Business for Good Podcast

You’ve heard of fruit leather, but what about making leather from fruit? Or more precisely, feeding fruit waste like mango pulp to bacteria which then convert those sugars into a leather-like material that can be useful for all types of purposes?

That’s exactly what Polybion, a startup in Central Mexico, is doing. Co-founded in 2015 by two brothers with a passion for using biology to save humanity from ourselves—as CEO Axel Gómez-Ortigoza puts it—Polybion has pioneered methods of turning the fruit industry’s trash into what they hope will be their treasure.

As you’ll hear in this episode, Polybion has methods for treating fruit waste to make it economic as a feedstock in their fermentation system to grow cellulose into a leather-like material they call Celium. Already the company is partnered with fashion companies eager to put Celium into their menu of offerings.

To sustainably feed and clothe ourselves into the future, it’s imperative that we no longer go big with animal agriculture, but instead go small with microbial agriculture. Will Polybion’s cellulose leather be a part of the solution? Time will tell. But for now, enjoy hearing the wild ride this company’s been on from conception to pivoting technologies to getting a product out onto the market.

Discussed in this episode

• You can see photos of Celium here.

• CNN on the partnership between Danish fashion brand Ganni and Polybion.

• Suzanne Lee was an inspiration for Polybion’s founders.

• Ecovative also inspired them, and we did an episode with them too!

• Plastic-eating fungi offer hope

• Axel recommends reading Microcosmos and My Inventions. He also recommends watching the original Carl Sagan Cosmos TV series from the 1980s. (The 2014 remake with Neil deGrasse Tyson is also great.)

• Guillermo González Camarena was an engineer who served as an inspiration to Axel. 

More about Axel Gómez-Ortigoza

Axel Gómez-Ortigoza was born with an innate fascination for the mysteries of life, the natural world, and the universe, which sparked his lifelong passion for life sciences and finding solutions to complex problems.

After completing high school, he decided to carry on the family tradition of engineering that had spanned three generations and pursued a career in bioengineering. With his expertise in Microbiology, Bioinformatics, Cell Culture, Murine Assays, Genetic Engineering, Synthetic Biology, and Origami, Axel became a skilled R&D scientist.

At the young age of 22, he and his brother Alexis co-founded Polybion, a New Generation Materials Company, which soon earned Axel a spot as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35. Today, he serves as both CEO and CTO of his company, and his groundbreaking work has led to the development of the world’s first Bacterial Cellulose Biomanufacturing Facility.

Axel’s tireless efforts have paved the way for the rapid advancement of bioassembled products, increased sustainability, and a more efficient transition toward a circular economy. He is convinced that the intersection of biology and technology is the key to solving the global health crisis. He envisions a future in which humans and nature can coexist in harmony.

Alt-meat today is typically made from soybeans, yellow peas, wheat, or some combination of those three crops. But there’s a whole world of plants out there, and maybe some of them can be harnessed to widen the world of ingredients available to manufacturers, perhaps even offering better functionality and flavor.

One of the problems though, is that making protein isolates from most beans or lentils can be pretty expensive, since these crops usually aren’t that high in protein to begin with. One reason why soy protein is so much cheaper than pea protein, for example, is that the soybean is typically 30-40 percent protein by dry weight, whereas the yellow pea at best is more like 25 percent. So you need to grow fewer soybeans to get the same amount of protein. With chickpeas, the situation is even worse, as they’re usually more like 20 percent protein. 

Enter NuCicer, a startup in Davis, California that has leveraged the power of natural plant diversity to breed a chickpea with 35 percent protein and which they say has superior flavor and functionality compared to pea protein, a common ingredient in alt-meat today, explaining one reason alt-meat is often more expensive than animal meat. 

They’ve done this by taking today’s commodity chickpea—the only domesticated species within the Cicer genus—and bred it with wild relatives that never made it into the basket of legumes which were domesticated by the humans living in the Middle East thousands of years ago. The result is a chickpea with 75 percent more protein than the typical chickpea, reducing the cost of chickpea protein by about 50 percent.

