The Future of Egg Production: Precision Fermentation with Arturo Elizondo

[00:00:00]if not now when i realized at that time that if i didn't do it i would probably end up regretting it i don't want to be in my deathbed asking myself like what if i had done it what if i had tried and what really helped me was saying let me give myself six months go to san francisco see if i can make something happen if it doesn't work out it's okay welcome to the proof podcast a space for science-based conversation exploring the health and longevity benefits that come with mastering nutrition physical exercise mindfulness recovery sleep and alignment facts nuance and trustworthy recommendations minus the hyperbole hey friends great to be here with you i'm your host simon hill i'm a qualified physiotherapist and nutritionist with an undergraduate science degree and a master's in the science of human nutrition in keeping with the recent theme exploring alternative proteins everything from plant-based proteins to precision fermentation and cultivated meat today i sit down with arturo gonzalez from the every co formerly clara foods a company based in silicon valley that specializes in using precision fermentation to produce animal-free protein their first commercial product being egg white arturo has a fascinating backstory one that includes an abrupt change in career and a huge leap of faith a leap that so far seems to be paying off in dividends the every co raised 175 million dollars in december 2021 funds that will be used to allow them to rapidly scale and expand across america an important step towards fulfilling the company's mission to change the paradigm and help the world shift to an animal-free food system i really enjoyed this conversation subject matter aside if you're stuck at a crossroads and looking to follow your dreams i think you'll be inspired by arturo's journey this is arturo gonzalez ceo and founder of the every co please do enjoy and i'll catch you on the other side hey arturo welcome to the show thank you simon great to be here yes i've really been looking forward to this uh we caught up we must have caught up uh about a month ago or so right when we had a previous conversation so um nice to be chatting again kick things off for me here you know ceo of a fast-growing food tech startup in silicon valley i'd love to to kind of get a feel for what a typical day in the life of arturo elizondo is do you have a kind of set routine uh most days in and amongst what i can only assume by that whiteboard behind you for those watching is is fairly uh chaotic and uh forever changing it would be quite a fast-paced environment i'm sure i'd love to to know what a typical day looks like and and what works best for you yeah happy to share um you know the my schedule and what i focus on has i mean changes every day but has changed um a lot since the early days of every formerly clara foods which we founded almost eight years ago we're one of the oldest companies in the alt protein space and now we're you know we're we're in the process of scaling and so my days look very differently now that that um we have we have a lot more people and a much bigger team to to take on and and put up more fires than i than than i was able to back then um but in the more um in terms of the the the day-to-day i i like to start off by by journaling i think a big part of my growth last several years has been on bringing intentionality back into my life and moving transitioning away from pure you know firefighting you know reactive state to more intentional um way of of working and it's and it's a and up and it's and it's a constant battle but i realize that that you're going slow going so to go fast and that's very very helpful so i do that in the mornings and then um and then uber to work it's like a 12 minute ride and i kind of use that at a time to meditate for a few minutes but also start getting some emails going and that way when i come into the office i hit the ground running and now i spend my time more so on kind of one foot in the company and then one foot out one foot in the company working with my with my clo my vp of strategy and my chief of staff on on like the the day-to-day part of the business and then one foot out working with our investors our board and partners um big you know new things that that that we're looking to incorporate into the business and so that's that's how i spend my my time for the most part silicon valley i think most people are familiar um with it or at least have heard about it but love i'd love to hear from you as a kind of insider in 2022 what give me a taste for silicon valley what what is you know as a community what is it all about what are the things that you you love perhaps things that you you maybe don't love that much yeah well i was a huge outsider um before coming in eight years ago i i'm from texas originally grew up in mexico i spent some years in mexico when i um when i was growing up and then spent most of my time on the east coast in boston and then dc so until silicon valley i i i didn't really know anything about this world um but what i what i've the what i've come to appreciate because investors or or you know people that i would meet would would ask well why like why are you all based here and what what's the magic why are all these companies in silicon valley and what i would say is like you know this is probably one of the only places in the world where people are crazy like are where crazy people are willing to fund crazy ideas and you know there's a lot of money and you know in many places across the world but what makes i think this place special is that the peop the people who have money here made their money with crazy ideas right you have the found you have early employees have like facebook and google and apple and you know dropbox and uber and and and those you know the early employees all of them become millionaires and then what do they invest in they invest in other crazy ideas because that's how they made their money and so there's this sort of really strong community and critical mass of angels of super angels of investors that are willing to fund it at the very early stages when companies are at their whether where they have the highest risk profile and no one really is willing to fund them um and so that's what i think makes this place really really interesting yeah so that sort of crazy idea and or ambition that you may be talked out of in another location around the world there it sounds like what you're saying is those crazy ideas are actually quite normal in that environment yeah exactly exactly and it also doesn't hurt that you know it's in california and people already have these you know they're they're they're kind of on a different wavelength and you know burning man is close by and you have you know people from from totally different backgrounds um just interacting with each other that that i think also makes it makes it especially as especially fertile ground for crazy ideas to um to emerge is there a lot of kind of collaboration cross-pollination between companies with with leaders perhaps between categories or is it quite a a fierce competitive environment you know it i think you know i can't speak for all kinds of of across industries but i do know that particularly on the you know in the world that that i've been in both on the food side and the biotech side it's it's quite friendly um and i think part of it is is a lot of us as founders are very mission driven you know many of us are missionaries and and not mercenaries and you know you have you have a lot of founders maybe in silicon valley but that that you know it's like their fifth company and you know they're you know it's not the first time they're their first rodeo and and maybe they're more on the mercenary route but i would say the vast majority of founders that i have met are are very very mission driven and i think that coming from that background and from from from that perspective i've found to be to have it be a very you know just a very amicable um and and uncompetitive place and i think when i talk to other founders you know we're all we're all going up against like it's the competition is not each other it's industrialized animal agriculture which is where we get 90 percent over 90 of our of all the meat dairy and eggs that we consume as a world yeah i want to come to that uh industry piece and and and dig into that that competition and what that's like uh at some point in this conversation so you said in 2015 you you founded clara foods uh or i believe it maybe it had another name at that stage was that right yeah it was called the very very first name was a new harvest egg project and then like two months later we called it clara foods okay and so now this is evolved and is known as the every company and it is a really fascinating journey i've heard you speak a number of times and i'm super excited to kind of unpack it all i was reading one of your press releases uh following the the funds that you re you raised in december which was quite a lot of money um and there was a quote from one of your investors rage capital and yeah i uh i took a note of that they said that by leveraging precision fermentation technologies every is bringing ingredient synthesis from science fiction to supermarket aisles starting with egg proteins and enzymes and i thought this was a really interesting quote because whenever i cover this topic or speak about it with someone that's new it does seem like science fiction when you first hear about the things that you're doing but from what i understand and i want you to to get you to comment on this it's not really so much a question of if you're already doing some of this right now and from my understanding you're well on the way to helping sort of redefine the way that we're thinking about producing animal protein would you say that that's that's a fair summary yeah a hundred percent you know i i and i'll add you know one of our investors you know quoted um [Music] quoted um had a quote that said you know the future is already here the problem is that it's not evenly distributed and that's i think what what gets to what you're saying is that for so many people you know in many parts of the world this sounds crazy and almost impossible um and we've already launched three products you know we've been in we we've been selling our products last two years and we just launched the world's first egg white without a chicken two months ago um and so people are already eating our products this is already real um but it's true i think for for most it still feels very much like science fiction so we'll come to those products because i have a number of questions about the the way that you're actually producing them and and how you're able to produce animal protein without an animal it's kind of a kind of abstract thing to to think about um but the process is very neat and and i think um you're very good at it at explaining how it works let's wind the the clock back a little bit though here and you mentioned texas and i uh i wore my texas hat today as a bit of a nod um i too i too actually spent uh about three and a half four years um living in texas when i was a young kid so um we we share that history there tell me about life