S8. E2: Yaakov Koby Nahmias: Future Meat
“You see, most of the people in the cultured meat world are usually either biologists that are excited about the biology or physicians that work with stem cells and regenerative medicine. They're asking, “can we make a steak? Can we make a muscle?” They are not asking what is the cheapest way of making this? They're assuming somebody else is going to come and solve it. The difference between them and us is that I am an engineer. So that, yeah, I can make a muscle. I made a muscle back then. I'm pretty certain that the biology is simple. The big question is, should I? And then how much does it cost?” – Koby Nahmias
Yaakov Koby Nahmias is the founder of Future Meat Technologies. Future Meat is a cultured meat company, meaning they make meat from animal cells without having to raise, harm or slaughter any animals. They are based in Israel but are coming to the US next year.
Future Meat’s technology is different than many other cultivated meat companies, which allows their products to be cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable. They are the first cultivated meat company to break the $5 cost barrier. They are making cultured meat for a $1.70 per pound. Their meat is made entirely from animal fibroblasts that grow in stainless steel fermenters and provides the same texture and taste as farm-raised meat.
Future Meat will play a big role in the agricultural revolution that is going to allow future generations to live in a world with fewer greenhouse emissions, less land and water use, and far less cruelty to non-human animals.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn More About Future Meat
Follow Future Meat on Twitter
Transcript:
Koby: [00:00:15] You see, most of the people in the culture of the meat world are usually either biologists that are excited about the biology, or physicians that work with stem cells and regenerative medicine. They're asking, Can we make a steak? Can we make muscles? They are not asking, what is the cheapest way of making this? They're assuming somebody else is going to come and solve it. The difference between them and us is that I am an engineer so, yeah, I can make a muscle, sure. I'm pretty certain that the biology is simple. The big question is, should I? Then how much does it cost?
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 Koby Nahmias. Koby is the founder and president of Future Meat Technologies. They're a cultured meat company, meaning they make meat from animal cells without harming any animals in the process. They are the first cultivated meat company to break the $5 cost barrier. They are making cultured meat for $1.70, a pound. Nice to meet you, Koby.
Koby: [00:02:10] It's a pleasure.
Elizabeth: [00:02:11] Glad to have you on. I want to talk about how all this started for you, because this was not, well clearly, this was not many people's career trajectory because this didn't even exist when most people started out, but how did you first get even involved in thinking about doing anything with cellular agriculture?
Koby: [00:02:31] It's funny if you ask me what my career trajectory it’s like, asking me, what do I want to do when I grow up? I never had a good answer of what I actually want to do when I grow up. You know, I'm a chemical engineer by training. I have a degree in biology, but I have a background in law and also a background in computer programming and electronics. Then when I moved to the States about two decades ago, I worked on the first and developed the first 3D printing of cells. We managed to take cells which are the smallest building blocks of all organisms on the planet, and then place them like Legos with tiny laser lights. Building these three dimensional human liver in the lab that was functional for the first time. That was at the University of Minnesota, where I also met my wife. Then both of us moved to Boston where I was in Harvard Medical School, first as a postdoc and then as a faculty during a lot of crazy things. I was working on organ on chip devices, and built the first patent for a company called Yeovil, which is the first liver on chip device on the market.
Elizabeth: [00:03:53] What does that mean?
Koby: [00:03:54] It's a way to do experiments for drug development without using animals, because animals and humans are very different. So we still use a lot of animals in research, but we are trying to develop technologies that would dramatically reduce their use. I was one of the first technologies that was licensed in that era. Then I got an invitation to move back to Israel and start a center for bioengineering in Israel, in Jerusalem. It's one of those invitations that you don't say no to, right? Because the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the university that was founded by Albert Einstein. So when they invite you, you say yes.
Elizabeth: [00:04:36] You show up for sure.
Koby: [00:04:38] You show up. It was great. Then I started building my own companies. One of them is Tissue Dynamics, which is actually doing animal free drug development.
Elizabeth: [00:04:53] Wow.
Koby: [00:04:53] I founded it about four years ago and it's still very, very active. So we have a couple of really cool things there. Then I had to take a break from it all. So my wife and I decided to do a sabbatical in Boston. So I was back on the Charles River. This is where I got a phone call that really made this interesting trajectory change. An Israeli investor wanted to ask me what I thought about cultured meat, and I told him that, well, I thought it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life.
Elizabeth: [00:05:31] When was this and where was the cultured meat world at this time?