Already, NuCicer is growing its high-protein chickpeas on 1,000 acres across five states and is moving fast to scale up. Does a new world of alt-meats, high-protein hummus, and even chickpea-powered proteinaceous oatmeal await? The father-daughter duo that co-founded NuCicer certainly hopes so. That daughter, Kathryn Cook, serves as CEO and is on the show to tell you all about her journey from her first chapter as an aerospace engineer to now a CEO engineering a better chickpea. 

Discussed in this episode

• NuCicer is backed by Lever VC and Leaps by Bayer.

• Kathryn’s father Doug Cook conducted the pioneering research at UC-Davis that led to the two co-founding NuCicer.

• Kathryn recommends the book Think Again.

• Chickpea protein was popularized by Nutriati, which was acquired by Tate & Lyle in 2022.

• Rebellyous Foods was also founded by a former Boeing engineer, and we did an episode on them!

More about Kathryn Cook

Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer. Kathryn started her career as a materials science engineer developing new raw material formulations and production methods. Shifting into product and program management, Kathryn managed multidisciplinary teams in both aerospace and machine learning technologies for natural language processing. Driven by the mission of enabling a more resilient, nutritious food system for our rapidly expanding population, Kathryn launched her career in food and agriculture. She is passionate about the urgent need to leverage breeding and biodiversity to improve our crop varieties and enable more delicious, nutritious ingredients.

Seafood consumption is going up around the world, including in the US, with salmon being the fish species Americans love to eat the most. (The only seafood Americans eat more is shrimp, who of course are crustaceans, not fish.) 

The biggest wave of alt-meat so far has focused on beef replacement like burgers and sausages, given how many consumers already view red meat as bad for their health. But the perception that salmon is a healthy food is widespread, meaning that any effort to entice consumers to switch to alt-salmon will be swimming upstream in ways that alt-beef isn’t. 

Yet the need for fish-free salmon is as vast as the sea, both for animal welfare and ocean health reasons, but it’s far more difficult to replicate salmon’s texture than ground beef.

Enter, Oshi, a three-year-old startup that’s raised $14.5 million dollars to date and has invented new machinery to essentially build a fish-free salmon filet layer by layer. 

In this episode, Oshi CEO Ofek Ron talks about his journey from being an animal advocate working at a nonprofit vegan advocacy organization to taking the leap to start his own alt-protein company. As you’ll hear, at first he really had no idea how he’d remake salmon, yet still assembled a team of technical co-founders inspired by his desire and they have raised money based on their skills and not the idea. 

Since then, they’ve invented new technology, released various iterations of their salmon filet, and now have entered more than a dozen US restaurants. For full disclosure, my own company, The Better Meat Co., works with Oshi, but I can assure you that my admiration for the company predates that partnership and the decision to bring Ofek on this episode is also independent of it. 

So, will Oshi help turn the tides for our oceans and their finned inhabitants? Time will tell. But Oshi is certainly riding a wave right now that’s taking them from across the Mediterranean to the shores of the US. 

Discussed in this episode

• Ofek was influenced to become vegan after seeing this speech online.

• Ofek is a founding board member at the nonprofit Vegan-Friendly.

• He met his cofounders via the Good Food Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

• You can see a photo of the Oshi salmon filet here.

• Paul loves fava bean tofu.

More about Ofek Ron:

Ofek is the co-founder and CEO of Oshi, a leading company in the plant-based seafood industry, where they have been at the helm for 3.5 years. Before Oshi, Ofek served as a founding board member and Vice President at Vegan-Friendly, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting veganism and animal rights. Prior to that, they were the CEO of Software Sources, a role that followed their entrepreneurial venture as the co-founder and CEO of Buzz Production, an event production company.

Ofek holds a BA in Economics and Business from Reichman University in Israel. A dedicated vegan for 13 years, Ofek has been an active advocate for animal rights, notably co-hosting the largest animal rights protest in Tel Aviv in 2017. Outside of professional and advocacy work, Ofek is a proud parent of two and is married.

