Original subtitles

inspired by one of the biggest ideas of the century,

the fate of our planet may depend on a new food science

that grows real meat directly from animal cells

without the need to breed, raise, and slaughter animals.

Let's face it, conventional animal agriculture

is wreaking havoc,

it occupies nearly half of the world's land,

produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases

and there's a potential breeding ground

for health pandemics like COVID 19.

With meat consumption expected to double by 2050,

we urgently need solutions.

Welcome to the next agricultural revolution.

This is the first time a meatball has ever been cooked

with beef cells that did not require a cow to be slaughtered

This has been something

that I've been dreaming about since I was a kid.

Thinking about the impact on human lives and animal lives

and the ills of food production.

It's been ten years since I finished training

in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic and wanted to be able to pursue

an idea of can you grow meat from animal cells

and I'm extremely fortunate to have the support I have at home.

My wife and kids are being proud of what I am doing.

Over the last few years we spent a lot of time

talking about what if your dad started this company.

And if we had to move, how would it look like?

It was extremely hard for us even to have the conversation

because I'm a very involved dad.

The last year has been determined

by the amount of changes in our lives.

So you know, I founded the company

built an amazing team here.

I quit Cardiology, operating from my home in Minnesota.

I've never been away from home more than 20 days a year.

In the last year, it's been like

250 days or something so.

It just went up in magnitude.

And I can see it only getting busier

and I can see that you know,

this requires that I'm under someone to focus, and passion.

We just have to keep trying.

Hi, Jason. Can you hear me well?

Yes, I can.

And how do I sound to you?

You sound clear.

Okay, great.

So let me make sure I'm pronouncing your name, right.

Dr. Uma Valeti, Right?

That's correct.

How much funding did you take on?

Is this venture back now or give us some idea?

So this was founded by Nick and myself

and Will from Memphis and the three of us,

we raised about $3.1 million.

We had a venture capital group called Indy Bio

that funded us.

Okay, this will be an edit, so just a moment.

What type of doctor are you?

I'm a cardiologist.

Okay, oh great. Let's just, let's just dive in and do this.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr Uma Valeti.

He is CEO of Memphis Meats.

So Uma, lab grown meat brings to mind

Frankenfood, playing with nature.

All of this kind of stuff take us through the process

of how you grow meat in your labs.

Yes, so let me just preface this by saying we are not calling

this lab grown meat because there is

confusion out there that 'are you

making this from plant proteins?'

'Are you synthesizing something?'

What is this? This is authentic meat.

But when you say it's authentic meat

I just beg to differ with you, maybe.

Just correct me if I'm wrong you are engineering it.

It's not. It's not completely

natural, if you will?

So we take cells

from whether it's a cow, a pig or a chicken

then we provide them with rich nutrients

these cells grow and become meat tissue.

So that's the process of making the meat and...

Okay, okay. But I want you to explain what's happening here.

I mean, are you basically cloning meat?

Right? Is that what you're doing?

So we are not cloning anything.

We are growing these cells. So these cells are growing

and becoming muscle tissue.

Look, we are pioneers in this area.

We're starting this on the commercial side,

But, it's so funny, like you have to change

your thinking and your vocabulary to even discuss the subject.

It's just such an odd new concept

This is a real mind blower.

This is a huge shift.

I would like to be an investor

because I have a feeling this might be

one of the biggest ideas in the history of the world.

So we literally moved into the space about four and a half weeks ago.

You know it will take another four to six weeks

to get this place up and running and that creates a sense of

restlessness in me and Nick and you know everybody

on our team because, you know we want to get going like yesterday

I know eventually the speed at which

we can come to the market is going to be

a function of funding and I think it's our goal

to keep printing when we can, take brief periods of rest

and then start printing again.

So operations update.

Right? This is the key for us. The focus for April will be

for all of us is to get up and running.

And I'm thinking we should

look at the farm, the large equipment

or the small equipment, and

you know what you have in terms of timelines for those.

There will be lots of, you know, challenges we have.

Of course, there are challenges.

It's never been done in the history of the world.

But I think we are taking the first step

and I think this first step is going to have lots

and lots of people also join us in that step

and we feel like we're going to kick start a revolution.

I have always had an interest in my social justice issues,

environmental justice issues.

Pretty much my whole life all I wanted to do was be a chef

and I wanted to focus on meat.

About half way through college

and I was like, no more basketball.

I need a career. I love science, I always have.

What I get really excited about

is engineering biology.

So my training is in biomedical engineering.

I was actually a tissue engineer.

I learned about some of the animal welfare implications

of animal agriculture, and that was kind of what did it for me.

I learned a lot about factory farming

and the conditions that animals are kept in.

The impact it has on the environment that I just had no idea about.

I took an urban agriculture class

that really opened my eyes to what we were doing to the planet

just by feeding ourselves

At first, I actually thought it was

kind of strange because I had been very ingrained

in the medical applications,

and then I started reading more about it.

Uma Valeti wanders across my Facebook feed with a meatball.

My brain exploded and I was like, 'I have to talk to these people'.

Yeah, it's like I got to be a part of this.

Like I have the skills.

Assert yourself and it will happen.

Basically. Pretty much.

I thought this could be a really great way to change the world

and incorporate my love of science,

but also my desire to make cool stuff.

That's kind of my story of way, why and how I got here.

So these are the samples of live tissue.

Billions of cells in this tiny portion right here.

These ones are called punch biopsies, where a large needle

essentially is inserted in the animal

and takes out a small cylinder of tissue.

