September 25, 2025 • 47 mins
Justin Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a company making seafood without killing fish.
Their first product is cultivated salmon, which is made from real salmon cells that are grown in a stainless steel vat.
Justin's problem is this: How to sell no-kill, vat-grown salmon for the same price, or better, as wild-caught salmon? On today’s show, Justin explains how Wildtype will scale, what’s going on across the cultivated and plant-based meat industries, and how new state bans on cultivated foods are shaping the future of his business.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Meat is expensive. It's costly, and it's costly in
a few different ways, on a few different dimensions. For
one thing, it just costs a lot to grow a
cow or to go out and catch a wild salmon. Also,
meat is costly for the environment. Cows are absurdly large
(00:39):
contributors to climate change and habitat loss. Wildfish stocks are declining.
Fish farming is associated with pollution. Also, a lot of
what farmfish are fed is wildfish, which in turn adds
to the decline in wildfish stocks. As a result of
all this, people are trying to figure out how to
make food that is like meat but does not require
(01:02):
growing and killing animals. Plant based fake meat has been
around for a while impossible beyond, but I would argue
that a limiting factor is right there in the name plant.
There is another strategy, a strategy that is technically harder,
that's not as far along, but that in the long
(01:24):
run might be more promising, growing meat from animal cells
without ever growing the animal. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this
is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
today is Justin Kolbeck, Justin is the co founder and
(01:47):
CEO of a company called wild Type. Earlier this year,
wild Type started selling what they call cultivated salmon at
a few restaurants around the country. The key ingredient in
cultivated salmon is cells that originally came from a real salmon,
but are grown in a metal vat, kind of like
the way you brew beer. Justin's problem is this, how
(02:08):
do you grow salmon cells in a vat, turn them
into something that looks and tastes like salmon, and sell
that for the same price as wild caught salmon. Justin
started off by telling me about this thing that happened
about a decade ago. He was visiting his friend Aria
Elfinbine at Aria's lab in San Francisco. Aria is a
(02:30):
cardiologist and he was growing heart muscle cells in his lab.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What was really interesting about that visit is Ari and
I were both having a conversation about what's the best
way to make food. Should we think about a plant
based approach or should we use cells? And it was
an active debate because at the time, Impossible Food it
was rolling out at Momofuku in New York. There were
lines around the block. People were really excited about what
plants could do, and he showed me under the microscope
(02:59):
a dish with beating human cardiomyocytes. So these are human
heart muscle cells, and at the cellular level they have
a pacemaking ability, so they beat just like our heart does.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Each cell sort of regulates itself.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
To be the cell. Yeah, like this is way before
it becomes the full organ. This is just like the
most basic building block of the human heart. And that
was a hugely impactful moment for me, because you know,
Ari had kind of always told me, hey, cells know
what to do all the way down to the most
basic level. They are programmed to become the building blocks
(03:38):
of our of our various parts of our body. But
seeing it beat was really an incredible moment for me, right,
And also it made the feet of turning cells into meat.
Sorry that that rhymed a bit I didn't intend it to,
did it seem a little bit more doable, quite honestly, right, Like,
(03:58):
here are these scientists that are growing functional human beating
heart cells for therapeutic purposes. Making a non functional piece
of meat just for human consumption seemed not trivial by comparison,
but a bit easier like, if.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You could literally grow human heart self that beat on
their own in the lab, surely we could make just
a slab of dead salmon for people to eat.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yes, exactly. And you know, and I wouldn't say that
all of my doubts went away in that moment, but
I did get it. I understood the sort of power
of what this technology could do.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
So you were already by this time thinking about food,
and in particular thinking about alternatives to traditional meat. Like
why why were you too thinking about that at that time?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I think we came at this from slightly different angles.
Ari and I. So my most recent overseas assignment as
a foreign service officer was in a place called Paktika, Afghanistan.
At the time I was there, which was two thousand
and oh, boy, ten to eleven, it's a long time
(05:06):
ago now, Afghanistan was the third most food and secure
country in the world, and the place where I was,
which was on the eastern part of the country right
on the border with Pakistan, was one of the most
food and secure provinces in that incredibly food and secure country,
and I saw people do incredible things to feed their families.
(05:28):
It was non inconsequential part of why a lot of
people signed up to become members of the Talban quite honestly,
to get a paycheck and essentially be able to feed
their family. I came home from that assignment thinking a
lot about food security, and so when Aria started talking
to me about the power of this technology, I got
really excited because it was at least part of an
(05:48):
answer to a question that had been tumbling around in
my head, which was where's all the food going to
come from for the next three billion people that are
going to show up on planet Earth? And by the way,
they all want to eat more like us here in
North America, So a lot of meat, a lot of dairy,
a lot of seafood. And it seemed like a very compelling, interesting,
(06:10):
partial solution to that.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So, okay, so you have this in your mind, you
see the beating heart cells through a microscope, right, and
then what like, how do you get from there to
deciding to start a company to make salmon out of cells?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So the first thing that I needed to get over
internally was does as technology have promised? And it was
clear to me that it did. The second thing was, Okay, well,
can we actually do it? And can we make enough
cells to cook something up and put it in our
mouths and chew it. And so that's what we did.
And so at the end of twenty sixteen we started
(06:50):
talking to potential for lack of a better word, rent
a bench locations on the West Coast. We ended up
at this great place that at the time was called
QB three. Now it's called NBC Biolabs in San Francisco.
They have a few of them now. But what was
incredible at the time is you could rent for I
think the price was eight hundred and fifty bucks a month.
(07:12):
You could have dedicated bench space. It wasn't much. It
was like the size of the dust that I'm sitting
at now.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
But is it just full of mad scientists with weird
o dreams cooking things up? What's going on in there? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And other than us and one other person who was
also working on some food applications, everybody was working on biotech,
healthcare type of stuff, right. And the advantage of this
place is at the time Ri n I still had
full time jobs and we were funding this from our
savings and from our salaries, so it didn't cost a
lot to get up and running. We had access to
like millions of dollars of state of the art equipment
(07:46):
that we could rent. And so, you know, we spent
the first part of twenty seventeen trying to find some
animals that we could isolate sales from, right and that
included you know, obviously fish, which we ended up working on,
but also some chicken. In the early days, it was
just a little bit easier to get a hold of
fertilized eggs, for example, which are full of the kinds
(08:06):
of sales that you need for starting a selling the
purposes that we need them for, you know. And I
remember when we grew our first real full dish of
chicken muscle cells. It was before we you know, at
the time, we were like literally going fishing to like
find a fish, and you know it's called fishing and
not catching. So you know, we went fishing a few
(08:28):
times and we weren't able to get any fish. We
were like down there in the San Francisco docks talking
to fishermen and being like, hey, I know you just
caught this fish. Can you cut us off a little
bit so we can see if we can find some
life cells. But while we were doing that, because we
always and we can talk more about this. We always
saw seafood is like the real place we needed to focus.
We were working on in parallel some of these kind
(08:49):
of poultry cell lines, and the first big aha moment
for me was, you know, we got in a very
small format, you know, just like your simple dish. We
got chicken muscle cells to grow and then and I
had this video still to this day of them like
kind of spontaneously contracting like our muscles, still, right, And
just like our muscles, if you give them the right
(09:09):
kind of environment, you can get them to grow and
to be bigger and all of that. And so eventually
we did find a place where we could reliably get
like fish cells because, as you might imagine, you didn't
come upon the ideal cell line the first time around.
That's not how science works typically. It took us a while,
and it was actually a fish that Aria dissected on
(09:32):
Christmas Eve of twenty eighteen that became the starter yeast
effectively for the cells that were that were making and
putting into products today.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It was a salmon.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It was a little salmon, a little salmon.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So why did you choose? You said, you always knew
you were going to do seafood, Like, why did you
choose seafood, Why did you choose salmon?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, look, there are a couple of reasons. One, we
wanted to focus on a big potential price, not just
price like in the monetary sense, but a place to
have a really big impact. And seafood is our species,
the human species number one source of animal protein, you know,
not driven by us here in North America, but largely
(10:13):
by other countries around the world. And so that was
one consideration and the other onse and Ari and I
felt pretty strongly about this. In the early days, a
lot of people were really getting interested in the plant
based movement. You know, there were certainly those who cared
about it from like a sustainability perspective, but I think
there were a lot of people that were just like, Wow,
I can have a burger and it's going to have
(10:34):
like lower saturated fat, and maybe this is healthier for
me than a beef broger. Right, And for seafood, there
was a really clear reason for people to switch, which
is nobody likes to find a parasite or a worm
in their sushi, and it is absolutely ubiquitous. Nobody likes
the heavy metals that are present in fish. I think
(10:58):
seafood is just this really complex thing where you like
ask people like, hey, what's better farm fish or wild caught?