Koby: [00:05:36] So it was a few years after Mark Post demonstrated that you can take cells from a cow, grow them in the lab, and then get the first hamburger. It was a nice hamburger. It just costs a quarter of $1,000,000 to make. Then it was around that time that Memphis Meat was founded by Uma Valenti. Again from the University of Minnesota. Uma just demonstrated its first meatball and then people became very interested in this area.
Elizabeth: [00:06:13] But so why did you think it was so stupid?
Koby: [00:06:16] So I've been consulting to the industry for a while and the fastest growing cells we have are called Chinese hamster ovary cells, CHO cells. You can grow them to about 30 billion cells per liter. It sounds a lot, but it's actually not. It's like a 10th of a gram in every milliliter. It's a tiny amount. So you need at least ten liters of raw materials to grow a kilogram, at the very least, the minimum. Every liter back then cost about $20. So, you know, I was telling them the very simple back of the envelope calculation is that cultured meat is going to cost you $200 per kilogram. Even if you get everything right and nothing was right back then. You know, the cells were not growing as fast as CHO cells. You know, they were growing muscle cells and they were definitely not reaching 30 billion cells per year. The media was close to $500 per liter. But I was telling them, look, even if you extrapolate all of these trends, it will never work. What made the difference for me is the fact that after I closed that call with a very angry investor, it was a sabbatical. I had time to sit and drink my coffee on the bank of the Charles River and think about it and think, wait a second, is there a way to go around this? I had friends in a company called Flying Spark.
Elizabeth: [00:08:08] What was that?
Koby: [00:08:09] It's going to sound disgusting, but they're growing fly insect larvae.
Elizabeth: [00:08:15] Yeah, it does.
Koby: [00:08:15] So very tiny worms, essentially. It's like 3000, 6000 cells each worm. They're growing them for about a kilogram, you know, a dollar, a kilogram. So why can they do this and the pharmaceutical industry can't. That's like the $1,000,000 question. $1,000,000,000 question, probably.
Elizabeth: [00:08:37] Why were they growing these? What are they growing them for?
Koby: [00:08:40] Protein, insect protein.
Elizabeth: [00:08:41] Okay.
Koby: [00:08:42] So I looked at that and it turns out, you see every organism on the planet has a way to remove waste products, a way to remove toxins. So the best way to describe it is, you know, when you are taking yeast and putting them in grape juice, you're growing the yeast. As they grow, they produce their own waste products. Luckily for us that waste is alcohol.
Elizabeth: [00:09:13] Okay.
Koby: [00:09:14] So when the alcohol increases at some level around 12%, the yeast dies, right. But, you know, you have a nice glass of chardonnay. So that's good for us. Bad for the yeast, good for us. The problem is that when you're trying to do the same with beef cells, you are growing the cells and they are making waste products, but they're not making alcohol. They're actually making ammonia. So the ammonia, when it reaches $5 million, kills the beef cells. But what's worse is that you don't end up with a nice glass of wine, you end up with a nice glass of urine. So it's this waste product that is killing your cells. That's why you can't get beyond a certain density, and that's why the industry was stuck. So I sat down and developed a process that is essentially managing to recycle the media and rejuvenate it, actively removing waste products like ammonia and lactate from the process. When you do the very brief calculation, you can see that you can actually drop the cost by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude.
Elizabeth: [00:10:35] So you're sitting there on the river and you're like, Oh, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Then you think to yourself, Wait, if I reinvent the whole industry, I could actually do this.
Koby: [00:10:45] Exactly, exactly that. So it's exactly that. So my sabbatical is over. The kids had fun. I went back to Israel and then I was invited to talk at the first conference on cultured meat. There I met the chief scientific officer of Tyson Foods. I gave a talk about why the technology is stupid and why we need to think about it in a different way. It’s there when we started talking. We then didn't stop talking and Tyson became the first investor in future meat technologies and the rest is history.
Elizabeth: [00:11:24] So when you give this talk, everyone was using the old technology at this time, right? Old meaning like six years ago probably, right?
Koby: [00:11:31] That's right. Two or three years ago, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:11:33] Yes. Wow. Did everybody shift then once you kind of brought it to the world's attention, like has everyone changed?
