend, and the Food Tech News round-up!

Air Up uses scent to trick people into drinking more water

UK-based Air Up has developed a bottle that flavors water through scent, and tricks the brain with retronasal smelling technology. The top of the bottle has space to insert a scented pod, which is made from aromas extracted from fruits, plants, and spices. Once the bottle is filled with still or sparkling water, and the desired pod has been selected, the user sips from the silicon straw attachment on top. While drinking the water, air from the pod rises up, and the olfactory center perceives it as taste, rather than just smell.

The scented pods come in flavors like berry, kola, coffee, and cucumber, with a single pod lasting for about 5 liters of water. Air Up products are currently available in Germany, Austria, Swiss, France, Belgium, the UK, and the Netherlands, and the company has plans to continue expanding throughout Europe and to the U.S.

Eat Just to launch alternative egg product in South Africa

Alternative protein company Eat Just and Infinite Foods, a market platform for plant-based food brands, announced this week they have partnered to launch JUST Egg products in South Africa. The JUST Egg Folded, made predominantly from mung beans, will be sold in a box of four in the frozen aisle. Wellness Warehouse, a grocery and wellness product retailer, will carry the product across South Africa, as well as in restaurants in Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Additionally, the alternative egg will be available on Infinite Foods’ website. According to the press release, this will be the first plant-based egg available in South Africa.

Grubhub and Yandex will offer robot delivery on the Ohio State University campus

Grubhub, a food delivery platform, and Yandex, a robot delivery service, have announced that they will be operating together on the Ohio State University. There will be 50 Yandex robots on campus that are able to deliver between the hours of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week. A robot is able to move throughout the campus going three to five miles an hour, navigate through crosswalks, and deliver in all weather. The campus is home to 60,000 students who can order delivery from any on-campus dining establishment to any residence hall on campus, and to the Bricker Hall and Thompson Library. This is the first college campus that the Yandex robots will be operating on.

Kabochamilk launches for consumers in Asia

We can buy milk made from chia seeds, barley, oats, pistachios, and now, kabocha squash. Shane Newman, a kabocha squash farmer in Hawkes Bay, Zealand, and Sachie Nomura, a celebrity chef and the creator of avocadomilk, have collaborated to produce Kabochamilk. The company received $95,000 from the Ministry for Primary Industries in New Zealand through the Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund to launch. The Kabocha Milk Company has created a shelf-stable formula that is intended for consumers in Japan, Korea, and China, where kabocha squash is a dietary staple. The alternative milk is currently available in two high-end chains, Tsurya and Harashin, in Japan.

June 30, 2021

Report: Eat Just Aiming for $3B IPO in 2021

Eat Just is reportedly targeting Q4 2021 or early 2022 for its IPO, which currently has a valuation of $3 billion, according to an Eat Just investor. Forbes was first to break the news after one of its contributors spoke to an anonymous investor in the company.

To date, Eat Just has raised $440 million, with its most recent fundraise being a $200 million round led by Qatar Investment Authority earlier this year.

Eat Just is best known right now for its plant-based egg products, which are available in the U.S. through grocery retailers as well as at restaurants. The company has also steadily built a significant international presence over the last few years, too. Notably, that includes teaming up with China-based QSR chain Discos to replace traditional eggs on the latter’s menu and expanding across Canada in March of this year.

Of late, however, Eat Just has grabbed the most headlines for its cultivated meat business, GOOD, which won the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat this past December in Singapore. The company has since sold its GOOD cultured chicken bites on the regular at restaurants in the city-state and even partnered with Delivery Hero subsidiary Foodpanda to deliver them.

GOOD raised its own $170 million in May of this year. At the time, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick hinted to The Spoon that regulatory approval in the U.S. was on its way for the company. In its report today, Forbes name-dropped China as another potential country that could next grant regulatory approval to sell cultured meat.

Whether the company will go public before achieving these regulatory milestones or after is not clear at this time.