You'll get all kinds of different answers, and you know,
some of them may or may not be based on
any kind of factual base. But it's complicated, right, And
so the idea was like, let's just remove all of
that complication and just make the purest, cleanest seafoot on
the planet. And that was kind of our north star
(11:19):
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Okay, so it's late twenty eighteen. You get your first
cells out of the original salmon that is the father
or mother of everything else, right, So let's just step
back at that moment and talk about the context of
this broader technology of working with cells. I mean, it
is the thing people had been working on for some time, right,
(11:43):
both in a medical context and in a like can
we grow meat from sales context? What was the existing
arc on the food side of people trying to grow
meat from cells at the time you started.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Interestingly, the very first demonstration of this technology was a
NASA funded project by a researcher I believe in New
Jersey whose name was Morris Benjaminson. And he grew goldfish
cells outside of the goldfish as a proof point that,
you know, because the basic question they were trying to
(12:19):
figure out is, Okay, we've got astronauts on long distance
space missions, or maybe we're colonizing Mars one day. We're
sure as hell not grazing cows on Mars. It's just
not going to be a thing. So and you know,
we're not going to be able to ship up on
rockets huge amounts of heavy meat for people to eat, right,
So what are we going to do?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
And I think that was the original impetus for exploring
this kind of technology is can we just make me
essentially on a spaceship that's traveling through space? And that's
what this researcher did, and he proved that it could work.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And when was that just more or less decade nineties
or nineties?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Ok, yeah, yeah, so it's a while ago. Then a
French artist demonstration where he grew some frog muscle cells
that he had sort of isolated from a living frog
and fed them to some people as like an art demonstration.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Somehow very French.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
They must have been smoking, right, I would imagine it
was like a you know, dark cafe somewhere on the
chamis Luise. Well this I don't know, but the people
watched the frog was alive kind of while people were
eating its cells. Essentially.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Oh I see, So it didn't harm the frog. They
whatever scraped them cells off the frog and didn't have
to eat the frog. Yeah, exactly, something sort of like
frog legs without eating that frog's legs or any frog's legs.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah. But what I loved about this is it wasn't
like a scientist or biologist. It was just an artist
who saw a chance to create this like absurd setting
and just see what happens and document it. And then
I would say for applications for like more serious applications
toward food started with a Dutch researcher named Mark Post
who made the first cultivated hamburger about a decade ago
(14:11):
and then ate it on live British TV.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So that had happened, so people could do it, but
nobody was doing it at scale or in any kind
of economic way. So what do you have to do? Like,
what are a few of the things you had to
figure out?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I think a good starting point for that question is
how did Mark Post make his burger? And how much
did it cost? So that burger costs well over three
hundred thousand dollars to make, just to put it into perspective.
And the way he grew it was in these things
called cell factories, which are layered large imagine like a
big plastic circulture dish, but like the size of a desk,
(14:50):
and it's like ten stories tall, right, And he had
stacks of these. I've seen pictures of it, just piled
up in his lab where they made this initial prototype.
So the first step was like, okay, well that's not
going to work. If we're trying to take plastics out
of fish, we better not be growing it. And he's
just plastic cell hotels, right, not to mention that doesn't scale.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
So the easier move would have been grow the cell
so that they're sticking to a plastic box. But you
were you didn't want plastic in the fish, so you
couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah. So look, most cell culture is done in stainless
steel fermentation tanks that don't look all that different from
a brew tank.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
So that seems fine, right, Fine, use a metal tank
instead of a plastic tank. But get well, let's see
three hundred thousand you need to basically get it to
three dollars, which is how many orders of magnitude? Right
a lot thirty three hundred, three thousand and thirty thousand,
five orders of magnitude. You have to get five orders
of magnitude out right. That seems like the big job.
(15:51):
Also make salmine, which nobody has done. But frankly, it's
the five orders of magnitude part that seems really hard
to me.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
So here's how we did it, and it was it
was really three things. One it was to start with
the right cells, right, like I was talking about, So
train the ones they can grow in a beer brewery
instead of these cell hotels.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And is that just a matter of choosing the right
kind of cell? Is it just trial and error that
one didn't work, that one didn't work, Oh, that one worked.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
So it was thousands of experiments literally, oh wow, over
two years to get the right type of cell.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Just different cell kinds to find one that would reproduce
in a in essentially a beer brewing vat.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
That's right, different types of salmon. So we used Atlantic
and within Pacific, we use coho and chinook and just
all these other kinds just to try to change as
many of the variables as we could, but we got
there in the end. The second thing was it.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Was Coho, right, the one that worked was Coho.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Is what won the contest.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
The second thing.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Second thing was what we feed the cells. So in
pharma cell culture, it's not uncommon for a leader of
cel feed to cost hundreds of dollars and in fact,
that's literally what ours cost when we started.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
A leader to cost hundreds of dollars. That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
And you know, just to zoom forward in time a bit,
we're at like three thousand liters scale now, so it's
just not tenable and so and by the way, that
feed has a lot of animal components in it, which
again defeats the purpose. Like if we're growing cells outside
of an animal, let's not grow it in another animal ingredients.
So then we had to put the cells on a
(17:24):
plant based diet and reduce the cost like crazy, right,
and just to give you sent So we went from
hundreds of dollars a lead to like about a buck
a liter.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Now, okay, and how much meat do you get out
of a leader of feed? I guess that is that
another optimization problem?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
It is, that's right, Yeah, yeah, and I'll put that
as a subset of the cost of the feed. But
while we were reducing the richness of the feed, essentially,
we were also selecting for cells that could grow in
a very healthy way at higher densities. So we can
get let's say, instead of a gram a leader, we
(18:01):
can get ten grams a lead, or twenty grams a leader,
or one hundred grams a leader, right somewhere in that range,
like where we're ten or one hundred x. Ying with
some of these efficiencies would be The third thing that
we had to do was to scale all this up,
so move it into larger and larger cultivation centers essentially.
(18:22):
So that was definitely not trivial, and that was more
less of a biology thing, more of an engineering thing,
like how do we keep the thing sterile? How do
we ensure that we're keeping the cells happy? Like nobody
had ever studied three D fish cell culture before to
the point where like we were, like, what temperature should
(18:42):
we grow the mat Almost all cells that are grown
for therapeutic use are grown at our body temperature, right
thirty seven celsius, never ninety eight point seven fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
What's the body temperature? Of a salmon.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's cold there, cold.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Was what whatever? The water is?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, yeah, and they have a range that they can tolerate.
It's pretty broad actually, which is why this was an
interesting question. And so yeah, that was a big process.
But once we got it, I would say, into our
first stainless steel tank, it got a lot easier.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
How does that work? By the way, so you start
with a cell, how do you get from a cell
to a piece of salmon that I can eat?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, So what we do is, you know, for now,
we're growing cells. Like I said, kind of the maxi
bawling that we're at is three thousand liters, which, again,
if you've been to a microbrewery and you like kind
of peer at all those big stanless steel tanks or whatever,
twenty feet tall, looks like that one of those.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
One of those okay, yep, and what's going on in there?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
So we've got a it's not not that complicated. So
we've got a little propeller like a literally we could
have like strapped one on from a boat. It circulates
oxygen in the in the tank. We control the pH
we can control the temperature. We make sure that the
oxygen in there is sufficient. But we're literally just stirring
cells in their feed for ten days, ten to ten
(20:00):
to fifteen days. At that point, we centrifuge or you know,
just spin at high speeds, remove the sel feed, We
wash it a few times, we concentrate it kind of
into pure salmon protein essentially.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
So what you have first is a lump of salmon
cells essentially, shapeless, shapeless, just like a goo. It's like
a goo. Is it a orange? Dumb question? Is it orange?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
It's not orange. It looks like kind of the white
part of the salmon, you know, like connective tissue part.
And yeah, So what we do is we then combine
that with some plant based ingredients, mix it, shape it.
We actually have a heating step to make sure that
we're killing off any microbes that might have found their way.
Because it's all ready to eat sushi product. We want
(20:49):
to make sure it's as safe as possible and slice it,
package it, X ray it, and send it out the door.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
So you work on this for many years and then
this year, it's this spring you got something from the
FDA that is called a no questions letter, So that
basically mean FDA approval. What does that mean what happened
with the FDA this year.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
So there's a process on the food side, and this
was a process that was done for our industry, it's
done for other types of food. You submit a safety dossier,
that's what it's called, so a summary of how a
producing company came to the conclusion that a new food
manufacturing technology, which is what we're doing, so familiar food,
new technology or a new food is safe. Right, And
(21:40):
so you compile this dossier with lots of supporting data.
And what that did is it then kicked off a
three year process of back and forth questions with the FDA.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
It should be called a no more Questions letter.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
That's right, That's exactly what it is. Right, So once
the questions have been satisfied, they don't have any further questions.
And you know, they issued a statement that essentially said,
we agree with wild types of conclusion that the food
made using this technology is no more, no less, and
food isolated from a conventional fish.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
That's what we were working toward, is some degree of
external validation that this new and somewhat crazy sounding technology
can produce food that's very, very safe. And indeed, like
we talked about a bit earlier, quite a bit safer uncertain.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Respects specifically, metal content and parasite or pathogen content.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Are those the two exactly? Yeah? So lysteria, for example,
is a big challenge with any kind of fish, right,
and because of the way that we produce our food,
we're significantly able to reduce that risk. Not to mention,
heavy metals are in some cases orders of magnitude lower
than what you'd find in conventional fish. Parasites cannot grow
(22:55):
in our environment. So if you want to guarantee that
there's no worm or parasite in your fish, like wild type,
sim is literally the only optional planet Earth that can
meet that. And we don't use antibiotics, so, which are
still fairly prevalent and a lot of fish farming today.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
So what's your cost? Now? What have you gotten your cost?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Down to the way that we like to think about
it is if we were at scale, what would our
actual marginal cost be, right based on the inputs that
we're using, And today those inputs are about ten bucks
a pound.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
So when you say at scale, how much bigger is that?
How much bigger do you have to be? Like, I
don't know how much more fish do you have to make.