Koby: [00:11:41] So we have three patents on the technology and Merck is actually now just last year started developing media recycling technology. We are about five years, four years ahead of everybody else. So it's going to be very difficult to play catch up. But industry here's the deal, you know, even when you give a talk that very few people understand what you want to tell them. You see, most of the people in the cultured meat world are usually either biologists that are excited about the biology or physicians that work with stem cells and regenerative medicine, right? Again, they are fascinated by the biology, they're asking, can we make a steak? Can we make a muscle? They are not asking what is the cheapest way of making this? They're assuming somebody else is going to come and solve it. The difference between them and us is that I am an engineer so that, yeah, I can make a muscle. I made a muscle back then. Sure, I'm pretty certain that the biology is simple. The big question is, should I? Then how much does it cost? So we're the first one to look at the economics of it and focus on the economics of it. We are ahead of the pack. This is why Future Meat Technologies is actually the fastest growing company in this sector. The company is four years old, but it raised the largest series B in this sector. We raised more than $300 million just in series B.
Elizabeth: [00:13:29] Yeah, I saw that. Congratulations.
Koby: [00:13:31] Thank you. Thank you. It's exciting. The company is only four years old. It's very, very young compared to all the other companies. But we are really leading the pack when it comes to cost reduction.
Elizabeth: [00:13:43] I want to talk about that, because like you just said, and now you make it makes a little more sense to me why cost wasn't such a bigger thought process in all of these other companies in the sense of, for the only way this stuff to really work and the world to really shift and the food system to really shift the cost has to be so much less than what it's been. What you're saying is it should be right up there on the top of the priorities, otherwise no one's ever going to be able to eat it. So when you said this and you said, okay, we got to figure out a way to make it a whole lot more cost efficient for people who don't really understand any of this. Will you explain kind of what you're doing versus what other companies in this industry are doing?
Koby: [00:14:27] Yeah, so there's a lot of things that we are doing that are different. Most companies are, again, they come from biology. So these are people that are stem cell engineers, that have worked with stem cells, that have worked with tissue engineering. They start with stem cells because stem cells are cells in our body that can grow very reliably and make different types of cells. So stem cells can make muscle and fat and bone and blood, right. So you can make them and then we'll be able to put them on this scaffold, on this sponge and the cells would slowly make a muscle like we traditionally eat in a restaurant. That's the chicken breast. Or a steak or T-Bone steak. That's a muscle. The problem there is that, well, stem cells are very unstable. In the body they don't last long. They last 48 hours and then they essentially become something else. So to keep them happy, you need a lot of growth factors and hormones and that costs a lot. The average for the industry is about between 100 to 200 dollars per liter of raw materials just to keep the cells happy. Then the second problem is that they have to stick to a surface to grow. The cells are not floating around like this. They stick to a sponge. They stick to the bioreactor. They stick to beads. Just that means the density of the production is really dependent on how much surface area you have in the bioreactor. So usually from a 100 liter vessel, you make two kilograms, that's it.
Elizabeth: [00:16:34] Okay.
Koby: [00:16:35] It's not very efficient. So from your refrigerator, refrigerators around six centimeters. So your refrigerator in the back, in the kitchen, will be able to make about 12 kilograms. That's not a lot, six chickens. Then the last thing is that after they grow these cells, they put the cells on a sponge and scaffolds, and then the cells would make a muscle. The problem is that it's a very slow process. It takes about a month to make the muscle and you have to feed the cells during this process. So that's the traditional way of making cultured data. Most other companies are doing that. We are doing something very different.
Elizabeth: [00:17:20] What are you doing?
Koby: [00:17:21] So we are working with fibroblasts. These are connective tissue cells. So every time you get cut, right. Your cells that close, that cut. I get cut a lot in the kitchen whenI make food for my kids. I don't watch, I get cut. The cells that close that cut, these are fibroblasts. They are stable, very stable and they grow extremely fast. It's also very cheap to grow them because they don't need all of those hormones and growth factors to keep them happy.
Elizabeth: [00:17:57] What do they need?
Koby: [00:17:57] So you start at a much lower cost of the medium. You start it around $20.
Elizabeth: [00:18:04] What are you feeding that?
Koby: [00:18:06] Nutrients. You feed them amino acids, vitamins, lipids, and then they are pretty happy. Now, the other thing we can do is, because fibroblast are very unique cells, they can go through a process called spontaneous immortalization, which means we don't need to do any genetic engineering. One of a billion is going to start growing forever and when it does, it will also grow as a single cell suspension. So it doesn't need to stick to anything. It will grow like yeast in a bioreactor. When you do that, you can get to around 130 billion cells per liter. That's what we are getting. So, you remember your refrigerator?