as a kid for you and and and what i'm really interested in is your kind of relationship with food as a kid and and whether yourself or as a family you ever remember as a child or a teenager kind of stopping and thinking about where our food comes from and the the sort of effect that it has on the world around us yeah well you know you as a as a fellow texan uh probably know it's you know barbie the barbecue capital of the world and you know uh you know animal protein was a huge part of my life both as a you know as a mexican you know as a texan with mexican heritage you know like any good like any good texan i had my barbecues every sunday and like any good mexican i had my two egg for breakfast every morning and animal protein was a huge part of my life and i never questioned where my food came from like that was i had never met a vegetarian up until i went to to college um like that that that was it was something that i knew existed but it felt so far away and so distant from my reality and it wasn't until i was 16 and i was online on social media and i someone posted a video um of a factory farm like an undercover investigation and there was this like guy working at a at a at a chicken farm and he grabbed two chickens by the neck and just slammed them across you know onto the cage and i i was i was just i was shocked like i was sick to my stomach and i thought there's like this is an atrocity there's no way that this is where our food comes from like this is this is a crime and there should and there are laws in place to protect these animals and so i posted on facebook and and um or i don't know what the social media i mean it was my space um but i i was so just upset and it clicked for me like oh i'm eating animals and they come from factory farms um and that's when i i i told my mom like you know what i i don't want to eat this anymore she's like you know good luck i have five other kids to feed i was i'm one of six kids and uh and she said you know go go make you can make your own meals but i'm gonna i'm not gonna cook anything differently for you and i lasted a whopping two weeks as a vegetarian um until i i left for for college but that was my my first the first time that i really thought critically about the word my food came from and in some ways since then i almost tried to turn my brain off when i was eating because i didn't want to think about it anymore because it it was it felt like this very strong cognitive dissonance so tell me about heading off to college you mentioned that that there i think many may presume that you you went straight into you know studying something about food or food tech or some sort of science around fermentation but that's not from my understanding the direction that you initially took and and if i have done my research well i believe that you even ended up doing an internship at the supreme court and at the white house um no small feat either of those but you had headed off in this kind of very different direction to to where you are now tell tell tell us about that journey yeah you know i i never thought i would be a founder i never thought i would i would work in food like those i never thought i would be running a biotech company and i never thought that i end up in silicon valley like that was never part of the equation because i didn't that was a that was a world i that that i didn't i didn't i didn't know and i knew from an early age you know i grew up on the border between texas of mexico in a city called laredo and my dad worked in mexico and we would he you know he would commute every single day to go to work and on the weekends i would go to work with him and cross the border and i would see little kids my age i was six or seven and i would see little kids my age who had no shoes who were selling gum on the streets and i thought man like that that could be me like there was i had i been born a few miles south of the border or had i been you know born to different parents with a different family my life would have been completely different and so i knew early on that i wanted you know i wanted to dedicate my life to service to and in my head that meant public service because that's the only way i knew i thought that i could make a positive impact in the world it was through government um because if i could change one law in one small way i could really make a big difference and impact the lives of millions of people or creatures or beings i went to harvard went to study government and i'm going to become an ambassador to the u.n and you know help the world that way i was very i was i was an idealist and i in many ways i still am and i i tried to figure out how could i make a difference in government and so i interned with my congressman in texas in the department of agriculture at the white house under president obama and then at the supreme court and i even spent the time at the u.n and just trying to see if i could if i could fit somewhere where i could feel like i was really making a difference and the more i tried the more i realized that i'm far too impatient for the political process and so at what point was it that you began to think about this idea of producing animal protein without an animal you know i've read i've read some some stories that suggest you were you were in geneva and you're researching china and they're growing meat consumption is it is that the the initial sort of project that that sort of opened your eyes to this new and evolving industry yeah you definitely did your research that's exactly right um i was in i was in geneva i was studying global food security at the un and i i read a headline that said china an article that came out that that month as i was researching in 2012 this was exactly 10 years ago and the headline was china doubles its own meat consumption in less than 20 years and then now consumes more than double the amount of meat of the us and i had been at the usda when we were slaughtering over 1 million animals per hour in the u.s alone to feed less than 5 percent of the world population and so then seeing that china now consumed more than double the amount of view of the us and there were no signs of it slowing down and it's not just china but across the developing countries the first thing people do when they enter the middle class is that they buy animal protein there's almost a one-to-one correlation between gdp per capita and animal protein consumption and so i did the math i was like there's just not enough land or water on the planet to satiate that kind of of of appetite for animal protein and something's got to give and then i began researching the impact like what that meant and to even and today you even even before you know having this you know even before um having these insane increases in animal protein consumption which are still predicted to increase well into 2050 today animal agriculture the meat that people eat today um and eggs and dairy emits more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector than all the cars planes ships boats motorcycles in the world combined it is the number one cause of deforestation on earth because so much of the amazon rainforest is not being cut down to it is being cut down to grow soy but it's not soy to make tofu to feed to people the soil is going to feed livestock and there's an insane conversion ratio where um where you have to grow all these grains and soy to feed these animals to to convert plant protein into animal protein and there's a huge lots of efficiency right then and there making animal agriculture the number one cause of extinction on earth and it uses three quarters of the world's agricultural land 75 of the land used for our culture today is dedicated to growing animals and so the list just kept on and on and on it takes over 600 gallons of water to make a dozen eggs or two you know over 2 400 liters of water and so you know it the more i researched this and the more that i learned about the impact of animal ag i just i couldn't stop thinking about it i became obsessed trying to figure out are there ways that we could that we could have a more efficient and sustainable technology that doesn't kill us or the planet in the process and so you come across this emerging field of innovation food tech called cultivated meat i'm not sure what it was called at that stage because it has quite a few different um name changes potentially you can speak to but i'm interested when you first started reading about it were you skeptical because i think a lot of people automatically will go to skepticism as soon as they hear about it tell me tell me when you first started reading about it you know what what introduced you to this concept and how did you feel about it totally so the first thing i did when i when i learned about the massive problems in food i was like why is no one talking about this and i was like and my mind immediately and this is just how i'm wired like as soon as i hear a problem even when a friend is sharing you know i'm not uh i'm not the best you know best friend when it comes to certain situations because as soon as a friend or a family member tells me about a problem my mind immediately goes so well what about this and why don't you what if you tried this or have you you know what if you did this and i immediately go into problem solving mode and so as soon as i learned the problems of animal ag i began immediately just researching like what technologies are out there to act to solve this problem and so i went on this massive um rabbit hole where i began researching the different technologies and i came across the two big areas of alternative protein technologies one is plants and two is cells um like cell-based technology and so on the plant side that's more of the beyond meat the veggie burgers the impossible foods the the plant you're using plants like pee and soul and texture you know using new texturizing technologies to get them to have a similar mouth feel and a similar bite to the animal products and so that way you can get plant proteins to start resembling more and more the animal products that they're aiming to replace so kind of a higher tech version of you know your grandma's veggie burger that you could see the carrots and the peas on there now you know with new technologies you can improve the texture to get them to be actually quite compelling um but still using plants and then the cell-based technology which at that point was you know it was just a call like lab-grown meat or cultured meat now we have uh cultivated meat is is is a new term where you cult where you grow you get us a couple cells from an animal right and meat meat is basically just a bunch of cells together um and you get those cells you get a couple cells from an animal like in this case a cow and you would you know give the nutrients to grow and the the the cells just replicate and so you're working with the same exact building blocks of meat um and recreating and just replicating them um to a point where you end up with like tissue um that then you can cook and grill and i mean those and at that point i think marpos had made the first burger and it was like 300 000 but i was like man like this is amazing um and i i i i was i was maybe a little skeptical about the cost for sure but the technology i mean