I don't know, I don't know the right way to
ask that question.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, get I get your question. So
the best way to think about this is, you know,
we are at micro brewery scale.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Now, how much fish do you make it a week?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
We make whatever, a few hundred pounds a week, right,
So it's not it's not enough. It's not enough.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
No, it's not enough. When you say ten dollars a pound,
how many pounds of fish you got to be making
a week for it to have your cost be ten
dollars a pound, it's more.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Like one thousand pounds a week. Is where we need
to be.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
That's not crazy, that's not crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
It's not And the reason our costs are so highs
because our volumes are low. You know, we just launched
a quarter ago.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Rent is expensive in San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah yeah, we started with a three hundred thousand dollars hamburger.
You're most of the way there.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
I think so. But but you know, the last bit
of the way is tough. And the reason it's tough
is because there's not a lot of interest I would say,
among either banks or project financers to put money into
capital intensive projects today, huh, and the path for us
And you know, again this should not be surprising. And
(24:39):
that's why I'm kind of using the micro brewery analogy.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
A lot of microbreweries at their scale are not super profitable.
In fact, a lot of them have gone out of
business in the last five years. There is kind of
a minimum efficient scale problem with what we're doing and
what a lot of other industries doing.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
So your problem at this moment is finance getting You've
had this sort of venture financing. Was that one hundred
million dollars that you raised to iver call that? Is
that the correct number?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, about one hundred and thirty million total.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So now you have a sort of more capital intensive
that was like you get your IP lined up, you
develop your product, and now you have this more sort
of classic financing problem where you need is not equity finance,
but like alone to build a bigger production plant. And
that's hard to get exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's it's really hard to get in twenty twenty five.
But that's what we need to do. And you know,
the thing is it's not really all that interesting or
sexy at this point because it's not proving out brand
new science it's just building bigger facilities and spreading fixed
costs over bigger volumes.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
There is a broader lab grown meat. It's not really
an industry yet, but there are a few other companies
that have what is it two other companies that have
been approved to sell lab grown chicken in the US? Right?
How are they doing?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Is there some like more narrowly? Are they struggling with
the same thing you are? Is there a sense of like, oh,
maybe people don't want to buy lab grown meat, or
at least not yet.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I'm not sure. I don't have the best information about.
So the two other companies you're talking about are Upside
Foods and each just they're both but also in San Francisco.
Neither of them are selling their products and restaurants today,
though I can't really speak as to why that is.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
It's more I'm selling in Singapore or something. It is
one of these things.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
So there are two companies selling cultivated foods on planet
Earth today, okay. One is Wild Type, which is selling
salmon in four restaurants in four states today in the
United States. The other is a company called val which
is based in Australia and they make a cultivated quail
product that's available for people to try in Singapore and
Australia today and that's it. So there's all this noise,
(26:44):
but what it boils down to is just a couple
of companies selling products in about say ten restaurants around
the world. We're at the starting line, I would.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Say, yeah, Like, why is it so small?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
So first, there's a regulatory hurdle, which is really hard,
and as you said, you know, there's I think five
companies in the US that have cleared that hurdle. Then
there's the manufacturing side of things, right, So part of
the proceeds or use of proceeds for the amount of
money that we raised was to build this first of
its kind cultivated seafood facility in San Francisco. And it
(27:21):
wasn't a trivial amount of money, right that we spent
on that. And it's really hard to scale the stuff up. Yeah, so,
and I think that's part of the reason why very
few companies have actually just made it over the regulatory,
the scaling, and the technical hurdles to get something into
the market.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Today, I'm less hopeful than I was when we started talking.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Can ask why please, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Well maybe I I don't know why. It's just the vibe.
I feel like, I don't know how you're going to
get that money. How are you going to get that money?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
We'll figure it out. Look, I think no new industry,
no new technology, is easy. What we're trying to do
is ambitious and it's really freaking hard, and it is
not for the faint of heart, but it's important, right,
Like my six year old kids, I have twins, When
(28:13):
I hear them explain what my work is, they're like, hey,
my daddy grows fish, so we don't have to kill
the fish. Like they just get it and it's obvious.
Like I think most people when you ask them, like, hey,
what's the future of seafood, they're not going to tell you, Yeah,
let's just pull all the fish out and have no
more fish left in the sea. Like, there's this big
(28:33):
problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve
from a bunch of different angles. And you know, I
think it's important enough that it's going to get done,
and you know, one or two, maybe three companies will
get through this crunch. Right, But we're at a point
now as an industry where there were one hundred and
fifty I don't even know. I don't count them all,
but I've seen a number of cultivated food companies around
(28:53):
the world. Not all of those companies are going to
make it through. Maybe we won't. I am very helpful, however,
that we will, and very confident actually, because we're making
something that people want and that the planet needs for
us to continue to sustainably feed people's seafood. And so
that moment of doubt pessimism that you were feeling is
(29:18):
just kind of wired into mine and Aria's brain, right,
it comes and it goes. We've got down moments and
we've got high moments, and that's just kind of part
and parcel of doing something like this. It's hard.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Why do you feel so strongly that the world needs
cultivated salmon?
Speaker 2 (29:49):
I would suggest talk to a fisherman, particularly one who's
been fishing for more than thirty years, about what they've
seen with wild stocks. But they're going down right. And
you know, if you look at any data measurement in
terms of the health of wildfish stocks around the world,
it's not up and to the right. Many of them
are being fish at levels that are kind of pushing
(30:10):
them into endangered species. Right, if you listen or following
any of David Attenborough's work, any of his recent films,
I mean, he talks about the ocean. You know, there's
a real risk that will have an ocean full of
jellyfish in fifty years if we're not thoughtful.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And careful and nothing else.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, plastic and jellyfish, like yeah, and let's not forget
that our ocean store like ninety three or ninety four
percent of the planet's carbon in the soil and the
seagrass and other things.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
So I don't know about you, but I get pretty
nervous when I think about that delicate ecosystem being so
thoroughly disrupted. And if you think about the oceans like
this is like the worst prisoner's dilemma type of thing,
where you've got this common good and everybody out in
international waters is doing whatever they can to pull out
as much fish as possible, make as much money, and
(31:03):
not everybody's worrying about whether that's going to be sustainable.
So that's wild caught, and I think most people get
that there's a finite supply. There's only so an efficientcye
on the fish farming side. I think what's really underappreciated
is that a full third of all the aquaculture feed
comes from forage fish like anchovies and sardines, which are
well caught and are not infinite in supply, and there
(31:28):
are real limitations in terms of the number of fish
farms that you can put in a given area. And
that's why we're seeing the move toward on land aquaculture
systems and all these other things. So the confluence of
all of that. If you don't believe anything I said,
just go look at salmon prices in real terms versus
inflation over the last fifteen years and you'll see that
(31:50):
there isn't five times faster than inflation, which to me
tells me that we have a real supply problem.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Salmon getting more expensive is good for you, right, Like,
if you can make salmon cheaper, then salmon can make salmon.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You'll win, yes, but the planet loses, right, And I
think it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Well, it depends, I mean, it depends on how cheap
you can get it, right, Like, yeah, I don't mean
to be glib, but like, fundamentally, your price to beat
is the price of wild caught salmon. Right, just as
a business proposition, Like that's the sort of solar story, right,
as you said, like you want people who don't care
to buy your salmon just because it's cheaper, That's what
(32:34):
I want, Right, That's the true scale, because most people
don't care about any particular thing, it's just the nature
of the world. But they would rather buy cheaper salmon.
And I'm sure there's an argument that, like people don't
want cultivated salmon, but I don't buy that. Like if
you look at the garbage people buy, they plainly don't care, right,
And so I feel like cost is the game.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
All of this is, I guess, in principle good for us,
but I know myself and my team we kind of
think about it at a much broader scale, which is salmon,
whether we make it or it comes from a fish,
healthy thing that we should be eating more of, and
it's not good for society if it becomes less accessible.
That is why I've got this bur in my saddle
to scale up this process as quickly as we can,
(33:19):
and not just for the cost and profitability and all
that stuff we were just talking about, but just to
get it to more people and to give people a
more affordable choice.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
What's the salmon. Like, now, if I got the salmon
sushi at one of the four restaurants where it's would
I even know?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I think it depends. And we've actually tested this, So
we've done blind taste tests for consumer and we obviously
tell them that there's potentially cultivated. We're not trying to
fool anybody, but.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Sure, sure. Yeah. When I say what I even know,
I don't mean would they be fooling me? I mean,
would I be able to distinguish?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah? Yeah, And so what we what we've done is
we put like a piece of our locks, you know,
so like cured and smoked salmon on a little cracker,
like a water cracker, and a piece of Russen Daughters
from New York City, which is delicious the best. I agree,
that's our gold standard, you know, so master credit to
Russ and Daughters. And the answer is no, you know,
with like a pretty high degree of like statistical significance,
(34:14):
we don't see a distinction in liking.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Is raw salmon harder to make identical?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
It's hard, yeah, And so I think obviously in the
right chef hands, and you know, obviously in certain preparations,
it is indistinguishable, which is a huge, huge accomplishment. And
the cool thing about what we're doing is that it's
always improving.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I mean, what would you like to improve on? In
what ways would you like to make the salmon you're
making better for me?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
There are a couple of things. The first one I
think we've nailed in the latest recipe that we're going
to be releasing soon is the texture, just like a
really nice fibrous bite, you know, like when you're biting
like a nice cube of sashimi.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
It's part of what's great about salmon sushi, right, it's
the texture. It's like both firm but so smooth and
of all the fat.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Right, that's right, Yeah, And it's hard to nail. I
think we're getting pretty darn close.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
In what way is your current version that's out fall short.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
On the text? I'd say it's too homogeneous, Like you
don't get this sort of like like you know, like
when your teeth are like biting into like a good
piece of meat, you kind of feel like the fibers
ripping a bit at a time. Like with the current version,
I would say, we haven't you know, fully achieved that
the thing that we're about to really is does so
I'm really excited about that. And you know, and the
(35:29):
other thing is protein. So protein is a big part
of the reason people like to eat any kind of
meat or seafood, and we're a bit light there, and
so it's hard to make a product that is raw
with equivalent protein.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
It's not obvious to me that that would be the case, Like,
why is that?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Because raw fish is like eighty to eighty five percent water,
and so if you want to have twenty percent protein
in there, that means a lot of the protein needs
to be in the water.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
That's the and in a fish, that's just the way
it works.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, yeah, and it's contained in the cells, for example,
so most cells the water. Yeah, that's a dramatic simplification
of a quite complex problem. But it's been a challenge
and I'd say we've made some progress. But those are
the two things I would like to improve.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Let's talk about policy. When we were just getting the
mic set up today, you mentioned that you were had
a press conference this morning today talking about joining a lawsuit.
