A new wave of food startups promises to up-end how food is produced and consumed, with potentially huge benefits to our health and to the environment. From meatless meats to meal replacement drinks, we have more nutritional options than ever. Let’s take a look at the future of food. Our guest is Cate Levey, Senior Food Technologist at Impossible Foods. Recorded 14 January 2018.

Image credit: Impossible Foods

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Shownotes

Let’s Make The Future Episode

The Future of Food

14 January 2018, 09:00 Pacific Time

Guest(s): Cate Levey

Panellists: Michael Currie, Daniel Valenzuela, Michael Olorunninwo, Tatiana von Rheinbaben, Sara Thalen, Hossein Kouhani

Guest Background Information

Cate Levey (Senior Food Technologist at Impossible Foods)

https://twitter.com/catelevey

Good Article Summarizing The Topic:

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/future-of-meat-industrial-farming/

Introduction

12,500 years ago, bands of hunters and gatherers penned their animals and began a wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making possible an increasingly larger population.  This also changed the land use of the planet.  Centuries ago, humans had already imposed themselves upon nearly all available agricultural land.

Since then, humans have moved to cities, and their diet has changed many times.

Today, driven various other advances, food technology holds the promise of changing our use of land and animals to provide our food.  Such changes may be as significant to the planet what happened so many millennia ago.

Joining us to speak about these changes today

1. Impossible Foods
2. Cate, how did you get into food science?
3. How to encourage adoption
   1. Perception of healthy -> naturalistic fallacy
   2. (Convincing people to be vegetarian)
   3. How terminology plays into that
4. Other plant based and cell culture meat
5. GMOs
6. Government
7. Environmental consequences to land use
8. Economic -> meat producing countries
9. Advantages:
   1. -> ethical
   2. -> health
   3. -> Environmental consequences to land use

Draft Questions for Interview

Impossible Foods:

What is an Impossible Burger?

I’ve tasted some pretty amazing veggie burgers in my life.  What makes the impossible burger different?

Can anyone truly replicate the taste of meat?  Have you done blind taste tests?

What about the texture?  Is it possible to replicate the stiffness and texture of steak, for instance?

Is there a chance this process could be adapted for other kinds of meat, like chicken or even fish?

Other new meat questions:

What about culturing the cells of cows?  Then you would get a patty biologically identical to real meat.  This would satisfy people’s nutritional requirements better, perhaps.

The term the stem cell meat industry has adopted for their product is “clean meat.” Do we like this? Why?

3.2% of Americans are vegetarian.  0.5% of Americans are vegan.  What will it take to get that percentage higher by an order of magnitude?

Other companies: plant-based shrimp, sushi meat(!), eggs, milk, yogurt. Lab grown “real” milk, meat, egg

Adoption of almond milk -> actually displacing cow milk in significant numbers

Perhaps the right metric is pounds of meat consumed per person per year.  In America it’s 123.  In India it’s 3.  In China it’s 55 and growing quickly.  Can meatless burgers stem this?

“Earlier in September, China announced a $300M deal to import lab-grown meat from three Israel-based companies — SuperMeat, Future Meat Technologies, and Meat the Future — as part of a broader plan to decrease the country’s meat consumption by 50%.”

Barriers to Adoption

Cate, how did you get into food science?  What piqued your interest?

• This article: How Junk Food Can End Obesity – The Atlantic
• Accessibility to healthy food, and how the effort for whole/natural foods ignores the people who need healthy food the most.

• Transition to modern perception of “healthy”
• what does healthy mean? (Cate can give a base framework, others can give their perspectives too)
• Transition to Soylent as a case study.
  • Processed food not nutritional/healthy?
  • Is this view of “future food” what we want?

The trend towards what is “natural” seems to run counter to initiatives to produce food in less natural ways.  To what extent does our desire for what is “real” prevent us from enjoying the full advantages of replacement products?  Will people wanting “real” meat ever end up as a niche minority, or is this desire too deeply-seated in the human mind?

How to get this from niche product to mainstream?

First, we must examine why people eat what they eat. (Cate can talk: Cheap, convenient, tasty)

1. Hampton Creek as an case study of food tech going quickly into the mainstream (US startup company making egg replacements)

Is it about competing on price?  Is it about creating a “better” product?  Is it about convincing people of the ecological advantage?  Perhaps electric cars are a good analogy: different people care about different arguments.

Fake meat sounds icky. Many consumers face a psychological barrier towards eating lab-grown foods and may prefer the familiar taste of real meat products.

Or will the “icky” factor reach a tipping point and tasting real corpses will start to horrify people instead?

These products take an order of magnitude fewer inputs than real meat.  So can these products ever be an order of magnitude cheaper?  Is that going to happen sooner rather than later?

Global cropland required for consumption at European levels is 3,000 square metres.

Could plants ever be grown by cell culture as well?

Why has there not been more attention put on this, given its impact on the world’s land use and environment?  There should be billions in funding available to ventures like yours!

