S5. E22: Uma Valeti: The Man Who Will Change the World
“I was doing really well in cardiology. I loved my role. I loved the work I was doing. I'd say except for two or three people, everybody said, ‘this is crazy, why are you giving up a career that is on an upward trajectory and that you're doing really well in?’
“The two or three people who heard me, they said, ‘Uma don't look back. If you have even a fraction of the impact of what you're thinking of having, that'll be a million-fold more impactful than what you could do as a cardiologist for the next 30 years in practice.’ Essentially, even if I had continued in practice for the next 30 years I would have probably saved about two or three thousand lives.
“But if the innovation that we're working on becomes mainstream or even a fraction of mainstream, we're literally talking about trillions of animal lives, but also billions of human lives…”
- Uma Valeti
Uma Valeti is a cardiologist, entrepreneur, and the CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats, the world’s leading clean meat company - meaning they produce meat directly from animal cells. There is no slaughter involved.
Uma’s mission is to feed the world’s growing population with meat that is delicious, affordable, and sustainable. Memphis Meats has already pioneered the world’s first multi-species, cell-based meat platform and made history by unveiling chicken, duck, and beef grown directly from animal cells.
I think it’s the most exciting thing to happen on the planet in my lifetime.
Uma is quite possibly going to go down in history as the man who changed the way the world eats forever. As soon as cell-based meat is regulated, scaled, and available in restaurants and grocery stores (which is coming sooner than you think), the demand to slaughter billions of animals year after year will diminish and at some point, it will be gone forever.
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Transcript:
Uma: [00:00:00] I was doing really well in cardiology, I love my role, I love the workers. I'd say, except for two or three people, everybody said, this is crazy. Why are you giving up a career that is on an upward trajectory and that you're doing really well? The two or three people who heard me said, Oh no , don't look back. If you have even a fraction of the impact of what you are thinking of having, that will be a million fold more impactful than what you could do as a cardiologist for the next 30 years in practice. You know, essentially even if I continue in practice for the next 30 years, I would have probably saved about two or three thousand lives. But if the innovation that we're working on becomes mainstream or even a fraction of mainstream, we're literally talking about, you know, trillions of animal lives, but also billions of human lives that could have a much more much stronger impact.
Elizabeth: [00:01:03] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Uma Valeti. Uma is a cardiologist and entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats. Memphis Meats is the world's leading clean meat company, meaning they produce meat directly from animal cells. There is no slaughter involved.
Uma: [00:01:58] Hey, Beth.
Elizabeth: [00:01:59] Hi, how are you?
Uma: [00:02:00] Very good. It’s finally good to get to see you here.
Elizabeth: [00:02:02] It's nice to see you. I'm really excited to have you. I think with what you're doing, it's always good timing. But with Bill Gates coming out saying this week that all rich countries should move to 100 percent synthetic beef. Everyone's talking about it.
Uma: [00:02:20] He has really opened up the conversation and says why it's important to start doing the shift now because it's going to take a while. With the timelines and all the things we're looking at with the work we're doing, it fits so perfectly.
Elizabeth: [00:02:34] Well and it feels like, for me at least, because I'm in a bubble for sure, talking to so many vegans and people doing future food that I feel like everybody knows about this. But most people I know that aren't in these worlds, it's pretty new. If they've heard of it at all, they know very little. So it feels like all of a sudden, people who are not in this space, their brain space has come in.
Uma: [00:03:00] That’s right, yeah. I'm sure that by the time the podcast comes out, there will be a number of people that will be saying, Where should I look for answers on this? Is it a good time to get it out?
Elizabeth: [00:03:10] Yeah, it's awesome. So of course, I want to talk about everything that you've done that you're doing with Memphis meats, but I want to start and go way back and talk about you and kind of the timeline and how this became your life. Can we go back to India and maybe even start with your grandfather?
Uma: [00:03:33] Certainly, yes. I grew up in South India, in a city called Vijayawada, and it's in a state called Andhra Pradesh. My grandfather was a physician and he was also in the freedom fighters for India in the nineteen forties to late forties. He was very much a follower of the Gandhian movement. He used to spin his own clothes and just wear them because he just wanted to be self-sufficient. So I took a number of walks with him, and was very close to my grandfather. I think, you know, being a physician, he treated everyone for free. So there were a number of people that used to come to my grandfather's house. I grew up for the first four years with my grandfather because my mom was getting her master's in physics. I just fondly remember a number of patients coming to him for free medical care. Then he used to talk about the freedom fighters he was in. It was a pretty big influence on me.
Elizabeth: [00:04:31] Amazing. Yeah. And then your father was a veterinarian?