May 23, 2021

Transcript: Excerpts From a Recent Conversation With Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick

By “in the future,” he didn’t mean next year. Anyone who keeps an eye on the cultivated meat industry knows there are many, many hurdles to leap before we’re eating cultivated Big Macs. For companies actually making the products and/or accompanying technologies, there’s still much to do around improving growth media, bioprocess design, and many other things. And, of course, more companies must get regulatory approval to sell in more countries.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned shift towards cultivated meat is happening. Restaurants are a major part of that process, as is the task of educating consumers about what cultivated meat actually is (“It doesn’t taste like meat. It is meat”) and why the heck we need it in the first place.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the transcript of my conversation with Tetrick below. And if you missed our weekly newsletter discussing the topic, go here to read the web version of it.

May 23, 2021

Delivery Has a Small But Vital Role When it Comes to Normalizing Cultivated Meat

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Setting aside scalability, price parity, and regulatory approvals for a moment, one of the major challenges for cultivated meat makers will be getting people to actually buy their products en masse and on a regular basis.

We’ve written before about restaurants being a critical step in this journey, and after this week, I would add restaurant delivery to that process, too. The industry-wide shift to delivery wrought by the pandemic forced the restaurant biz to get pretty creative in terms of what it can do with delivery. Similar energy could be put towards delivering consumers an entire education about cultivated meat, not just a meal in a box.

There’s currently only one company in the world that’s even allowed to sell cultivated meat in restaurants right now — Eat Just, which nabbed the first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat at the end of 2020 and subsequently started selling its GOOD chicken product at Singapore restaurant 1880. The San Francisco-based Eat Just has since struck a deal with Delivery Hero’s food panda service to deliver meals from 1880. This week, Eat Just announced (among other things) that it is doing something similar with JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan restaurant. To start, GOOD chicken dishes will only be available from Madame Fan with delivery orders.

When I talked to Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick this past week, he was admittedly a little more blasé about delivery than I’m being at the moment: “It just was kind of as simple as, ‘It’d be nice if people could eat meat without slaughter in their homes. So let’s do delivery.'” Delivery Hero happens to be an investor in Eat Just, and food panda happens to be one of Asia’s biggest delivery services. Those convenient factors made delivery something of a no-brainer for the company to pursue.

But Tetrick also pointed out that delivery is part of the overall process of getting cultivated meat out of the lab and onto our plates. “Start with regulatory approval,” he said. “Then it’s getting on a menu. Then it’s having a family sit down and have a chicken dinner together. Then you can go to a retailer and buy [it]. All these things create a context in which this idea of making meat — which seemed like it was some futuristic thing a year ago — suddenly becomes a way that people just eat meat.”

Restaurants have historically played a role in the evolution of what we eat. But thanks to the forces at work, both technological and pandemic-related, restaurants are no longer just in-person experiences between the four walls of a dining room. If there was one idea that’s been dissected ad infinitum over the last year, it’s that the word “restaurant” now encompasses a far wider range of experiences. One of the biggest is delivery.

The pandemic accelerated rather than created delivery’s popularity, which means as a meal format, it won’t go by the wayside anytime soon. Numbers may taper off a bit as the world reopens, but many consumers have already said they will continue to order delivery on a regular basis. That makes it an integral part of the restaurant industry that anyone looking to enter the biz needs to pay attention to. Like cultivated meat companies.

If we go by the example Eat Just/GOOD have set, that involves more than putting some lab-grown chicken bites in a cardboard box. Tetrick said that delivery for the Madam Fan deal will operate similar to what his company did with its original 1880/food panda deal. Customers can choose from a few different dishes (chicken and rice, katsu curry, etc.). Meals are delivered to customers along with a Google Cardboard viewer and a link to a 360-degree short film about meat. Tetrick described the film as follows:

“You you put the glasses on and you’re in the midst of a rain forest in South America. Then it transitions to the rain forests being removed, and you see that it’s connected to planting lots of soy and corn. And you see how the soy and corn is connected to feed going to animals, and you see how that’s connected to your plate and how we could do something different.”

The point is to help consumers familiarize themselves with the term “cultivated meat” and explain why it matters for the health of the plant (more food made with fewer resources) and how that big-picture context fits into each individual consumer’s life, whether they’re in Singapore or Tennessee.

Longer term, immersive experiences like the above could help with what’s something of an end game for cultivated meat: getting people to think of it as just meat. Not “lab-grown meat” or “slaughter-free” meat or any of the other descriptors floating around nowadays. Just regular ol’ meat from regular ol’ animals.

