You’d know a chicken nugget if you saw one, right? How about one grown from a single cell without harming animals?
Josh Tetrick doesn’t bet.
After receiving the world’s first approval for his company’s farmed chicken in Singapore in late 2020, he is trying to win over consumers with his morsel of lab-grown chicken.
“We have the freedom to sell across Singapore, whether it’s retail, hospitality, hawker, whatever,” Tetrick told CNBC Make It.
Starting with an egg
Tetrick is the founder and CEO of Eat Just, the California food startup responsible for bringing the world’s first lab-grown chicken to the table.
Its groundbreaking approval for human consumption could potentially disrupt industrial animal farming. But when Tetrick started in 2011, that idea was a pipe dream.
The idea was…to create a food company that took the animal, the live animal, out of the food system equation.
Josh Tetrick
Founder and CEO of Eat Just
“I had less than $3,000 in my bank account and the idea was: We’re going to create a food company that takes the animal, the live animal, out of the equation of the food system,” he said.
Tetrick, who began his career working in nonprofits in sub-Saharan Africa, wanted to solve one of the world’s biggest problems: food sustainability.
And for him the egg came first.
“We decided that the first thing we wanted to do was figure out how to make an egg, a chicken egg, out of a plant,” he said. “All I knew back then was that there were 375,000 species of plants in the world, and I bet one of them could move around like an egg.”
Gain investor support
Investors liked his vision. Shortly after he founded the company, billionaire technology investor Vinod Khosla and his business partner Samir Kaul were on board and invested $500,000 in the idea.
“That was enough to get me off the couch,” Tetrick said. “I started hiring food scientists, biochemists, molecular biologists, analytical chemists and chefs.”
After years of experimentation, the team came across mung beans – a protein-rich legume commonly used in cuisines across Asia. And in 2018, Eat Just’s first product, Just Egg, was born.
To date, the company has sold the equivalent of 100 million plant-based eggs major retailers like Walmart, Whole Food Markets and Alibaba.
But the egg was just the beginning.
What we wanted to make next was real chicken and beef, but not plant-based.
Josh Tetrick
Founder and CEO of Eat Just
“Next we wanted to make real chicken and beef, but not from plants,” Tetrick said.
“Real chicken and real beef that didn’t require killing any animals and didn’t require a single drop of antibiotics. And that’s broadly a process called cellular agriculture.”
How to Make Cultured Meat
The process of creating cultured meat begins with a cell. In this case from a chicken.
It can be taken from either a live bird through a biopsy, a fresh piece of meat, a cell bank, or the root of a feather. This cell is then fed nutrients such as those found in soy and corn before being allowed to mature in a large steel vessel.
The process takes about 14 days from start to finish and the end product is raw ground meat.
Creating the cell-cultured meat product was the easy part. The harder part was getting regulatory approvals, which took two years.
Towards the end of 2020, Singapore became the first country to approve Eat Just’s flagship cultured chicken nuggets for nationwide sale under the Good Meat brand.
The Chicken Nugget is now available at 1880 Restaurant in Singapore and retails for around $17 for a set meal. More restaurants are expected to be added to the city state in the coming months.
Singapore takes the world’s first bite
Singapore is home to Eat Just’s Asia Pacific headquarters and its first factory in Asia. The company is also considering making Singapore its global production base for Good Meat.
While the island nation – which is slightly smaller than New York City – seems an unlikely location for a global meat production facility, Aileen Supriyadi, senior research analyst at Euromonitor International, said several factors are at play.
Since Singapore is the hub in Asia, these companies can even export to other countries.
Aileen Supriyadi
Senior Research Analyst, Euromonitor International
“Singapore has the 30 by 30 initiative, so the country wants to produce 30% of food locally (by 2030),” she told CNBC Make It.
“Singapore can also leverage scientific knowledge, particularly stem cell research. And Singapore, as a hub in Asia, actually helps these companies export and sell their products to other countries.”
Revolutionizing animal husbandry
An estimated 50 billion chickens are now slaughtered for food every year. Agriculture as a whole is responsible for 10-12% of greenhouse gas emissions – a key driver of climate change.
However, not everyone is behind the cultured meat craze. Some are still skeptical about its nutritional value and suitability for human consumption, while its impact on the environment and society remains to be seen.
However, Tetrick claims the process is cleaner and more ethical than traditional farming.
Industrialized animal production is probably the strangest and most bizarre thing happening, you just aren’t aware of it.
Josh Tetrick
Founder and CEO of Eat Just
Then there are those who just find the concept strange.
“I tell them that industrialized animal production is probably the strangest and most bizarre thing that’s happening, you’re just not aware of it. If there’s a way we can do better, let’s strive for it,” Tetrick said.
Growing appetite for alternatives
In fact, demand for alternative meat products such as cultured or plant-based meat appears to be growing.
One report estimated that the alternative meat market could be worth $140 billion within a decade – or 10% of the global meat industry.
“It’s actually pretty big in Asia Pacific,” Supriyadi said of alternative meat. “In 2020 itself, the market size will increase has reached about $800 million. With lower prices and greater knowledge, consumers may be more interested in purchasing alternative meat products.”
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are among the names making noise in the plant-based meat space, while brands like Memphis Meats are betting on cultured products. Tetrick said he welcomes the competition.
“I want businesses to step in and be part of the solution to the problem,” he said. “I hope someone… decides I can do it better than this guy who had no experience with food technology before he started doing it.”
We are preparing to operate globally
However, destroying the dominance of the established livestock industry will not happen overnight.
“The limiting steps to ultimately making this ubiquitous are regulatory approval, scale and consumer education,” Tetrick noted. “We can’t just focus on one, we have to focus on all three.”
At some point we will decide to go public. This is not possible without a lot of capital, there is no way around it.
Josh Tetrick
Founder and CEO of Eat Just
According to Tetrick, Eat Just has raised over $400 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Bill Gates’ Gate Ventures and Singapore-based Temasek. It is now seeking $2 billion in funding.
“We will continue to raise more capital,” he said. “At some point we will decide to go public – we want to achieve operational profitability first. “It’s not possible without a lot of capital, there’s no way around it.”
But with Eat Just aiming to gain regulatory approval in more countries, Tetrick is confident the bet will pay off.
“You have to take a leap of faith every day, right?” he said. “We act as if the US will approve it at some point. We act as if Europe would approve it at some point.”
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