SPEAKER_06: Here's a little tip for your growing business. Get the new VentureX business card from Capital One and start earning unlimited double miles on every purchase. That's one of the reasons Jennifer Garner has one for her business. That's right. Jennifer Garner is a business owner and the co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, providers of organic snacks and meals loved by little ones and their parents. With unlimited double miles, the more Once Upon a Farm spends, the more miles they earn. Plus, the VentureX business card has no pre-set spending limit, so their purchasing power can adapt to meet their business needs. The card also gets their team access to over 1,300 airport lounges. Just imagine where the VentureX business card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureX business. Apple Card is the perfect credit card for every purchase.
SPEAKER_04: It has cashback rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cashback on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. Apple Card is subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, member FDIC. Terms apply.
SPEAKER_06: Football season is back, and Whole Foods Market has everything you need to host a successful watch party or tailgate on game day. In the meat department, there's animal welfare certified marinated chicken wings, organic chicken sausages, hot dogs, and more. And you can grab football-ready sides in a flash. Everything from mac and cheese and potato salad to sushi. I love picking up Whole Foods guacamole, which if you haven't eaten it, you're about to get your mind blown because it's actually amazing. By the way, catering from Whole Foods makes tailgates a breeze. Explore the menu at shop.wfm.com. Save 20% from September 20th through October 17th with promo code FALLCATERING, all one word. Don't sleep on the build-your-own-taco bar. It's always a winner. Terms apply. Elevate game day at Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. If you're a small business owner, it isn't just your business. It's your life. Whatever your business might be, you want someone who understands. And that's where State Farm Small Business Insurance comes in. State Farm agents are small business owners too, and know what it takes to help you personalize your policies for your small business needs. Like a good neighbor? State Farm is there. Talk to your local agent today. Hey everyone, so the How I Built This Lab team is taking a little time off for the summer, but don't worry, we'll be back in your feed with fresh How I Built This Lab episodes in just a few weeks. Meantime, I hope you enjoy one of our favorite episodes from last year with the founders of WildType. It's a company working on lab-grown salmon, just like the real thing, without the actual fish. So, hope you enjoy it. Here it is. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Alright, so a lot of us have made the decision to either cut back or completely cut out meat from our lives. For some people, it's a moral issue around harming animals. For other people, it's health, and for me, it's because of the environmental impact of meat consumption. But I still eat meat, and I still eat seafood, and admittedly, I have occasional pangs of guilt knowing that I'm contributing to a bigger problem. Meat production is a huge contributor to global carbon emissions. Our oceans are being overfished, and the huge amount of microplastics floating deep in the sea are making their way into our fish and consequently into our bodies. So a good question to ask is, do we need to kill animals to create meat? Well, until recently, the answer was, of course, don't be ridiculous. But with advances in stem cell technology, we are coming much closer to a different answer. And that's the starting point for a company called Wild Type Foods based in San Francisco. Wild Type was started by two friends, Justin Kolbeck and Arya Elfenbein. Justin was a foreign service officer who spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Arya is a biologist and a trained cardiologist. But together, they ditched their careers to pursue the idea of growing real salmon without killing a single fish. Wild Type is not a plant-based substitute. The company grows real salmon from real salmon cells to form real cuts of sushi-grade fish. And while you can't find their products in grocery stores or restaurants just yet, Wild Type is part of a growing number of companies hoping that within a few years, cell-cultivated meats will become just as common as those plant-based substitutes. Arya Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck are with me. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_06: Let me start with you, Arya. You are a cardiologist, right? Justin, you were a State Department employee. You've lived in countries all over the world. First of all, how did the two of you meet? Yeah, it's a funny story about how we met.
SPEAKER_08: We met in my first year of internship. This was after I'd finished medical school and was just starting to train as a doctor. There was a dinner that both Justin and I were invited to. The idea of this dinner is that nobody knows anybody else at this dinner except the person who is hosting it. I had never been to a dinner like this. You were at Yale, right? Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_06: Postdoc work. Justin happened to be doing an MBA at Yale at the same time. It was around 2011, is that right?
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. Okay. It was, for me at that time, somewhere between 80 and 100 hours a week in the hospital. Something about this invitation and something about the possibilities of just what could happen at a dinner where you don't know anybody else at this dinner really intrigued me. That's when I went. That's when I met Justin. I ended up sitting next to him at this dinner.
SPEAKER_06: And Justin, you were doing an MBA. Tell me what you were thinking about doing. You had been at the State Department and been a Foreign Service Officer. Clearly, you were thinking, maybe I'm going to make a change. What were you thinking about maybe doing?