The taste, texture and flavor of meat

is a combination of manufacturers.

It's not just muscle cells, it's fats.

It's connective tissues.

It's all sorts of things. And we're taking those small

samples of meat or tissue apart so we can better understand

the different components and use that to build our product.

These are very precious biological samples

which are going to give us huge insights

into the biology of the animals.

And these are stem cells sources

for future products.

These small tissue samples

will produce extremely large amounts of meat.

Traditionally in tissue culture,

one of the elements of the food that you're giving the cells

is fetal bovine serum.

If you start with fetal calf serum,

essentially, you're starting with this perfect

rich broth of awesome stuff that is designed

to make things grow and thrive.

But one of the scientific goals

of the company right now is to eliminate any animal

derived product from our process as soon as possible.

We want to separate the animal from meat making.

To develop a consistent media with no animal derived

components in which our cells could thrive at a large scale.

That would definitely be a...

really great moment for our company.

It would probably be a while before we announced that that had happened.

because you want there to be a lot of internal validation.

There are all these systems that animals have been building up

through millions of years of evolution

and that includes a digestive system and an immune system.

So in some ways, cellular agriculture is more simple

because you're just focusing on this one part of the animal.

Instead of saying, you know, all I want is the Tenderloin.

But I have to grow the liver, too but it's also a little

bit more complicated because you need to

engineer these systems to protect the cells.

And you know, engineer sounds like a big word,

but it's just like figuring out what's the best fence

to keep the cow in but keep the wolf out?

except kind of in a more a, more modern environment.

It's what's the best fence

to keep the bacteria out of our cells

but keep the cells healthy without using antibiotics

because that's a major concern with current animal agriculture.

The whole goal here is to make cells exist

in a bioreactor.

So it's like what you

would grow yeast in if you were making beer.

So we're going to take cells

and put them in an artificial environment

so that they can grow and proliferate.

There are known ways of producing animal muscle

in a laboratory.

The science is established and lots of people have studied it.

What we're looking at is chicken,

the sort of structure, the typical structure

of chicken.

I am still blown away by how complex the tissue itself is.

All poultry is very similar and these are very early

in the process, so they haven't completed anything yet.

But you can see it's starting to adopt this sort of...

it looks like a Van Gogh like "Starry Night".

The muscle fibers are trying to align

and form these beautiful tendrils.

This is a huge, huge paradigm shift.

This meat production depends on the division cycle of the cell

rather than the reproductive cycle of the animal.

This was a goal that for many years I sought out,

but there were no like-minded individuals or resources

to support this goal.

Uma was very passionate,

and we both took a leap of faith

and decided to start a company.

And use our complimentary areas of expertise.

You know his business in administrative expertise

and my scientific expertise

driven by the same mission, the same motivation.

You know, personally growing up in a family farm,

I would raise the animals

and they looked up to me for their care and their protection.

I was their guardian. And as their guardian,

I sent them to auction... I sent them to auction,

and I sent them to slaughter.

And this... after doing this for a couple of years,

I realized this is a problem.

So I wanted to be part of that solution.

So this is a conventional beef from a local store

to compare against our product.

We want to make sure that whatever we're giving

to consumers is the same as what they're used to.

And when they get it in their hands

that it will behave just the same.

And so I am today looking at cooking loss.

I want to make sure that the moisture loss is the same.

Fat loss is the same. It needs to behave like

functionally as close as possible.

Going up to puncture it.

- I guess that's why-- - I got 185 on this, so...

The meat industry knows

that they can't meet the demand of the people

And if the demand for meat

is going to double by 2050,

there is just no method of production

that they have at their disposal now

that will satisfy that hunger for meat.

There just isn't.

Uma would you just take your hands

and clap them in front of your face like that?

- Okay, everybody's standing? - Yup.

Okay. Any time, Uma.

So March 14th, 2017. That is today, team.

We are here to do something that has never happened

in the history of humanity.

Thank you, guys. Thank you for being here.

Here we go! Ready?

Let's rock!

Whenever you're ready.

All right, are we ready for the cook off?

What's that?

Right there? You see that?

Who touched that?

Let's just get the ingredients shouted out if you would?

In terms of technical breakthroughs

that allowed us to do what we did over the last year

we had a few substantial, isolated breakthroughs,

so one of the things that was more relevant to the poultry

is starting to have texture, because the meatball,

there was a texture, but not the types of texture

we had with poultry, where we could have

very clearly fibers that you could see in there.

Fiberosity starting to have three-dimensional nature

to the meat that we're producing.

August 23rd, 2017 we announced the closing

of a major round of financing

We were able to put together a group of investors

that really care about what we're doing,

and it includes impact investors,

but it also includes the meat industry incumbents.

So it's all about sustainability.

It's about, call it "clean meat", if you will?

It's not going to replace the consumption of beef

or chicken or duck overnight but nonetheless it's a way

to produce meat in a different alternative

that isn't as resource intensive.

Memphis Meats has raised a total of $22 million

which signals a commitment

to the "clean meat" movement.

Which other companies are working on as well,

including Tyson, which is one of the

largest chicken suppliers in the United States.

So here we are in the epicenter of venture capital.

We have invested about $4 billion.

Companies like Skype, Hotmail, Baidu, Tesla, Twitter, Twilio.

There's a long list we've had, I think

28 companies that have exited with

over $1 billion valuation

and certainly food is a huge area,

certainly a big market, and there's a lot of change

going on with technologies with respect to the production

and distribution of food. And then there are also

changing consumer behaviors and changing consumer taste.