Elizabeth: [00:19:00] Yes.
Koby: [00:19:01] Previously it could make only, you know, 12 kilograms. Right?
Elizabeth: [00:19:01] Six chickens.
Koby: [00:19:03] Six chickens. So if you get the density up, you'll be able to make 180 kilograms, every time. So 180 kilograms means your refrigerator is now making 90 chickens.
Elizabeth: [00:19:20] Wow.
Koby: [00:19:21] Yeah. So that's the difference in cell density when you move to this high density approach. Now, the last thing is that even if you do that and get all this biomass, if you waste your time doing tissue engineering, essentially taking these cells and putting them on a scaffold and asking them to make a muscle, you're going to be spending another month and all of the cost involved with that. So this is why even though I'm a tissue engineer, I really love tissue engineering. We're not doing it. We're just not wasting resources and tissue engineering. We're taking the biomass and we are extruding it in a way that gives you the texture of meat, but without the three dimensional organization of meat. So it's not a muscle, it looks like a muscle, it tastes like a muscle, but it's not a muscle.
Elizabeth: [00:20:20] Okay.
Koby: [00:20:21] So it's just the protein, the lipids and everything that gives you the fibers that you're expecting.
Elizabeth: [00:20:26] And do you have to do something else to it to make it look more like meat?
Koby: [00:20:32] No extrusion does the entire thing and this is and this is the cool thing because at the end of the day, why do you want the muscle? Why do you need tendons in what you eat? Do you like to eat in tendons? I don't like eating tendons. I have five little kids. None of them like eating tendons. So why do I need that? I'm not going to implant it in anybody, right? That's not the point. I want my kids to eat it. So this is what we're doing and it's very, very different from everybody else.
Elizabeth: [00:21:06] And it's much faster, right? Like how fast versus a month?
Koby: [00:21:10] Yeah we make, so instead of a kilogram an hour, we do it at about 500 kilograms an hour.
Elizabeth: [00:21:19] Wow.
Koby: [00:21:28] Yeah, it's very fast. For every line.
Elizabeth: [00:21:23] Well, are you the only ones doing this? It feels like it. It seems like it.
Koby: [00:21:28] Right now yeah, but I'm pretty certain other companies will see the benefit and start moving in that direction, because speed and cost are essential. A lot of the companies that used to talk about tissue engineering are now talking about 3D printing. But even 3D printing is not fast enough.
Elizabeth: [00:21:46] Will you talk a little about 3D printing?
Koby: [00:21:49] 3D printing is an awesome technology. It's a way that you can traditionally take plastics and make three dimensional parts out of it, even moving parts. So for prototyping type experiments, it's very useful. You can take cells like muscle and fat and then use 3D printing to get the structure of a hole cut. So, for example, you can make a T-Bone or or Wagyu beef with 3D printing, right? So it's very exciting to be able to make meat layer by layer with 3D printing. The problem is that this is not going to scale.
Elizabeth: [00:22:36] Yeah.
Koby: [00:22:38] 3D printing is a wonderful technology, and if chefs want to have it in their own restaurants and I definitely see a place where, you know, a michelin star restaurant would want to have a 3D printing to make this, you know, Wagyu like structure of whatever they want. I think it's wonderful. But come on, if we're talking about the trillion dollar market that needs to make billions of kilograms of meat. 3D printing is not going to cut it.
Elizabeth: [00:23:08] No.
Koby: [00:23:09] You know, we are surrounded by a lot of plastics, everything from your headphones to the cover of my iPhone. These are all plastics. But even though 3D printing of plastics has been around for 20, 30 years, none of the products that we have today are 3D printed. They are all injection molded, right? You play around, you know what you want to do and then you injection mold it. Because the difference in cost is about 10,000 times. It's three orders of magnitude.
Elizabeth: [00:23:50] No, that's such a good point, though, because you would think a lot of things would be 3D printed by now and really you just never see it. You're right, yeah.
Koby: [00:24:00] Yeah. Because, look, if injection molding of this thing would cost me $0.02, right? This is $0.02 to injection molding. Now, if I 3D print it, it would cost me $2, a dollar. There's a couple of things. One is that. You know, 3D printers have to have a staff around them. So you have to have an engineer that knows how to operate the printer because sometimes it gets stuck. The second thing is that 3D printers have engines that move, right? Just like your printer at home, do you have an HP printer somewhere?