Not everyone gets a second chance of life. But Inna Braverman got just that, and is using her second chance to try to solve one of humanity’s most pressing problems. 

Born in Chernobyl, Ukraine, Inna was only two weeks old when the nuclear disaster nearly took her life. When her mom found Inna blue and unresponsive from the pollution spewed from the damaged reactor, she used her nursing skills to revive her baby and miraculously keep her alive long enough for paramedics to arrive. 

A few years later, the Bravermans moved to Israel, where Inna would grow up to be a translator at an energy company in her early 20s. But as she learned more about the failed efforts to capture the energy of ocean waves, she wondered if there was a better way. This wondering led Inna to found her own company and start making some waves of her own. 

In this episode, we dive into the world of renewable energy with a focus on the innovative efforts of Eco Wave Power, an Israeli startup seeking to revolutionize clean energy production. Founded by Inna when she was 24, Eco Wave Power is harnessing the energy of ocean waves to generate sustainable electricity from onshore locations. Now at 37, Braverman has led the company to the forefront of the renewable energy sector.

Eco Wave Power's cutting-edge technology captures and converts the natural motion of waves into usable electricity, offering a viable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional fossil fuels. Unlike many offshore wave energy systems, Eco Wave Power's approach involves attaching their wave energy converters to existing human-made structures, such as breakwaters and piers. This onshore method simplifies maintenance and reduces costs while maximizing energy output.

Already, the company has installations at several locations, including one at the Port of Los Angeles. Eco Wave Power went public in the US in 2021 with an IPO on the NASDAQ (symbol: WAVE) and hasn’t had to raise additional money since. 

Throughout this episode, we’ll explore Inna’s journey from company inception to its current status as a pioneering force in the renewable energy industry. Eco Wave Power is not only contributing to the global shift towards sustainable energy but also demonstrating the potential of young entrepreneurs to make an impact on our planet's future.

Discussed in this episode

• To view a photo of an Eco Wave Power installation, see here.

• The United Nations on Eco Wave Power’s work.

• Inna recommends Sheryl Sandberg’s book and TED talk.

• Forbes profile on Eco Wave Power in 2024.

• How wave energy works and why onshore may be more promising.

• The story of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.

• Why nuclear power is safer than using fossil fuels.

More about Inna Braverman

Technology entrepreneur, Inna Braverman founded Eco Wave Power in 2011, at the age of 24, and was recently chosen as one of the 100 most influential individuals in the world by medium.com (along with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others). Under her leadership, Eco Wave Power installed the first grid connected wave energy array in Gibraltar. She is also responsible for securing the significant projects pipeline for the company.

For Inna, clean electricity is a very personal journey, as she was born two weeks before the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and suffered respiratory arrest due to the pollution in the region. She got a second chance in life and decided to devote it to mitigating pollution.

Inna has given three TEDx speeches and her personal journey as a female entrepreneur was documented in a virtual reality film by Google, under the name “Female Planet”. She was also featured in Sanjay Gupta’s “Tomorrow’s Hero” in CNN for her impressive work in the wave energy field.

Some of her notable awards include:

• “100 Makers and Mavericks” by Medium.com

• Wired’s list of “Females Changing the World.”

• “Eight young innovators with ingenious ideas for the future of energy” by Smithsonian Magazine

• The “30 most influential women in the world” by MSN.com

Imagine thinking it would be a good idea to try to help people eat more fruits and vegetables, so you start making whole foods smoothies for your friends and family. Soon you’re selling them to more people than you personally know. Next thing you know, you’re running an all-vegan frozen meal company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, a billion dollar-plus valuation, and hundreds of thousands of customers all enjoying your whole foods plant-based meals. 

That’s the true story of Rachel Drori, founder of Daily Harvest, whose success with the company landed her on Forbes’ list of America’s Wealthiest Self-Made Women.

But it wasn’t all success along the way. Two years ago, after the company had achieved its unicorn status, tragedy struck. Dozens of people were sickened by one of their products, and it wasn’t clear why. Some people were even hospitalized. In addition to the serious suffering of some of its customers, the crisis captivated national headlines, threatening to put an end to the Daily Harvest story after so much growth and success. Eventually, the root cause of the problem was found: A little-known ingredient called tara flour (not to be confused with taro flour) caused a seemingly allergic reaction in a small number of people—and policies were put in place to prevent a recurrence. 