And Memphis was really special

The timing felt right.

So we, you know, DFJ led the series.

Memphis Meats was in the enviable position

of having more money

coming at it than it wanted to take.

So it was an interesting dance to...

For example consider, do you want strategic investors?

So investors who themselves are in the meat industry.

What are the pros and cons of that?

What would that say about us? What kind of restrictions

might they put on us in order to do that?

So, you know, we ultimately ended up with both Tyson's

and Cargill as investors, and they've been wonderful partners.

And they've been really helpful in various ways,

such as understanding some of the regulatory environment.

Hey.

I don't think 110 pounds of dry ice is going to be enough.

Now we just gotta move them.

We currently occupy about this much space.

- Yeah. - We're getting this much space

which is 17,500 square feet.

We have these two rooms

that are functional cold rooms. And then the process development

space over here, where we define the right conditions to

grow the cells into functional meat tissues all of that space

is here and then leads right into the kitchen space.

We're going to build up the process to allow us

to make scalable large quantities of meat.

We can do this at small scale now, but to scale that up

is going to be one of the really, really big challenges.

Yeah, if you just wanna throw it in that small room...

The scale for food production,

the more we dig into this and think about it,

it's unfathomable. It's so large.

And so, I have this analogy that I say,

if San Francisco is roughly a million people

and if every person had one burger a week,

which is like a quarter of a pound, then in a month

they would each eat a pound,

which is 12 million pounds a year.

And so to feed everyone in San Francisco,

one burger a week, 12 million pounds a year,

if we make meat 50 weeks a year,

that's two 240,000 pounds every week,

which is approximately the size of a blue whale.

And so every week, week after week after week,

for San Francisco, it's a blue whale.

Anyone have a marker, or a Sharpie?

- All right, here. - We want our present.

- You want your present? - A housewarming gift.

All right, let me get the gift.

One of the most important milestones you guys have,

at least one of the ways we think about it,

is price per pound, which is kind of a singular

thing that over time, presumably,

will continue to go down. So I went home last night

and I made you this little sign as an office warming gift.

So it's like a little old grocery store sign and it says

"Memphis Meats, today's price".

And it's out of glass, because this is my hobby, I make glass.

So you want to write in todays' price?

- Go ahead, Nick. - Do it.

Do we need to consult on this?

- No, Go for it. - Go for it!

See if it matches what I saw in the deck yesterday

All right, just a little ways to go

We had a couple of extra 0's next to it when we started.

I know, I know, this is already progress.

Maybe three zeros next to it.

Like I said, if we keep on at the same rate, we'll be there in no time.

Okay, so February 16th, 2018.

The last harvest of meat at Memphis Meats

was $1,700 a pound

- That was beef. - Beef. Yes, yes.

Day one in the new building is always extra exciting.

I'm filled with gratitude.

I've always said I'm here because of my family

Then it started up with Nick and I joining here.

Now, this is our extended family,

and I want to really thank you very much.

I raise a glass for better meat, better world.

Cheers.

I haven't been here since 2012.

Yeah, we've been in this business for a very long time.

I mean this company's so diverse.

You were still practicing as a cardiologist then.

That seems like eons ago.

Hello?

Uma's talked about this idea of growing meat

for as long as I've known him which is almost 25 years.

He's talked about this in some form or another.

It's among the values that we talk about as a family.

- Mm, thanks. - Yeah.

He spent a lot of time thinking about it

and one thing you know is that when

you have a desire like that,

it doesn't go away with ignoring it.

It only grows, especially when you know it's meant to be

The only process that we are changing is one step.

Instead of these cells growing in an animal,

we are growing them outside the animal.

Meat is still the same meat, and we're harvesting it.

The idea was to go to the U.S.

wanting to do cardiology and cardiac surgery at Mayo, and I had a number

of interviews at Mayo Clinic but my visa got rejected multiple times.

So, back then when your visa was rejected,

you could try, I think three times in total.

And I believe I got rejected three times.

Any reason why they give you? Why they rejected you?

No, I mean, it was hard to know.

I think I went well prepared.

Okay.

But it was all over in a few seconds

and there was really no explanation.

So it was at that time I thought

the world was turned upside down and it was a shade of shock

because I pretty much thought this is where I would train.

But then you go into solutions more than they decided

that I would go to Jamaica and work there for a while

and reapply to go to the U.S. to train again.

So that started my journey to leave India.

But...

If I didn't get those rejections,

I wouldn't have gone to Jamaica.

And if I didn't go there, I wouldn't have met my wife

Oh, can you tell me the moment when it took that big leap of faith?

You know, your journey from cardiology to business?

As I started working in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic

That's when stem cell research was really being worked on

to grow heart muscle and I started to think about

how could we translate the benefits of stem cells

into treating disease and later on

in my practice, I was injecting stem cells into patients' hearts

do regrow heart muscle, and that's where the idea came from.

I started thinking about

if I practice cardiology for another 30 years

I would probably save two or three thousand lives,

But there is very little in the form of any idea

that even comes close to the level of impact

of what this could be impact on billions of human lives

and trillions of animal lives.

And it felt like it was not even close to

the choice of me continuing cardiology.

Although it was enormously satisfying.

I felt good about leaving cardiology

and starting something that had

a transformative impact.

I would say coming to India

it feels like connecting back with the roots

of where the idea came from.

When I was twelve years old, there was a party

for one of my friends in this neighborhood.

There was a birthday party. There was a lot of people.

He was like dancing, and there was a lot of food

and I just happened to walk to the back of the home

where they were making the food

where I saw the animals, chickens, being slaughtered.