Elizabeth: [00:24:38] Yes, right?
Koby: [00:24:40] How many times do you need to change it? Every couple of years, right. So it's half life. You have to change your printer at home every three years. That’s how long they last.
Elizabeth: [00:24:51] Okay.
Koby: [00:24:52] So think about a factory with 3D printers for meat, you know, like a million printers. Do you have to change the factory every five years? All of the CapEx investment has to be replaced every five years. It's insane. Why would you do that?
Elizabeth: [00:25:08] Yeah, that makes sense. So it's just a novelty, pretty much.
Koby: [00:25:13] Look, there's a lot of good companies, you know, Redefine Meat is doing amazing work and 3D printing of meat in Israel. They are in plant based business. I think it could be an interesting bridge until another technology comes in and we are working on another technology and actually an injection molding of food, of steaks.
Elizabeth: [00:25:42] How does that work? Explain that?
Koby: [00:25:43] I'll be happy to. Injection molding means that you essentially have a mold. So a surface, right. Then you pass material through an extruder like let's say a syringe in high pressure and then you inject it into that cavity. We built a process where we can make any type of product so we can make T-Bone steaks and we can make types of Wagyu beef. It's a technology that we have that we built at the Hebrew University under mon steak. It's really exciting. It's for me, like whole cuts are definitely the future of this entire industry, especially, you know, things like chops like lamb chops could be extremely interesting there. So the ability to create those structures very, very rapidly and the cost efficient way is incredibly appealing. We can make a steak in about 2 minutes.
Elizabeth: [00:26:58] Wow. Really?
Koby: [00:27:01] Yeah. It's a big difference.
Elizabeth: [00:27:03] Are you making everything right now? Like chicken, steak?
Koby: [00:27:06] Are we doing everything? We are very focused right now on getting our chicken product approved by US regulations and then getting the first chicken product onto consumers as soon as possible. I think that's the main focus.
Elizabeth: [00:27:25] In the US?
Koby: [00:27:25] The main focus of the company is going to be to launch our first products in the United States as soon as possible.
Elizabeth: [00:27:33] I know nobody knows the real answer to this, but what does it look like?
Koby: [00:27:38] It looks like 2023 is the year that we will be able to get regulatory approval. I think once we have regulatory approval, that's going to be the main threshold. We're probably not going to be the only ones. There's going to be a couple of small scale cultured meat products on the market, mainly in a couple, in several restaurants. The plan is to build a larger production facility in the United States that will enable us to reach a lot more consumers and a lot more, both in food chains and then in retail.
Elizabeth: [00:28:26] Right.
Koby: [00:28:27] When we're talking about products, you know, really the first products are going to be chicken breast type products which are missing from the inventory right now. So these are the types of products that we're very excited about for our first generation. But yes, we have everything else coming. So we have beautiful lamb. You saw the lamb chops.
Elizabeth: [00:28:48] Yes.
Koby: [00:28:49] We have beautiful lamb chops and kebabs. We have beef and we have pork coming. All of these things are working really, really well with our technology.
Elizabeth: [00:28:55] Once you're in high end restaurants, what's the jump from that to say, high end grocery stores? How long does that take?
Koby: [00:29:03] It's really an operational challenge. It's the number of units you can deliver per amount of time. Right. So for restaurants, you need several tons. But if you want to go to retail, you need to be in the thousands of tons range.
Elizabeth: [00:29:21] So you need a big factory.
Koby: [00:29:23] You need a big factory. That's right. You know, keep in mind, our factory can be 20 times smaller than our competitors, but you'll still need a big factory. That is correct. This is why we raised this very large round and we recruited some of the world's leading talents to get this massive factory built and online as soon as possible.
Elizabeth: [00:29:49] Right. Where is it going to be?
Koby: [00:29:51] I can’t tell you that.
Elizabeth: [00:29:52] There's so many secrets.
Koby: [00:29:56] It's like you're trying to do your best, optimizing so many different parameters.
Elizabeth: [00:30:03] So Tyson was your first investor. I'm curious about this because with the animal agriculture world and that world of meat, a lot of those companies are investing in cellular meat. But are they on board with it as in are they fighting it? I mean, they know it's coming, right? But are they trying to fight it, too? Because eventually it's going to take down a lot of animal agriculture.
