Business for Good Podcast

Eric Schulze loves the intersection of science and food so much that after many years as an FDA regulator, he decided in 2016 to leave the federal government to join the then-nascent Memphis Meats (now UPSIDE Foods). He’d go on to spend the next seven years working to advance the cultivated meat pioneer’s science, technology, communications, and ultimate regulatory approval by the agency for which he used to work.

Now, Eric’s charting a new path for himself, founding GoodHumans, a consultancy aimed at assisting and even launching biotech startups seeking to bring their new innovations to the world.

In this episode, Eric and I discuss the state of the cultivated meat movement today and where it may be heading. This includes the path to commercialization, the obituaries being written for the sector, the statewide sales bans on the product, and comparisons to other technologies. We even discuss our mutual love of sci-fi and give some recommendations to those of you fellow nerds out there. 

Eric’s a wealth of knowledge on all things alt-protein, so if you want both information and inspiration, listen to what he’s got to say.

Discussed in this episode

• Eric first learned about cultivated meat after the $18,000 meatball was unveiled in 2016.

• Our past episodes on this show with Uma Valeti and Teryn Wolfe, the latter of whom Eric has jointly launched a new company, Nexture Bio.

• Eric is a big fan of British physicist David Deutsch 

• Eric recommends reading The Science of Science (nonfiction) along with fiction such as The Name of the Wind, Three Body Problem, and The Maniac.

• Paul recommends Tender is the Flesh (fiction) and Frostbite (nonfiction). He also wrote a review of some 19th century animal protection literature recently. 

• Both Eric and Paul liked the films Gattaca and Elysium.

More about Eric Schulze, PhD

Eric Schulze, PhD is a professional molecular biologist, genetic engineer, and former federal biotechnology regulator, and most recently is the CEO of GoodHumans, a full-service strategy and design firm. He served as Vice President of Product and Regulation at UPSIDE Foods, where he led both design and development of the company’s meat products as well as its regulatory-, policy-, and government affairs. Before that, he served as a U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulator, handling a portfolio of novel food and drug biotechnology products. As a civil servant, Dr. Schulze also served as a federal STEM education policy capacity within the National Science Foundation and currently works with the National Academy of Sciences on undergraduate STEM education transformation. He holds a doctorate in genetic, cellular, and molecular biology with a specialty in embryonic stem cell engineering and is trained in broadcast communication, speechwriting, and risk assessment.

We all know chocolate is sweet. The way that it’s made—not so much. 

From deforestation and climate change to child labor and heavy metal contamination, cocoa farming leaves a lot to be desired. 

But what if we could make cocoa powder without having to chop down the rainforest and engage in so many other unsavory practices? That’s what California Cultured is working on now.

The Davis, California-based startup has raised $16 million to grow cocoa cells inside of bioreactors and has already produced some pretty tasty chocolate from this process, as I can personally attest.

This isn’t their CEO Alan Perlstein’s first shot at growing food inside of bioreactors. As you’ll hear in this episode, Alan was part of the team that a quarter century ago grew the world’s first-ever cultivated meat (goldfish cells funded by NASA). He went on to found Miraculex—now Oobli—which grows sweet proteins inside of bioreactors. After running the company for six years, he’s now embarked on a journey to divorce cocoa production from farming the rainforest, and he shares that story here.

Can they compete on cost with farmed cocoa? How long before their cocoa makes its way onto the market? Most importantly, does it taste as good as the chocolate we eat today? These are all questions we bite into—and more—in this conversation!

Discussed in this episode

• Our past episodes with the RAND Corporation and Oobli. 

• Our World in Data greenhouse gas emission chart showing chocolate similar to beef.

• Alan endorses starting your company through SOSV.

• California Cultured signs agreement with Japanese chocolate giant.

• Cocoa consumption’s effect on muscle synthesis. 

More about Alan Perlstein

Alan Perlstein is a visionary entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the food technology industry. From his early career in one of the first cell-cultured meat labs to founding California Cultured, Alan has consistently pursued sustainable innovations to solve global food production issues. His passion lies in addressing the environmental and ethical challenges of traditional agriculture by using cutting-edge plant cell culture technology to create real chocolate and coffee without the harmful impacts of deforestation, child labor, and toxic chemicals.