It was an experience where I saw intense

and, you know, true happiness in the front of the home

where they were celebrating my friend's birthday.

And then I walked back. And then there was this moment

where that happiness is being supported

by ending life, and that was very hard for me and...

It was just this feeling in me that how, as humans,

we were incredibly capable of having

a lot of joy, fun, generosity.

And on the other side, there was

this dark reality of you know, ending life.

There was a birthday on one side and there was a death day on the other side.

and it was happening at the same time.

Obviously, as a kid, I thought,

Why don't we all stop eating meat?

And that is a solution that is on the table always.

What I thought I would do today

is talk to you about the stages in my life.

I want to talk about the four kilometer circle I grew up in.

But some of the things that happened in my life,

the experiences

and the stories that shaped who I am, I'm going to talk

about my progression from being a kid

walking the streets here to what brings me back here today.

What I want is, out of 1,200 students,

if two people get ignited and if two people reach

the level of Shaker where he is that wonderful. That is our wish.

Okay. Can you hear me okay?

Thank you very much for having me.

I feel like I'm still a 16-year-old

seeing all of you in this room. So I want to talk to you guys.

Vijayawada has autonomous schools.

So we had to run our own cafeterias.

Then we would go to the market shopping

for, you know, a thousand kids and I saw a large scale slaughter.

So when you see large scale slaughter like that

that's automated on machines like in a few seconds,

you know, hundreds of lives are taken.

It was hard for me to understand

how we could allow some things like that

which at that point is when I said, okay,

I am going to stop eating meat.

But I love the taste of meat.

It's not something that you want

to give up easily, but it was one of

those things I said, Well, let's just stop

and I used to dream at that point, about,

meat growing on trees, but that was pretty unusual

to dream about meat trees.

50 years from now

people will look back and say, My gosh, you had to raise

billions of animals, kill them to get meat to the table.

Why could you not just grown it directly?

So the implications are massive.

I know. I've spoken for about 30 - 40 minutes.

I want to kind of bring us back

in the full circle back to this colony.

I grew up in front of this building my entire life

before I left Vijayawada I was in a four kilometer

radius in this colony with a number of people

that I finally remember as people that I depended on

it's the relationships around me that made me pull through.

My family, my friends, my teachers, my neighbors.

Thank you again for having me.

I'm happy to take some questions.

- Hey. - Hey.

Oh, Auntie Alanaru. Oh, I'm so happy to see you.

Thank you.

Yeah, so nice to see you. Thanks for coming.

What? Do you want me to write on this, mom?

The U.S. Cattleman's Association filed a petition

with the U.S. Department of Agriculture

asking for the USDA to change its policy book

to define meat and beef in ways that make it impossible

for clean meat to use those terms on their labels.

Usually, when consumers pick up a package of beef

in the grocery store, they expect it to be

from the flesh of an animal harvested

in the traditional manner.

If you have these other products floating around on shelves

and potentially being co-mingled with our products we see

not only food safety concerns but obviously consumer's

rights issues, because, everybody deserves to know

where their food comes from.

it should be more along

the lines of alternative protein or, you know, specifying

that it's coming from a muscular tissue sample.

now is a make or break moment for clean meat.

Is it going to be FDA or is it going to be USDA

and whichever agency it is

is it going to be a reasonable process for coming to market?

So we started talking to the Meat Institute.

And on August 23rd, 2018 we wrote a letter to the president.

The letter was a culmination of lots of discussions.

It took a lot of back and forth conversations.

We, you know, we wouldn't have even dreamed of this

a year ago or two years ago.

I think the moment felt very surreal.

And I also saw...

enormous amounts of, you know, conflict within me.

I can't imagine I am signing a letter with the largest meat

trade association in the world.

Felt like the right thing to do and this is signing my name behind it and saying

we are going to truly bring everybody under this tent in saying

this is a solution that the world is looking forward to.

Using markets and food technology

to solve problems? That's not a left or a right issue.

There should be governments,

there should be massive foundations,

there should be billion dollar philanthropists.

We need Manhattan projects.

We need moon landings. We need absolute commitment

to making this happen as quickly as possible.

It is just true

that the vast majority of people are not going to incorporate

ethical considerations into their dietary choices

So let's take ethics off the table and let's just create

products that people want to buy because they are delicious

they are reasonably priced and they are everywhere.

So that's, you know, the brainstorm and the focus GFI.

One of the things that GFI does

is thinks about consumer acceptance issues

and we just had so many people who would hear cultured meat

and they would just sort of recoil.

And obviously lab grown meat is even worse.

In-vitro meat is even worse.

And so we surveyed everybody in sort of the community

of clean meet at the beginning of 2016.

We said, what do you think? You know what should we call it?

And the results came back

and clean meat was about, led to about 20% greater

consumer acceptance than cultured meat.

We can eliminate industrial animal agriculture

in the next 20 - 30 years.

The best way to do that, it's markets, it's food technology,

it's creating products that people actually want to buy

that they can afford and that they can find.

Hello! Hello.

Hello, everyone.

Hello.

Welcome to the first annual Good Food Conference.

Hey, hey Uma. How are you? Good to see you.

The last time we met you were moving faster.

What do you call this? Our hometown.

- Our hometown. - Yes.

So we started to think about

making a hamburger from stem cells

or making meat from stem cells in 2004.

Funded by the Dutch government

we could start those technologies, develop those technologies.

Unveiling of that first hamburger was in August 2013 in London.