Yet, the story didn’t end there. 

In the two years since the tragedy, Daily Harvest has since branched out away from just direct-to-consumer sales and is now in thousands of supermarkets too, making it easier than ever for consumers to choose healthy plant-based meals. And as you’ll hear in this conversation with Rachel, they’ve even achieved that lucrative land known as profitability. 

So, how did this all happen, and what’s next for Daily Harvest? Listen to the episode to find out.

Discussed in this episode

• Rachel recommends Brené Brown’s Power of Vulnerability TED Talk—apparently 65 million viewers agree.

• Daily Harvest is now sold at Kroger, Target, and more.

• Some Daily Harvest meals are about $5 per serving.

• Rachel landed on Forbes’ list of America’s Wealthiest Self-Made Women

• Our past episode with Doug Evans of Juicero. 

More about Rachel Drori, Founder of Daily Harvest 

Rachel Drori is taking care of food, so food can take care of you. As the Founder of Daily Harvest, Rachel and the company are on a mission to improve human and planetary health by making it convenient to eat more sustainably grown, organic fruits and vegetables every day.  

Since launching the business out of the trunk of her car in 2015, more than 20 million pounds of sustainably grown fruits and vegetables have been delivered to consumers' doorsteps while supporting farmers’ transition to regenerative and organic practices.

Drori founded Daily Harvest with just 12 smoothies. The company, now valued at over $1 billion, offers meals and snacks for any time of day. In 2023, the company built on its successful direct-to-consumer business with its launch into national retail. Daily Harvest is now found in the freezer section of grocery stores across the country.

Prior to Daily Harvest, Drori spent years honing her skills as a customer-centric marketing executive, leading teams at Gilt Groupe, American Express and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. She has been named one of Inc.’s "Female Founders 100". Drori graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and earned an MBA from Columbia Business School.  She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

If America’s roughly 180 million meat-loving dogs and cats formed their own nation, they’d reportedly be the fifth biggest meat-consuming country in the world. As pet-keeping has exploded in the developed world, so too has demand for all the chickens, fish, pigs, and cows to feed those pets. There’s even been a trend toward human-grade meat in pet food, meaning pet food isn’t simply the meat that would have gone into lower end uses. 

This is of course a major environmental and animal welfare problem, and it can even be a problem for the pets who are consuming all that meat. 

As a result, startups are being formed to provide an animal-friendlier way to feed our animal friends. One such company is Omni Pet Food. Based in Europe, the company was started only a few years ago but has now already sold millions of meals to European dog lovers, and is on track to bring in about £4 million in annual revenue, or about $5 million USD. 

By using novel, animal-free proteins from plants, yeast, and algae, Omni claims that its pet food has real health benefits for dogs, and is actually preferred by many dogs to the conventional dog food they were previously given. The company has raised a couple million pounds in investor dollars, including even a crowdfunding campaign that generated £400,000 (half a million USD) in 15 minutes.

With so much success in its first nascent years, Omni is aspiring to bring to the world the first-ever cultivated meat cat food by partnering with cultivated meat startup Meatly, which it claims it intends to do within 2024. Already, the company has secured a retail partner for its cat food made with chicken cells grown chicken-free.

In this conversation with Omni CEO Dr. Guy Sandelowsky, we talk about everything from who the audience is for animal-free pet food, why non-vegetarians would choose to feed their pets vegetarian, what the future may hold, and more. 

Discussed in this episode

• Omni went through the ProVeg Incubator.

• Omni’s (future) cultivated meat cat food!

• Our past episodes with UPSIDE Foods (cultivated meat) and Wild Earth (plant-based dog food).

• Guy recommends reading The Lean Startup.

• Paul’s blog on the rising meat demand from pet-keeping.