What's going on? Why were you on a press conference
this morning and what were you talking about?
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So Texas banned cultivated foods effective the first of September,
which which was really unfortunate because you know, we picked
Otoko because of the head chef is an incredible person,
he's an adventurous head chef.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And this is a restaurant in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah. Yeah, And it was literally like one of five
that we picked that we wanted to introduce our products
to the commercial market in. And this decision was made
way before this band was even like a thought in
the rancher's minds. But this band went into effect on
the first and so we had to stop selling at Otoko,
which is just really unfortunate. And this isn't the first
(37:13):
date in the Union that has banned cultivated foods, it's
I believe the seventh. And this is being driven one
hundred percent by economic protectionism, really by the cattle industry
who's afraid of competition.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
It does seem like an anti free market, like on
its face, right, an anti free market move.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It is like, let.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
People decide they want to eat cows and fish, they can, right, No,
it is proposed taking away that option.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
That's right, And given everything that we just discussed in
that moment of pessimism that you felt, yeah, I just
like they should have bigger things to worry about, right
than try to ban a.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Three little companies that can't even get alone to build
a factory.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah. Yeah, leave us alone, for God's sake. And I
think if most Americans heard about this, they would be
pretty annoyed that now the government's telling us what we
can and can't eat, And like, if you don't want
our food, don't eat it. That's fine, But that choice
should be people's choices. It should not be the choice
of state legislators who got a strategically timed campaign donation.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, so your fish is still at four restaurants around
the country.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Then, yeah, So luckily Yoshio Kai has a new restaurant
in Aspen, so we just moved it over there. So
we're still in four and we'll be announcing a fifth
one in the next couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
So what do you have to do to get wider?
What's your ramp from four to everywhere?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah? And maybe the question to ask before that is like,
why did we just start with five? When you're making
real things like what we're doing food, you don't go
from It's not like software where you just like write
a program and distribute to million people. You need to
ramp up manufacturing, hire people, supply chain all that stuff.
And so what we've been trying to do is go
from literally zero three months ago to shipping product every
(39:04):
week to three or four, soon to be five restaurants
around the country.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Well, so should I how is that going? Or like
are you getting the fish out the door? Is it
hard to like make the fish every week?
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It's some things have been harder than we expected. Like,
for example, we had we had like an ingredient provider
shift their ingredient pretty dramatically. That changed our formulation, so
we had to adjust that on the fly. So things
like that that are just kind of part of any
new products standing.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Up manufacturing in a way, it's like biomanufacturing, right, what
you're doing exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
And so from here we are absolutely open to starting
to ship to more restaurants as demand comes in, and
we have had quite a few restaurants reach out to
us and ask if they can start buying it.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
That's good and is the answer yes?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, the answer is yes, And we're just kind of
slotted into our production schedule. And again, we don't want
to have stock outs, right, That's the last thing you
want when you're introducing the new product, somebody shows up.
They went out of the way to try this product,
and it's like, sorry, we don't have it this day.
We didn't get our shipment yesterday.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
And then how much bigger can you get with your
current production facility.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
If everything is maxed out and we tack on a
little bit more capacity, which we can do. You know,
we can maybe get up to like fifty restaurants.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
And then you have this step function where you need
to get alone essentially to build a real industrial scale plant.
This is the ram question, Like fifty restaurants is great,
but it's not at all what you're going for. It's
like what does the magnitude from what you're going for?
So how do you keep going from there?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
So what I was describing is one path where we
just build our own facility. We do what we did,
but just bigger, and we've got to get that finance.
That's really hard, it's not a lot of appetite. There
are two other ways you can do this. One is
we can go to a contract manufacturer that makes cells
or fermented products and has spare capacity. So instead of
building it ourselves, huh, we just pay them a toll
(41:01):
and they make it for us, the cells or even
the finished product, and then we can expand our capacity.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And so that is not so capital intensive. You don't
have to have any huge upfront costs that you need
to take out a loan for.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
That's right, But it is slow and you can't innovate.
So if you're working with contract manufacturers, it's like pencils down.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Uh huh. This is the recipe, that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Yeah, And the reality is we're still learning, we're still
adjusting and going fast, which is why we haven't taken
that path today, but we might. The other option is,
and we're open to this, is there are companies that
can build facilities that have lots of cash and a
much lower cost capital than we do, and we'd be
happy to license our technology to them. Right, And so
(41:43):
that means the cell line and the feed and the
know how to make our products well.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
So like Cargil, the giant food company is actually an
investor in your company, right, is that the kind of
company I should be thinking of in this context? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Or giant seafood companies that are maxed out on their
fish farms, like we would absolutely be happy to partner
with them.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Uh huh. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
That the reality is we're trying to do a lot
of things at a little seventy some odd person company.
We can't do it all, and I think we just
try to be really clear out about that, and when
it comes to scaling and maximizing the impact and getting
this product in front of as many people as possible,
we try to be really open minded about the best
way to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Do you think you're going to try and make something
after salmon?
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yes, eventually we will, I think. But the companies that
really focused on doing one thing and one thing really
well tended to do better.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Who are you thinking of the impossible burger?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Right? They weren't trying to do like chicken shreds and
the nugget and sausage like all at once. They're like,
let's make a kick ass burger that tastes pretty good.
It's made from plants. And they did it, and I
like that product. They eat it a lot. No, it's
not for everybody, but a lot of people do it.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
No, our freezer is full of many impossible meats.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Hopefully that means you're not stockpilling, but you're actually eating them.
From time to time, not out yet waiting for the apocalypse.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
We don't have the big giant basement freezer. I don't
want that. It's just a regular freezer.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
But you know, they chose that path while a lot
of others were like, let's just make like ten different
things at once, right, And I think for us, focus
is powerful, and so for now it's salmon. But if
we start to get energy from potential customers like hey,
can you make us a blue crab or can you
make us lobsters scallop? Like, we would take that really
seriously and we've got the right technological know how to
(43:29):
do it.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
We're going to finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
So you were in the US Foreign Service in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Correct, Yes, What is one surprising thing that
happened to you there?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I was as a guest of honor with the governor,
served the head of a goat, and I had no
idea what to do with it.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Like they just put the w all head in front
of you and said you're welcome.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I wasn't sure if I was being hazed or honored
or both.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Huh, Well, did you watch the governor and follow his lead?
Speaker 2 (44:23):
No? Because it went to me.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
I felt very self conscious about that because you know,
I was about twenty years younger than the governor. It
certainly didn't feel like I should have. Sure, I represented
the United States government, but I was also thirty years old.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
So is the governor of the province that you were in. Yeah,
So what did you do?
Speaker 2 (44:41):
I did the best I could. I like keeled back
at jowl and went for it. Didn't taste How was it? No?
It wasn't good. There's some whiskers in there.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
This is this is.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Not even saying like I think it might have been hazing,
because there were plenty of other parts of that goat
that were delicious.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
What's something you missed from that part of the world.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
I missed the food, and I miss the culture of hospitality,
which I think, unfortunately kind of got lost. A guest
is sacred to a lot of the push people, and
there's nothing you essentially wouldn't do for a guest, even
though he or she might be your putative enemy.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
How did you experience that in practice? What's an example
of that? From your experience?
Speaker 2 (45:22):
There were people who I knew were active Taliban fighters
who welcomed me into their home and introduced me to
their relatives because that's what the customs demanded, even though
you know, later that night they were probably laying IED's
blown up my friends. So yeah, it was things like that.
And by the way, it was not like duplicitous. They
(45:46):
were genuinely trying to extend hospitality.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Were you a spy?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
I was not.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
I mean, you would say that in any case. But
I had to ask, what's one thing you've learned as
a diplomat that is helpful to you running your company?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Thinking before you speak?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Very good answer. I'm still working on that one.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
You know. I didn't say anything.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, just not speaking. I've learned just not speaking and
not speaking is a great move, Like you don't have
to respond.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
It turns out that's one of the most powerful things
you can do as a parent when you're challenged. It's
just not say anything.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Yes, you weren't a scientist when you got into this business.
What's one great thing, interesting thing, favorite thing that you've
learned about cells in your work.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Cells are the most miniaturized, incredibly powerful versions of us,
and they have so much potential right. I think when
we all go through biology classes we learn that cells
are the building blocks of life, but like no shit,
they actually are and see and seeing it, seeing it
(47:00):
happen and assemble into things that become tissues and organs
is incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Justin Kolbeck is the co founder and CEO of Wild Type.
Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bricguherrett.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
(47:35):
another episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin. Meat is expensive. It's costly, and it's costly in
a few different ways, on a few different dimensions. For
one thing, it just costs a lot to grow a
cow or to go out and catch a wild salmon. Also,
meat is costly for the environment. Cows are absurdly large
(00:39):
contributors to climate change and habitat loss. Wildfish stocks are declining.
Fish farming is associated with pollution. Also, a lot of
what farmfish are fed is wildfish, which in turn adds
to the decline in wildfish stocks. As a result of
all this, people are trying to figure out how to
make food that is like meat but does not require
(01:02):
growing and killing animals. Plant based fake meat has been
around for a while impossible beyond, but I would argue
that a limiting factor is right there in the name plant.
There is another strategy, a strategy that is technically harder,
that's not as far along, but that in the long
(01:24):
run might be more promising, growing meat from animal cells
without ever growing the animal. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this
is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
today is Justin Kolbeck, Justin is the co founder and
(01:47):
CEO of a company called wild Type. Earlier this year,
wild Type started selling what they call cultivated salmon at
a few restaurants around the country. The key ingredient in
cultivated salmon is cells that originally came from a real salmon,
but are grown in a metal vat, kind of like
the way you brew beer. Justin's problem is this, how
(02:08):
do you grow salmon cells in a vat, turn them
into something that looks and tastes like salmon, and sell
that for the same price as wild caught salmon. Justin
started off by telling me about this thing that happened
about a decade ago. He was visiting his friend Aria
Elfinbine at Aria's lab in San Francisco. Aria is a
(02:30):
cardiologist and he was growing heart muscle cells in his lab.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What was really interesting about that visit is Ari and
I were both having a conversation about what's the best
way to make food. Should we think about a plant
based approach or should we use cells? And it was
an active debate because at the time, Impossible Food it
was rolling out at Momofuku in New York. There were
lines around the block. People were really excited about what
plants could do, and he showed me under the microscope
(02:59):
a dish with beating human cardiomyocytes. So these are human
heart muscle cells, and at the cellular level they have
a pacemaking ability, so they beat just like our heart does.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Each cell sort of regulates itself.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
To be the cell. Yeah, like this is way before
it becomes the full organ. This is just like the
most basic building block of the human heart. And that
was a hugely impactful moment for me, because you know,
Ari had kind of always told me, hey, cells know
what to do all the way down to the most
basic level. They are programmed to become the building blocks
(03:38):
of our of our various parts of our body. But
seeing it beat was really an incredible moment for me, right,
And also it made the feet of turning cells into meat.
Sorry that that rhymed a bit I didn't intend it to,
did it seem a little bit more doable, quite honestly, right, Like,
(03:58):
here are these scientists that are growing functional human beating
heart cells for therapeutic purposes. Making a non functional piece
of meat just for human consumption seemed not trivial by comparison,
but a bit easier like, if.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You could literally grow human heart self that beat on
their own in the lab, surely we could make just
a slab of dead salmon for people to eat.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yes, exactly. And you know, and I wouldn't say that
all of my doubts went away in that moment, but
I did get it. I understood the sort of power
of what this technology could do.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
So you were already by this time thinking about food,
and in particular thinking about alternatives to traditional meat. Like
why why were you too thinking about that at that time?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I think we came at this from slightly different angles.
Ari and I. So my most recent overseas assignment as
a foreign service officer was in a place called Paktika, Afghanistan.
At the time I was there, which was two thousand
and oh, boy, ten to eleven, it's a long time
(05:06):
ago now, Afghanistan was the third most food and secure
country in the world, and the place where I was,
which was on the eastern part of the country right
on the border with Pakistan, was one of the most
food and secure provinces in that incredibly food and secure country,
and I saw people do incredible things to feed their families.
(05:28):
It was non inconsequential part of why a lot of
people signed up to become members of the Talban quite honestly,
to get a paycheck and essentially be able to feed
their family. I came home from that assignment thinking a
lot about food security, and so when Aria started talking
to me about the power of this technology, I got
really excited because it was at least part of an
(05:48):
answer to a question that had been tumbling around in
my head, which was where's all the food going to
come from for the next three billion people that are
going to show up on planet Earth? And by the way,
they all want to eat more like us here in
North America, So a lot of meat, a lot of dairy,
a lot of seafood. And it seemed like a very compelling, interesting,
(06:10):
partial solution to that.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So, okay, so you have this in your mind, you
see the beating heart cells through a microscope, right, and
then what like, how do you get from there to
deciding to start a company to make salmon out of cells?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So the first thing that I needed to get over
internally was does as technology have promised? And it was
clear to me that it did. The second thing was, Okay, well,
can we actually do it? And can we make enough
cells to cook something up and put it in our
mouths and chew it. And so that's what we did.
And so at the end of twenty sixteen we started
(06:50):
talking to potential for lack of a better word, rent
a bench locations on the West Coast. We ended up
at this great place that at the time was called
QB three. Now it's called NBC Biolabs in San Francisco.
They have a few of them now. But what was
incredible at the time is you could rent for I
think the price was eight hundred and fifty bucks a month.
(07:12):
You could have dedicated bench space. It wasn't much. It
was like the size of the dust that I'm sitting
at now.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
But is it just full of mad scientists with weird
o dreams cooking things up? What's going on in there? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And other than us and one other person who was
also working on some food applications, everybody was working on biotech,
healthcare type of stuff, right. And the advantage of this
place is at the time Ri n I still had
full time jobs and we were funding this from our
savings and from our salaries, so it didn't cost a
lot to get up and running. We had access to
like millions of dollars of state of the art equipment
(07:46):
that we could rent. And so, you know, we spent
the first part of twenty seventeen trying to find some
animals that we could isolate sales from, right and that
included you know, obviously fish, which we ended up working on,
but also some chicken. In the early days, it was
just a little bit easier to get a hold of
fertilized eggs, for example, which are full of the kinds
(08:06):
of sales that you need for starting a selling the
purposes that we need them for, you know. And I
remember when we grew our first real full dish of
chicken muscle cells. It was before we you know, at
the time, we were like literally going fishing to like
find a fish, and you know it's called fishing and
not catching. So you know, we went fishing a few
(08:28):
times and we weren't able to get any fish. We
were like down there in the San Francisco docks talking
to fishermen and being like, hey, I know you just
caught this fish. Can you cut us off a little
bit so we can see if we can find some
life cells. But while we were doing that, because we
always and we can talk more about this. We always
saw seafood is like the real place we needed to focus.
We were working on in parallel some of these kind
(08:49):
of poultry cell lines, and the first big aha moment
for me was, you know, we got in a very
small format, you know, just like your simple dish. We
got chicken muscle cells to grow and then and I
had this video still to this day of them like
kind of spontaneously contracting like our muscles, still, right, And
just like our muscles, if you give them the right
(09:09):
kind of environment, you can get them to grow and
to be bigger and all of that. And so eventually
we did find a place where we could reliably get
like fish cells because, as you might imagine, you didn't
come upon the ideal cell line the first time around.
That's not how science works typically. It took us a while,
and it was actually a fish that Aria dissected on
(09:32):
Christmas Eve of twenty eighteen that became the starter yeast
effectively for the cells that were that were making and
putting into products today.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It was a salmon.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It was a little salmon, a little salmon.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So why did you choose? You said, you always knew
you were going to do seafood, Like, why did you
choose seafood, Why did you choose salmon?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, look, there are a couple of reasons. One, we
wanted to focus on a big potential price, not just
price like in the monetary sense, but a place to
have a really big impact. And seafood is our species,
the human species number one source of animal protein, you know,
not driven by us here in North America, but largely
(10:13):
by other countries around the world. And so that was
one consideration and the other onse and Ari and I
felt pretty strongly about this. In the early days, a
lot of people were really getting interested in the plant
based movement. You know, there were certainly those who cared
about it from like a sustainability perspective, but I think
there were a lot of people that were just like, Wow,
I can have a burger and it's going to have
(10:34):
like lower saturated fat, and maybe this is healthier for
me than a beef broger. Right, And for seafood, there
was a really clear reason for people to switch, which
is nobody likes to find a parasite or a worm
in their sushi, and it is absolutely ubiquitous. Nobody likes
the heavy metals that are present in fish. I think
(10:58):
seafood is just this really complex thing where you like
ask people like, hey, what's better farm fish or wild caught?