We got the money for that from Sergei Brynn

who put something like $1.5 million in it.

We made three hamburgers for that money.

What I knew is this is a big societal problem,

and this is a potential solution for that societal problem.

What we had experienced, of course, in the project was

yes, there was media attention for it, but there was not

a whole lot of public interest for it.

Actually the trigger for the whole thing was the story

of William Van Eelen at that time already 86

and who basically was so enthusiastic about this project

and really wanted us to do this.

Pan it to me too.

Will do.

I'm really honored to meet you and you know your dad's work

has inspired me while I was in training in cardiology.

I was about fourteen when he started working on this.

And that's 40 years ago now.

and where there was a handful of people

that you could talk to and to be here now was about

450 people in a sold out conference.

And everybody knowing what clean meat is, is for me

like, a very weird situation.

In many ways,

your dad's kind of stimulated an entire generation of thinking.

Yes, he did.

You don't have to be a scientist.

You have to have conviction on your vision.

And I think he's kind of sewing the seeds

for all of us to kind of stand on his shoulders.

He wrote the patent and he got funded.

And then, of course, Mark took over the torch which was good.

I am the daughter of William Van Eelen.

He's considered the great grandfather of clean meat.

In 2010 I organized the first ever

clean meat, or at that time was called Pure Meat Conference

in Nemo Technical Museum in Amsterdam. And there we got

the first footage of very small slivers of pig meat

that Mark Post had made.

And that was the first ever

pictures of actual clean meat,

and they went into the media

and that is actually how the investors of

Sergey Brin found Mark Post.

So this is a story full of domino tiles.

Tell me you are kind of the rock star here.

You have been described to me as a rock star.

You and Mark Post,

people are so interested in Memphis Meats,

you've got all these investors

Why is there so much interest in your company?

Well, I'm flattered to hear what you're saying

about me and Mark, but ultimately this is something

that caught the imagination of,

I say, every country, every continent.

Cell based Sounds a little scary

and clean meat implies that

implies the conventional meat is dirty.

Right. So the background for this,

in the context of it is then we started

talking about this industry and starting the company,

Memphis Meats was the first company in the space.

We started talking to a number of people

and people uniformly got excited and they started calling

the product clean meat.

Clean duck, clean chicken, clean beef.

Because it mainly communicated the benefits of a cleaner

production environment as well as the benefits

we thought we could have

at scale in terms of energy savings.

But as we started talking more and more about this

it became particularly clear that there are people that

felt like while they want this innovation to come to market,

using a prefects like clean was not inclusive.

Our nomenclature.

Why cell based or why clean or why cultured?

Or you know what are the...?

Rather than saying what it is, because what it is, is meat.

Isn't there a quick way to just say how it's made?

When a consumer is buying it,

we want them to know it's coming from animal cells.

versus, a meat alternative.

Why are we so fixated on having a word in front of meat?

It's almost like gluten free,

like you want it to be like factory farm free.

Consumers want transparency.

They want you to be honest with what you're doing.

So that's why I support cellular.

And we want to be transparent. I don't want people mixing up

with stuff with regular--

No, but on the other hand,

what we're not communicating is... we're communicating back

to being too technically driven.

We're communicating the process.

What if the adjective is more about a global solution?

Yeah, I'm bullish

FFF.

But there's a lot of meat out there factory farm free.

So you shouldn't define it by what it's not.

How's it going?

Good. Going.

Really good? Really, busy?

The alternate would be bad.

So how about you? Are you travelling or?

Uh yeah, just got back from Zuürich.

When we thought about the next thing we were

in 4,000 Walmarts, we were in 3,300 public schools,

We were making tens of millions of dollars in sales so we easily

could have done meat with plants that was there for us to take,

but I couldn't imagine a world where McDonald's would replace

all of their hamburgers with the plant based burger

and we decided to go headlong into cultured meat.

All right, guys, we're going to get ready here in just a second.

This is a jam packed panel.

I'm so excited for it.

More people are eating meat today than yesterday

and more people unfortunately will eat meat tomorrow, than today.

We think it's going to be critical

ultimately, to get the price of meat below the cost

of conventional meat.

Proof of concept has been demonstrated

to the public, but now we're about proof of scale.

You know, what is this factory of the future?

It is a food factory. It has a lot of the similarities

to any other food factory following some the same principles.

And I really see this industry

as being a parallel supply chain,

or maybe integrated into the food system,

which I like that people are starting to talk

about the food ecosystem and the system that's what we're a part of.

We are not a separate entity.

The lowering the cost to feed is the biggest challenge in this field.

And right now that's a problem

because no one is producing those ingredients at scale.

But as you start figuring out the key ingredients

that our animal cells need to grow I have very little doubt

in my mind that those things can be scaled up.

I think the folks in the audience

that are thinking about starting their own company

don't just you know, look at what the folks up here

on the stage you're doing think about how you could

provide something to the ecosystem

that could be even more valuable

than what we're doing up here.

Right. So, for example, I would imagine

that if a company were to start trying to create steak,

there might be another startup that would emerge that would try

to produce the fat that would fit into the marbled steak.

From the consumer perspective,

we're facing a brave new world

with technology that was once the stuff

of science fiction now becoming a reality.

I think it's also worth pointing out that people love

innovation almost as much as they despise change.

And there's no place they despise change

more than in the food they eat.

Consumers have come to expect satisfaction and a high quality

eating experience from real beef.

The manufacturers of lab grown

products should be required to invest in their own market

development efforts and not ride the coattails of beef's success.

Consumers are enthusiastic about these products.