More about Dr. Guy Sandelowsky

Dr. Guy Sandelowsky, co-founder and CEO of Omni Pet Food, is a veterinary surgeon with over 10 years clinical experience and an MBA from Imperial Business School. 

Maisie Ganzler has never worked at an animal welfare charity nor an alt-protein company. Yet she’s in the upper echelon of effectiveness when it comes to reducing the suffering of farmed animals. That’s because she’s served as an executive of a national food management company supplying 1,000 schools and corporate dining facilities, Bon Appetit Management Company, for decades. In her career, Maisie pioneered some of the first-ever corporate policies to require suppliers to stop using battery cages for laying hens and gestation crates for breeding pigs, meat reduction policies, and a whole host of other important animal welfare and sustainability initiatives. 

When Bon Appetit would implement a policy like those mentioned, it was often seen as leading edge at the time, yet eventually would become the norm among food service companies. For example, Bon Appetit’s 2005 cage-free egg policy would come to be adopted by McDonald’s a decade later. Maisie even ran for McDonald’s board of directors, backed by billionaire Carl Icahn, a campaign she writes that the fast food company spent $16 million to defeat. While she didn’t make it onto McDonald’s board, Maisie does sit on the board of directors of an alt-protein company called Air Protein, whose CEO Lisa Dyson has been a guest on this show before!

So it was with great pleasure that I learned that Maisie has come out with her first book, which is part autobiography and part guide for others on how to create meaningful change in our food and agricultural system. The book, which just recently came out, is called You Can't Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company. I read it and found it both informational, inspirational, and entertaining. What more could you want? 

Well, maybe you’d want to hear Maisie’s story straight from her rather than from me, so enjoy this conversation with a true pioneer for animals, farm workers, and everyone who wants to build a better food system.

Discussed in this episode

• Josh Balk worked with Maisie on many animal welfare policies, and now runs The Accountability Board.

• David Benzaquen was a student who in 2005 helped catalyze Bon Appetit’s cage-free policy, and who now is an executive in the plant-based food industry. 

• Maisie discusses the difficulties implementing the Better Chicken Commitment, leading Compassion in World Farming to extend its deadline for compliance. You can read more in CIWF’s 2023 Chicken Track paper.

• Maisie recommends reading Civil Eats and the NRA Smart Brief.

• Our past episode with Resetting the Table author Robert Paarlberg.

• Walker Hayes’ song Fancy Like has 146 million YouTube views, so it’s not just Maisie and Paul who like it. 

More about Maisie Ganzler

Maisie Ganzler is the go-to expert on how companies can make positive change in supply chains and other entrenched systems. She’s been interviewed by leading media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fast Company, and Bloomberg, spoken at conferences around the world, written thought leadership pieces for Forbes, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle and is frequently called upon for strategic counsel by start-ups and big business alike.

As Chief Strategy & Brand Officer for Bon Appetit Management Company, a $1.7 billion onsite restaurant company with 1,000-plus cafés at corporations, universities, and cultural institutions in 33 states serving more than 250 million meals per year, Maisie tackled local purchasing, antibiotics in meat production, sustainable seafood, humane care of farm animals, climate change, farmworkers’ rights, and food waste, positioning the company as the foodservice industry’s undisputed leader in sustainable purchasing and holistic wellness.

She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

Many listeners of this show will be familiar with precision fermentation, or turning microbes into factories to produce proteins like those proteins that have historically been produced inside of chickens and cows. Think of companies whose founders we’ve had on, like Perfect Day and The Every Company.

But, what if instead of using microbes as protein factories—and all the associated costs of bioreactors and other capex—you could simply turn plants into protein factories, and make actual animal proteins inside of the plants, which can then be extracted and sold?

That’s exactly what Israeli startup PoLoPo is doing inside of potatoes. Their first protein: Ovalbumin, or the protein that makes up most of the egg white’s protein content. If you pay attention to ingredient decks on food packaging, you’ve probably noticed that albumin is an ingredient in many foods, often serving to help color and texturize foods, as well as serving as a high-quality source of protein. In fact, the global egg albumin market is valued at billions of dollars, with some estimates around $5 billion USD and others as much as $30 billion USD.