If you follow the world of cultivated meat, you probably know that a few companies have gotten historic regulatory approval and have sold some limited quantities of product both in the US and Singapore. But earlier this year, Meatly—a company founded only in 2021 and with just a few million British pounds in their pocket—succeeded in getting regulatory approval to start selling its cultivated chicken meat…in pet food.

This was the first-ever European approval for a cultivated meat product, and the first-ever approval for such a product in the pet food space. And as someone with a dog who sadly makes his distaste for plant-based dog food very clear, I can assure you that I’m eager to see if my dog Eddie will enjoy Meatly’s debut product. 

In this episode, I talk with Meatly CEO Owen Ensor about his journey from starting the company to now. We discuss the scale he’s at, the cost structure of his product, the inclusion rates in pet food he anticipates, what stores he plans to sell in at first, how he’ll fund the company, when he thinks cultivated meat may make a dent in total meat demand, and much more. 

It’s a riveting conversation with someone making headlines across the alt-meat world. Will pet food be the gateway for cultivated meat’s market entrance? You be the judge.

Discussed in this episode

• Owen became vegan after watching Cowspiracy.

• Owen’s chart showing the timeline to regulatory approval for various cultivated meat companies.

• Paul’s essay on pet food’s contribution to total meat demand.

• Bond is another company growing chicken protein for the pet market. You can see Paul’s dog Eddie enjoying it here.

• Our past episodes with Jim Mellon from Agronomics and Mark Post from Mosa Meat.

• Owen recommends reading Good to Great.

More about Owen Ensor

Owen is the Founding CEO of Meatly. Since establishing Meatly in 2021, with only £3.5m in funding, it has become the first company in Europe to get regulatory approval for cultivated meat, developed industry-leading technical processes, and created the world’s first cultivated pet food products. Before establishing Meatly, Owen started his career at the Management Consultancy company Bain and scaled one of the world's first insect protein facilities.

Around the time his son was born in 2011, Beni Nofech saw a video that changed his life. After listening to an argument about the need to move away from the view that animals are mere commodities for humanity to use however we like, Beni adopted a vegan diet and soon found himself attending animal movement and alt-protein conferences. From there, he began making angel investments in food tech startups that could help animals, eventually leading him to leave his career in the medical device world to become a full-time venture capitalist in the alt-protein food tech world.

Today, Beni runs Milk & Honey Ventures, an eight-figure investment fund with a mandate to place early-stage bets on Israeli food tech startups that are seeking to displace animals in the food system. He’s backed some of the biggest names in alt-protein, including many companies who’ve been on this podcast before.

In this episode, Beni and I discuss the state of alt-protein investing, whether he views the current apparent malaise as permanent or transitory, and what he sees for the future of this important industry. 

I’ve known Beni since 2016 and can attest that he’s a great guy with important insights from which anyone who cares about building a better food system will benefit.

Discussed in this episode

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

• Beni helped promote this 2016 fundraising video by SuperMeat, to which Paul donated.

• Beni served on the board of the Modern Agriculture Foundation.

• Beni recommends: Startup Nation, Clean Meat, Sapiens, and Calvin and Hobbes.

• Bonus: One of Paul’s favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips. 

• The Good Food Institute’s suggestions for white space in the alt-protein sector.

• Our past episodes with Oshi and PoLoPo.

• Pitch Milk and Honey Ventures at [email protected]

More about Beni Nofech

Beni is the Founding Managing-Partner of Milk & Honey Ventures - Israel’s leading venture capital fund exclusively dedicated to the Sustainable-Protein industry.

He has been a key player in the sector in Israel for over a decade, actively serving as an angel investor, entrepreneur, and advocate for the industry.

His experience spans investments in over a dozen startups, including some of the most notable success stories in the global alternative-protein space today.

Beni’s passion is the effective acceleration of disruptive Sustainable-Protein technologies

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.