What about cricket protein/insects? (yes, interesting!)

Fish replacements?  (Dairy? Egg?)

Michael’s thoughts

The biggest inconvenience of Soylent is having to order it by mail.  It should be available at every convenience store!  Then I would never be at risk of not having a meal to eat again.

What’s stopping us from growing food vertically in an economical way?

1. Energy. Currently the world’s conventional farms are “solar powered” in the sense that they are spread flat over huge amounts of land to soak up the sun’s rays (and nutrients and water in the ground). If we could generate electricity cheaply enough, we could use artificial lighting to light stacks of vertically layered crops.
2. Automation. Currently farms can be automated becuase they are vast and you can just draw huge threshers and combines across them. Automating vertical farms is a much greater robotics challenge.  Getting dextrous arms to carefully plant and cultivate crops arranged intricately in ways that are not natural will be difficult.

However: advantages: no pesticides, no weeds, far less land use, can be grown anywhere (not just in countries with a suitable climate)

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/future-of-meat-industrial-farming/

Earth has 139 million square kilometres of land.  Just 3% of the Earth’s land is urban.

Roughly 37% of Earth’s land is today employed for agricultural purposes, with about 11% used for growing crops and the remainder (26%) for pasture.

This means Livestock production uses more than ¼ of the earth’s land area!

Equivalent to all of North, Central, and South America combined.

(https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agriculture/ and http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/ar591e/ar591e.pdf and other sources)

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1025_021025_HumanFootprint.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

30% of Earth’s land (40m sq km) is forest, and this is shrinking fast in developing countries – for example, from 1970 to 2015, Brazil’s rainforest went from 4m to 3.3m sq km. much of this is driven by the desire for cattle ranching lands, but it’s done by poor farmers who slash and burn and leave the land infertile after just a couple of seasons.

Top beef producers: (top 4= 58% of the world production)

US 20%

Brazil 15%

EU 12%

China 11%

Top meat consumers per capita: US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, EU, Russia, Israel

Low meat consumers per capita: India, Africa.

Imagine a future where people are happy to eat delicious meat substitutes that taste better than meat ever did, are revolted at the concept of eating the corpses of actual dead animals, and

25% of the Earth’s land is returned to forest, reversing a trend started millenia ago of human land use at the dawn of the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago?

We haven’t even discussed how fake fish meat could restore our fisheries.

Thanks to all of this meat eating, at any given point in the year, there are 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, 1 billion pigs and 1 billion sheep on the planet

 

Thoughts from Michael

What does each panelist see as the biggest advantage to transitioning away from animals as a food source?

[MICHAEL] I am a vegetarian and I’ve heard some version of the following arguments:

• Humans are omnivores and biologically require meat to survive (or thrive)
• Animals eat other animals, it’s how nature works. Humans are an animal, we are a part of nature.  Therefore, it is fine for humans to eat animals.
• Plants feel pain too.
• Meat is delicious and that’s all the reason I need to eat meat

Ecological advantages

Economic consequences

Moral problems.  Millions of birds and mammals killed every week.  They all have brains, and can feel pain.

Research

Ecological impact of global food production, and how it will change in the next 50 years.

Richer consumers, more meat eaters

It has been estimated that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation, which equates to 50,000 species a year.

Largest beef producers in the world are in developing countries?

What are some ad

Tyson Foods of Springdale Arkensas is the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork after JBS S.A. and annually exports the largest percentage of beef out of the United States.

Every week, its 54 chicken plants, 13 beef plants, and six pork plants slaughter and package 42.5 million chickens, 170,938 cattle, and 347,891 pigs.

The “Vegetarianism in America” study published by Vegetarian Times showed that 3.2 percent of U.S. adults, or 7.3 million people, follow a vegetarian-based diet. Approximately 0.5 percent, or 1 million, of those are vegans, who consume no animal products at all.Apr 16, 2008

Sources:

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-01/global-meat-consumption-will-soar-2024-what-meat-eaten-makes-big-difference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil

Daniel’s thoughts:

Random statements

Statement 1 (Importance of food):

Obviously food is such an impactful topic that matters to every being and every thing on earth: we all put everyday something into our complex, only partly understood system that is our body, and what we put inside is the result of supply chains that again impacts workers, animals, and the environment. Also Impossible Foods incorporated that into one of their ads: “Good for you and good for the environment”.

• In these two broader categories, health and sustainability, what do you think will become two major trends?
• Emphasizing health and sustainability. Can you tell us a little bit why that is and what Impossible foods does?

Statement 2 (GMO):

Let’s come to another very controversial topic: GMO. As we all are currently joining this discussion from 4 very distant time zones, on average we probably all consume different quantities and qualities of GMO. In Italy, GMO is completely banned, here in Germany highly detested by the masses and much regulated, whereas in the US it’s common practice, or in South America, where most of the world’s soy is produced (and btw over 90% of the world’s soy crops is GMO). There are obvious upsides to GMO, from efficiency or durability reasons on the sustainability side, to micro nutrient enhancements on the health side. With regards to the unknown long-term implications of GMO, what is your stance on it and how do you think our relation to GMO should be moved forward?