It’s significant, then, that Eat Just’s deal with Madame Fan will deliver cultivated meat that actually replaces its conventional counterpart on the menu. In future, says Tetrick, restaurant menus will still offer some plant-based options (for those who can’t eat animals for ethical and/or religious reasons). But in his mind, “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have both cultivated meat and conventional meat on the menu.”

“I think you’ll end up having restaurants all across the world transition,” he added.

Not tomorrow, mind you. As I write this, global demand for meat is up. There is also a huge difference between letting someone taste something as a one-off experience and getting them to order it on a regular basis. As more companies attempt to scale up — often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — they will need to start educating their prospective consumers on what the heck this stuff is and why we need it in the first place. Choosing the right restaurant partners and getting the actual chefs involved will be important for this, too, as well sending the right messaging to each different demographic.

Food delivery may be one small step in this process, but given its ubiquity right now, it’s a crucial one to get right.

Elsewhere in the Restaurant Biz . . .

Top Three Takeaways from Our Food Robotics Summit – The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht gives some thought to the future of robots, including restaurant robots, in his wrap-up from our latest event.

Take on Big Pizza by Supporting Bitcoin – An investor/entrepreneur has launched Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. Proceeds in part go towards supporting independent restaurants.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital – The on-demand payment service for restaurants and retailers has secured $500 million in capital and will use it to expand to new markets.

May 18, 2021

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.

May 6, 2021

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

April 25, 2021

Food Tech Show Live: AB InBev Enters Alt-Protein Game

The usual Spoon gang got together this week to talk food tech with special guest Riana Lynn, longtime food tech entrepreneur and CEO of Journey Foods.

This stories we discuss on this week’s show include:

  • Robot servers are now bringing drinks and overpriced food to Houston Rockets fans at Toyota Center
  • Amazon is bringing Palm Pay to WholeFoods
  • Eat Just has notched another first with cultured meat in that they are going to be the first to deliver it to a consumer’s home. They’d partnered up with FoodPanda to do so in Singapore.
  • Clara Foods is partnering up with ABInBev’s innovation arm to scale up production of their animal-free egg products using microbial fermentation

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also just click play below:

April 20, 2021

Singapore: Eat Just and foodpanda Partner for Cultured Meat Home Delivery

Alternative protein company Eat Just and delivery service foodpanda announced a partnership yesterday that will see the two companies offer the world’s first home delivery of cell-cultured meat.

The program kicks off on April 22 in Singapore, where Eat Just made the world’s first sale of cultured meat in December 2020 at restaurant 1880. For the new program, customers will be able to order dishes from 1880 featuring Eat Just’s GOOD Meat cultured chicken for home delivery via foodpanda.

Yesterday’s announcement is noteworthy because it marks the first time consumers will be able to eat cell-based meat from the comfort of their own homes. Up to now, cultured meat has only been available to consumers via exclusive taste-testings like those at Supermeat’s kitchen lab in Israel, where customers offer feedback on dishes instead of payment. 1880 remains the only restaurant in the world right now to have made an actual sale of cultured meat.

Wider acceptance of cultured meat are coming, though. Cultured protein is being heralded as a way to fight climate disaster, since it requires fewer resources (land, water) than traditional animal agriculture. And startups around the globe have received massive amounts of funding of late, including Eat Just, who recently raised $200 million. Other cultured meat startups raising funds include Future Meat, Mosa Meat and CellMEAT.

Before more sales (and deliveries) can happen, though, cultured meat needs to get regulatory approval from more governments, and ideally needs to reach price parity with animal based protein.

For those in Singapore inside 1880’s delivery radius, GOOD Meat dishes available include Chicken & Rice with coconut rice, pak choi, sweet chili, chrysanthemums, microgreens; Katsu Chicken Curry with jasmine rice, heritage carrots, micro shiso, edible flowers; Chicken Caesar Salad with kale, romaine, edible flowers, shaved radish, plant-based Caesar dressing.

GOOD Meat and foodpanda said they plan to collaborate with other restaurants in Singapore, too. Starting in mid-May, GOOD Meat selections from JW Marriott Singapore South Beach will be available.