Founded in 2022, PoLoPo has already raised a couple million US dollars to scramble that market with real egg proteins grown inside of potatoes. Since the process is totally animal-free, it should go over easy as a  vegan ingredient, but since it’s an actual egg protein, those with egg allergies will still want to avoid cracking open a food with PoLoPo’s Ovalbumin.

In this episode, PoLoPo CEO Maya Sapir-Mir and I chat about her work as a plant biologist, how she teamed up with a vegan scientist to co-found this company, her passion for using bioengineering to help save the planet, and of course, how she plans to use the humble potato to displace some of the need for chickens in our food industry. 

Discussed in this episode

• 2022 Food Navigator story on PoLoPo’s technology.

• Our past episodes with The Kitchen and Aleph Farms. 

• As well, Paul recommends reading Resetting the Table, whose author we did an episode with too.

• Fellow molecular farming startup Moolec received approval from the USDA for its soybeans that contain pig proteins. 

More about Maya Sapir-Mir

Maya Sapir-Mir is CEO and co-founder of PoLoPo, a molecular farming pioneer producing proteins directly in common crops, beginning with egg protein (ovalbumin) grown in potatoes. She has nearly ten years of experience in the biotech industry and agricultural R&D, including senior management at a small cannabis industry startup. In addition to leading R&D on plants with commercial and medical applications, she managed collaborations with partners and customers.

She holds a PhD in plant sciences and an MSc in plant genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a BSc in biochemistry from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She performed post-doctoral work at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s leading agricultural R&D facility, creating a new area of research for the organization in Protein Identification, Extraction, and Characterization in plants and microorganisms.

Upon reading his obituary, Mark Twain reportedly wrote that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Whether Twain actually wrote this or not, the reality remains that today the reports of the death of cultivated meat are indeed quite real. Yet Bruce Friedrich, the president of the Good Food Institute, is here to tell you that he believes such reports are not based on science and are indeed greatly exaggerated. 

Few people have done more to inspire others to pursue alternative protein—including cultivated meat—as a strategy to ameliorate world problems than Bruce. I’ve known Bruce since 1996, and one thing that’s remained constant during the past three decades is that Bruce’s commitment to reducing suffering on the planet is simply enormous. Whether in his role as part of the nonprofit animal advocacy world or the crusade he’s been on since co-founding GFI in 2016 to render alternative proteins no longer alternative, Bruce’s lodestar has always been: how can he do as much good as possible during his limited time on the planet?

In this conversation, Bruce and I focus on the state of the plant-based and cultivated meat industries today, why he believes the critics are misguided, whether China will lead this race, how to respond to the new cultivated meat bans like those newly passed in Florida and Alabama, and critically: what it will take for alt-protein to no longer be alt.

Discussed in this episode

• This episode is the 10th in our ten-part podcast series on cultivated meat. The previous nine episodes include Orbillion Bio, UPSIDE Foods, Avant Meats, BlueNalu, Eat Just, Fork & Good, Mosa Meat, New Harvest, and Aleph Farms.

• Dr. Elliot Swartz’s presentation: The Cost Drivers of Cultivated Meat Production.

• GFI’s Plant-Based Meat Production Volume Modeling 2030 analysis.

• GFI’s numerous additional resources, including The Science of Cultivated Meat, Advancing Solutions for Alternative Protein, The Costs and Environmental Impacts of Cultivated Meat, and The GFI Startup Manual. 

• You can sign up to receive GFI’s many newsletters and to be alerted to their many webinars and other events and resources at gfi.org/newsletters. 

• Bruce cites numerous laws, including Amara’s Law (we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run), Wright’s Law (for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs will fall by a constant percentage), and even Newton’s Third Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction).

• Good Meat is now selling cultivated chicken at a butchery in Singapore.

• China’s five-year plan for the future of meat.

• The cultivated meat documentary Meat the Future.

• Bruce recommends Hannah Ritchie’s book, Not The End of the World. You can see Paul’s review of it here.