You'll get all kinds of different answers, and you know,
some of them may or may not be based on
any kind of factual base. But it's complicated, right, And
so the idea was like, let's just remove all of
that complication and just make the purest, cleanest seafoot on
the planet. And that was kind of our north star
(11:19):
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Okay, so it's late twenty eighteen. You get your first
cells out of the original salmon that is the father
or mother of everything else, right, So let's just step
back at that moment and talk about the context of
this broader technology of working with cells. I mean, it
is the thing people had been working on for some time, right,
(11:43):
both in a medical context and in a like can
we grow meat from sales context? What was the existing
arc on the food side of people trying to grow
meat from cells at the time you started.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Interestingly, the very first demonstration of this technology was a
NASA funded project by a researcher I believe in New
Jersey whose name was Morris Benjaminson. And he grew goldfish
cells outside of the goldfish as a proof point that,
you know, because the basic question they were trying to
(12:19):
figure out is, Okay, we've got astronauts on long distance
space missions, or maybe we're colonizing Mars one day. We're
sure as hell not grazing cows on Mars. It's just
not going to be a thing. So and you know,
we're not going to be able to ship up on
rockets huge amounts of heavy meat for people to eat, right,
So what are we going to do?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
And I think that was the original impetus for exploring
this kind of technology is can we just make me
essentially on a spaceship that's traveling through space? And that's
what this researcher did, and he proved that it could work.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And when was that just more or less decade nineties
or nineties?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Ok, yeah, yeah, so it's a while ago. Then a
French artist demonstration where he grew some frog muscle cells
that he had sort of isolated from a living frog
and fed them to some people as like an art demonstration.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Somehow very French.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
They must have been smoking, right, I would imagine it
was like a you know, dark cafe somewhere on the
chamis Luise. Well this I don't know, but the people
watched the frog was alive kind of while people were
eating its cells. Essentially.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Oh I see, So it didn't harm the frog. They
whatever scraped them cells off the frog and didn't have
to eat the frog. Yeah, exactly, something sort of like
frog legs without eating that frog's legs or any frog's legs.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah. But what I loved about this is it wasn't
like a scientist or biologist. It was just an artist
who saw a chance to create this like absurd setting
and just see what happens and document it. And then
I would say for applications for like more serious applications
toward food started with a Dutch researcher named Mark Post
who made the first cultivated hamburger about a decade ago
(14:11):
and then ate it on live British TV.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So that had happened, so people could do it, but
nobody was doing it at scale or in any kind
of economic way. So what do you have to do? Like,
what are a few of the things you had to
figure out?
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I think a good starting point for that question is
how did Mark Post make his burger? And how much
did it cost? So that burger costs well over three
hundred thousand dollars to make, just to put it into perspective.
And the way he grew it was in these things
called cell factories, which are layered large imagine like a
big plastic circulture dish, but like the size of a desk,
(14:50):
and it's like ten stories tall, right, And he had
stacks of these. I've seen pictures of it, just piled
up in his lab where they made this initial prototype.
So the first step was like, okay, well that's not
going to work. If we're trying to take plastics out
of fish, we better not be growing it. And he's
just plastic cell hotels, right, not to mention that doesn't scale.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
So the easier move would have been grow the cell
so that they're sticking to a plastic box. But you
were you didn't want plastic in the fish, so you
couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah. So look, most cell culture is done in stainless
steel fermentation tanks that don't look all that different from
a brew tank.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
So that seems fine, right, Fine, use a metal tank
instead of a plastic tank. But get well, let's see
three hundred thousand you need to basically get it to
three dollars, which is how many orders of magnitude? Right
a lot thirty three hundred, three thousand and thirty thousand,
five orders of magnitude. You have to get five orders
of magnitude out right. That seems like the big job.
(15:51):
Also make salmine, which nobody has done. But frankly, it's
the five orders of magnitude part that seems really hard
to me.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
So here's how we did it, and it was it
was really three things. One it was to start with
the right cells, right, like I was talking about, So
train the ones they can grow in a beer brewery
instead of these cell hotels.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And is that just a matter of choosing the right
kind of cell? Is it just trial and error that
one didn't work, that one didn't work, Oh, that one worked.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
So it was thousands of experiments literally, oh wow, over
two years to get the right type of cell.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Just different cell kinds to find one that would reproduce
in a in essentially a beer brewing vat.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
That's right, different types of salmon. So we used Atlantic
and within Pacific, we use coho and chinook and just
all these other kinds just to try to change as
many of the variables as we could, but we got
there in the end. The second thing was it.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Was Coho, right, the one that worked was Coho.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Is what won the contest.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
The second thing.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Second thing was what we feed the cells. So in
pharma cell culture, it's not uncommon for a leader of
cel feed to cost hundreds of dollars and in fact,
that's literally what ours cost when we started.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
A leader to cost hundreds of dollars. That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
And you know, just to zoom forward in time a bit,
we're at like three thousand liters scale now, so it's
just not tenable and so and by the way, that
feed has a lot of animal components in it, which
again defeats the purpose. Like if we're growing cells outside
of an animal, let's not grow it in another animal ingredients.
So then we had to put the cells on a
(17:24):
plant based diet and reduce the cost like crazy, right,
and just to give you sent So we went from
hundreds of dollars a lead to like about a buck
a liter.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Now, okay, and how much meat do you get out
of a leader of feed? I guess that is that
another optimization problem?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
It is, that's right, Yeah, yeah, and I'll put that
as a subset of the cost of the feed. But
while we were reducing the richness of the feed, essentially,
we were also selecting for cells that could grow in
a very healthy way at higher densities. So we can
get let's say, instead of a gram a leader, we
(18:01):
can get ten grams a lead, or twenty grams a leader,
or one hundred grams a leader, right somewhere in that range,
like where we're ten or one hundred x. Ying with
some of these efficiencies would be The third thing that
we had to do was to scale all this up,
so move it into larger and larger cultivation centers essentially.
(18:22):
So that was definitely not trivial, and that was more
less of a biology thing, more of an engineering thing,
like how do we keep the thing sterile? How do
we ensure that we're keeping the cells happy? Like nobody
had ever studied three D fish cell culture before to
the point where like we were, like, what temperature should
(18:42):
we grow the mat Almost all cells that are grown
for therapeutic use are grown at our body temperature, right
thirty seven celsius, never ninety eight point seven fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
What's the body temperature? Of a salmon.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's cold there, cold.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Was what whatever? The water is?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, yeah, and they have a range that they can tolerate.
It's pretty broad actually, which is why this was an
interesting question. And so yeah, that was a big process.
But once we got it, I would say, into our
first stainless steel tank, it got a lot easier.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
How does that work? By the way, so you start
with a cell, how do you get from a cell
to a piece of salmon that I can eat?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, So what we do is, you know, for now,
we're growing cells. Like I said, kind of the maxi
bawling that we're at is three thousand liters, which, again,
if you've been to a microbrewery and you like kind
of peer at all those big stanless steel tanks or whatever,
twenty feet tall, looks like that one of those.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
One of those okay, yep, and what's going on in there?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
So we've got a it's not not that complicated. So
we've got a little propeller like a literally we could
have like strapped one on from a boat. It circulates
oxygen in the in the tank. We control the pH
we can control the temperature. We make sure that the
oxygen in there is sufficient. But we're literally just stirring
cells in their feed for ten days, ten to ten
(20:00):
to fifteen days. At that point, we centrifuge or you know,
just spin at high speeds, remove the sel feed, We
wash it a few times, we concentrate it kind of
into pure salmon protein essentially.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
So what you have first is a lump of salmon
cells essentially, shapeless, shapeless, just like a goo. It's like
a goo. Is it a orange? Dumb question? Is it orange?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
It's not orange. It looks like kind of the white
part of the salmon, you know, like connective tissue part.
And yeah, So what we do is we then combine
that with some plant based ingredients, mix it, shape it.
We actually have a heating step to make sure that
we're killing off any microbes that might have found their way.
Because it's all ready to eat sushi product. We want
(20:49):
to make sure it's as safe as possible and slice it,
package it, X ray it, and send it out the door.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
So you work on this for many years and then
this year, it's this spring you got something from the
FDA that is called a no questions letter, So that
basically mean FDA approval. What does that mean what happened
with the FDA this year.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
So there's a process on the food side, and this
was a process that was done for our industry, it's
done for other types of food. You submit a safety dossier,
that's what it's called, so a summary of how a
producing company came to the conclusion that a new food
manufacturing technology, which is what we're doing, so familiar food,
new technology or a new food is safe. Right, And
(21:40):
so you compile this dossier with lots of supporting data.
And what that did is it then kicked off a
three year process of back and forth questions with the FDA.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
It should be called a no more Questions letter.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
That's right, That's exactly what it is. Right, So once
the questions have been satisfied, they don't have any further questions.
And you know, they issued a statement that essentially said,
we agree with wild types of conclusion that the food
made using this technology is no more, no less, and
food isolated from a conventional fish.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
That's what we were working toward, is some degree of
external validation that this new and somewhat crazy sounding technology
can produce food that's very, very safe. And indeed, like
we talked about a bit earlier, quite a bit safer uncertain.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Respects specifically, metal content and parasite or pathogen content.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Are those the two exactly? Yeah? So lysteria, for example,
is a big challenge with any kind of fish, right,
and because of the way that we produce our food,
we're significantly able to reduce that risk. Not to mention,
heavy metals are in some cases orders of magnitude lower
than what you'd find in conventional fish. Parasites cannot grow
(22:55):
in our environment. So if you want to guarantee that
there's no worm or parasite in your fish, like wild type,
sim is literally the only optional planet Earth that can
meet that. And we don't use antibiotics, so, which are
still fairly prevalent and a lot of fish farming today.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
So what's your cost? Now? What have you gotten your cost?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Down to the way that we like to think about
it is if we were at scale, what would our
actual marginal cost be, right based on the inputs that
we're using, And today those inputs are about ten bucks
a pound.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
So when you say at scale, how much bigger is that?
How much bigger do you have to be? Like, I
don't know how much more fish do you have to make.
I don't know, I don't know the right way to
ask that question.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, get I get your question. So
the best way to think about this is, you know,
we are at micro brewery scale.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Now, how much fish do you make it a week?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
We make whatever, a few hundred pounds a week, right,
So it's not it's not enough. It's not enough.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
No, it's not enough. When you say ten dollars a pound,
how many pounds of fish you got to be making
a week for it to have your cost be ten
dollars a pound, it's more.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Like one thousand pounds a week. Is where we need
to be.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
That's not crazy, that's not crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
It's not And the reason our costs are so highs
because our volumes are low. You know, we just launched
a quarter ago.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Rent is expensive in San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah yeah, we started with a three hundred thousand dollars hamburger.