April 7, 2021

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on What It Will Take to Normalize the Concept of Cultured Meat

Will we ever reach a day when fast food restaurant serve nothing but plant-based or cultured meat? Many hope so, including Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just. But Tetrick’s ambitions for alternative protein stretch far beyond the QSR sector.

As of this writing, Eat Just is selling its cultured meat product at a restaurant in Singapore (where it got regulatory approval late last year). Stateside, the company has sold enough of its plant-based egg product to equal 100 million chicken eggs, and has been rapidly expanding throughout the restaurant industry.

As to wether we’ll ever see a day where the plant-based restarant is the norm, there are a lot of steps needed to get there. Tetrick and I chatted recently about these along with many other topics on the alt-protein front. Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, Tetrick explains what exactly it will take for cultured meat to reach parity with traditional meat, how experience matters when introducing it to consumers, and why he hops we reach a day when cultured meat becomes boring.

You can listen to the interview read the transcript of our conversation below. Note that the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Jenn Marston: You’ve had a few different announcements in the last few months around JUST getting into more restaurants. Do you ever see a point where we’re going to have restaurants, and I mean, big restaurants, McDonald’s, or, you know, Starbucks or something, only offering alternative proteins on their menus?

Josh Tetrick: I think that one, if we don’t get to that point — similarly if we don’t get to a point where every car dealership only sells an electric car — that our planet will not be in a good state 30 years, 50 years, 100 years from now. So before I tell you what I think it should happen, I’ll say I think it’s a necessity that it does happen, given the urgency that we have around oceans, rain forests or [the danger of] another zoonotic disease outbreak. 

I don’t think it will only be plant based. I see a world in which restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu. So they remove fried chicken, they remove hamburgers, they remove steaks or remove fish, they replace it with cultivated cultured meat. And some restaurants end up having plant based on the menu. That’s what the restaurant menu in the next 10, 20, 30 years will look like. I don’t think there’ll be a need for conventional meats. 

When you have actual meat cultivated, it doesn’t require slaughtering animals. So we’ve done a lot of really important research around this particular topic. [We did a lot of work] in Singapore, looking at restaurant operators and surveys and I’ll give you one finding from that: About 80 percent of restaurants said that they would put cultivated cultured meat on their menu. And about 70 percent of people said that if [cultured meat] meets the tastes and the cost demands, there would be no reason to have conventional meat on the menu at all. So I think that’s what you’ll see. And I think there will always be people that want plant. My girlfriend Shelley is a good example. I gave her some my chicken and she almost spit it out. She said, ‘I don’t want something that tastes like an animal.’ And I think there’ll be a lot of people like that. And that’s okay.

Jenn Marston: I definitely know some people who, if it tastes too much like the real thing, they don’t want anything to do with it. So that’s definitely a good point.

Josh Tetrick: I think it was a combination of [the product] literally being an animal, not a plant. It tastes very much like an animal. But it literally being an animal, combined with it tasting just like an animal was too much for her to take.

Jenn Marston: On the subject of cultured meat, there have been a ton of developments since we last spoke, including Eat Just serving customers in Singapore.

Josh Tetrick: You know, we’ve served almost 300 people, but 80 percent of the people said they feel good about eating it, about 70 percent of the people who paid for it say they’d be open to substituting [cultured meat] for not only conventional meat, but even plant based. So we’re going to be expanding to more restaurants and building a larger manufacturing facility in Singapore to make sure that we’re able to meet all the [demand].

Jenn Marston: Why did you choose Singapore? Was it just that Singapore was most realistic to get regulatory approval first? Or is there something about that specific market you were interested in? 

Josh Tetrick: There’s a few reasons. Their regulatory approach is often very evidence-based. The more science- and evidence-based you are, the less politics are involved. Second reason is that Singapore is a global melting pot. You have people from all over the world there. So when you’re wanting to learn how consumers think about this, why they like it, why they don’t like it, what is causing them to hesitate, you get lots of different cultures. Within those 300 people, we got people from all over the world, young, old everywhere in between. That’s another important reason. And then the third reason is, you know, more people consume meat in Asia than anywhere else in the world. So that was, that was another important reason why we chose Singapore.