Uma: [00:04:35] That's correct. Yes. My father was a veterinarian. He was the youngest of five boys. He grew up in a farming family. They had land and they had cows, and he was the first among those five to get a graduate degree. He became a veterinarian. My mom and he got married when they were pretty young. My mom was 18, he was 23, and they supported each other through college and post-graduation and then built their life. So my dad was, I'd say, the one who taught me that happiness comes from inside. He just made everybody in the room feel really good about themselves. I just lost him recently, a few months ago to COVID. Both my mom and dad were going to come and visit me in Berkeley, but decided that it would be safer to be in India because of the surge of cases here. Unfortunately, my mom initially got symptoms and she recovered pretty quickly and my dad did not. That was a tough time. I had to go back, I was in the ICU with him for the last several days. It was just an incredible feeling of helplessness, not being able to do anything. Here I am seeing this person who lived their life with happiness and someone who, you know, I don't remember a single moment in my life where he made me feel bad as a son.
Elizabeth: [00:05:50] Wow, I'm so sorry.
Uma: [00:05:52] Yeah. So it was a tough loss. But look, you know, he was very proud of the work we were doing. Like, he's heard me talking about this since I was a kid. You know, how can we make me come to the table in a way that's much better? He was incredibly proud. He was able to come and spend a little bit of time with some of our team members in the early days, and he was going to come back and throw the pilot plant we were building this year.
Elizabeth: [00:06:15] So when you were growing up and your father was a veterinarian, was there a connection between I mean, clearly he was helping animals, but did it affect you in the sense of caring about animals?
Uma: [00:06:27] You know, I have to imagine because I used to go to the hospital with him and I used to hang out outside. He was a large animal veterinarian, so there were a lot of cattle and sheep he used to take care of. But there were also, you know, household pets that used to come to him. I remember going to the village many times and he was mostly with cows. He was in the department where they were taking care of dairy cattle. So I grew up around animals, my family and the village had animals, so I think there was a pretty close connection to how humans are connected to animals and how there was this cycle of dependence. I grew up in a mediating family, but somewhere around, like when I was 12, I went to a birthday party of my friends who was adjacent to our house. That's kind of where I started realizing how meat comes to the table. I didn't really quite know, but that kicked off a number of things in my life since then.
Elizabeth: [00:07:23] What happened at this birthday party?
Uma: [00:07:25] This birthday party, I was, I think, about 12 years old. There was a lot of fun and music and dancing in front of the house, and there was a lot of food, of course. I walked to the back of the house and that's where they were slaughtering the animals to cook, to feed the people on the front. To me, it was a real stark thing I couldn't hold in my head. The birthday, incredible joy in the front and then the incredible sorrow or suffering in the back and just holding them both together. Saying we could be capable of incredible joy at the same time, of course, that's being supported by something that would be very hard for a child to think through. I don't know what to think about it. I kept eating meat for many years after that, but that became one of those defining moments where that unrest got seared in my head that I love eating meat, but I wish there was a better way of getting it to the table.
Elizabeth: [00:08:16] The seed was planted back then. Then when did you stop eating meat?
Uma: [00:08:21] In medical school. So I went to medical school in that school called Jaipur. It's an all Indian Medical School in South India, where they took about two to three kids from each state. So there were about 25 states in India. It was an autonomous medical school, so the student body ran their own cafeteria. I was in charge of running the cafeteria for about four months with two of my friends, and I was in charge of writing the menu and going to the market along with our chefs to shop for pizza for about 400 kids. That's when I saw a large-scale slaughter. You know, I was writing all these menus which had, you know, tandoori chicken, chicken tikka masala, chicken fried rice and fish cutlets, you know, beef biryani. All of these were on the menu putting it up, and it became one of the most popular for months on campus because we really revamped the whole menu. But when I saw how it was coming to the table, I distinctly remember sitting with one of my friends and eating chicken drumsticks because there were quite a few of them and we were just eating them. I just saw the dichotomy in my head. I'm like, OK, I'm going to stop. So I stopped during medical school, but always loved the taste of meat and that kind of led to the next chapter.
Elizabeth: [00:09:39] So you've finished medical school and you're like the number one student in the country?
Uma: [00:09:45] Yeah, I was ranked number one for the postgraduate exam and I was looking forward to going into cardiology, but I've always wanted to do cardiology or cardiac surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. So I decided not to take the position in India and apply for a visa to come to the U.S. because I'd gotten interviews at approximately 15 or 20 programs in the U.S., and Mayo was one of them. I went to the U.S. consulate in Chennai to get my visa and my visa got rejected. So that started a different turn in my life.
Elizabeth: [00:10:22] That's just unbelievable that your visa was rejected.
Uma: [00:10:25] Yeah, it's one of those moments where you have no idea why the visa gets rejected because I remember standing in the line at the consulate at 3:00 in the morning and finally they opened the gates at 7:00. You go in with your papers, you go in with your passport and you literally have five seconds or 10 seconds in front of the concert officer. I recall that either they had a green stamp or red stamp and then the officer, the lady who was interviewing me, just looked at my papers, just looked at me. There were no questions. The just the red stamp went up and I got the reject on my passport or my visa application,
Elizabeth: [00:11:01] And no one explains.