We did a poll with the company Faunalytics

and we found that two thirds of Americans

are willing to try meat grown from cells

without slaughtering animals and 40%

that they would pay a premium for these products.

Allowing cellular based proteins or plant based proteins

to bear the label meat or beef or the USDA Federal

meat inspection shield or stamp would be misleading.

Thank you.

We fully recognize that debate will continue

as to what these products should be called moving forward.

And although we have not firmly determined

what the nomenclature should be,

our producers will seek a labeling regime

that provides a clear separation between lab produced products

and conventionally grown meat.

Some terms, like fake, synthetic

or artificial meat, are intended to not only

cast our products in a negative light,

but are also simply false and misleading.

We're making real meat and seafood,

and that's the whole point.

The term lab grown has an accuracy problem

as well. As with many familiar

and currently marketed food products

the early development of our products happens in food labs,

but the products that we bring to consumers will be produced

in food production facilities, not labs.

We really want to hear from you today.

That's really what this meeting is about.

Anyone else would you like to come forward

and make a comment during this open comment period?

We cell based food producers do need to use the terms

fish and meat to reiterate if one is allergic to animal

based seafood, that person has a high probability

I would say almost a 100% certainty

that they will be allergic to the seafood

produced using our technology.

We as cattle producers, we worked a long time to

build trust between consumers and stuff like that.

That's why I urge these companies or individuals

that are doing this technology to maybe step back

and educate us so we understand it.

It might help us be more accepting

to what you want to accomplish. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Would anyone else like to come forward and comment?

I suspect that producing meat

from animal cell culture, rather than whole animals,

could result in fewer viral epidemics

fewer threats to food security

and fewer externalized costs to environment,

public health and animal welfare.

Currently, 815 million people around the globe

are malnourished, as has been

discussed a few times today.

Hunger has been on the rise

for the last three years, and this number is expected

to drastically increase as the world's population grows.

We must rethink the global food production system.

For us producing bluefin tuna, cell based bluefin tuna,

there will be no mercury,

no plastic, we're not using antibiotics

we are not overfishing, the ocean.

We are not engaging in animal cruelty.

On the question of safety

innovation in the meat industry is urgently needed.

Conventional methods rely on the intensive confinement

of animals in unsanitary and inhumane facilities.

These unnatural conditions require extensive use

of antibiotics to address diseases

that proliferate among the crowded, stressed animals.

Contributing to the spread of drug resistant superbugs.

We need real alternatives to the suffering.

We need real alternatives to the cruel

and inhumane conditions forced upon billions of animals

we need alternatives to artificial insemination,

overcrowding, genetic manipulation,

long transport and slaughter.

Without a clear, predictable and timely framework,

this industry cannot succeed.

Any delays in moving forward would jeopardize the U.S.'s standing in the world

as the leader in protein production

and responsible science based food innovation.

In addition to providing clarity

in terms of the regulatory pathway,

are there any other incentives,

either through research, maybe through ARS

or any other type of ways that can be implemented

to help ensure that the American startups

pursuing cellular agriculture products can move forward

Well, the good thing about the environment, the economy

and the democratic process we have here

is our innovators and entrepreneurs

and our risk takers are very creative in their efforts.

We want to be ahead of the game.

I think the regulatory framework

needs to be there to provide guidance

for our entrepreneurs and innovators to work towards so.

we will be moving post haste after this meeting

to more clearly define that.

I think this is one of those unique examples

where we're contemplating

all these things really early in the process,

really in advance of the products even being available

and that's going to, I think help the innovation take root

and provide really clear guidance to the manufacturers.

I think it should accelerate the innovation. Thank you.

Would you like America to be first?

Yes.

I've been like thinking about this

for the last month, obviously in preparation.

This moment where heavily vested parties and cultural identities

would intersect in a formal way.

Hi, you here for Eric?

What little company with no product on the market

gets two federal agencies to talk to each other

in the most productive way?

It was incredible. It is incredible.

Food is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

and it's about 80% of the domestic food supply.

and for the remainder it's largely under the USDA.

The U.S. food system splits into,

for meat and poultry, animals that are alive,

the FDA regulates and then basically from the

moment of slaughter forward, the USDA regulates.

This good, though?

Yeah. If you want to pull up right here, that's fine.

We want to compete on market

with products that are safe and labeled, and then

that's where we want to be. And the way to get there

at the last hurdle is the regulatory system.

And that's why we're putting so much energy into it right now.

So we have jurisdiction for both FDA and USDA.

You've done a fantastic job

leading this effort from Memphis Meats, so...

I hope you take a moment, pause,

and recognize it's a big milestone.

Yeah, I think all these big

moments happen and then we sort of like wait,

Did it just happen?

We'd have to like pinch ourselves to make sure it really happened.

We finally get to this end point.

So one thing I was thinking, what is next now for us?

It doesn't matter how great our tech is,

if we can't sell it legally, who cares?

I think that the next step is one we're working on the pathway.

But it could slow down.

There's a possibility that pathway negotiations stall.

Or if there's congressional intervention

which is still lingering.

We know that there's language in the approach bill.

So there's a chance that this could still delay.

I want to be realistic about that.

There was, let's say the pathway gets slowed.

At least we have a reasonable time frame

of getting under the market,

we can continue to do technical development,

continue to lower cost,

continue to increase scale and be ready for that moment.

What would be motivating factors for that?

Very successful lobbying against us.

Okay, so safety and truthful labeling, right?

Correct. Those are the two legal requirements for us.

Yeah, this will be FDA. This will be USDA.