Jenn Marston: Is it is the plan that get into more restaurants next? 

Josh Tetrick: It is.

Jenn Marston: It seems like there is a lot of hype happening right now around cultured meat. And it seems like a lot of folks are very confident that cultured meat is gonna just explode very, very quickly. What do you think of some of these comments about it’s going to reach price parity quickly, it’s going to scale up very quickly. 

Josh Tetrick: Well, there are a lot of factors involved. So I guess I’ll just start with the things that I think are certain, then I’ll go to things that are higher and lower probabilities. 

What is certain is that cultured meat will eventually get to the price and then below the price of conventional animal protein. I do feel certain about that. 

The next [issue] is when we’ll get there [to parity] — a year or five or 15 years. This is where there is not 100 percent probability. But I would say more likely than not, that in the next 10 years, this production process will get below the cost of chicken. Now, in order for that to happen, other things need to happen. And those other things include more countries allowing for the sale of [cultured meat]. If you can only sell in Singapore, your market is restricted to the million plus people on the island. You’re not going to be producing tens of billions of pounds, which is what is ultimately required to get to the kind of efficiencies necessary to get below the cost of chicken. 

And then the third thing has to do with where we are in the US. I can’t tell you whether we are going to get regulatory approval this year or not, or whether [regulators are] going to approve it ’22. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell. A lot of companies will go out of business trying to get there. [Making cultured meat] is incredibly capital intensive, it is not easy. It is not straightforward. It requires hundreds and millions of dollars, if not a billion-plus dollars in investment, ultimately, to get there. It’s not for the faint of heart. And much like electric car production, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of companies making electric cars. You might have tens of thousands of companies making different sub components of electric cars, you know, the engine, the battery, the software.  But we only get to have a handful of companies doing the whole thing. I think that is very analogous to the cultured meat industry. 

The final thing I’ll say is, it is one of the real bright spots for us of what’s happening in Singapore. It’s one thing to talk about where production costs are going if you’re only making stuff for your friends and family and boyfriend and girlfriend and your fancy investors. That was the case for us up until we got clearance, and it’s the case for every other company. It’s another thing when you need to scale up to meet the demands of hundreds and thousands, then 10,000, then a million people. You learn a lot about producing more when you actually can produce more. So there’s going to be a ton of learnings that happen. As that scale up process happens, some things might be surprising on the downside, and some might be surprising on on the positive side, but we’ll learn as we make that happen.

Jenn Marston: How challenging is that? Part of getting consumers on board with this is obviously not just price parity, but also parity around taste and texture and the actual product. So how difficult has has that been for you all?

Josh Tetrick: Certainly at some point, whether it’s 5, 10 years (I sure hope it’s not 30 years), cultured meat will be below the cost of traditional meat. The second thing that I am certain about is we’ll eventually get to the point where not a single person can tell the difference because there’s literally no difference at all. Today, in the work that we’ve done, about 70 percent of the people think it tastes as good or better than traditional meat. There’s still a lot of work we want to do on texture. We’re going to be rolling out a chicken breast, which is a more advanced structural product.

But even if we solve for taste and texture, there’s also consumer perception: the feelings, the ideas that make people want to buy the product. It’s a confusing process, making cultured meat. It’s an unnatural process. I’m not saying these things are right, I’m just saying this is what a consumer feels. And I think ultimately, you could get your costs right, you get the taste and texture just perfect. But you’re still left with the most important thing: Do the consumers want to buy your product. The process of lab-grown meat might be holding them back. So it’s really important that we address that stuff. Now. We built a brand around addressing that stuff head on. We know many consumers will think it’s unnatural. That’s okay, let’s deal with it. And we want to deal with it by explaining our process, contrasting it to the conventional meat-making process. Eventually, having a digital platform allows consumers to really interact with stuff a little bit more, so they can get familiar with it. We need to normalize this method of production, so it’s not so opaque to consumers. When it’s confusing, their brains will naturally jump. In the case of cultured meat, many brains will naturally jump to, ‘This just isn’t natural.’ And we have found quite a stark difference between consumers over the age of 20 and consumers under the age of 20.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I get a lot of a lot of folks who just look at me like I’m crazy when I asked them if would you eat meat grown in a lab, but I think it’s, you know, what more do we do to sort of educate consumers? How do you start talking to everybody in a way that’s going to make it have the same appeal, as, say, Doritos?