Uma: [00:11:04] There isn't time for it. There's so many people that have to get through. So I desperately wanted to know what I could do differently, but there was no time to ask a question. I played again. I waited a week and said, that must be a mistake. There was something that didn't go right in the paperwork, so I reapplied and got rejected again. Back then, if you applied a certain number of times, you could not reapply for either five years or so there was a rule like that. So I thought, OK, that was the end of my dreams of starting at Mayo. So I decided to come to Jamaica and the West Indies.
Elizabeth: [00:11:37] Why Jamaica?
Uma: [00:11:38] No, no idea actually. You know, my parents were really supportive of me. I heard through a friend who said, Hey, why don't you go to Jamaica? They have the British system of medicine, and maybe you can go and do work there, understand how medicine is practiced in the West, and you might go to the UK and do RCOS, which is a fellow of Royal College of Surgeons. So I said, OK, well, I'll buy a one way ticket and go to Jamaica and see if I can get a job there. So I bought a ticket, well my parents bought me a ticket and they gave me things like $100 and said, OK, why don't you go try it? That started off another journey in my life. I went to Jamaica, didn't have anyone I knew there and there was a gentleman who was really kind to me and he came to pick me up at the airport. He let me stay in his place for a month, and I went to the Ministry of Health in Jamaica every day to apply for a job and finally got a job at Kingston Public Hospital.
Elizabeth: [00:12:36] Awesome.
Uma: [00:12:37] So that started off my work in neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, ophthalmology, medicine. I worked as a registrar or a house officer for approximately a year, and that became one of the most important times as I met my wife there. She was an anesthesia intern and I was doing pre-op work on neurosurgery patients that had had head injuries and that's kind of where we met.
Elizabeth: [00:13:01] So did you say to yourself, Oh, this is why my visa kept getting rejected?
Uma: [00:13:05] Yes. I mean, honestly, looking back, I was so devastated. I was so down when the consular officer in the U.S. in India rejected my application, and I still distinctly remember her face. I used to literally feel like, why did she reject that application? And I didn't have an answer. But looking back, I am so grateful for her. If that rejection did not happen and I just went, I would not have met my wife.
Elizabeth: [00:13:34] Yeah. So, yeah, is it a blessing or a curse, right? And often the biggest curse has turned out to be our biggest blessings.
Uma: [00:13:40] I think that's right. Yeah. So it was very clear. I mean, that moment is one of the most important moments in my life. That rejection set off a very different path. After meeting my wife, we decided to train in the U.S. together, and my visa got rejected a couple more times. But eventually I did get my visa from Jamaica to come to the US and train
Elizabeth: [00:14:24] At the Mayo Clinic.
Uma: [00:13:40] Yes, I started off initially in Detroit and subsequently went to Buffalo, New York for my internal medicine training, then went to the Mayo Clinic for cardiology, which is what I always wanted to do. That took us to Minnesota and my wife, she's an ophthalmologist, and she did pediatric ophthalmology training in Minnesota as well at the University of Minnesota, and I did my training in cardiology and interventional cardiology and advanced imaging at the Mayo Clinic.
Elizabeth: [00:14:24] How long are you at the Mayo Clinic?
Uma: [00:14:26] Approximately five years. A long training program, Cardiology by itself was four years and interventional cardiology is a year. So, and during that time, I also did something called advanced cardiovascular imaging, which is imaging the heart without opening it through using MRI and CT. That was very new back then, and I specifically went to Mayo because I wanted to train in that, as well as in angioplasty and stents and treating patients with really critical cardiac arrest. That kicked off another cycle in my life.
Elizabeth: [00:15:00] Will you tell that story?
Uma: [00:15:01] Oh, sure. Yeah. Keep in mind, by that time, I had stopped eating meat. It's been during my medical school, my residency and my fellowship, almost coming to about seven or eight years. It was still in the back of my mind. I would say, Well, wouldn't it be great to be able to, you know, to eat this dish? But I got really into advanced cardiac imaging and interventional cardiology, and so we were treating patients with heart attacks. I started learning how to image the heart by looking for scars in the heart and infarction or heart attacks, and really understanding what part of the heart muscle was saved and what part was dead. Later on, in my practice, after I left Mayo, I got involved in a clinical study that was injecting stem cells into patients' hearts. Stem cells are these really powerful cells that are in our body that can grow into any part, any type of cell. We were injecting these stem cells into patients' hearts when they had a heart attack specifically to regrow the heart muscle so we could make the heart stronger.
Elizabeth: [00:15:54] What were the stem cells supposed to be doing exactly for the heart?