seeing the burger in uh you know it you know in pictures and that this is real um made it very real to me was was memphis meats now upside foods were they around then no we were we were before them so i think before us the only companies they came after us through the same program called indie bio um so we're the first company to ever get funded out of indie bio and it's here in san francisco and then since there yes um there was memphis meats now upside finless foods that make seafood um cell-based seafood new wave that makes shrimp with algae so now there's a lot more companies i think there's now we're number five i mean it's probably now like over 300 companies in the space [Music] so at that stage you're you're in geneva um you you learn about the problems in china you're compelled to start researching and think about well here's a problem what solutions exist you come you come across cultivated at that stage did you had you become aware of microbial fermentation which i understand you use and is i guess slightly different to to kind of the cellular agriculture that you just described yeah so it's funny because my my journey took me to all right like my my thesis was my big take away from that research was both of these technologies are very interesting using plants and using cells but they're on opposite sides of the spectrum right with plants the scalability component is is absolutely there right you're using off-the-shelf technology that already exists and using ingredients like pee and soy that companies have been using for decades but you know the fungibility is an open question right getting the plant proteins to taste and function like the animal proteins it's still something that's being worked on and then for cell base it was a complete opposite where the fungibility right the taste and of the products i mean you're working with the same exact building blocks and so you can get to a much more compelling you know sensory profile but the challenge becomes the scalability and that's something that now there are a lot of companies working around up at the time it was incredibly cost prohibitive i mean 30 000 for a burger right that was that was um that was that's quite steep and so but what but the big takeaway for me was there is something here and specifically my hypothesis became technology can be used there are technologies out there that we could use to give industrial animal agriculture a run for its money and truly truly transform our food system and that was my big takeaway and it wasn't until i moved to san francisco that i where i met my co-founder who had this crazy idea of making egg without using chickens um where where we talked about the fermentation technology and when i did the research i thought man like that's so that's the third kind of pillar of alternative proteins now it's plant-based on one eye one side cell based on the other and then fermentation kind of in the middle and i fell in love with that technology because the scalability i mean companies across the world have sold this technology for decades and the fungibility was i mean it was incredible you can make real animal proteins without using an animal with the same taste nutrition and um and functionality that made it very very compelling as a as a technology let's back up a tiny bit you just mentioned that you flew to san francisco um and you said that rather nonchalantly like it it was a quick and easy decision and i'm interested you know you're you're moved to san francisco from the outside you know you were in this other car on this other career path totally and you were kind of on your on your way up to working in government and thinking about policy trying to influence the world in that way make the world more equitable but then you decide or you feel compelled drawn to to explore this area of food tech the the decision to leave behind what you were doing pack up and go to san francisco what was the the kind of game plan that you had in mind when you did that did you already understand what you would be doing in san francisco or was it more pack up get on a plane let's get over to silicon valley and see what happens yeah it was much more the latter i had no job i had no place to stay um but i i knew i had to give myself a shot at trying to make something happen so i was actually in dc at that time and i was about to take a job in the obama administration full-time and i called up my amazing an amazing mentor of mine who was um i did an internship also credit suisse and investment bank and he was also vegan and super excited about food tech and so i would call him up and just fangirl about all these companies and technologies and how much i wanted to do it and so i called them up and i was like hey i'm about to take a job in the obama administration because i never thought that i would work at food formally until maybe down the road in my career when i i had skills to contribute and maybe i was uh you know maybe it was more on the government side or or something else i didn't i didn't cross my mind that i would start something but um i remember calling him and i was so excited i was like i'm about to take a job in the obama administration uh like this is exactly what i studied this is exactly part of my 10-year plan for myself that i had since i was like 16.

[00:32:47]and and you know instead of him being excited he just asked me what are you doing like why you should be in san francisco like why aren't you in san francisco building the future of food and working on what you've been telling me since we met that was like which was your passion and and it just it really it caught me off guard because i wasn't expecting him to to to to to tell it to me that bluntly um but as soon as he did i i just stayed quiet and i was like you know what [ __ ] i breathed heavily and i was like you're you're right like what what am i doing um and i realized that at that point that i was i was scared like i had i didn't like not having a plan was something that was very foreign to me and i was scared to fail i was scared to do something that i had that i had no idea was going to pan out and i i just i didn't want to do it but there was something in my gut that said if not now when and and i thought that i would i realized at that time that if i didn't do it i was i would probably end up regretting it and i thought i may be on my death i don't want to be in my death bed asking myself like what if what if i had done it what if i had tried and what really helped me was saying let me give myself six months go to san francisco see if i can make something happen if it doesn't work out it's okay i'll reapply working work go back in government or go do something else and i think me giving myself permission to just try it and time bounding it was a very helpful way of thinking about it that made it much more of a manageable and managed risk that then i could take so i guess as well within the the government career that you were pursuing you'd kind of gone far enough to be able to have it still as a fallback plan if things didn't quite work out well i think it was also acknowledging like um no i mean that's what i was scared of i was like i don't if i leave i don't really want to get this job again or if there's gonna be something else but i i think what i realized is i i'm gonna i'm gonna work my ass off trying to make that happen and i'm at least gonna have a lot more conviction in pursuing this path in government if i know that the food piece fails if i fail at that i know that i can double down on government and i think what i realize is if i if i did the government path or if i did if i pursued that i knew i wasn't going to be the best i i knew i wasn't going to be the best i i because my heart wasn't going to be 100 in it and so i almost had to get it out of my system right get it out of myself get the food out of my system and like if i failed miserably i could then go back into government with you know with a focus and conviction to say this is what i'm gonna do and you know in a couple of years then i can work my way back into food and i think that that was that was quite helpful so after the day after i had that call with my mentor where i was like you know what you're right i it was a really i mean like my stomach was hurting i remember and i was i i didn't want to do it because i was scared but the next day i booked a one-way ticket san francisco and i thought you know what this is let me let me just try it so you had the support of of this friend of yours uh do you do you recall any conversations with your family or or the rest of your kind of support network i mean getting this opportunity in the obama administration is is kind of a big deal so i'm sure there were other people that perhaps had an opinion were was was the the kind of overwhelming response one of of just supporting you in this or were there others that that perhaps thought you were mad yeah no yeah my uh my parents were by far the most uh um yeah they they were they were disappointed and upset like they didn't really quite understand it um because you know government is also like safe and it's exactly what i had been telling them i wanted to do and it they they could at least imagine it in a way that like this whole san francisco thing and food like even to to this day when i've talked to my mom she's like how's your science project go how's your project going and it's like you know it's huge it's cute like she you know it's so for first it feels like something that isn't it just it's so different from the world that we grew up in in texas um that it's hard to wrap her you know to wrap their heads around they're you know my siblings they knew how much i i i how much i cared about this and i remember i mean just like rescuing like pigeons that would crash into our windows at our house and me trying to rescue them when i was little and so they knew how much i i i cared about this issue um and so i think overall they they were quite supportive but my parents what i loved about them is at some point they're like look you know because they grew up in mexico they couldn't help me in the application process for college they couldn't help me in school and they you know in some ways i kind of had to figure it out or work with my siblings to get and friends to get advice on how to how to progress in my career and then and in school so my parents were you know they were pretty hands off and said you know what you know the day like you've kind of managed to do well on your own like you have good judgment you know you this is your life and you know we don't agree with it but you know do you know do whatever you do whatever you want and that was helpful so you you sort of you sort of got the the tick of approval there and then you you head to san francisco you mentioned that you you met your business partners there um tisha and dave who then you went on to to found clara foods with for folks who have not heard of isha before and and her work with new harvest can you give them a bit of a sort of isha 101 because she does seem to be like a very important figure uh sort of pioneer of this space absolutely yeah she um and so let me back up a little bit i moved to san francisco and the first thing i did started just networking my ass off