Josh Tetrick: A big component is allowing people to experience it. So I’ll use a car analogy. Imagine I was in Birmingham [Alabama, where he grew up] and I was talking to some of my friends and I said, ‘Would you would you want to drive a pickup truck doesn’t have an internal combustion engine? Would you be down with buying that?’ I’m almost certain my friends would say, ‘Hell no.’ But then Tesla comes out with that pickup truck that I saw them demoing. If my friends could go to a Tesla store in Alabama, get into that truck, and take it on the back country roads, then there’s an experience of something and there’s a perception change.

The most important thing we think you can do to change perception is allow people to experience in a concrete way, not in a theoretical abstract way. We need to get out in front of more people, right, more restaurants and more retailers and allow people to have the ability to actually access their other meat analogues. 

The second thing is, I think you need to talk about this in a way that is not so technical that you lose people, but is concrete enough where you’re not hiding things from people. And that’s the hard balance. Because the more you unpack, the more you’re being open about it. But the more you unpack, sometimes people can just get lost in the science. It’s about finding the right balance of not getting so technical that people’s eyes just glaze over, but concrete and technical enough that people don’t walk away from that interaction thinking something has been hidden from them. That balance applies whether it’s a label interaction or commercial interaction or menu interaction, or a one to one interaction. One thing that we’ve actually found to be effective is to say, ‘Yes, it is true, the meat is made in a large stainless steel [container], that true statement.’ That statement can be both a little off-putting to people and a little liberating to people. But when you contrast that to how conventional meat is produced, people tend to feel a little bit better. So I think, experience number one, people just got to experience that. And then two, I think talking about in a way that is a little bit more relatable.

Jenn Marston: Something that I think there’s a huge need for more of translating the science into something that isn’t gonna insult folks intelligence or lied to them, but it is also going to, you know, the average person needs to be able to understand it.

Josh Tetrick: Especially if some of our folks are over the age of 20, if you describe the process of culturing meat, the vast majority will say it is strange. And I think the first step to effectively communicating is to acknowledge that is true. To most people, it sounds bizarre, it sounds strange. That’s okay. Let’s now let’s deal with it. Right?

Jenn Marston: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Tetrick: The more we effectively address it, the more we move [the industry] forward. For example, I understand why my mom would think it’s strange. In her mind, meat has been made her entire life (and the history of humanity) by slaughtering an animal and then cutting up their flesh. Cultured meat is different. Let’s just acknowledge that.

And what we’ve seen in other industries and with other products is that something that can be strange can also at some point in time be normalized, and can end up being pretty boring. And eventually, I want [cultured meat] to get to the point where people are sitting down at restaurants or go into grocery stores, and they don’t even have conversations about it anymore. They’re just like, yeah, I want some chicken. Sounds good. Do you have any chicken left in the freezer? Right? Yeah. There doesn’t need to be this philosophical engagement.

I think I think the truth is that whether it’s [about] not slaughtering an animal or an environmental reason, or a zoonotic disease reason, I guess all these things kind of are wound up in, “How does it make a person feel?” All of them — sometimes individually, sometimes in combination — I think, for most people, make them feel better about eating it. But I do think you have to talk about things like health, not using antibiotics, to some extent food safety. Often those things can be a bigger driver than sustainability or animal welfare. With that said, and this was a surprising result from the research that we did, the primary purchase driver, both for US consumers, and consumers in Singapore, was the fact that they could consume this meat without slaughtering an animal. Now, they might have correlated that with lots of other things like food safety and environment. So it might not have been looked at like it’s just like a purely independent variable. But I did find that to be interesting. But yeah, I mean, you have to talk about in a way that people can relate to. If I’m talking to my mom about this (my mom is not vegan or vegetarian), I would focus on you know, ‘Mom, you know, the fried chicken used to make me so it tastes like that. And it’s gonna have less antibiotics, that stuff you want and you’ll probably feel a little bit better by the day.’ That’s probably what I would say to my mom. That’s what I actually have said to my mom.

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