Uma: [00:15:58] Yeah, those are stem cells that you take from that same patient who had a heart attack and you would take them, you'll separate them and purify them and re-inject them into the heart of the patient through a small artery. Those are expected to then grow into the area where the heart was damaged and regrow the heart muscle there. So that's kind of where the idea really came from, whilst I am injecting the cells into one of the patient sites. That's kind of where the idea came from, could you grow food from cells? And if so, how would that be? It was like a one way street. It just went into my head and I just could not get that idea out of my head. I'm like, what if we could just grow food from cells? Wouldn't that really be great? Because then you could do that for nearly any species. You can do that for cows, chickens and pigs. I started really deeply studying all of that and quickly recognized that the field was growing rapidly in medicine for regenerative medicine or organ transplants. People had been talking about, you know, using these cells to grow meat for like decades, but no one was really doing it beyond the realms of small university demonstrations or projects. So initially, I wasn't thinking of doing anything about it except reading a lot about it, and then I started encouraging people to go into that field and of course, it was very risky because it was never done before. But after talking to a number of people, including scientists from the Netherlands, to do this, it became clear to me that people were very comfortable with the roles that they've already been in because, you know, they are well set as professors. They are well set as industry leaders in other areas in medicine or pharma. But no one was willing to take this leap. So, you know, I've been talking about this for close to 10 years with my wife and kids, then came back one day and I was talking about this again and they said, Dad, you've been talking about this for so long. Why are you not doing it? That was the other defining moment in my life. So that was really great. So I decided, OK, why don't I do this? I'm going to start a basic science lab. Initially just kicked off a basic science lab, interviewed a number of PhDs and post-doctoral students to join me in the lab. I got funding for it and hired my co-founder, Nick, who started in my lab as a research associate. After seeing the work in academia and where I would see that path in the next 5, 10 years, it became very clear to me that this should not be in academia. Because while it's important to just do the fundamental breakthroughs in science in order to translate it into the benefit and the impact I was hoping for in the world, it should live in the real world. I started looking at if there is actually an opportunity in the industry building site, keep in mind, Minnesota is the backyard for Cargill, Hormel, General Mills and a lot of other, you know, really well-known food companies. It became clear to me that meat was one of the largest markets in the world. Meat, poultry and seafood is somewhere between two to $3 billion of sales every year, and that was going to double by 2050. To me, it became very clear that in the history of humanity, there's never been innovation that brought meat to the table, without having to raise an animal. I'm like, look, this is one of the largest economic opportunities available for any business or industry. Therefore, that was a big check to show opportunity for people who, you know, want to build sustainable businesses that can thrive for decades or centuries. The second thing is, I started looking at the impact of raising the number of animals we raise to feed the humans. Then, of course, I had no idea of the numbers, but once I started looking at it, it became abundantly clear that it was like staring in our faces. It's an unsustainable equation where we are raising 70 billion animals to feed approximately seven billion people. But with incomes rising in the rest of the world, as well as the knowledge that once someone has some disposable income, the first thing they spend that on is buying meat. The fact that by the time we get to 10 billion people, the demand of 70 billion animals will need to be doubled to 150 billion animals. When I looked at the cost of resources, the cost environment, the greenhouse gasses, the implications for water and water pollution and water demand. There wasn't going to be anything left for humans, and that's when we started learning a lot about climate change. All of these things started coming together, and there was this other big check point that, OK, this is going to be incredibly useful for the planet if we want to preserve the choice of eating meat. In the back of my mind, I always thought, Look, we don't have to have meat absolutely to be able to say we can survive. But looking at the history of ten thousand years of human evolution as humans, we've always eaten meat and it's continued to be a part of the diet that for nearly the last couple of hundred years has been the center of the plate. Prior to that, it was the most desired part of a diet of humans, but it was not available as much. Knowing that once people are well-calibrated meat eaters, asking them to give up the choice of eating meat, I thought was not tenable. But it was also proven in my own practice of how powerful the impact of choices on humans, even when their life is at stake. I had a number of patients that came in with cardiac arrest dead on the field that I resuscitated, you know, opened up their arteries and put stents in all their arteries. I would say, look, this is a second life. This is a second lease on life. I would like you to quit smoking. I would like you to have a diet that is much more balanced, and I'd like you to think about taking the medicine that keeps a stance open. I'd say about 20 to 30 percent of the people within a few months would go back to their old habits, even when their life was at stake. So I just thought, look, the power of choice is incredibly important for humans as we grow and asking people to give up eating meat and go into a meat alternative or a meat substitute in my mind wasn't going to work and it was not a risk I thought we should be taken as a population. I saw the plant based proteins and other options that were coming up and while I love the mission of it and I think that they are going to have a really important role in reducing our footprint, 9 out of 10 people in the world love eating meat. If we offer them the choice of being able to continue to eat meat but not have the incredible impact on the planet, on animal welfare and have an opportunity to actually improve their health and make meat better. I thought that was one of the most, strongest, you know, propositions for us in the world and decided that it's time for me to quit cardiology. So I wrote this idea along with my co-founder to one venture capitalist in San Francisco and it's called S.O.S Ventures, and they immediately loved the idea. Within an hour of sending the note they were on the phone. I remember talking to Ryan Bethancourt and Arvind, who immediately said, you know, we want you to move the company here.