You're most of the way there.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
I think so. But but you know, the last bit
of the way is tough. And the reason it's tough
is because there's not a lot of interest I would say,
among either banks or project financers to put money into
capital intensive projects today, huh, and the path for us
And you know, again this should not be surprising. And
(24:39):
that's why I'm kind of using the micro brewery analogy.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
A lot of microbreweries at their scale are not super profitable.
In fact, a lot of them have gone out of
business in the last five years. There is kind of
a minimum efficient scale problem with what we're doing and
what a lot of other industries doing.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
So your problem at this moment is finance getting You've
had this sort of venture financing. Was that one hundred
million dollars that you raised to iver call that? Is
that the correct number?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, about one hundred and thirty million total.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So now you have a sort of more capital intensive
that was like you get your IP lined up, you
develop your product, and now you have this more sort
of classic financing problem where you need is not equity finance,
but like alone to build a bigger production plant. And
that's hard to get exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's it's really hard to get in twenty twenty five.
But that's what we need to do. And you know,
the thing is it's not really all that interesting or
sexy at this point because it's not proving out brand
new science it's just building bigger facilities and spreading fixed
costs over bigger volumes.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
There is a broader lab grown meat. It's not really
an industry yet, but there are a few other companies
that have what is it two other companies that have
been approved to sell lab grown chicken in the US? Right?
How are they doing?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Is there some like more narrowly? Are they struggling with
the same thing you are? Is there a sense of like, oh,
maybe people don't want to buy lab grown meat, or
at least not yet.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I'm not sure. I don't have the best information about.
So the two other companies you're talking about are Upside
Foods and each just they're both but also in San Francisco.
Neither of them are selling their products and restaurants today,
though I can't really speak as to why that is.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
It's more I'm selling in Singapore or something. It is
one of these things.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
So there are two companies selling cultivated foods on planet
Earth today, okay. One is Wild Type, which is selling
salmon in four restaurants in four states today in the
United States. The other is a company called val which
is based in Australia and they make a cultivated quail
product that's available for people to try in Singapore and
Australia today and that's it. So there's all this noise,
(26:44):
but what it boils down to is just a couple
of companies selling products in about say ten restaurants around
the world. We're at the starting line, I would.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Say, yeah, Like, why is it so small?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
So first, there's a regulatory hurdle, which is really hard,
and as you said, you know, there's I think five
companies in the US that have cleared that hurdle. Then
there's the manufacturing side of things, right, So part of
the proceeds or use of proceeds for the amount of
money that we raised was to build this first of
its kind cultivated seafood facility in San Francisco. And it
(27:21):
wasn't a trivial amount of money, right that we spent
on that. And it's really hard to scale the stuff up. Yeah, so,
and I think that's part of the reason why very
few companies have actually just made it over the regulatory,
the scaling, and the technical hurdles to get something into
the market.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Today, I'm less hopeful than I was when we started talking.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Can ask why please, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Well maybe I I don't know why. It's just the vibe.
I feel like, I don't know how you're going to
get that money. How are you going to get that money?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
We'll figure it out. Look, I think no new industry,
no new technology, is easy. What we're trying to do
is ambitious and it's really freaking hard, and it is
not for the faint of heart, but it's important, right,
Like my six year old kids, I have twins, When
(28:13):
I hear them explain what my work is, they're like, hey,
my daddy grows fish, so we don't have to kill
the fish. Like they just get it and it's obvious.
Like I think most people when you ask them, like, hey,
what's the future of seafood, they're not going to tell you, Yeah,
let's just pull all the fish out and have no
more fish left in the sea. Like, there's this big
(28:33):
problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve
from a bunch of different angles. And you know, I
think it's important enough that it's going to get done,
and you know, one or two, maybe three companies will
get through this crunch. Right, But we're at a point
now as an industry where there were one hundred and
fifty I don't even know. I don't count them all,
but I've seen a number of cultivated food companies around
(28:53):
the world. Not all of those companies are going to
make it through. Maybe we won't. I am very helpful, however,
that we will, and very confident actually, because we're making
something that people want and that the planet needs for
us to continue to sustainably feed people's seafood. And so
that moment of doubt pessimism that you were feeling is
(29:18):
just kind of wired into mine and Aria's brain, right,
it comes and it goes. We've got down moments and
we've got high moments, and that's just kind of part
and parcel of doing something like this. It's hard.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Why do you feel so strongly that the world needs
cultivated salmon?
Speaker 2 (29:49):
I would suggest talk to a fisherman, particularly one who's
been fishing for more than thirty years, about what they've
seen with wild stocks. But they're going down right. And
you know, if you look at any data measurement in
terms of the health of wildfish stocks around the world,
it's not up and to the right. Many of them
are being fish at levels that are kind of pushing
(30:10):
them into endangered species. Right, if you listen or following
any of David Attenborough's work, any of his recent films,
I mean, he talks about the ocean. You know, there's
a real risk that will have an ocean full of
jellyfish in fifty years if we're not thoughtful.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And careful and nothing else.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, plastic and jellyfish, like yeah, and let's not forget
that our ocean store like ninety three or ninety four
percent of the planet's carbon in the soil and the
seagrass and other things.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
So I don't know about you, but I get pretty
nervous when I think about that delicate ecosystem being so
thoroughly disrupted. And if you think about the oceans like
this is like the worst prisoner's dilemma type of thing,
where you've got this common good and everybody out in
international waters is doing whatever they can to pull out
as much fish as possible, make as much money, and
(31:03):
not everybody's worrying about whether that's going to be sustainable.
So that's wild caught, and I think most people get
that there's a finite supply. There's only so an efficientcye
on the fish farming side. I think what's really underappreciated
is that a full third of all the aquaculture feed
comes from forage fish like anchovies and sardines, which are
well caught and are not infinite in supply, and there
(31:28):
are real limitations in terms of the number of fish
farms that you can put in a given area. And
that's why we're seeing the move toward on land aquaculture
systems and all these other things. So the confluence of
all of that. If you don't believe anything I said,
just go look at salmon prices in real terms versus
inflation over the last fifteen years and you'll see that
(31:50):
there isn't five times faster than inflation, which to me
tells me that we have a real supply problem.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Salmon getting more expensive is good for you, right, Like,
if you can make salmon cheaper, then salmon can make salmon.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You'll win, yes, but the planet loses, right, And I
think it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Well, it depends, I mean, it depends on how cheap
you can get it, right, Like, yeah, I don't mean
to be glib, but like, fundamentally, your price to beat
is the price of wild caught salmon. Right, just as
a business proposition, Like that's the sort of solar story, right,
as you said, like you want people who don't care
to buy your salmon just because it's cheaper, That's what
(32:34):
I want, Right, That's the true scale, because most people
don't care about any particular thing, it's just the nature
of the world. But they would rather buy cheaper salmon.
And I'm sure there's an argument that, like people don't
want cultivated salmon, but I don't buy that. Like if
you look at the garbage people buy, they plainly don't care, right,
And so I feel like cost is the game.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
All of this is, I guess, in principle good for us,
but I know myself and my team we kind of
think about it at a much broader scale, which is salmon,
whether we make it or it comes from a fish,
healthy thing that we should be eating more of, and
it's not good for society if it becomes less accessible.
That is why I've got this bur in my saddle
to scale up this process as quickly as we can,
(33:19):
and not just for the cost and profitability and all
that stuff we were just talking about, but just to
get it to more people and to give people a
more affordable choice.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
What's the salmon. Like, now, if I got the salmon
sushi at one of the four restaurants where it's would
I even know?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I think it depends. And we've actually tested this, So
we've done blind taste tests for consumer and we obviously
tell them that there's potentially cultivated. We're not trying to
fool anybody, but.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Sure, sure. Yeah. When I say what I even know,
I don't mean would they be fooling me? I mean,
would I be able to distinguish?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah? Yeah, And so what we what we've done is
we put like a piece of our locks, you know,
so like cured and smoked salmon on a little cracker,
like a water cracker, and a piece of Russen Daughters
from New York City, which is delicious the best. I agree,
that's our gold standard, you know, so master credit to
Russ and Daughters. And the answer is no, you know,
with like a pretty high degree of like statistical significance,
(34:14):
we don't see a distinction in liking.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Is raw salmon harder to make identical?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
It's hard, yeah, And so I think obviously in the
right chef hands, and you know, obviously in certain preparations,
it is indistinguishable, which is a huge, huge accomplishment. And
the cool thing about what we're doing is that it's
always improving.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I mean, what would you like to improve on? In
what ways would you like to make the salmon you're
making better for me?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
There are a couple of things. The first one I
think we've nailed in the latest recipe that we're going
to be releasing soon is the texture, just like a
really nice fibrous bite, you know, like when you're biting
like a nice cube of sashimi.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
It's part of what's great about salmon sushi, right, it's
the texture. It's like both firm but so smooth and
of all the fat.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Right, that's right, Yeah, And it's hard to nail. I
think we're getting pretty darn close.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
In what way is your current version that's out fall short.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
On the text? I'd say it's too homogeneous, Like you
don't get this sort of like like you know, like
when your teeth are like biting into like a good
piece of meat, you kind of feel like the fibers
ripping a bit at a time. Like with the current version,
I would say, we haven't you know, fully achieved that
the thing that we're about to really is does so
I'm really excited about that. And you know, and the
(35:29):
other thing is protein. So protein is a big part
of the reason people like to eat any kind of
meat or seafood, and we're a bit light there, and
so it's hard to make a product that is raw
with equivalent protein.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
It's not obvious to me that that would be the case, Like,
why is that?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Because raw fish is like eighty to eighty five percent water,
and so if you want to have twenty percent protein
in there, that means a lot of the protein needs
to be in the water.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
That's the and in a fish, that's just the way
it works.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, yeah, and it's contained in the cells, for example,
so most cells the water. Yeah, that's a dramatic simplification
of a quite complex problem. But it's been a challenge
and I'd say we've made some progress. But those are
the two things I would like to improve.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Let's talk about policy. When we were just getting the
mic set up today, you mentioned that you were had
a press conference this morning today talking about joining a lawsuit.