One of the big unknowns,

of course, is, where inspections will be split.

Labeling, we know that's going to be handled by the USDA.

We know that, but we don't know how.

So this is a bare bones pathway right now.

USDA comes in here and the bio system we're talking about.

Where's the biosystems?

This is the bio system

where the animal cells and the feed are growing.

They would do it as part of a pre market safety evaluation.

So they'll evaluate the safety, they'd inspect it and then

they would check to make sure that we're following.

our inspections ourselves

so they wouldn't come on site and check regularly.

Okay.

That's currently what we're thinking.

I think there's a lot of fear

around the intersection of food and technology,

and we really want to,

many of us want to go sort of back to the land,

and we have our own little backyard gardens

and chicken coops and do it the way

that you know they did in Little House on the Prairie .

But that won't work to feed 9 billion - 10 billion people.

And tech will have role.

The question is what role?

And how can you do tech right?

- Hey, David. - Hey, Uma.

How are you? Good to meet you in person.

How are you? Good to see you after all of this, how nice.

So what's the--?

Yeah, so I think in the interest of time,

we should probably start heading over to the R&D facility.

Should we start walking this way?

Yeah. So what we believe in is it starts with the consumers and

ends with the consumers right, so they have to get behind it

and we want to get this right as opposed to being

first to market. First to market

you know, it sounds really exciting to do

but doing the most desirable product that consumers allow

is what we're trying to do.

- Hey guys. Good morning. - Hi.

- Hi. How are you? - Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you as well.

Casey is our vice president

of process development and has enormous experience

in growing cells in very, very large quantities.

I've been growing cells for a long time.

and it never dawned on me to eat them, ever so,

it's a little bit of a shift,

but it's so exciting because the things that

we've been learning for decades all totally apply.

This is the brew? This is the special broth?

It's a superfood.

This is a superfood, a cellular superfood,

and it's a nice lavender...

Time to walk over to the next spot.

Let's do that in a little bit.

You know maybe we should actually do that now.

Let's just walk over there.

Thank goodness, David. Keeping our ass on time.

You know I'm really showing restraint.

I have a lot of other questions.

This lab is just being set up now

there will be a lot of automation units in there.

There is some there are liquid handling robots that means

They're handling the feed that Casey is working with.

Did you say liquid handling robots?

Take you around and when we first started,

we were only producing very small quantities

where, you know, you can make them evolve now.

Since then, we can pretty much grow as much as we need for our

tasting and testing purposes, so we can do several pounds

of meat production and testing at this point,

but the goal is to be able to take

and we scale up to a few thousand pounds.

There we go.

Trying to get it nice and seared.

Let's see if you want to just quickly--

This feels about as low risk a food as I have ever eaten.

Even if I just signed a high risk agreement.

You're not eating anything that I am not eating

so you're eating meat that comes from cells

from a very high quality animal.

This this is still a early stage product,

but I think I just want to make sure you're looking at this

as a very big, historic thing in this world.

So I'm anxious to see what you think about it.

See it's really, you know, see all the fibers in there?

See the browning of the skin? And as you pull apart, you know

meat's hard to pull apart because it's got those

features and those proteins and the elasticity which is...

That is meat.

That is duck meat.

It's delicious!

It's got all the stringiness of the strands of muscle

which is something you don't get in plant based meats, of course.

And you don't get that resistance

with the chew resistance.

I mean, the chew is, it's very chewy.

Yes.

Very, it's very meaty.

Wow, amazing.

We don't take a very long time to grow meat, right?

So if you have to think about

a cow from conception all the way to slaughter

at the age of 18 to 24 months,

the whole process is about two and a half years.

For us to grow beef,

if it takes about four weeks, at the most six weeks.

So tell me about your inputs.

I mean, this gets to the bovine growth room

and also the environmental implications, right?

Yeah, yeah. So in the early parts of research in this area,

the supply chain includes serum.

And when we think about scaling this up,

we cannot have a supply chain that is going to have serum.

That's why we want to separate out serum from meat production.

or blood from meat production and have our own feed for it.

So that's the process we are working out

and we've developed a full end

to end method of growing cells without any serum at all.

For us to put products on the market completely animal free.

It's going to take a while.

There are still parts of our research that depends

on getting that serum in to understand how the cells grow.

Yeah, I guess what I'm wondering

so for the carbohydrates, for example,

like are you actually using some kind of carbohydrate source?

You know, for example, some grain or I mean,

are there actual sort of recognizable ingredients

that go into the production?

100%. They're all recognizable.

They are already in the current feed system.

It's still proprietary of what kinds of feeds that we are using

because we're trying to break it down

and saying, okay, what is the most efficient source

of like carbohydrate feed?

So it might be some crop that we recognize?

- Right. Yeah, yeah. 100%. - Okay. Okay.

So it's, you know, maybe it might include some amount

of corn or soy or something?

I just want to address that this as an important point.

It doesn't mean that we're going to stop growing corn

just because we stopped stopped growing cows?

- Right. There are estimates of 40 - 50% of land being used

to grow crops to feed animals.

We'll still need crops like you said, but it's not even close

to the degree that we need for keeping, you know, a very, very large herd

of 70 billion animals on this planet.

Keep in mind

you're seeing very small scale production at this point,

and as we start thinking about scaling this up,

one of the big areas of innovation

that we'll start seeing

is decreasing the environmental impact,

decreasing the environmental footprint.

It also makes me feel like that is the reason

we are here, to solve this problem.

- It keeps us going. - Biomemesis right?