Koby: [00:30:32] Let's start with Tyson who has been with us since the seed investment and ever since and ADM, by the way, also one of the world's largest ingredient suppliers, has co-led a series B, in addition to other companies. Tyson has been super interested in sustainability for the last decade. I think the entire Tyson family and John Tyson in particular have really been trying to lead sustainability efforts up and down the food chain because they know that they need to change. So that's good. That's a good start. Number two is that the industry has a problem. They can't grow anymore. They are using every single acre and every single gallon of water to produce the meat that they're producing today. Climate change is actually going to make them less effective, not more. This is a challenge because the demand for meat is going to increase by 50% over the next 20 years. The demand is going to increase for an industry that actually reached peak capacity. So they are looking left and right and asking, okay, how can we meet this increasing demand? We can't continue doing what we are doing right now because it's not going to be useful. We need a process that is going to be a lot more effective in producing a lot more meat, a lot faster. This is why they are all looking into cultured meat, not necessarily as an alternative to what they are doing, but to augment what they are doing. That said, it's probably not going to happen this way.
Elizabeth: [00:32:07] What do you mean?
Koby: [00:32:08] Because, look, there were a lot of wagon drivers in New York before the first car came in. When the first car came in, you know, they're a novelty. You know, you could see cars and horses on the same road in New York for a couple of years. Until Ford opened his factory when the first Model T arrived on the streets of New York. You know, people could still think, yeah, I can have a horse for some days and I'll have a car for the other days. But very, very soon it was obvious that, you know, horses are a way of the past. With horses, you have to pay for manure removal. We have to pay for housing. You have to pay to groom the horse. You have to play to maintain it. With a car, you don't. So it's the most efficient way of making something. So, the industry is going to be interesting, but it's probably going to behave the same way. It's going to be a decade where both types of meat production exist in the same path. Then we're going to see a switch and it's probably going to be faster than we can imagine.
Elizabeth: [00:33:20] Right. Have things gone faster than you predicted when you first got into this? Because when I first started talking to people about this, their number, the years they were always talking about seemed to be a lot bigger, you know, bigger spans than people are saying now. Is it already moving faster?
Koby: [00:33:38] Well, I'm an impatient person.
Elizabeth: [00:33:41] Well, you moved it a lot faster, right.
Koby: [00:33:45] So, honestly, the revolution is not coming fast enough for me. But, yeah, things are moving fast. Things are moving fast in the technology spectrum. I think that's great. However, we all need to understand that we're using about 30% of the land on the planet to make meat right now, 30%. That's kind of insane. If you take all that and you say, well, cultured meat is a lot more effective, right? Koby, you just told me I can get 30 chickens from my refrigerator. So you're right, it is more effective. We can probably reduce the use of lamb by, you know, 95%, 98%. That's great, but what does that mean? If you're using 30% of the land on the planet? And you take 98% less. That still means that you will need to use, what is it, 0.6 close to 1% of the land of the planet to make cultured meat. We're talking about planetary scale industry. We don't have anything like that, nothing on the plants is like that. We will need close to $1,000,000,000,000 investment in operations to get there. So it's going to take time to invest that money and build those plants, even if everything is as successful as we predict it to be.
Elizabeth: [00:35:17] Right, okay.
Koby: [00:35:19] So that's the amount of time that we need to change the industry.
Elizabeth: [00:35:22] But once we do, there's just so many upsides.
Koby: [00:35:25] But let's talk about a couple of things. First of all, probably the most interesting ones. The most interesting thing for a father with kids is sustainability. Right. So right now, the industry is responsible for about 40% of the carbon emissions on the planet. It really depends on which numbers you're looking at, but it's anywhere around 11 to 14%.
Elizabeth: [00:35:48] Yeah.
Koby: [00:35:51] Reducing that is something critical to do. I think that we can do that. We can reduce it down to about 1%. So we can reduce it by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. So the numbers that we have from our life cycle analysis is closer to 98%. So that's great. Carbon emissions are something that we have to tackle now. The second thing is water use. You know, climate change is going to make means that we're not going to have the same amount of water resources as we had in the past. You can see the Colorado River right down to understand what we're facing over the next couple of decades. So the fact that we need 1% of the water, big deal. Very big deal.
Elizabeth: [00:36:39] Yeah. It’s really that small, 1%?
Koby: [00:36:42] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:36:43] Wow.
Koby: [00:36:42] Then the other thing is, we just came out of a massive pandemic. This pandemic was caused by isotopic viruses, just like all the other pandemics before that and the next pandemic is probably going to be influenza, right? We see it coming.