Statement 3 (Mass Health & suffering / medicine):

Statement 4 (Insects & sustainability):

Statement 5 (Government):

The government is supposed to regulate and incentivize behavior that is good for the society and is not yet economically attractive enough for the companies to go after. In my opinion the climate is one of these topic. Another, less controversial one would be the society’s health.

With this viewpoint it saddens me, that Germany, probably the milk country and export master, still subsidizes meat and dairy, making the gap towards a more plant based diet harder to achieve. Particularly poor people tend to have a bad health and do not have the education nor the financial resources to go more plant-based.

And on the sustainability side, the government regulates how eco-friendly your car needs to be, depending on where you want to go with it. And it is so proud of it, even though its protectionism for German car manufacturers again drastically slows the process towards e-mobility. I’m getting of track.

In my opinion, given its role, for the government, it seems ignorant to stay this way when the research strongly suggests the big impact of a society’s food choice.

And now, Even though major investors start diversifying their portfolio towards a more plant based flavor, which is not only for altruistic reason and therefore a potential predictor for future market and therefore economic incentive, how do you think the government should interact in pushing the food agenda into a more progressive direction?

Statement 6 (Looking forward/nextsteps):

Now, looking forward to that future that we painted and like to achieve, what do you think are the most crucial and urgent next steps that companies, governments and/or consumers must adopt that can and should be done now?

Statement 7 (Thanks):

And also thanks so much for the work and successes that Impossible Foods has already delivered and will continue to. This really is a great contribution to the future of food.

Random thoughts

• Robots in agriculture
• GMO labelling and vegan labelling (side effects of consumer transparency)
• I always think, that it is kinda cool to be able to pick between a dozen of different sorts of milk, instead of just relying on cows milk. Personally I also don’t crave cows’ milk, but I need to admit that it still tastes hella different to all plant-based forms. As a chemist working in the area of plant-based burger patties, how close do you think can we come to plant-based cows milk and when?

Cate’s thoughts

A couple topics I suggest we cover:

Cate has frameworks for thinking about these, and case study/examples we can all talk about.

• What does “healthy” food mean? (Processed vs unprocessed)
  • Soylent
• If you were put in charge of marketing, how would you position these products to encourage mainstream adoption?
  • Hampton Creek (plant-based eggs)
• Other future food companies
  • Plant-based
    • Meat, seafood, Milk, eggs, yogurt
  • Real: Fermented or lab-grown. “Clean meat”
    • Milk, meat, gelatin
    • What do we think of the term the industry has chosen, “clean meat?”

 

Episode Machine Transcript (unedited and uncorrected)

Let’s make the future.

They’re making us.

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Time that talent promised I promise I’ll tell it straight to everybody. Because no matter you’re going to China I’m silent for a day.

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Will come to let’s make the future a discussion about future trends technologies and their implications for human society.

From all over the world.

Brought to you by dot.

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This episode’s future trend discussion topic.

The future.

With Lady.

Welcome to let’s make the future I’m Michael Curry and joining us today on the panel we have Hi I’m Daniel currently coming from Munich I might go alone you will come if I will and I am talking up my mum I’m currently in power I’ll collaboratively from Germany joining us we have our guest Kate Oh OK.

One more on.

So centuries ago humans had already imposed themselves upon nearly all available agricultural land and since then humans have moved to cities their diet has changed many times but today driven by other advances food technology holds the promise of changing our use of land and animals to provide our food so I’m certainly excited to talk about that and.

Everybody I’m sitting here with Daniel after the show we realized we didn’t introduce a few of the core concepts for this episode so we’d like to just quickly do that right now first of all why does anyone care about meat less food why does anyone care about making a new kind of food Well it all comes down to what’s called trophic level if you want to feed one human being you can do it with one cow and you then have to feed that cow with ten units of grain or you could feed ten humans with that grain that you used to feed just that one cow which fed that one human so you can basically get an order of magnitude more calories to humans if you skip the intermediate stage of feeding the plants to animals to get animal protein and that was a concept that we didn’t discuss So there you go the second thing that we probably should have introduced is in addition to the company that our guest works for impossible foods there are also many other. In this space and one of the big ones that we discussed in fact the granddaddy of them all is Soylent which has the biggest amount of funding from investors in fact seventy one million and disclosed funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz So there’s plenty of other companies that we hinted at but didn’t mention by name like P. protein milk producer ripple foods nondairy cheese provider case hill we have San Francisco based Memphis meats which produces meat from self reproducing cells thereby producing me that is an animal based product but avoiding in the need to breed raise and slaughter huge numbers of animals there’s also beyond meet in addition to a possible meat so there’s plenty of other startups that are in this space and the discussion was centered around a lot of these different companies and their impact on the future of food so kids what is impossible foods and what is an impossible burger not impossible burger burger made entirely.