You're listening and learning from the animal.

There is a pretty intense need to

innovate how we produce food.

Almost everything we are doing in terms of innovation

is to do more with less and that's really foundational

to all the conversations in climate are happening.

I mean, for instance, our idea is to be able to grow more food,

more nutrient dense food,

with less resources to get a pound of meat.

Our target is to be able to say

we could use almost ten times less land,

almost ten times less water and less deforestation.

And all of these have a direct impact on climate,

the amount of CO2 that is released.

There is no methane production

when you're growing cells.

When you culture cells,

the cells are basically,

it's an oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange that's happening.

Methane doesn't come into the picture, so

we don't expect to have methane in our production process as we scale up.

So I'm going to make some pancakes for breakfast?

- Okay. - Is that good?

Blueberries?

I have some blueberries and blackberries.

Do you want coffee?

Sure. Yeah. Do you have the decaf?

Sure.

Bananas?

- I'll cut them. - Okay.

That's coming out nicely, too.

So this is from...

So I'm leaving on Sunday to Minneapolis.

Okay. Yeah.

So you have a lot of late meetings this week?

Yeah.

Can you not do that next week, please?

Make sure that the kids get home at a decent hour

so that you can spend some time with the kids in the evening?

Yeah. I actually told Jerry to have me out

every day by 5:30 or 6:00.

So I should be home pretty early.

When I had moved to the Bay Area,

of course, my family was still

living in Minnesota and the kids were going to school there.

Thank you for making breakfast.

Mrunalini had her pediatric practice there.

And it was not easy.

But ultimately being able to move the family here

and just being able to talk to them every day.

Seeing them, I think has completely changed my life.

Just having the opportunity for us all to as a family

spend time under one roof as we are going after

this very big idea in this world,

I'm just very grateful.

I actually brought some markup boxes

of our what packaging could look like.

Is it gonna be like vacuum?

Like you know? That sealed thing so you can...?

Yeah. So people can see what they're buying.

And this is the beef.

I like it.

I like this "made with love in California".

When I think about the why

of what we're doing, it's not a product.

It's much more than that.

It's about the way that we want the future world to look

and that's what drives and motivates Uma every day.

He has two hats going at all times.

It's the what?

Like, what will it look like?

But the why and the how?

The ingredients it says cell based

are grown from cells and salt, spices.

Yeah. That's what it says here, chicken,

cell based sea salt, spices including chipotle pepper.

And same thing here.

Of course. Right. We need to get labeling approved

and all of the materials approved.

But this is what we're thinking.

We've got to be open to innovation

and open to conversations,

but also keep the focus on which particular one will we

bring forward at the next step.

Knowing that this is not a race,

it's not going to be a one and done and that we'll be

doing it in sequence.

So our focus is entirely on scale.

Like we've got to produce it at a scale that is meaningful.

This is just about 70,000 square feet, rentable space here.

So this is a 70,000 foot print.

And the height is--

It will easily cost us

tens of millions of dollars

to get this first production facility up and running.

The goal is not just to make

the meat in this facility, but also to have it be

a showcase for future facilities and for partners who can join us

and build out their own production capacity

in their facilities using their capital.

So it serves a lot of purposes

beyond just the meat but it will not come cheap.

It's a really heavy lift that we're taking on here.

There's a service elevator that we'll take down

that gives you access back down to the ground floor.

And if I wanted a fireman's pole?

These are high ceilings.

Yeah, so this is a lot bigger.

Oh nice, this I more than 24 feet it looks like.

Or maybe it's 24.

Yeah, so this is 20,000 square feet here

where you can do the manufacturing operations.

Okay.

So you could have a flow of basically follow

the process from an area with your raw materials,

your media preparation provide all the nutrients

for the cells back into the bio processing suite, harvest

and then to the food formulation space.

So you can follow a a U shaped thing here

for the process all the way around.

It could be really nice.

Our paradigm for production will continue to evolve.

But this is this seems like the most accessible,

relevant next step for translating from R&D.

It's a launching pad. Yes, it's a launching pad.

It's transformative.

Having it all right here, locally sourced

and being able to put it out

Locally sourced, locally produced, locally distributed.

How's that?

Yeah, amazing.

That's what you're going to be making right?

I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

I think it has the potential to also be

that transparent venue where people can really

understand how we're making meat.

There were times where Nick and I

in the first six months of the company

looked at each other and said

I don't know if anyone will believe us.

And if we can actually take this

to a stage where we can scale it to producing

meaningful amounts of meat and you know, Nick said

in one of those tough moments, "we've got to have faith".

I still remember that day

because it was one of my lowest moments

because it was challenging

to get people to recognize it, it was impossible

for people to understand that this needed a chance.

The birth of this game changing industry

is no longer science fiction, it's reality.

The innovation of cell cultured meat, poultry, fish and seafood

is accelerating quickly around the globe

with pioneers on every continent.

Our shared humanity

depends on this hopeful and rapid momentum

towards a sustainable future for us,

the animals

and for our beautiful planet Earth.

A kind of classic kinda technique to get the chicken nice and brown

without it getting dry.

We're just going to let it rest for a minute

before we slice through it.

All right, there is Morgan, thanks for cooking it for us.

All right, cheers.

Delicious.

Everybody can come and start taking pieces. Go for it.

We just grew the part that we wanted to eat.

This is what Winston Churchill was talking about in 1931.

I actually remember that exact quote.

"We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken

in order to eat the breast or wing,

by growing these parts separately

under a suitable medium."

That's exactly what we all did. All right.