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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Paul Shapiro

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.

Better Meat Co. Serves Legal Foie Gras To Hungry Silicon Valley Workers

No trip to Silicon Valley would be complete without a visit to one of the sumptuous dining experiences at companies such as Yahoo, Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn. We’re not talking private dining rooms with white table clothes; employees and guests (especially employees) are treated to five-star dining every day, at no charge. And, if someone is hungry between scheduled meals—no worry; there are more snacks on hand than you would find at your neighborhood grocery store.

Thanks to its relationship with Bon Appétit Management Company, a Palo Alto-based café and catering service, Better Meat Co. is pulling a sleight of hand by offering foie gras to the employees at LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale officer cafeteria. The trick here is that foie gras is illegal in California, so Better Meat substitutes fungi for duck or goose liver. For good measure, Better Meat is showcasing its deli turkey slices, also made from mycelium called Rhiza. Rhiza (the Greek word for root) is a whole food, complete protein that’s allergen-free, neutral in taste, and has the texture of animal meat.

Showcasing is the keyword here. At this point in its lifecycle, Better Meat Co. is more of a supplier than a producer, offering its mycoprotein to partners such as Hormel for inclusion in its existing and new products.  As CEO Paul Shapiro explains, Better Meat Co. is focused on what it does best—“Our real expertise is in the fermentation and creating this extremely meat-like and versatile ingredient,” he told The Spoon, “But every once in a while, we like to showcase what the ingredients can do and the fact that it can make things as diverse as a turkey slice and foie gras really showed that. And so, in California, it’s illegal to sell foie gras, but now there is an option to enjoy that same delectable experience.”

Better Meat Co. walks a tightrope like others in the plant-based protein and cultured meat sector. Once a viable product has been developed, they face the option of taking their creations directly to the market (B2C) or taking the safer B2B route where a company offers its product to food manufacturers for their use in existing or new products. Shapiro, known throughout his industry as a visionary, realizes his company can take both paths to success.

In October 2021, Better Meat Co. and Hormel’s venture division entered an exclusive partnership to bring new mycoprotein and plant-based protein products to the marketplace. “Companies like Hormel have dramatically larger product development teams than we do,” Shapiro said. “Once our ingredients are in the hands of experts at companies like Hormel Foods, we are confident that the next generation of alternative meats will be more convincing and economical than ever.”

Perdue is another partner of Better Meat Co. In June 2019, the Sacramento-based company launched a national partnership with Perdue Farms – a leading chicken producer in the U.S. The company will provide Perdue with plant-based blends mixed with Perdue chicken to create the Chicken Plus product line.

While relationships with Hormel and Perdue make sense in the short run, neither, at his point, shows the breadth of Better Meat’s possibilities. In-house products developed by its food scientists and chefs range from Rhiza-based beef to fish to pork and may lead to the company—at some point—going directly to consumers.  “I think you can expect to see that,” Shapiro said of such future plans. “We want to be able to bring our micro protein to as many people as possible, and we want to make it humane, easy to eat and affordable for everyone.”

According to Crunchbase, Better Meat has raised $9.6 million, the bulk of which came in a July 2020 round of $8.1 million. The new funding is led by Greenlight Capital and Green Circle Foodtech Ventures, and Johnsonville, the maker of Johnsonville Sausages. Another financing round would be expected for Better Meat Co to scale enough to bring its branded crabcakes and deli slices to hungry, healthy consumers.

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.