Cooks and takes just like we all know it almost sounds too good to be true to be honest it sounds impossible Kate exactly what I’ve been learning about the last five that everything about who we have.

Who who.

Spend time looking at it through a lot of different questions about what makes.

What our founder discovered is that what makes what is a molecule called Cool naturally occurring and pretty high abundant in the bread and it’s also very low abundant well and very abundant in the protein.

Rich.

Impossible to put. Into our burger and it makes it still like so. I have to admit I’ve tried this burger and it really does live up to the hype like if it really taste like a burger I might not be the best judge of this because I’ve been vegetarian for like fifteen years but I’m pretty sure he tastes pretty close so that’s pretty amazing and I wonder what got you into this whole science in the first place how does someone get into the idea of making replacement for meat I had just graduated with a chemistry degree and was thinking about where I wanted to go and I read an article called How junk food could end obesity in the Atlantic and this article is talking about how most of the people in the country in the United States who care about healthier or more sustainable food are advocating things like everybody should be organic kale from farmer’s market and this is not realistic for a huge number even if people had who know that what they don’t could afford to shop.

Had never been a morning from work which they don’t you still have this factor of who would be a huge part of the culture and you can’t have been there and say hey I am more educated than you are and I know you’ll really enjoy eating all the things that you been eating your whole life but you need to.

Organic kale which by the way I like better and fibrous than like not that and if we could use this article of arguing if we could take the stuff people are already eating in their everyday lives and use science to make just a little bit better more nutritious. More nutritious and maybe a little more sustainable that would make a bigger impact. So for example maybe we can put a little bit more nutrition take a little bit of that out of the food at McDonald’s. And use science to create a better world for those people who need it and I thought that we’re back. What I want to do and by the to know. Yeah I just as we were talking about at the beginning I mean this really has the potential to make a huge difference I mean the numbers are out there like before the show I looked this up the number of kilograms of meat consumed per person per year now in America it’s one hundred twenty three in India it’s three and in China it’s fifty five and growing quickly now regardless of what the specific numbers are it does seem like if you could get these products to be taken up by a significant number of people perhaps these numbers could be reduced but wow.

Yes certainly and you can imagine that if other countries start to consume meat at the levels that are done in America Argentina or Australia which are very very high then you can imagine how unsustainable that would be or how difficult it would be to find enough grazing land for all those animals for sure but I think just as you say the issue is perception or basically convincing people that these kinds of products are really that tasty and really that fun to eat is there some strategy that you think is the best strategy for this beyond just making it taste good is price going to make a difference if these things potentially have the chance to be an order of magnitude cheaper because you know how to grow plants and then feed those plants to a cow and move that carry on the country to be processed into meat instead it’s all done in one place so presumably you could make it cheaper maybe that’s one way people could be encouraged to use it.

So that will soon who would I think about it or requirement which are.

Or if you think about.

How people.

Who are what.

She’s.

About to pass who are on their house. And they don’t have a grocery store somewhere nearby than that what they’re logically going to do that you live in an area where the store with fifty cent a pound produce on a corner you’re more likely to you know and I can park a bit more about to the equity as well who want to get into Syria food equity I imagine that has to do with how people who are less economically well after her eating different kinds of food people who are economically better off so how do you choose you could if you are a single mom working two jobs and trying to make by you have a choice when you are getting home whether you’re going to go to the grocery store and helping the OP or your family and that involves waiting for the bus riding us to grocery store dragging your two kids around the grocery store while they’re like a pop up the shelves an apple or isn’t causing a ruckus when you check out and you just missed the epic twenty one.

Who didn’t do all the dishes are ordered and perhaps your kids aren’t even going to enjoy that as much as if you had stopped at McDonald’s on the corner on your way home and take that happen you know what So the logical choice and you would do that too if you’re in the situation and you know Kraft Foods and I grew up in American South and you see people there there’s a huge difference in percentage of overweight people the tool more affluence and what’s up with people so if we can get better suited to the people like that who honestly don’t have a lot of choices right now that can make a huge I’m all right I just want to go up on the floor if others have questions or comments about what we discussed so far I located this is a whole saying from Michigan and I was just looking at the map from your Web site where I can grab one and I’m happy because I found five locations already in Michigan which is within one hour from Lansing where I live and I’m a fan of age barriers and I’m so excited to try this one which has seen. And it’s and see how it tastes and I think about it I see the sometimes meat and I think about why Actually we eat meat a lot and I was recently in an restaurant that the owner used to be an avid hunter of the years and he has a bunch of deer heads and lots and all I can see of the deer you can think of on the wall and it makes me think of apart from the flavor of meat there are other aspects of why humans eat meat and the way I put it in wars is probably the psychological side that’s who’s the person in a predatory situation and they kind of feel like they’re dominating and under species or something that kind of feeling that they’re being a higher status human being by eating that beat and I also think of texture as another factor because I haven’t tried it impossible yet but I see that it’s from vegetable that coconut wheat so I wonder if how would you compare impossible with another approach like Memphis company that is actually growing actual meat in the lab how would you compared that have you ever thought about it great aquatic topic I’m working a lot on the texture Adam will and we have super cool technology and a lot of time comparing.