like trying to just emailing friends and contacts and food we got cold emailing vcs to see if i could maybe join a font to help deploy capital and one founder of of a company called hampton creek now called just uh they make the vegan eggs using plants using mung beans they my my friend josh balk you know i had met him in boston when i was when i was there for school i reached out to him and said hey i want to i'm here in san francisco i want to join the movement i just you know i left everything to to make something happen he said all right come to his conference with me in two weeks um it's one of the first ever future food conferences and hopefully you'll meet some interesting people there um i show up that's the day that hampton creek got sued by unilever for like mislabeling their mayonnaise because it didn't have eggs in it and so he ends up not going i show up this conference by myself and i see the only table with young people in it and there was an empty chair and something in me was like i need to take that chair and so i just walked up and took you know asked if i could take that seat and little did i know i was sitting across the table from dave my future co-founder and isha from new harvest and then the founders of perfect day um formerly mufri and isha is the executive director of new harvest which is a which i had actually researched and interviewed the founder of new harvest when i was in geneva studying cell-based technology and so i told her i'd watch her ted talk and new harvest helps accelerate the entire sort of alternative protein ecosystem but particularly on this on the on the cell based kind of deep tech uh deep tech angle uh and so she had brought david my co-founder from canada who was finishing up his phd in microbiology to this conference as well because he wanted to do something and he's the one who had the crazy idea without using chickens she had already helped cope on perfect day and said you know what you and dave need to come together and apply to this one called indie bio and start that you know and and and and you know see if this if this if this idea has any legs so talk me through the idea so i think you said dave had had this kind of idea of creating eggs without needing chickens i'm interested in the kind of creation of that that idea or him wanting to kind of pursue that why why eggs was that sort of a product of the kind of where the landscape was at and that there was no one focusing on eggs and secondly to that i'm interested in your reaction so you meet dave he says he wants to do this with eggs can you remember how you you sort of initially felt when you heard that yeah i well when he first told me and it was like replicating the hand over duck cell so it was actually using the cell based technology i was like this is gonna be hard because if making meat is hard maybe making l's making making making eggs using and using that technology is like 10 times harder and so i knew it was going to be really challenging but as we talked about it and as he thought through it that's when you know he realized you know there's fermentation as a technology which perfect day was using for for dairy impossible was using further heme protein that kind of is the secret sauce to their burgers and um and other companies have been using that's when he was like look we actually could use that the fermentation technology to make eggs because eggs actually don't have any cells they're just proteins fats and water for the most part and so from a technical feasibility standpoint it made a ton of sense and then when i started looking at the at the research and the business side like eggs were actually super expensive um and egg whites specifically which were much simpler as a product were even more expensive because subway had just launched the egg white you know breakfast the egg white delight for their for their breakfast mcdonald's had launched the egg white like you know the um the the egg white um mcmuffin and you know almost every restaurant was launching a healthy you know healthier breakfast options and so eggs had gone through the roof from a pricing standpoint and so i was like look the business is there the b2b angle i thought was really compelling because eggs are not just a tasty product but they're a critical ingredient in so many things like they're in cakes and patties and you know and and protein bars i mean they're in face masks like and all these companies i couldn't imagine them wanting to be using eggs except for the fact that they they just do things that nothing else can do and so they're very hard to replace and so i found that the b2b angle was very compelling because it aligned very much with the way that i saw the world which was i don't want to convince people to buy our products i want to make it just so easy that that they're buying already like my mom and dad you know i've been vegan for 10 years they still eat steak as as often as they get there as often as they can and and they know how much this means to me and so if my parents and my siblings are still eating the way that we ate growing up i'm realizing consumer habits and changing them is incredibly difficult but my mom buys the same cake you know for christmas every year the same more or less the same grocery list and so we could work with the brands that she already buys and the consumers already buy and just you know revamp the back end of food production without without compromising the consumer experience i thought that's how we can make a massive massive difference in our food system if we work in the back end and work with all the world's biggest companies and then scale much much faster [Music] yeah that makes a lot of sense and for folks that may be hearing b2b for the first time that means essentially creating these these ingredients products and selling them to other businesses which are then using them in their formulations food products as opposed to uh you know a b2c customer that would be selling direct to consumer as a brand that you may see on the shelf i'm curious so the the technology as i understand it to produce uh egg protein through fermentation that at least some of that technology has existed for quite a long time 40 plus years and and you can kind of speak to the history of that but i'm interested why do you think nobody else had thought about using it to produce egg protein yeah it's it's a great question and one that i was asked almost you know every day when i was pitching the company to investors um which is so one is yes the technology's been on for 40 years and that was shocking to me as well i'm like why would we not do why you know if this technology works and has been scaled before why aren't we using this for other applications and what i realized is that combining disciplines is actually quite hard and not intuitive and and quite different and what i mean by that is this technology had largely lived in pharma companies like the technology been around for 40 years but actually having people take a technology from one industry and apply it to another is is doesn't happen you know it doesn't happen very often sometimes technologies just live in certain industries for decades um and so you know genetic across the street from us actually here in our labs was the first ever biotech company in the world they helped make the first ever animal protein without using an animal and that protein is insulin insulin came from pigs before the 80s we had to kill a pig to get the insulin protein you have to kill the pig extract some protein from their pancreas purify it and then inject it into people and that's how every diabetic got their insulin protein from otherwise they would die and it wasn't kosher it wasn't halal it wasn't vegan but if you wanted to live as a diabetic you had to get your insulin protein and that was the only way to do it genetic found a way to essentially 3d print that dna sequence encoded in the codes for the insulin protein so all proteins in the world are encoded by four letters right a t c and g in the same way that all computers are encoded by zeros and one zeros and ones so every those four letters code for every protein in the world and depending on how they're arranged code for specific kinds of proteins and genetic found a way to 3d print that dna and code that into a microbe and then fermented and then have it print out that specific protein so fast forward to today 99 of insulin is no longer made by pigs but by fermenters and so we thought this is a very cool technology um can we can we actually use the same technology instead of making pig proteins and now pharma companies all over the world use this technology to make other kinds of medicines other kinds of drugs so this technology has been you know a lot of the medicines that we consume today and that we inject into our blood today are made using the exact same technology but it hadn't really been produ used in food in a significant way because it was pretty cost prohibitive um insulin is very expensive and just at a for as a fun fact it you needed over you need to kill over 50 000 pigs to make one kilo of insulin protein but for formulation hey friends i hope you're enjoying this episode so far a quick message from one of our sponsors who makes this show possible and then we'll jump straight back into things if you're familiar with my nutrition philosophy you will know that i'm a huge believer in plant-rich diets being better for people and our planet you'll also know that i frequently draw attention to what i describe as nutrients of focus these are nutrients that science shows plant-based eaters whether plant predominant or exclusive can fall short in which can leave you feeling run down lacking energy experiencing brain fog and generally just not as vital as you'd like to be for that reason together with a meal a plant-based health and wellness company i formulated essential eight essential eight is your one-stop multi-nutrient formulated with dha epa omega-3s from algae oil vitamin b12 iodine vitamin d3 iron zinc selenium and calcium to perfectly complement your plant-rich diet i personally take essentially every morning with breakfast just two capsules much easier than supplementing with these eight key nutrients individually what's even more convenient is i have a monthly subscription so it turns up automatically on my doorstep and i never miss a beat to get yours head to the proof.com forward slash friends that's theproof.com forward slash friends where you'll find a link to purchase essential 8 that will get you an extra 5 off your first order on top of the significant subscription discount there will also be a link to this in the show notes okay back to the show so if i'm kind of hearing you correctly you know of course being able to produce meat and complete eggs and whatnot is is important and hopefully we get to a future where that's happening through cellular agriculture and precision fermentation but it sounds like there's a whole lot of other proteins animal derived proteins in our food system that perhaps people are not aware of they're not as tangible yeah and that you know companies like yours and some of the ingredients that you're producing to begin with or the proteins can actually make a huge difference simply by being an ingredient