Elizabeth: [00:23:06] Then when you quit your job at the Mayo Clinic and you moved your family outside of what you know, they've been there for years now were people. How did people around you react to go basically create this whole new food system, right? What do people say?
Uma: [00:23:25] I was doing really well in cardiology. I love my role. I love the work I was doing, I'd say, except for two or three people. Everybody said, like, this is crazy. Why are you giving up a career that is on an upward trajectory and that you're doing really well in? They said, you know, the two or three people who heard me, they said, oh my, don't look back. If you have even a fraction of the impact of what you are thinking of having, that will be a million fold more impactful than what you could do as a cardiologist for the next 30 years in practice. Essentially, even if I continue in practice for the next 30 years, I would have probably saved about two or three thousand lives. But if the innovation that we're working on, you know, became mainstream or even a fraction of the mainstream, we're literally talking about trillions of animal lives, but also billions of human lives that could have a much stronger impact. I just couldn't pass that up. So I'd say nine hundred and ninety nine thousand people said no, but I think one or two of them said, yes, let's you know, you should not look back. The idea was very simple, right? We were going to take cells from animals and grow meat directly from it, and we had to prove how it was done. That's really what the company was founded on. So that started our journey. It was the founding of Memphis Meats, became the first company in the space and that kicked off an industry. In 2015, there was not a single company in the space. We were the first one. We demonstrated how to make beef by showing a beef meatball that was released in January 2016. We had closed our seed round of financing. When we were cooking the meatball, I distinctly remember this time when we were describing the excitement of making the meatball and I'm like, can we redo that shot again? Because what if this thing goes viral? The person who was filming it laughed at me, said, Uma, this is not going to go viral. Don’t worry about it.
Elizabeth: [00:25:26] Was the meatball the first meat that you'd actually created?
Uma: [00:25:33] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:25:35] So that was like an astronomical moment, right? Hhow did that feel?
Uma: [00:25:38] Yeah. I mean, look, when you when people say that blew my mind, that's not a metaphor. It's literally that's what happened because I remember before the meatball we had preparation for it. We had done tastings we had done just among the team that was working. We did like a fajita, we did a mini meatball. The moment that you put it in your mouth and it touched the palate and you chewed it, it became abundantly clear that this is meat without a question because we'd all tasted meat before, everybody on the team knew what meat tasted like. We're all tasted every meat alternative available in the market, but just taking a small bite of it made it clear, OK, there is like, this is a line in the sand. There is no doubt that this is meat and people need to experience it to believe it. So that was like the moment, and it was also a moment where we're incredibly proud and also, at the same time, a big relief because like we didn't know, we knew fundamentally the principles made sense, but we just didn't know how ultimately it would taste. That's the human experience, the taste and the aromas. When it was cooking, it was distinctly clear that even if you're in the adjacent room, meat was being cooked in the grill and just the fact that, yes, this could happen now we have proven it. We knew there were lots of hurdles ahead of us, but the first thing was checked off.
Elizabeth: [00:27:01] What a moment. So for people who don't know or haven't heard of this, will you just explain how you did this?
Uma: [00:27:08] Absolutely. I think that's one of the most important things we have to let people know. Number one we are preserving the choice of eating meat, it's the same meat that we've been eating or poultry or seafood. So what we do is we take cells, high quality cells from animals that are already destined for the food system. So let's say if there's an animal being raised to be slaughtered, to go to the grocery or go to restaurants, we ask to give a small amount of cells like maybe just a small pinch, maybe one or two millimeters square. So really like the size of a rice grain, we'll take that and that's called a biopsy, and we don't need the animal to be slaughtered for it. All we need is a small amount of tissue and from that there are tens of millions of cells and we look at these cells and identify the ones that can continue to grow and continue to become muscle, become fat, become connective tissue. We store these cells because these are cells that are able to keep renewing themselves in the right conditions for a long enough time to make a lot of meat. That's called selecting the right breed of cells. So we did that for cows, we did that for chickens, we did that for pigs, we did that for other animals. Once we have those cells, you basically take those brain cells and you store them and you can store them for a very long time. You can store them for months to years to decades. When you want to grow them into meat, then you take those cells and you put them in a very clean environment. What we call cultivators, so we're cultivating meat, so we put them in a cultivator and then we feed them with nutrients and you know, cells in an animal are getting the nutrients from blood and the blood's bringing them oxygen. It's bringing them proteins, which are amino acids. It's bringing them fats or fatty acids, it’s bringing them sugars and it's bringing them oxygen. So we basically have just like a solution, which is very similar to circulating blood in an animal. We call this the feed. It's similar to animals eating feed. Ourselves also need to eat, so this feed just has a mix of water, it has oxygen, it has vitamins, it has minerals, it has amino acids, it has sugars and it has the growth factors that let cells grow. That's what is circulating an animal. So we put them together and in the cultivator. These cells initially are loosely floating around and then as they start growing, they start multiplying. One becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight and so on. As I start doing that, they also start becoming attached to each other and starting to form tissues. That's really what happens in an animal because the animal is growing, the cells are attaching to each other, forming tissues. We see that happening in front of us. We wait anywhere between two to six weeks and harvest the meat at the end of it. When I say harvest, it is essentially we take all the feed away and what is left is the meat. That meat is then, you know, it looks like what you'd expect meat to look like, raw meat. Then we package them or freeze them if you want to put them in a freezer or you can immediately cook it, or you can package it and cook it later, so that's essentially the cycle.