Burgers to the I’m well program and that he everything ranking to we now on a one to ten how do you then machine that can look at the profile of biting down into a burger now through a combination of many of the approaches we feel like we have a very close to Granby if you want to explain a little bit the technical aspects of how would you simulate different texture with different ingredients water to terminology or some tips you could picture what it is that people do in the lab actually. Yes we have probably at least half a dozen taste tests per day and I’m on the handle of strange tasters and actually the best way to measure whether something like people to beef and what you’ve made and the how similar or different to the. French a different texture medians For example you have the sweets coconut and other ingredients you have the same ingredients you changed it takes your to make it closer to an actual I think that’s intellectual property of their cost but let’s let’s find out what kid can say yeah I can talk a little bit about it so but one of the things that’s really unique about the impossible burger is that it goes from a raw state to where the molars ground where you can form it into look while the paddle or next it in the meat loaf or whatever you would do a regular ground beef and I will cook it gradually firm and juicy like a burger like this and go on oil and transition from the texture of raw beef to cook and that’s one of the things that makes the impossible burger really unique and texture as compared to other burgers on the market right now so now if I go to a restaurant ask for the impossible burger I can ask it to be either a rare medium or done that’s what you know interesting yeah that’s pretty cool technology and actually also everybody thought I heard basically people that eat meat that try to do we really really impressed by the quality in also different states if it was like rare or. Staying one minute longer on the tech side for example I mean we were talking all that meat what about our animal products such as for example how close do you think we can get to replacing milk by basically a plant based or turn it if and I’m not talking about the dozens of time based milks that we have because I think it’s pretty cool to choose between all of them and they all taste really well in their own way but to be honest probably they all do not really taste. Like me quote do you think we will get there at least a little I would say the adoption.

Has been going really really well on talk especially is taking over a large share of the market and what we find there is again I talk about the ways that people choose what they eat almond market take it doesn’t in this case have to take exactly like not for people to like it and adopt it into their everyday requirement is that people like Michael I want you to explain why we did order if you made it if need be made and why it should become an issue in the door they left or in the anywhere from the wall they did that with us why should we wish to automate you know what the benefit to all and how can we sell the idea it is just if a large hole where the real issue that people before you can see the big picture I think that people in again because of the West just because it can be and they are how to cook at it available wherever they are and it’s a part of culture and because right now pretty cheap I think that if you provide an alternative that just as good or maybe even better that people see a lot of things about eating that they are so pleased with but right now there are better option that they can choose that. Requirement if you provide them with an option that satisfies those other three I think that where they or alternative has a clear and there and I would also love that question some of the other panelist what do you feel as some of the advantages of being able to get your meat that has everything you want has the taste of your favorite local but doesn’t come from animals what do you see as the advantage of well Daniel if I can take the environmental topic higher up on the. I can weigh in on that if you like please do I mean I guess you can put the advantages categorize them into like three major areas which is probably an ethical advantage just towards the animals it is health for the individuals consuming food and it is also environmental consequences and maybe Michael you start with the environmental consequences that are I think really important to you and I mean all of us but most most wealthy.

I’m not the Lorax here Daniel Come on let’s let’s Well I’m fact I think you could even phrase the last one not even as environmental you could phrase that as economic if you wanted to because you could say that in theory you could get all of your nutritional requirements for a lot less money you could spend a lot less of your income on food if you didn’t have to use animals this is at scale and again theoretically right now I believe all these startups are basically positioning their products as premium products but theoretically they could be made cheaper but in any case the advantage to me and Kate can agree or disagree with this is the consequence to the environment and now as I said at the beginning ten thousand years ago land use change dramatically when we settled down and became an agricultural society and to put it in numbers the Earth has one hundred thirty nine million square kilometers of land so how do you think we use that three percent of that way and is used for cities urban and thirty seven percent of the earth’s land is employed for agriculture so eleven percent of that is growing crops and twenty six percent of that is pasture land so imagine a quarter of the earth’s land is used for raising animals to eat them imagine if the consequence of impossible foods and the other start ups working on this was that we didn’t eat animals anymore twenty five percent of the planet could be returned to its natural state to forest or to other uses and it would be as dramatic an impact on. Planet as the agricultural revolution that is alone I think a reason for basically a Manhattan project level of investment in the kinds of technologies that Kate is working on Kate maybe you agree or disagree with that statement totally OK I got a quick question on that you know Michael Yeah go ahead OK this is Sara I joined a little late Hello everybody hi Lou there’s a lot to argue for the positives of this like environments are health the economy this is great for like lower income communities but Jose mentioned something earlier that caught my attention about how there’s some parts of eating that are necessarily about logic or economy like some people have this idea around that I think would be hard especially for some groups of comes to rest to let go of like you mentioned the restaurant taxidermy like people have this thing like you know I’m a meat eater you know my family has been hunting for generations or me it’s more natural and no matter how many people can really argue that you know impossible burgers come from gradients as well as this kind of sense to mentality ideology just like I eat meat so I’m wondering what marketing obstacles the company might foresee is kind of groups of consumers and how you guys imagine we would of overcome those Yeah absolutely we’ve definitely been thinking about that what we see is that if people like to identify with eating. And I think that to really driven by in most cases they like the taste of meat they don’t want to compromise that maybe they see that you Terry Anzur began being I don’t know annoyingly sacrificing for reason that don’t personally but I think it.