within existing products it exactly exactly and you know what was the craziest part is that it's not just that it lived in pharma it was actually already in food when we started the company so 10 years later the dairy industry took note of this technology and started making a protein called rennet using this technology and for context render is a protein that is used to curdle the milk to make cheese and the only way to make cheese industrially was to get the rennet from baby cows that were only a couple days old and the rennet could only be found in the fourth stomach of baby cows you have to kill the baby cow extract the remnant protein from their fourth stomach throw that into milk and have it curdled to make cheese and that's and at the time that was so cheese wasn't vegetarian up until the 90s um so the only way to at scale the only way to eat to produce cheese was by killing baby cows and now fast forward to today after the dairy the some of these companies started making the rennet protein using fermentation around 90 of the cheese in the us and around over 80 percent of cheese produced in the world is made using fermentation and so we thought look we've replaced the pig for insulin protein production as a society we replaced the baby cow for rent of protein production we thought can we replace the chicken for egg protein production and can we replace animals more broadly from the protein production process and that's really the innovation that we're creating here is democratizing democratizing that technology and applying that across the board it's great to have those examples because i think it does make it less science fictiony when when you can explain that we're already using this on scale in in other areas i've had a guy called jared raines on the show previously he's from a company in australia called algae foods that are interested in using precision fermentation to produce dairy products mostly mostly milk they're looking at so we did talk a little bit about the the sort of process of uh using microbes and the the dna sequencing that's involved but it is a bit of a sort of complex area for someone that's hearing this for the first time so perhaps we we just tread through that um in a little bit more detail can you kind of explain that process what is a 3d printed dna sequence sort of where do you get that from and when you say you uh encode a microbe or put that into a microbe what does that actually mean yeah yeah happy to i'll i'll take a step back and i think the easiest way for me to understand it was uh microbes are like little factories and so in the same way that brewers use yeast to convert sugar into alcohol to make beer and wine bakers use yeast to convert sugar into carbon dioxide to leaven bread and yeast can also be used to convert sugar into proteins or sugar into lipids into different kinds of molecules and so yeast just basically rearrange carbon and other muta and other other atoms into and reconfigure them to make different kinds of compounds and so and all of that all of all of those all of those instructions are encoded by dna and so what we do is we work with the yeast that naturally makes protein the natural converts sugar into protein instead of using the yeast that we converted into alcohol or carbon dioxide or something else but then what we do is that instead of having the yeast make any kind of protein there are online databases that have all of the proteins known to man and by by what i mean by those proteins is that you know for example hemoglobin right for uh the different kinds of egg white proteins different kinds of dairy proteins different kinds of human proteins they're all on their they're all online and when you get the dna sequence that that codes for each of those proteins what we there are companies out there that have been around for decades that literally print out that synthesize that dna um and and and package it into little tubes that then what we call plasmids and those um are already incorporated protein that protein that gets that dna sequence gets sprinkled into the yeast um and and the yeast actually naturally by poking little holes in your cell wall you can integrate the dna sequence um into the into the yeast and so as the yeast starts eating the sugar instead of producing anything it starts actually reading that dna sequence as and metabo as it metabolizes and starts producing that specific protein and so that's not the innovation that's every biotech company in the world that's what biotechnology is um every company in the every company in the world uses that technology what we specialize on is getting you know essentially making the designing and programming these yeast to not just become any kind of computer but become super computers that can produce these proteins at very very high levels that make them actually affordable for the food industry and for consumers because insulin and these other medicines they're thousands of dollars per kilogram so you don't need to you can make any protein and if you don't need very high yields to make them profitably but for us the key crux is how do we actually democratize this technology so presumably then a key part of your kind of intellectual property and any of the companies that are in this space is that the microbe that you're working with and how you've programmed them to be those super computers would that be something that's quite unique between companies exactly exactly and then you can essentially specialize like make those yeast eat like such great computers for specific kinds of proteins or for like for us we've we've designed and made our microbe just really efficient at producing animal proteins very efficiently across the board what another example that that people may be aware of and i'm not sure this is in market but collagen is another protein and i think i saw a company geltor are they using a similar type of kind of technology to do that exactly exactly yeah now there's quite a few companies all tackling different parts of the food system and just to to kind of get our terminology right here so um microbial fermentation as i understand it is kind of like an umbrella and then underneath that you have precision fermentation which is what you're talking about this use of dna sequencing and inserting that into a microbe and then it produces proteins out the other side um we haven't yet spoken about the the what happens next um but i believe there's some sort of filtering that takes place versus say um paul shapiro's company better meet co that's also a type of microbial fermentation but it's it's considered whole biomass fermentation so how do we kind of separate these different types of fermentation totally so in the biomass fermentation you actually eat the microbe that is the product so the fung the the yeast or the bacteria or the fungi the fungus that that that that you're using as like the the bug to make the product the in biomass rotation the bug is the product the microbe is the actual product that you eat so like corn q-u-o-r-n same thing you're eating that that that fungus um for four percent fermentation the the the microbe is the little factory so you're not actually eating it it doesn't end up in the end product it's just that little machine that converts that dna sequence into the actual into a specific kind of protein and so that and so for us the yeast that we work with we don't sell we um we either we you can use it you could there are other uses for it like fertilizer or other kinds of of uses but the actual product for us is and for prison fermentation companies is the specific molecule that the little supercomputer of the microbe made got you so that microbe in your instance produces this protein you then separate them and you end up just selling the the protein that's been produced i think there are probably plenty of skeptics out there we hear a whole lot of um you know confusion and discussion about genetic modification yeah and and i'm sure you get this all the time from what i'm hearing there's genetic modification is used genetic material it is then separated and it's not in the kind of end product that someone um consumes but if someone's listening and thinking this this sounds a bit sus um what would you kind of like them to better understand about the process well i would say that there's like that that's you know those are all fair questions and fair concerns that's why for us and again this it's a technology right you can use it for so many different purposes and so many different uses we try you know for us the real question is what are we doing to make the world a better place and let's have that be our true north and what and the reason why it's that is because we you can actually make any protein on earth and even new kinds of proteins and modify the proteins themselves to have you know to have different kinds of amino acid profiles etc we only use we only produce proteins that are found in nature so we do not engineer any of the proteins that we make they are all the same ones our bodies the same ones that the body is already recognized as being bioavailable as being nutritional and that have a long history of being in our food system for for centuries um oftentimes millennia so i can't speak for other companies but for us specifically we only specialize in proteins that have been around in the food industry in in our in our in the food system and in our bodies for centuries if not millennia and we don't change them if you put your say your egg white proteins under the microscope and you compared them to that from from a live chicken egg um from a live chicken that had an egg um would would it look exactly the same yeah so this is actually the one of the beauties of fermentation which i which i love um so the egg the egg white has um and the egg has hundreds of proteins and they all do different things and so when you eat an egg you eat all the proteins at the same time even some proteins that are actually not good for you um so for example avidin is a protein in the egg white that actually binds to biotin if you don't um if you don't if you don't denature it i.e cook it um and so sometimes you create a biotin deficiency in the body and that's why certain animals can't consume it because it actually is not good for them and so we can remove those proteins that are either like anti-nutrients that that actually are not totally beneficial because as safe as these proteins are because we know that they're safe broadly but um the challenge with these proteins is they weren't made for us like the chicken egg right the the proteins in the egg were meant to support the life of a baby of a of a chicken embryo right and to feed that and so they just so happen to be also available to humans and to and we can process them well but they weren't necessarily intended for us and so part of our job is you know really deciphering which proteins are awesome and which ones maybe are not so awesome um and so we can actually pick and choose the different proteins and and and isolate them and and use them as individual products so all to say that the proteins to answer your question directly the proteins we produce are identical so under microscope they will have the same amino acid profile they will be processed in the same