Elizabeth: [00:30:26] Other than the meatball, what have you made? What other meats have you created?
Uma: [00:30:30] Yeah, we've actually shown all of these in the public setting. So we've done a meatball with beef carousels and we've shown chicken. We've done multiple varieties of chicken, we've done southern fried chicken, we've done chicken breast, we've done chicken tenders, we've done them on a grill, we've done them just really directly in various dishes like Asian dishes or Indian dishes. Anyone who tasted it immediately felt like, this is the most tender chicken or this the most delicious chicken that we've had. We've done that with ducks. We've done duck skewers. Some of the chefs who came were from Cargill, and they were doing a blind testing with us. One of them said, this is one of the best ducks I've eaten in the world and believe us, we know we know duck really well. We've had other people that were in the meat business for a very long time, and one of the most telling moments was there was this lady who came in whose family was in one of the largest meat businesses in the world. She came and she tasted a duck that we served, and she said, oh my, this duck is better than the duck I shot yesterday. She was an avid hunter. And I'm like, Wow, you know what better compliment can we get as a team and we're trying to grow meat and saying we want to preserve the human choice of being able to eat meat, but do it in a way without having to raise animals or slaughter animals. So those were like defining moments for our team that gave them confidence. Since then, we haven't looked back. In 2015, we were the only company in the space. From the founding of the company we are also very clear that in order for this idea to grow and for this to cause real change in the world, there has to be an ecosystem. There has to be a number of people that need to get excited about it. We started working with a number of other groups, like nonprofit groups. We've started working with New Harvest, we started working with the Good Food Institute. We started working with a number of other startups that were coming up in this field. I remember talking to probably the founders of the first 20 companies in this field to talk about why this is important and how to get the right message out to people so that people were not in stealth mode.
Uma: [00:32:42] We kick that off and say, look, this is not an innovation that should live in the stealth mode, and you suddenly spring it on people and say, Hey, here it is. That people have to talk about it, they would understand how it's made and the why behind how important this innovation is and ask the questions. There will be skeptics, there will be people who won't like it, but we had to answer the question. So that's the reason why at Memphis Meats, we've always shown our products in the public domain. We've invited independent journalists. We started sharing this with regulatory agencies in the U.S. and outside the world. We started talking about this with academia. We started talking about this with governments. We started talking about this with other companies, as well as industry incumbents like Tyson, Cargill and a number of other meat companies. Just so they're aware that meat can be brought to the table in a very, very different way. But with the same product, a very relatable product, but a process that could be much more scalable as we look at the demand coming up. I think that was a really bold move on our part at that point.
Elizabeth: [00:33:40] Yeah, to bring all these people in and are the industry like Cargill, Tyson, are they on board?