Goes on I think that they try to distance themselves from deliberately Yeah exactly you know what we’ve seen is people who might be very skeptical of the idea of adopting a plant based burger. Well it takes it something that they have to try after they try the impossible burger and they see how delicious of this they are quite happy to switch their tired of the idea of the young to see that the delicious burger that they’ve been eating their whole life they’re not necessarily tied to where that came from like how confident Kate is about the taste and like the texture of a likeness to real meat that’s definitely a treat for me that alone is enough to make me want to go out and try to myself.

Yeah I just wanted to I’m a question read to that one so I know I’m probably already starting to look at international markets so what challenges do you see there and I guess what team members. Going to need to be able to expand internationally I mean production pretty and how can we adapt or take the proper burger to how meat usually ate them in Mexico or is I know Bangladesh for him or are you going to be looking more at people who are looking at it like this or marketing strategy international countries because I think of big interest people wanting to join because the specially people are eight who are maybe internationally based Yeah definitely I don’t really know how much I should be to our international expansion strategies but I can say that we are getting a lot of people who are really interested who really want the impossible burger right now like on a Facebook page you’re somewhere and you don’t have it at my local grocery store and you know Ireland or something and the one hundred fifty that is what we want to be their wife probably even more than you or her hair and we are doing everything we can to fair and really fast and making a physical product is harder to scale than say what we think an athlete in the press one button really still like the whole world so we’re working on it and well thank you and others. Thing that comes to my mind related to the last two questions is basically terminology or maybe labeling because I noticed for example that in Germany it’s really easy to buy or identify beacon foods in the supermarkets because everything is labeled super well where is in the United States is really hard to find because you need to like read all the ingredients lists and blah blah blah and so this is I don’t know if it’s a good thing it’s at least thing that provides consumer transparency I think they just announced that there will be a new agriculture a label now that will basically also tell about your veggies whether they’re going or not so it’s really taking a big part here and labeling we’re not talking only about the leaving for example also about G.M.O. labeling I think was the Scientific American that warned against G.M.O. labeling which is something that sounds really natural and only been official for years a consumer that might have side effects same as with a beacon label and why it might not be in the United States because it might signal something that it distinguishes some foods from other food so something like maybe some kind of dangerous signal so maybe generalizing that how do you think all of this terminology that we have been constructed plays into our perception of what we consume So what are people perception and who know it’s only a boiling I mean we label them and it has maybe for different people would have different consequences some larger undesirable and I think the view can movement for example is talking a lot about like everything being big and then plant based and then there’s this hipster hate is Sarah call it so how would you proceed about creating a good terminology good base for this world basically that’s a great question I would say that.

Probably will not one. Word that.

Describe it because by turning away what this product is horrible what we.

Presently in the United States and our product or everybody.

Very very wild bill already leaving things that are very good in terms. Unpack with Michael talking about and if we label are that it’s going to discourage either from adopting though in terms of labeling the grocery store maybe something that no overt would be OK I think that we have gone on the path to.

More helping or having other Ben and maybe I don’t know twenty years away but what General drives normal people away from it but I think right now people might pick.

Or know if you have a burger or like or whatever it is I think people are going to.

Have something in the labeling on what that may be it’s not going to be as good so instead of saying more indirectly saying what is good about it and what it does have and there’s surely a lot of like psychological things going on in the consumer that maybe has an ominous opinion about beginning I think there’s a tipping point here I think for example you could call your burger the impossible blocked chain burger and it would get lots of people interested in it right now because that term is super sexy right now at least in some parts of the world but I think there’s a tipping point in the sense that right now the problem is fake meat or food sounds right many consumers may face that psychological barrier towards eating anything but in particular lab grown foods that’s not a problem unique to impossible foods but also to all kinds of start ups that are making lab grown innovations and this plays into this Naturalistic Fallacy people think what’s natural is what’s good but I wonder if there will be that tipping point I wonder if at some point maybe in twenty years like it says if we’ll have the X. Factor reverse and. And people will feel like tasting corpses that would be horrifying to people like oh my God I don’t want to hack off a piece of a corpse and eat it that’s disgusting and I wonder if that will become the majority view in some point in the future I upon it could take us a little bit into the details of how scene is actually extracted because what I see is the more special ingredient of impossible you seem the rest of it can be categorizing other types of yours and so on the can label How are you on but how’s he mix track that and what are the resources and process that goes through and what’s a more a mental impact of he makes traction like a please be careful has his own start up making based burgers better watch out is interested in the intellects or profit.