What's going on? Why were you on a press conference
this morning and what were you talking about?
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So Texas banned cultivated foods effective the first of September,
which which was really unfortunate because you know, we picked
Otoko because of the head chef is an incredible person,
he's an adventurous head chef.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And this is a restaurant in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah. Yeah, And it was literally like one of five
that we picked that we wanted to introduce our products
to the commercial market in. And this decision was made
way before this band was even like a thought in
the rancher's minds. But this band went into effect on
the first and so we had to stop selling at Otoko,
which is just really unfortunate. And this isn't the first
(37:13):
date in the Union that has banned cultivated foods, it's
I believe the seventh. And this is being driven one
hundred percent by economic protectionism, really by the cattle industry
who's afraid of competition.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
It does seem like an anti free market, like on
its face, right, an anti free market move.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It is like, let.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
People decide they want to eat cows and fish, they can, right, No,
it is proposed taking away that option.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
That's right, And given everything that we just discussed in
that moment of pessimism that you felt, yeah, I just
like they should have bigger things to worry about, right
than try to ban a.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Three little companies that can't even get alone to build
a factory.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah. Yeah, leave us alone, for God's sake. And I
think if most Americans heard about this, they would be
pretty annoyed that now the government's telling us what we
can and can't eat, And like, if you don't want
our food, don't eat it. That's fine, But that choice
should be people's choices. It should not be the choice
of state legislators who got a strategically timed campaign donation.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, so your fish is still at four restaurants around
the country.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Then, yeah, So luckily Yoshio Kai has a new restaurant
in Aspen, so we just moved it over there. So
we're still in four and we'll be announcing a fifth
one in the next couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
So what do you have to do to get wider?
What's your ramp from four to everywhere?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah? And maybe the question to ask before that is like,
why did we just start with five? When you're making
real things like what we're doing food, you don't go
from It's not like software where you just like write
a program and distribute to million people. You need to
ramp up manufacturing, hire people, supply chain all that stuff.
And so what we've been trying to do is go
from literally zero three months ago to shipping product every
(39:04):
week to three or four, soon to be five restaurants
around the country.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Well, so should I how is that going? Or like
are you getting the fish out the door? Is it
hard to like make the fish every week?
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It's some things have been harder than we expected. Like,
for example, we had we had like an ingredient provider
shift their ingredient pretty dramatically. That changed our formulation, so
we had to adjust that on the fly. So things
like that that are just kind of part of any
new products standing.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Up manufacturing in a way, it's like biomanufacturing, right, what
you're doing exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
And so from here we are absolutely open to starting
to ship to more restaurants as demand comes in, and
we have had quite a few restaurants reach out to
us and ask if they can start buying it.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
That's good and is the answer yes?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, the answer is yes, And we're just kind of
slotted into our production schedule. And again, we don't want
to have stock outs, right, That's the last thing you
want when you're introducing the new product, somebody shows up.
They went out of the way to try this product,
and it's like, sorry, we don't have it this day.
We didn't get our shipment yesterday.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
And then how much bigger can you get with your
current production facility.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
If everything is maxed out and we tack on a
little bit more capacity, which we can do. You know,
we can maybe get up to like fifty restaurants.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
And then you have this step function where you need
to get alone essentially to build a real industrial scale plant.
This is the ram question, Like fifty restaurants is great,
but it's not at all what you're going for. It's
like what does the magnitude from what you're going for?
So how do you keep going from there?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
So what I was describing is one path where we
just build our own facility. We do what we did,
but just bigger, and we've got to get that finance.
That's really hard, it's not a lot of appetite. There
are two other ways you can do this. One is
we can go to a contract manufacturer that makes cells
or fermented products and has spare capacity. So instead of
building it ourselves, huh, we just pay them a toll
(41:01):
and they make it for us, the cells or even
the finished product, and then we can expand our capacity.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And so that is not so capital intensive. You don't
have to have any huge upfront costs that you need
to take out a loan for.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
That's right, But it is slow and you can't innovate.
So if you're working with contract manufacturers, it's like pencils down.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Uh huh. This is the recipe, that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Yeah, And the reality is we're still learning, we're still
adjusting and going fast, which is why we haven't taken
that path today, but we might. The other option is,
and we're open to this, is there are companies that
can build facilities that have lots of cash and a
much lower cost capital than we do, and we'd be
happy to license our technology to them. Right, And so
(41:43):
that means the cell line and the feed and the
know how to make our products well.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
So like Cargil, the giant food company is actually an
investor in your company, right, is that the kind of
company I should be thinking of in this context? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Or giant seafood companies that are maxed out on their
fish farms, like we would absolutely be happy to partner
with them.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Uh huh. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
That the reality is we're trying to do a lot
of things at a little seventy some odd person company.
We can't do it all, and I think we just
try to be really clear out about that, and when
it comes to scaling and maximizing the impact and getting
this product in front of as many people as possible,
we try to be really open minded about the best
way to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Do you think you're going to try and make something
after salmon?
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yes, eventually we will, I think. But the companies that
really focused on doing one thing and one thing really
well tended to do better.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Who are you thinking of the impossible burger?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Right? They weren't trying to do like chicken shreds and
the nugget and sausage like all at once. They're like,
let's make a kick ass burger that tastes pretty good.
It's made from plants. And they did it, and I
like that product. They eat it a lot. No, it's
not for everybody, but a lot of people do it.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
No, our freezer is full of many impossible meats.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Hopefully that means you're not stockpilling, but you're actually eating them.
From time to time, not out yet waiting for the apocalypse.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
We don't have the big giant basement freezer. I don't
want that. It's just a regular freezer.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
But you know, they chose that path while a lot
of others were like, let's just make like ten different
things at once, right, And I think for us, focus
is powerful, and so for now it's salmon. But if
we start to get energy from potential customers like hey,
can you make us a blue crab or can you
make us lobsters scallop? Like, we would take that really
seriously and we've got the right technological know how to
(43:29):
do it.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
We're going to finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
So you were in the US Foreign Service in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Correct, Yes, What is one surprising thing that
happened to you there?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I was as a guest of honor with the governor,
served the head of a goat, and I had no
idea what to do with it.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Like they just put the w all head in front
of you and said you're welcome.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I wasn't sure if I was being hazed or honored
or both.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Huh, Well, did you watch the governor and follow his lead?
Speaker 2 (44:23):
No? Because it went to me.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
I felt very self conscious about that because you know,
I was about twenty years younger than the governor. It
certainly didn't feel like I should have. Sure, I represented
the United States government, but I was also thirty years old.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
So is the governor of the province that you were in. Yeah,
So what did you do?
Speaker 2 (44:41):
I did the best I could. I like keeled back
at jowl and went for it. Didn't taste How was it? No?
It wasn't good. There's some whiskers in there.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
This is this is.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Not even saying like I think it might have been hazing,
because there were plenty of other parts of that goat
that were delicious.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
What's something you missed from that part of the world.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
I missed the food, and I miss the culture of hospitality,
which I think, unfortunately kind of got lost. A guest
is sacred to a lot of the push people, and
there's nothing you essentially wouldn't do for a guest, even
though he or she might be your putative enemy.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
How did you experience that in practice? What's an example
of that? From your experience?
Speaker 2 (45:22):
There were people who I knew were active Taliban fighters
who welcomed me into their home and introduced me to
their relatives because that's what the customs demanded, even though
you know, later that night they were probably laying IED's
blown up my friends. So yeah, it was things like that.
And by the way, it was not like duplicitous. They
(45:46):
were genuinely trying to extend hospitality.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Were you a spy?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
I was not.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
I mean, you would say that in any case. But
I had to ask, what's one thing you've learned as
a diplomat that is helpful to you running your company?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Thinking before you speak?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Very good answer. I'm still working on that one.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
You know. I didn't say anything.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, just not speaking. I've learned just not speaking and
not speaking is a great move, Like you don't have
to respond.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
It turns out that's one of the most powerful things
you can do as a parent when you're challenged. It's
just not say anything.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Yes, you weren't a scientist when you got into this business.
What's one great thing, interesting thing, favorite thing that you've
learned about cells in your work.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Cells are the most miniaturized, incredibly powerful versions of us,
and they have so much potential right. I think when
we all go through biology classes we learn that cells
are the building blocks of life, but like no shit,
they actually are and see and seeing it, seeing it
(47:00):
happen and assemble into things that become tissues and organs
is incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Justin Kolbeck is the co founder and CEO of Wild Type.
Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bricguherrett.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
(47:35):
another episode of What's Your Problem.
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