Elizabeth: [00:36:59] It's coming everywhere, right.
Koby: [00:37:01] Animal viruses that are jumping from food to us and if you dramatically reduce animal agriculture, you are going to get a lot less isotopic diseases. It's very, very clear, you know, it's not only viruses jumping from animals, it's also we saw meat operations essentially collapse in the United States during COVID crisis because the facility, the environment in the meatpacking facility is so conducive to viral transmission. Then across the Midwest, you know, I have family in Minneapolis and people didn't have meat in the supermarkets for a couple of months. This is not going to happen with an economy that is focused on cultured meat. So that's a major advantage. You add to that cases like salmonella, which is in about 21% of all chicken products in the United States right now. Again, this comes from fecal matter, and we're not going to see that in cultured meat. So there are major advantages from a food perspective where I would love to feed my kids cultured meat because I know it's safer for them.
Elizabeth: [00:38:22] Once you guys are regulated, once the US is open for cultured meat. What still needs to happen in terms of subsidies and funding and money?
Koby: [00:38:34] So we can be pretty cost efficient even without subsidies. But we want to be cheaper than traditional agriculture. Traditional meat is heavily subsidized, so most companies don't pay for the land. It's about $800 billion worth of farmland that nobody's paying for it. Then all the feed is heavily subsidized. We are subsidizing maize, for example, corn and soy production. So these subsidies are great to keep the prices low. If we want to subsidize the help the cultured meat industry, we will need to subsidize the right ingredients for farms. So amino acids, vitamins, lipids, you know, there needs to be some changes if we're doing that. In terms of investment, well, like I said, we will need a massive amount of investments. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars to build this industry up. I think the money is there. I think there's a lot of things that will make it very exciting and very cost efficient. So one one thing that is very unique about our process. Do you remember the rejuvenation system, the recycling technology that I told you in the beginning?
Elizabeth: [00:40:00] Yeah.
Koby: [00:40:01] So the waste products are ammonia and lactate. Ammonia is super interesting because it's an excellent fertilizer. So you can take the factory and when our process is working, we're producing ammonia that can be fed to the fields, that would grow the soil, that would feed ourselves so we can create a circular economy around the nitrogen cycle. The second thing that we can do that is really, really cool is one of the critical byproducts for us is lactate. Lactate is the building block of polylactic acid, biodegradable plastics. We can double the world's production of biodegradable plastic without doing anything other than using our waste. So the same factory that will make your chicken and beef. Will also make the biodegradable plastic that you wrap it in.
Elizabeth: [00:40:58] That is awesome.
Koby: [00:40:59] So thinking about this in a circular way in a circular economy, I think is critical to everything that we are doing. If we are trying to build the future, then we need to think about it like engineers at the end of the day.
Elizabeth: [00:41:12] That's absolutely incredible. When is this factory in the U.S.? Have you started? Have you broken ground?
Koby: [00:41:20] Not yet, but I can tell you that we have a couple of really cool sites.
Elizabeth: [00:41:26] But it's coming soon. I mean, we need this soon.
Koby: [00:41:28] It is coming. It's coming incredibly soon.
Elizabeth: [00:41:31] I am so excited for this to be, you know, accessible.
Koby: [00:41:34] Come and eat.
Elizabeth: [00:41:35] I want to. Yeah.
Koby: [00:41:37] Okay. Yeah. The British minister of Science, actually ate our chicken just a few weeks ago. It was very exciting.
Elizabeth: [00:41:45] And what did he say?
Koby: [00:41:47] He loved it and it's funny, the most common reaction is, wow.
Elizabeth: [00:41:57] I love it.
Koby: [00:41:58] It’s funny, this is the first, this is the first word reaction from anybody that tries it. The most difficult consumers were actually from France, very picky eaters. But we even passed the French test. So that's good.
Elizabeth: [00:42:14] Thank you so much for this. I'm just blown away by all that you are doing.
Koby: [00:42:19] Thanks. It's a pleasure being on your cast.
Elizabeth: [00:42:30] To learn more about Koby, to learn about Future Meats, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support Species Unite, we'd greatly appreciate it. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
Become a Species Unite member!
You can listen to our podcast via our website or you can subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Play. If you enjoy listening to the Species Unite podcast, we’d love to hear from you! You can rate and review via Apple Podcast here. If you support our mission to change the narrative toward a world of co-existence, we would love for you to make a donation or become an official Species Unite member!
As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.