Right that’s all down.

The good test on can’t maybe he can exist as the limits of the company and so on so.

You just wanted to get in big trouble yeah that’s Radia. Yes So obviously with a kind of time about how to get there and have to get it at the least and I went to him we spent a long time with everybody knows down to the lab in the field hoeing up and I played in the little bit on the route that have been and one thing good enough to supply based on that and after a year or two of that we discovered that that was actually going to have a pretty large environmental impact to care of the player so what we decided to do and that was to promote. So the a process similar to what than used to make a Belgian beer or. We take instruction for making cool and put it into and and in something that looks like a beer brewery. Will manufacture the woman for a.

Relatively what process to purify that product in a much lower and island so that fastening you actually talked about using the roots of soil so does that mean that all the rest of the so I planned could be used only and how much use is there currently off the soil root in other products we decided not to use.

Ours for. Daniel their sources couse so don’t reveal the secret. Source for. OK sorry we’re using to put it up you really use alqaeda I thought it was a combination OK sorry my ignorance for chemistry excuse me maybe I Daniel you had a question about how government and the consequent. As they’re sure first of all we were talking with environmental consequences of food choices and I think at least it’s part of the role of the government to incentivize to regulate behavior that is good for society and not yet economically attractive enough for companies to go after for example in particular environmental issues so if the government should regulate these things it seems ignorant to stay this way when the research is strong suggesting that impact over food choices on the farm and it’s really strong so currently I think it’s not regulated at all but yeah how do you think government should deal with us I feel like the for most frustrating thing about the regulations around these new high tech food innovation companies is that they can be in government just band Soilent they said it doesn’t pass all the rules or some obscure bureaucratic rule that doesn’t allow them now and apparently to operate in Canada this is I think one of the problems with having the government regulate these sorts of things is that it’s very hard for the regulations to stay current to what the status of the innovation is so it’s the same problem with labeling I think where if the government mandates labeling you end up with I think misleading consumers in unintended ways if you for example said the government is going to require labeling for radioactive levels and then you get bananas that would be labeled with this bananas radioactive but of course it’s radioactive at a level that’s perfectly safe so I think if you introduce regulations that are not evidence based of course you’re going to end up with a lot of problems and this is what we end up in Europe where a lot of the regulators are captured by lobby groups into banning generally modified foods or labeling genetically modified foods and that’s probably stifling a lot of innovation there where genetic modification might enhance crop yields and be better for the environment and save people money so I think there’s a big problem here how governmental regulation of current Well what Michel. Is there ever a lot and then there’s what it could be and currently that I very have only corn palace and maybe an alternate universe could be a better way to do that that would be more evident you know also in Germany meats and also milk I mean Germany’s probably the most country is subsidized a lot and people start screaming when they hear that people are sometimes talking about taking awake this subsidizing it yeah but it’s so sad to hear about what you said earlier Kate that poor people tend to have health problems or worse health often because being forced into their food choices so that would be definitely a thing for the government to regulate in my opinion and I wonder if this is something that we can discuss in our final few minutes here because it does seem like imagine if we didn’t need all this pastor land anymore imagine if all this food could be made without all that land then the farmers that made that their livelihoods would potentially agitate for the government to ban this kind of food or to heavily tax it or to subsidize their pasture land and they might significantly delay the time where this food might make a big difference to the environment and to our economy and also culturally you have to admit that even if this change did go through in ninety five percent of people stop eating meat to change the planet would be cultural as well because all the picture ask farms and milk producers perhaps in Germany that Daniel drives through and he’s going from Munich to Frankfurt they’re not there anymore and they’re really that’s a big cultural hit to a lot of countries in Europe in America in Japan and other countries as well and I wonder how the world will deal with that change but definitely.

Right like if we were reducing the one in the story that means another industry going to be coming up to a quite a. That we they won’t have more drive by farms or we’ll have that farming culture in my school about the.

Logical fallacy of China so yeah it’s certainly an exaggeration I agree and exaggerating I also wanted to touch on the perception healthy food because I think that in modern society we are having their e sharp sudden shift away from processed food that all profit to the strain when healthy and people want to transition to eating more whole or natural to think like well whole.

So how I think about healthy food is not so much healthy but how much nutrition you’re getting and the food that you’re eating so something that process might be more or less nutritious than something that’s not the current state of thing that. Would tend to not be correlated with nutritious food if you think of like she knows the quintessential processed food right now is like a very little nutrition that the people on the other hand frozen fruit and vegetable while being more process than the fresh one find in the supermarket have Morning question because they’re taken out of the field and immediately preserved then like the day Arbor Day after that that verse is being shipped across the country for a couple weeks which a lot of nutrition a great and other interesting example of a process food that might be challenging our current perception of the soil and and I guess Michael has some opinions on oil went but I want to Powell other panel thought of that.