way as as traditional egg white proteins but it depends but the combination of them is not is not what we specialize in we can combine them in different ways and that's part of for applications for for cakes you don't necessarily want you you want a protein that can foam really well and so we can actually dial up some of the foaming properties to create lighter and fluffier kinds of cakes and then for athletes we can make you know scrambles that have actually a better amino acid profile than those of you know that then then been a traditional chicken egg actually and so that's how we can actually leverage the technology to create foods that are not just good just as good as what the animal makes but how do we how do we actually create food that is designed for the end user how far can can this technology go with with eggs as i understand it i think you have a product out already that is egg whites but do you do you have plans and you mentioned scramble there but do you have plans to to work towards recreating an entire egg i'm sure people are thinking that right now is that possible to recreate that sort of entire experience or do you see the consumer's kind of understanding and expectations of what an egg looks like changing yeah i mean i think the day we so our ambition is and our plans are to replace the egg in all its forms um to create to create a animal-free sustainable option for anyone who consumes eggs in whatever application at the end of the day for us the number one thing is impact and the way to drive the impact is by meeting people where they're at so not you know there we have other products like the every protein that is actually an egg white protein that is that is found in the egg white but actually has no eggy smell and no eggy taste and so it's a very very clean protein that you don't have to add any sugar or artificial sweeteners or chocolate vanilla strawberry to consume a high protein drink a high protein you know your coffee in the mornings how do you add protein to your diet in a way that um that that doesn't come with all the other baggage and crap that's added to it so there are some products where we're actually going well beyond what what what what what animals can do and what our existing food system can provide um but for the most part on the egg side our focus is uh meeting people where they're at and creating the same form factors and then and then also eventually also kind of optimize and innovate and create new form factors and i think ultimately for us the focus is let's drive impact as much as possible what that means is firing across all cylinders because the beauty of this technology is that it's very scalable you know like i mentioned with brewing and and and the way that brewers use these conversations alcohol we we actually can use very similar infrastructure and so our factories at scale are like just big protein breweries but instead of making beer they're making protein and you know we have a bm as a partner and they're the world's largest fermentation company um that has a massive global footprint and so we want to make protein high quality protein as available and accessible as butt light so you i guess you're being careful not to over promise but um you you did say you want to replace egg in all its forms and yeah um you know i'm just curious with the scientists that you work with and the the understanding of kind of what's possible yeah do you think there is a day where you walk into the grocery store and you pick up a carton of 12 eggs and they're produced without needing a a chicken at all yeah 100 what is the the biggest challenge with regards to scaling all of this you mentioned before the the efficiency of the microbes really important we haven't yet spoken about i guess the the the inputs and the the amount of those and and how much better it is than traditional animal agriculture but i think that's interesting too um but what what are the kind of biggest challenges to ramping this up being able to provide it on a scale where it is having that significant impact that you're looking for yeah the the biggest challenge to scale is at this point scale like the capacity side so being having enough access to fermentation capacity very quickly and then that it's affordable there is some fermentation capacity out there but there really isn't um a ton and there's long lead times to build these kinds of facilities so the biggest challenge of scale is just getting large enough capacities online as as quickly as possible the microbes i mean the beauty of this technology is that we can get it's hard to imagine a chicken ever getting more efficient than it is today right we've we've sadly over optimized that system where they're laying you know almost an egg a day when in the wild previous before we engineered them to to produce at these kinds of levels chickens in the wild normally produce between one to two dozen eggs a year they're producing over 300 eggs per year today that means that their bodies often register that as cancer because they're just producing chicken periods right that's what eggs are so a point where their oviducts actually have tumors around them um and so it's the same with like the chickens for for that we use for meat right they have that breath so big that they their legs break after like a couple of months of of being on this earth because we've bred them to be these these these monsters um because they they taste good and so our uh our approach and the beauty of our technology is that we can we can the we can always optimize our our our microbes and that's that's an ongoing process or companies out there that have been optimizing their their microbes and their yeast for 30 years and so it's really exciting that we continue getting better and better and better and even once we beat the chicken we can make we can make our proteins even more affordable so that way every person on this earth not just the people in la and melbourne and sydney and you know san francisco and new york and get access to them but really every human in the world um and to make you know to make to make uh global hunger a thing of the past i should not in a world this rich we should not be food should be the last thing people should be worrying about i see often online people kind of questioning you know how much better is this for the environment and i read a paper that was published in nature it was just about a week or so ago on on microbial protein i'm not sure if you've seen it but it was it was more centered around what are the benefits of shifting uh it looked at 20 of protein from ruminant animals to microbial protein and so not not uh relating to egg protein per se but still an interesting paper and their kind of modeling showed that just replacing 20 of the global ruminant meat on a per capita basis it would pretty much half the annual deforestation and related carbon emissions and that's just one solution of of many i'm curious uh from from your perspective when it comes to eggs how much better is what you're doing as a company and and particularly on scale going to be for the environment compared to traditional chicken we're going through the process right now so we now that we're scaling because we we did some initial analyses when we were a lab scale but it is it you know it's just not representative of what i wanted real numbers that we can stand behind from our like larger skill operations and that's we're going through now so in a few months we should have that data but we should and we should be better across almost every dimension than the animal incumbent industry the question is not if it's a it's it's by how much and that's something that i want to highlight with um a lot of folks because you know this is something that i think from my phase in government was very salient which is you know we like to hold people to these impossible standards and i remember when president obama was running for reelection people are like oh well he didn't do enough and he didn't do this and he didn't do that and like you know and and why you know he uh why didn't he do this and he was supposed to be doing all these you know all he had all these um we had all these aspirations for this person and so because he didn't get to all of those things he shouldn't you know he shouldn't be reelected and one of the things that joe biden said is don't compare him to the almighty compare him to the alternative and for me that hits home because this is not the panacea that we need every solution on the table and let's not get like let's not start being you know like comparing and fighting against these little you know which technologies better which one is worse like you know at the end of the day either we we need every solution on the table and whether it's you having your own little chickens in your backyard right like people are so well what about animals and like what you know it's right now the problem and the and the default the de facto that de facto mo of this world is industrialized factory farms where we produce over 90 of the meat milk and and eggs that we consume and and that is that is an ill of this world that needs to that that that needs to not exist for us to continue to live for us to to have a shot at averting this climate catastrophe and so my hope is that at the end of the day these technologies whether it's us or all these other companies as long as we are doing you know that we are all fighting the good fight and we are and not every solution is going to be the you know the the best one for everyone and that's the beauty of food right there's a billion brands when you go to a grocery store and you as a consumer get to pick and choose what you want no one's shoving it down your throat if you want almond milk great if you want soy milk great as long as you're not drinking the factory farmed milk you know you can drink from the 20 different options that are on the tape that are at the grocery store and i want the same thing to happen across every category and that people have the choice to pick their winners um and pick their cup of tea talk to me about regulations so i know that cultivated meat it's been spoken about quite widely uh eat just and and and their approval in singapore for some level of of of um of distribution of their chicken product um where where does kind of precision fermentation sit within this conversation of being potentially considered a novel food and does it need any form of government approval or does it need to go through a process to be recognized as general generalized recognized as safe or generally recognized as safe um what's that process look like yeah it so one is yes we need approval and we go through all the safety all the traditional agencies for for for approval of our products um they're already pre processes in the u.s in the us we have the fda grass process in australia in europe i mean there's the novel food process et cetera we follow all the all the existing infra all the existing pathways and the beauty of it is that with the reason why you haven't really heard much about this technology in terms of approvals is because the process already exists like you know the there's no new process to undergo because again the rented for cheese making has already been approved the the