Uma: [00:33:47] Absolutely, yes. I mean, look, I think industry including Tyson, Cargill and a number of other companies in the space small, medium or large are recognizing the importance of being able to produce meat in a way that their customers also start feeling great about and start relating to and not feel like, you know, as there's increases in meat shortages, meat will have to be rationed or they'll have to depend on intense factory farming or production techniques that have become a necessity because of the demand that meat has had. You know, I think these companies have a few choices. One is to continue to do intense animal farming, which you know, has its incredible downsides, right? There are upsides also, you're feeding a lot of people who are asking for meat. But the downsides are intense pressures of resources concentrated in waterways being polluted. It also causes the risk of pandemics. It causes the risk of zoonotic diseases, right? This is well, well known. It's been proven over and over. When you have a lot of people or animals in a setting, disease spreads much faster. Unfortunately, COVID 19 is hopefully going to have an impact on us and how we plan for a scalable food system going forward. It's one of the most critical things that we were not prepared for adequately. Our food system has been fantastic in feeding a number of people in the safest way possible, but it's clearly, at a breaking point, the experience from COVID 19 also has shown us that we need to keep innovating much more rapidly, and all the meat companies are looking at this and paying attention. To give them credit they've also started paying attention to it before COVID 19 hit. Both Tyson and Cargill are pretty significant investors in the space. They're investors in Memphis Meats. I talked about getting support from a variety of people because meat is so relatable and it is a central place for nearly every culture in the world. We wanted to build our team that had mediators that had vegetarians, that had vegans, but we also wanted to have investors that represent a very wide diversity of interests. We have financial investors that really care about the economic opportunity and building big businesses that are sustainable. So we have some of the top financial investors in the world starting off with Atomico, SoftBank, Temasek, Norwest. We have impact investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk, and we have industry incumbents like Cargill, Tyson and we have people that care deeply about animal welfare. So we have a group called New Crop Capital, and all of these have come under a big tent for the first time ever that all these companies are investing together in an idea and that's never happened before. That's also something that Memphis Meats has pioneered and we call this the big ten philosophy where we want to have a number of people, we feel like this could be the solution that can all get behind. Since 2015 looking forwards, there are like 80 companies in the space now, and soon to be 100 companies in every continent in the world except Antarctica. That was a movement that was kicked off by our team. Memphis Meats seated that and there's regulatory approvals happening in the world because of it. There's governments investing and offering research dollars for scientists. There's academic training programs that have been kicked off because of this. Clearly, the meat industry investing in this, there's like an enormous amount of interest that is picking up and being at the center of it and leading that, our team has recognized that we're pioneering something. As we learn, as we grow, as we share it with the world, there will be tough moments because there are still challenges ahead of us in order to be able to produce this kind of meat at the level that we're looking for in scale and at the cost, we need to bring it to the market. There are some incredible challenges ahead of us, but just seeing these barriers were, I'd say, 100 times higher five years ago. But as we start lowering them, we are starting to just be able to peek across the wall and say, this is how this could be in the coming years, and I'm more excited now.
Elizabeth: [00:37:59] It's the future. I mean, you're totally changing the future. The whole planet is going to change. When you say that there's still a lot of challenges, what kind of challenges do you mean?
Uma: [00:38:08] Yeah. So a couple of challenges to think of. One is when we, you know, there are 750 billion pounds of meat that's produced in the world right now for the current demand. Imagine that doubling right. So for us to produce a million pounds of meat. It's a very large amount, but it's just a drop in the ocean. So the challenges ahead remain. How could we scale production up so that we can start the enormous demand that's even hard to fathom? The second one is to be able to produce that at a price that is in the range of like what current conventional meat prices are is an important challenge. Both of them are challenges that can be overcome because we started building industrial production systems. That's what our pilot plant is going to demonstrate how to produce meat at scale and that will become the footprint or the blueprint on which much larger commercial facilities can be built and what our goal is to show this as a blueprint to say, OK, let's say this is going to produce a thousand pounds. The next one can produce a million pounds, but the principles are the same. That's really what this technological innovation is. If we build a production facility that can produce million pounds or 10 million pounds, then you start thinking about how could you put that in various zip codes where the meat demand is the highest and start making it for that geography so that the resources for that come from that area and the distribution is from that area because there is not the need for transporting animals back and forth across borders and only using 30, 40 percent of the animal or 50 percent of the animal for meat. We start reducing the wastage that comes in there. We also started improving resource efficiency. We start decreasing energy requirements to make meat. All of these can be done and will be done for people to recognize they're not giving up what they love, but they're moving to a production system that can be scalable without the impact on the planet in the next decades to come. It's a human switch. It's a scale switch. It's a cost, economics and supply chain switch that needs to happen. Those are the challenges.
Elizabeth: [00:40:11] Right and they are big, huge challenges. But at the same time, it feels like it's not a challenge that you can't overcome. It's just step by step. Then the more you, the more you grow, the more you can do.
Uma: [00:40:24] Absolutely. And the more we see, the more we know, the more we grow, the more we can keep growing. I think it's very clear these are steps that are like, these are things that will happen and should happen, and there's no technological barrier for them to happen, which makes me more excited about the next ten years
Elizabeth: [00:40:40] For the skeptics. A couple of the comments I get often are, how is it healthy?