• Ezra Klein’s 2021 NY Times column, Let’s Launch a Moonshot for Meatless Meat.

• Bruce’s 2019 TED Talk.

• The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ report: The Future Appetite for Alternative Proteins.

• Our past episodes with Ryan Bethencourt and Jason Matheny.

• An upcoming episode with Israel’s albumin producer PoLoPo!

More about Bruce Friedrich

Bruce Friedrich is founder & president of the Good Food Institute, a global network of nonprofit science-focused think tanks, with more than 220 full-time team members across affiliates in the U.S., India, Israel, Brazil, Singapore, and Europe (UK, Germany, & EC). GFI works on alternative protein policy, science, and corporate engagement - to accelerate the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity. Friedrich is a TED Fellow, Y Combinator alum, 2021 "American Food Hero" (EatingWell Magazine), and popular speaker on food innovation. He has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Nature Food, Wired, and many other publications. He has represented GFI on the TED Radio Hour, New Yorker Radio Hour, the Ezra Klein Show, Making Sense (Sam Harris), and a variety of other podcasts and TV programs. Bruce's 2019 TED talk has been viewed more than 2.4 million times and translated into 30 languages. Friedrich graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics.

If you follow the cultivated meat sector, you know that the last couple years have been tough. Some companies have gone under, others have gone into hibernation, and others have shed staff in cash-conserving layoffs. Major publications have published opinion column obituaries for this industry, yet the work goes on. Part of that work is that of Obillion Bio, a B2B cultivated meat company which successfully raised capital in 2024, surely a Herculean feat.

Having now brought in $15 million, while the Orbillion technology is complex, the business model is simple: grow high-quality wagyu beef cells and then sell those cells to others who will create finished goods with them.

In this conversation, Orbillion CEO Patricia Bubner and I chat about what makes them different from other cultivated meat startups, her work as a plant and fungal biologist prior to her career in mammalian cell culture, what she thinks are the best ways to scale, why she thinks she was successful in fundraising during a funding famine, and more. 

Discussed in this episode

• Patricia is a fan of John Steinbeck’s books.

• Patricia co-founded The Millet Project.

• Orbillion went through the Y Combinator accelerator program

• Patricia and Paul both recommend Hannah Ritchie book, Not The End of the World. You can see Paul’s review of it here.

• AgFunder News on Orbillion Bio.

More about Patricia Bubner, PhD

Patricia Bubner is a PhD scientist and engineer focused on commercializing cultivated beef. She is the co-founder and CEO of Orbillion Bio, Inc. with the mission to make sustainable, nutritious, and flavorful cultivated meat at price parity. 

Patricia grew up in Graz, Austria, surrounded by an abundance of local and regional foods. With farmers as grandparents, she learned early where food comes from and the hard work that goes into producing it. Her deep interest in food — and the molecular basis of food — led her to study chemistry.

Patricia holds an MSc in Technical Chemistry and a PhD in Biotechnology from Graz University of Technology in Austria, and she conducted her postdoctoral research at the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. During that time, she also pursued her conviction of a more sustainable food system as a co-founder of the agriculture and food systems initiative, The Millet Project. 

Prior to Orbillion, Patricia advised several technology companies and led the Analytics and QC teams at biopharma startups. During her time with the Bioprocess Science team at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), she built and led a team dedicated to scaling bioprocess development for mammalian cells — the very systems required to commercialize cultivated meat. At BI, Patricia met and worked hand-in-hand with Orbillion co-founder, Samet Yildirim, on a novel bioprocessing technology now commercialized by Pfizer.

Combining her experience in the biopharma, food, and sustainable materials industries, Patricia co-founded Orbillion Bio, Inc. Orbillion is a B2B cultivated meat technology company that brings commercially viable meat to the ever-growing $211B global ground beef market. Orbillion has developed a game-changing algorithm for the scale-up of cultivated meat that makes commercializing low-cost cultivated beef possible.

Orbillion has raised $15M and is backed by The Venture Collective, Y Combinator, At One Ventures, Venture Souq, and Metaplanet among others.