you know a lot of the the vitamins that we today a lot of these ingredients the heme for impossible like these there's there's a lot of products that have already been that have already um that are already in our food system that came through this process and so we we use the same technology more or less the same process just different kinds of products that we apply it to uh but we followed more or less the same process uh that being said on the regulatory and government side well you mentioned what are the challenges to scale besides the infrastructure piece which i touched on um the other piece is there's go you know we we need this movement does not have any political capital it has some financial capital where there's some great investors that have been backing this because they know that this is inevitable the science is there like the consumers want this but um government there's various there's zero political capital for this movement unlike clean energy right when the world was transitioned to clean energy um the government made a decision that we need energy independence but we also need protein independence we need food independence because we we know that when pandemics strike which are going to continue happening because three out of every four emerging infectious diseases like covid right soros mers swine flu avian flu they're all zoonotic um and so we know that pandemics with having animals in factories that have no genetic diversity and they're pumping antibiotics to pumping and healthy animals antibiotics is a you know it's a breeding ground for uh for pandemics and so we know that that that that this is only going to intensify covet is just the beginning um and number two is we um we this th this movement needs needs political capital um and in the clean energy space the government knew that it didn't want to depend on other countries for its energy and food secured and that it became a national security issue it wasn't because the government wanted to save the world and prevent you know and prevent climate change it was we don't want to rely on other countries for our energy supply and the same thing i mean when when famine hits you know people go to the streets and so food is a national security issue as well and we need to be be up front you know be um be very very thoughtful about how do we how can we support it and i think that's one major obstacle to scale is having political capital in the same way that the incumbent animal ag industry has if we double click on on government funding for a moment here given your background i'm sure you've given a lot of thought into this but in in if it was up to you how would that funding be used to support this industry and are there any policy changes that you would like to see that would better allow companies like yourself to to scale and to prosper and to achieve the the mission that you have totally i mean number one and this is a little bit of a again like are you talking practically or hypothetically if i had a magic wand like what would i do i think let's stick to practical so in the current environment that exists with your understanding of the policies that are in place with your understanding of the funding or lack of funding if there was greater political will what would you like to see so okay i i'll i'll still say the hypothetical which is um which is i mean if we had an applica which i think other countries can do i just don't see it in the us but it's not even it's not even a hard ask it is just look let's level the playing field don't give us any money just remove the subsidies we have a subsidy regime in the us against the worst foods for you know for for us like there's a reason why the cheapest foods are the most terrible for us it's not by accident um and so as long as we can remove the subsidies from the like and just put put that money back into into um into people's pockets or do something you know focus on reforestation or something else but like we don't have to we don't even have to give money to companies like us or this movement just level the playing field so we have so we can really compete like the free market which is what we claim that that that we stand for so that's like one kind of dream aspiration that i have it's just a level playing field but in terms of the practicality of it i think the most practical way that we can um if there's some political will uh which i think is actually quite quite plausible is whenever we're talking about competitiveness which in the u.s now is coming up bigger and bigger conversations how do we how do we stay on top or how do we not keep falling behind and so how does it competitive with new technology semiconductors et cetera lithium-ion batteries you know like that's that's a conversation that's already happening let's include alternate proteins in there whenever you know these these new industries are getting supported from government just add alternate proteins as part of that mandate and so whatever funds are going towards you know lithium ion batteries towards uh towards these other initiatives also go towards alternative proteins and that way you know we we can ensure that we as a country are staying on top of things because you know china just announced in their five-year agricultural plan president xi jinping alternative proteins as a core um part of their of their future food strategy in a way that in the us that you know i don't know how many billions of dollars have gone into you know in it into um into traditional animal ag but there's been there was an amendment filed where there was five million dollars allocated for alternative proteins and that was like a huge moment for the space and so you see that i mean we've raised 200 million in private capital 5 million from the us government for the entire industry is you know it's it's symbolic um more than anything but it is really a drop in the ocean and we need a lot more support if we're going to be competitive it's pleasing to see china doing that i i wonder if their government is under the same amount of pressure from from lobbyists and and i guess that that kind of extends to something else i wanted to ask you about which was the egg industry and how you you feel going forward what that relationship will look like are they going to be heavily threatened and and in opposition to to what you're doing or is it something that you think they will embrace and get involved with it's going to be it's a toss up as we've seen with the existing with the existing players today right you have some of the biggest meat companies like jbs and tyson and cargill investing in these companies not just as active participants but investing and putting you know money behind cultivated and plant-based options um those two technologies and so that already you know you already see that with smart companies that are forward-looking i see that very similarly with the egg industry there are some net companies that we're talking to that are very that want to partner because they have distribution and they know that demand for animal protein is continuing to grow and so we have to find a way that you know it's hard to imagine that i mean the egg eggs and meat they just can't scale the way that these technologies can and so as we provide you know for them there's a lot of companies they're not wedded to the idea of torturing animals they want to make money right they want to exist and want to give people what they want and and whether that's from chicken eggs or from fermentation eggs or plant-based eggs you know they're pretty open and i think a lot of when we talked to several companies some of them actually have already launched their own plant-based eggs and or launched their own plant-based options like brazil's largest egg company launched a plant-based egg and so there are a lot of really thoughtful companies that want to stay relevant uh because they know if they don't they'll end up like kodak and they don't want to speaking of plant-based eggs and you actually you mentioned um you know your story very much starts back with one of the founders of hampton creek um who who you had a friendship with um i'm interested in do you think going forward you'll see hybrid products say for example eat just we've been talking about them and i'm probably throwing you on the under the bus here or putting you on the spot but um feel free to to comment or not comment do you feel like certain plant-based egg products can benefit by tapping into the the precision fermented uh produced proteins like what you're producing and is that something are you planning to kind of work with those companies in a b2b capacity yep yeah exactly exactly um yeah and that's why that's where we rent it to every because we are not this like you know we're not trying to be the next beyond or impossible or or these consumer pacing companies at the end of the day our focus is how do we enable everyone to win right all the world's biggest food companies and also all the challenger brands the just of the world and all of these other plant-based companies that are doing awesome work and could really benefit from some from some proteins that they you know in some ways it's not their specialty they're great talking to consumers they're great at building brands and getting distribution you know what we want to do is power the future of food and being the intel of protein for these companies to tur to really turbo charge their products so when consumers eat them they are delighted because if these products taste like crap or they don't function or they don't taste good the space itself suffers right and so it's in our best interest and in my best interest to acknowledge that we can't do it alone and that if we're going to prevent the world from heating up by another point you know 1.5 degrees celsius we have to partner and work with as many as many companies and people as possible and and and i have no ego about that i want to work with anyone and everyone uh to to get there as soon as possible i love that it's very much an an ally approach within a competitive landscape but um you're right you mentioned at the start there having that joint mission that many of these companies has is a kind of thread that can kind of pull uh people together and and uh in in some capacity be on the same page with regards to working towards a common goal totally and that that's what i love about this space more broadly and you know if i can go back and and just reflect on my career a little bit because i think it's important i never thought that i could do well by doing good like it just was like that i could work in business and use capitalism as a force for good that that we can make money and grow professionally and you know and and change the world while while while feeling good well the girl professionally make money while being able to change the world and do something that i felt good about i thought either i joined a nonprofit or in government and did something that was good for the good for the world but i had to compromise on my paycheck right or my professional development or i worked for a company and sold my soul right made a ton of money grew really you know grew professionally and went off the corporate ladder but was selling my soul in the process