Uma: [00:40:46] Yeah. So one of the things that is very easy to comprehend here is because it's the meat that we're growing from animal cells. It is animal based meat, right? Because this is the meat experience that we all know as meat for the last thousand plus years. It is animal based meat. The way it's grown is in a clean environment and a controlled environment. So generally, when we look at studies from, let's say, Consumer Reports or any article that's looking at the amount of contamination in meat, that's whether it's in a grocery store or whether it's being, you know, samples that are being randomly checked, 60 to 70 percent of the samples do have some level of bacterial contamination, in conventional meat. That's because of the process. That's because during the time of slaughter, either bacteria from the skin or from the gut could get introduced. Once they are introduced, it's really hard to ask the animal to be clean and not have guts in it. So that's always going to be a part. That's a challenge for conventional meat, whereas in cultured meat, we are growing these animal cells in clean environments. After doing a number of studies showing that the risk of contamination is lowered very significantly to us, that's one of the biggest advantages of this being better for us. Then the second thing I talk about is, you know, it's only a matter of time before these meats are made to be much better for people that have heart disease, chronic disease, diabetes or hypertension, or decreasing the risk of inflammation based on the markers that you can look at in meat that would reduce that. I think the opportunity to make meat better is, I'd say, multiple magnitudes higher in cultured meat than in a traditional animal based meat because it takes about seven years to breed a trade into an animal or to selectively breed a train into an animal. Seven years is too long because there's so many things that you can select for when you're just directly looking at cells because you're looking at millions and millions of cells, and we can look and select for the traits in a matter of days to weeks versus seven years for just one trade. There's a number of things that can be done to make meat better. So that's why I am very optimistic that from a health perspective, better for humans, better for the planet, better for the animals, cultured meat is going to just rewrite the story.
Elizabeth: [00:43:04] Absolutely. When would I be able to order this in a restaurant?
Uma: [00:43:07] I have my fingers crossed. We are very close to this because we are working with regulatory agencies. We've been very fortunate that the FDA and the USDA have been incredibly interested in making sure that innovation like this comes to the market, and they're going through the process of what every food that is introduced to the market should go through. They are going through safety evaluations, they're going through inspection of the plant. They're going through labeling and saying consumers should know that this is meat. Look, this is coming from cow cells, pig cells and fish cells. So how do you educate and label it in front of a consumer? Those are the things that the agencies are working with us and think as soon as we get approval from them, we'll be able to start serving in restaurants.
Elizabeth: [00:43:47] And the grocery stores?
Uma: [00:43:50] That's right. Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:43:51] That's awesome. It's so exciting. It really is the future. The only people I know that have tasted it, your meat, are vegans like people have been on the show. All of them have the same comment. They're like, I tasted the future.
Uma: [00:44:05] That's exactly why it's really important for our solution to be presented also to the world as something that nearly everyone in the world can get behind. People who love meat, people who don't want to give up the option of eating meat and people who really strongly believe that, you know, humans have evolved because of eating meat. I think asking us to give that choice up, I think is not going to go really very well. Also even people that are talking about factory farming or conventional agriculture, they recognize that this is a manifestation of the incredible demand for meat, and they're meeting that supply through any possible way they can. You know, it's at a breaking point, and I think the producers, the farmers and the distributors are recognizing that and because the demand is so much, we can still meet the delta in the demand with this production system without immediately affecting any of their roles, but eventually what I see is the average age of a farmer in the U.S. is close to 60, and we have so many people that are children and grandchildren and farmers that apply to work with us to say, Look, I want to be a part of this, and I think that's incredible because it's a generational change. The current way of raising meat has fed a lot of people and has taken care of a lot of people. It's also inevitable that as we progress as a humanity, we need to continue to innovate. Just like man innovated in the past to make intense production techniques successful with the industrial age, we also have to start figuring out how we can make this a sustainable age and scalable age. I think that's kind of what we're ushering in without giving up the choice aspect. So we're preserving choice, and we're also doing it in a way that is better for us, for the planet and also for the animals.
Elizabeth: [00:45:51] Well, and the conversation is really changing, and it's changed in the past five years since you started to where people before were very kind of frightened or didn't understand and immediately went to sci-fi and now it's becoming more common language even, and you can talk to people about it and people are starting to understand it.
Uma: [00:46:11] Absolutely. I mean, you said something really important there as we as people start recognizing the advances made in science that are based on, you know, work that's being done on cells and genes and we are direct beneficiaries of that. For instance, there's cancers of children that are cured because of gene editing technologies. They are cured because of cell therapies or cell based technologies. As people start seeing the effect of that in such a powerful way that their child or their spouse or their dad or their loved one is saved because of it. It's just a matter of time they make the connection that we could make food better. You know, when you consider that or the number of times we eat in our life and to actually look at the opportunity to change that, I think, you know, even though there is some hesitation among some groups of people at this point, it's going to change.
Elizabeth: [00:47:10] Well Uma, thank you for this, for everything you're doing, for taking that giant leap into the unknown and changing the world.
Uma: [00:47:20] Thank you so much Beth. I appreciate being here, thank you and come and visit us.
Elizabeth: [00:47:33] To learn more about Uma and Memphis Meats, go to our website. We will have links to everything on SpeciesUnite.com. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, it's Patreon.com/SpeciesUnite. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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