Michael you want to introduce White House you must have an opinion on it.

You’re talking about Soylent like just my opinions on Soylent snow headstand and the content you know how you perceive I discount the I think US oil and I tried some I did try it.

And it no i even though I totally believe this is doing my body good I just was not able to it goes back to life for me how experience food like I perceive that is healthy and even though it will actually I saw that as a better choice than eating like toast and for breakfast for example I was able to kind of get on board with the experience of just drinking Soylent so I don’t know maybe there’s some even psychological aspects that enter into the perception of you know how I eat and the way I see my food pointed to my health I don’t know what you guys think about that so sorry if I would give you a pill that has zero carbon footprint and that would make you healthier than other foods and not dependent on food you would not take it because you would miss the psychology of eating food yeah because I think you know maybe I’d replace like you know when I’m out and about in the middle of the day and I’m busy and lunch seems like a pain I would have but I think sharing a meal or just that experience of having a meal is a cultural ritual that I would have a hard time separating myself from and I can’t say there’s a reason for that that’s environmental or maybe even not rational but I think that something about that is human to me or yeah that’s really deeply ingrained in how do you guys feel about that yeah absolutely and I think that sort of brings with that around the beginning where mood is a huge part of quarter and you can’t dismiss that when you’re trying to shape the future to trend your might have something that you know the best mood on earth for a reason X. Y. Z. but if people don’t like it but not if it doesn’t bring to the. Will it not going to take off yeah I agree with that I think our society see a younger generation for them it’s not much about just eating to live but it’s really becoming a very fluid obsessed propriety everything though take around to it so even though we have these numbers of obesity increasing healthy eating that sort of on the other extreme increase think there’s still an oppression about who what and how influence or power you look like and how you interact with people so I guess in that your case scenario we would all be eating what’s out affecting anybody humans or animals are just intuitively eating it and to think between foods that are a cool free and cool he based but I think because food is such a big role you will have to make the cool the free food just mainstream so people can still have their own special around because up going to be so much harder to change then the product out there on the market probably maybe the real future is one where just like the sexual revolution with the birth control pills and enabled us to separate the pleasurable acts of sex from the reproductive act maybe we’ll do the same thing with food where we can take these pills or the proverbial pills or drink Soylent just for our actual nutritional requirements and when we want to go out with friends and take some selfies with some amazing looking food we can do that too but it will be nutritionally inert and it won’t affect our health and then you could also say with all the like trans and individual identifications that chant I was mentioning like also in other subcultures where you basically identify yourself with a trend but it will be maybe a virtual trans virtual foods virtual dice that’s a fun idea yet down secret or in that you narrow food because I like Soylent but I like the experience of eating food again as Sarah said and for me like when are working going to have a meal and the pleasure roll act eating is important psychological break for me also from work and I enjoy it and I enjoy eating a lot that I want. Out to be able to eat more so it’s like sort of like the opposite so I didn’t like putting more energy me read out giving me any pleasure and I’m like what’s the point and I eat food because I love it and work out lose energy to be able to eat more because it’s fun you know so you have to kind of offish and say that I would resist I totally agree with that like we would be so much more efficient as a society if the pleasure part of eating was work cut out and we were just to recharge our batteries with these pills but I don’t know I want to be that official where we go to do this efficiency I mean at the end of the day where are we going now we just sit and have them yell together and enjoy our wives I don’t know what you guys are talking about I love the taste of soil.

That’s all right he is likely wrong others like that or. Somebody said Rob pancake batter who is that yeah when I try to like Rob better rock pancake better taste delicious I don’t know what you guys are talking about.

All right guys well we’re past the top of the hour here does anyone have any final comments other was not will be I think THANK YOU LIKE well and want Michigan and I have it maybe we can Same here but I’m going I would like to ask you a question later which might involve shipping impossible Bergersen Germany but.

Otherwise I don’t need to wait longer and look for my internship application I’m going to definitely can be applying for an internship but impossible for some time in the area yeah cool very Terry I’m quite sure I think oh yeah.

Yeah you can also apply at Haase’s company if you’re interested in an internship.

Call could I.

Know your company.

Perfect OK well I believe Kate is still there or someone dropped of but jump out OK Got it OK So Michael you want to think about. Yeah I think either way let anybody. See that and then I think I’m one of a fool and you want to enjoy your food and they want it and if you see how they progress you me and yeah right OK Yeah thanks a ready for the wonderful discussion particularly to you Kate do you want to point us to like one online resource to find out more about impossible foods about you or your work whatever you’d like.

OK then my so thanks a lot and good night by and for me to thank you very much and thanks to goodnight like everyone thank you.

Let’s make the future featuring the boy says Michael. Danielle Allen’s way to.

Say.

Michael.

And.

Music and to take Christian pal to.

Let’s make this.

The future.

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