and i never thought that i could merge those worlds and so i really feel like we operate almost like a non-profit um and what i mean by that is our bottom line is directly tied to the impact we have on this earth for every kilo of protein that we sell for every dollar of profit we make as a company we can measure exactly you know how many how many pounds of greenhouse gases are not being embedded into the atmosphere how many gallons of water we're saving you know how many acres of land are not being deforested in brazil you know how many animals no longer have to live a life where they will never see the sun they will never walk on grass and you know i i never thought that was possible in the private sector and so i still feel you know like uh you know i still feel like i i'm in the government or non-profit world in many respects because i'm having a having a positive impact but i'm able to do it in a really fast-paced environment where i can put matters in my own hands and make the change i want to see um at at very fast at a very very fast speed yeah that's got to be you know extremely powerful and extremely powerful motivated to get you up out of bed every morning i and i know that your company has grown rapidly i'm not sure how many staff you you have now but i did want to get your thoughts towards the end of this conversation about the pressure that inevitably comes with taking on a mission like this building a team taking on investment from companies that expect you to perform well um dealing with staff you know increasing numbers of staff people their emotions trying to build culture and i thought that you might have a few tips for other young leaders out there that also have that ambition to to scale their company like yours i think one thing that's been very helpful is celebrating myself uh and what i mean by that is for such a long for for a very for a very long time i was my own worst critic and i just beat the hell out of myself and i and that's how i pushed myself to achieve and i thought that by you know by by being so critical of myself that i would that that's how i would achieve and it it engendered a lot of unhappiness and stress in my life and i began working with my therapist and just you know and focusing more on like a just being grateful like how lucky i am that i know what my purpose is on this earth but i know that i was put on this earth and i feel it to my core that i'm here to shut down the last factor from on earth that if i that i want to be on my deathbed and if i would have accomplished that i know that i lived a life that i would be very very proud of and that gives me a lot a lot of comfort and that my family supports me that they're alive that i get to work with really great people and also kind of focus on the day-to-day like sometimes you know i think when i take a step back it can be scary and maybe you know there's a lot of pressure but in the day-to-day i kind of it gets lost and that in some ways is is healthy as well for me because i i'm just focused on one foot in front of the other one day at a time one meeting at a time and you know yes we raised a lot of money we've grown the company a lot but i've also been doing this now for eight years and i was i was 22. i i when i started the company i had no idea what i was doing so in some ways the pressure was on then and actually the more money we raise the bigger the company gets um it also actually feels a lot easier the easier it gets too counter-intuitively because i feel like i know what i'm doing i have people around me that i really trust but technology works you know like there's a lot of risk that we've retired and taken off the table and so that gives me actually a lot more comfort to lean into that that power and so i think with a lot of the you know a lot of founders or people who are looking at their careers um you know i i am very happy that i i just went for it and i thank myself as often as i remember that i just go for it and you know in some ways like the universe finds a way to take care of yourself if you're if i'm pursuing you know my my true north uh and i and and my soul's path and having that kind of clarity and just throwing myself out there and asking for help has been has made all the difference if someone is listening and is really excited by what you're talking about and just thinks this is a really interesting category and perhaps they're they're wanting to to get involved somehow in terms of their career um would you recommend that they attend any events or connect with any sort of industry bodies where would be the kind of best place for them to to get started with regards to learning a little bit more yeah definitely look at gfi.org they're an awesome non-profit that that has a ton of materials to learn about the space but two is also just like you know i i think one thing that i love that that i really appreciate about myself is trying to get like forcing myself to get out of my head and into just inaction and just trying it out and that's what i loved about the internships i was like i want to work in government so then i went ahead and did an internship and then i was like i hate this this is not where i want to be try another internship and i didn't like that and i tried and i tried again and it was really positive possible of elimination but the more times that i said no like i don't think had i not done all of those internships right when i did and just went for it i would likely have gone into government very definitively because i i would not have had those data points and so all to say that if people are intrigued and interested and you're working now in some other company apply to these companies like we're hiring across the board and we you know this movement needs people who have every kind of skill set under the sun whether it's finance or operations or you know social media like you know now these companies are big enough and the space is big enough that before you know you we only needed scientists right to build the technology now these companies are big now we're big enough that we're hiring you know across the board for product managers you know and marketing managers and social media and what league you know councils and all these other positions that you know i i would say why not you know i i i learned so much through the interview process and i hope that for some of you that that may be inspired to look at some of these job ads um and um and apply you may be you may be surprised you have i'm sure you know the the fire plus the fire in the belly and the hunger to make stuff happen is something that i cannot underscore enough when it comes to when i interview candidates like they need to really want it and that's something that you just can't teach arturo this has been uh great i've really enjoyed this i might get you to leave us with a bit more of your vision you know in 10 years from now you know you already have some some products in the market we've spoken about those but in 10 years from now where would you like to see the the every company and and what would success look like for you at that time yeah what's funny you say that because we have an eight-year target and then an 18-year target as a company uh so we have our and we have obviously are our annual goals but in eight years so in 2030 um our our objective is to become the world's largest supplier of egg protein and that's not like vegan egg company i think we're probably almost there um but the world's largest supplier bank protein on earth and then by 2040 is to enable the shutdown of the last factory farm on earth and that is our goal as a company and what that means is in the short term really work you know to your to what we talked about earlier really owning um and making you know making the egg accessible across all every kind of application in the in the forms that consumers know them whether it's in cakes or cookies or scrambles or pasta or frittatas or protein powders but and then in parallel is work to actually support all the other companies in the space to produce every kind of animal protein that companies are already using today to to to make that that future possible through through all of our all of our partners one thing that we didn't touch on but if someone's in the states and they're thinking i'd like to to to buy a product that's using their their egg protein are there any brands that you can or products that you can speak to that are using it yeah so we launched um we we're we're pretty tight on product right now but we will um but we launched with pressed juicery in the us in the in new york and la uh it's like a we launched the world's first protein smoothie made with animal-free animal protein um with them last year and we maybe we may do something later on but that was a limited time offering and now we are working with chantal which is a you know an awesome one of the best french macaron companies uh on the west coast that makes uh that make french macarons which is like the holy grail of egg white functionality we used our every egg white which is where we launched it and they're in the bay area so you can get them in the stores or online anywhere in the u.s through that through through them um we're out of where we just sold out uh but we will be restocking soon so people can now eat our product if they're in the us wherever they are amazing thank you so much for sharing and all of your incredible insights it's been very very interesting i really appreciate you taking the time to to do this and and i look forward to watching uh how your story and the story of the every company unfolds in the the coming years i'll uh of course put a link to your personal socials and company website etc in the show notes i highly recommend that anyone who's been listening please connect with arturo online and stay up to date with everything that he's doing thank you so much arturo and uh please do enjoy the rest of the day yeah simon thank you so much for having me this was such a such a treat i'm so glad to have been a part of it thank you for having me thank you for joining me for this episode and your interest in science-based conversation i hope you enjoyed it and found the information covered interesting and instructive if you did and you'd like to show your support for the show please subscribe to our youtube channel where you can stay up to date with new episodes and watch them in video format yes the full length videos please also consider subscribing to the show on the spotify and or apple podcast app wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts you can also leave a review on apple or spotify again a great way to support the show and make our content more discoverable for others to enjoy and learn from if you have any comments about the episodes suggestions for future episodes including guests you'd like to see on the show or questions that you'd like to have answered please leave those in the comments section on youtube i myself and my team will take note of these comments when planning future episodes finally the best way to support the show and receive discounts on products we love is by checking out our sponsors at theproof.com forward slash friends enjoy your week stay well and i look forward to catching you in the next episode