SPEAKER_09: I had just finished an assignment in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, which is on the Pakistani border. It was something called a Provincial Reconstruction Team, which is essentially what it sounds like in terms of the goal. I had always had it as a life goal to get a graduate degree. I was kind of the first person in my family to go into college. Then being able to get a graduate degree seemed like something that I was very passionate about. So, I decided to take some time off from the State Department and do an MBA at Yale because it was this mission-driven school. That really appealed to me that it wasn't just about going on and working in an investment bank but maybe having a big impact on the world, which is what drove me into the Foreign Service to begin with. To be honest with you, I showed up at school and I met these people that had started companies that were making a netting that went over a bassinet, and it would help reduce the incidence of child malaria. Somebody who started a company, employed all these people, is having this huge impact on the planet. It just had a really big effect on me. That was the mindset I was in when I sat down next to Aria.
SPEAKER_06: Aria, you were a cardiologist. You already had your medical degree and you're doing residency at Yale. You were clearly on the fast track to becoming a prestigious cardiologist, maybe having an appointment at a university. When you hadn't met Justin in 2011 at that dinner, was that where you thought you were headed?
SPEAKER_08: Absolutely. I had finished medical school. I had done a PhD mostly in Japan around the same time and in the same place where the discovery was made that we could create stem cells from ordinary skin cells that completely revolutionized the world of science. I absolutely thought that my career would be one that would stay within academia.
SPEAKER_06: The research you mentioned changed the entire conversation because it used to be that you had to cultivate stem cells from fetuses and there was a lot of ethical debate around it. This research showed that you could cultivate stem cells through skin.
SPEAKER_08: Prior to that, there was a moratorium on research in the United States on stem cells and the future of understanding how these incredible cells grow, develop, and communicate with each other was really in question because of this. This incredible discovery really changed everything. It took all of those moral issues off the table and all of a sudden now we could understand how a cell becomes a neuron or a liver cell or any other part of the body, essentially adopt different careers for themselves.
SPEAKER_06: You were really on this path to becoming a heart doctor and really also doing research around therapy for those with heart ailments. In the meantime, Justin, you're taking some time off from the State Department where you had worked in the developing world getting an MBA and then maybe going back into that world. The two of you meet at this dinner and what, you instantly connect that night?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's rare when you're an adult to make new deep friendships, I have found. To me, this felt like one of those rare opportunities where you can really connect with someone who would be a lifelong friend. I don't think Ari and I were initially thinking about, hey, let's go start a business together. It was a great deal of mutual respect, really different backgrounds. I had a great deal of curiosity about the work that he was doing. We'd get together on the weekends and talk about things that we were interested in. This idea started percolating a little bit, this entrepreneurial spark, I guess. I remember very clearly we were having coffee in New York City one morning. We had this friend who came to us and said, let's come up with a hundred ideas for businesses. Maybe most of them would be really bad. We sat down, Ari and I, and started penciling out some ideas. Not because we were serious about starting a company because it sounded like a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning. Through that process, hearing each other think about what really matters to us, the silly ideas that we came up with on that list started to fall away and pare back into something that would later become wild-type, something that the two of us are extraordinarily passionate about.
SPEAKER_06: Justin, what were the kinds of business ideas that the two of you were talking about? Were you listening to what Ari was working on and saying to yourself, hey, this is interesting. The stem cell stuff is really revolutionary. Maybe there's something there? Or were you talking about business ideas that were completely unrelated to that?
SPEAKER_09: This is so embarrassing, but why not? This makes for interesting radio, right? We had a few ideas on there, just to give you a sense of the range. One of them was an idea to create a new kind of neti pot that we would call the schnozzle. The idea was doing a neti pot is actually very good if you're feeling congested. It's kind of gross, right? The water goes in one nostril and out the other.
SPEAKER_06: Yep, I've been there. Yeah, you're hanging your face over the sink and flushing your nasal cavity.
SPEAKER_08: And also, what innovations have been brought to the neti pot in the last thousand years? And what could we do to make it extra special? I love that. So we would sometimes on the weekends get modeling clay and come up with all kinds of different designs and ways that this might work and all of the things that we could do to make the neti pot so much better than it already is.
SPEAKER_09: The thing that was missing, I think, for both of us was a real hook that tugged at our heartstrings. It's something that we cared a lot about. And yeah, I think that conversation really started back in earnest in 2015 when we first started talking about this particular idea.
SPEAKER_06: All right, so 2015. Ari, where did the idea for cultivating meat come from?
SPEAKER_08: I had one of these rare vacations that they would give us in residency and went back to my childhood home of Australia and was in the far north parts where there used to be a lot of rainforest, a lot more than there is right now. And today, a lot of it is agricultural land. And I was just kind of looking around and thinking about everything I had learned about, not just stem cells, but what modern agriculture means, particularly when it comes to beef. And I just kind of asked this question of, can we still eat meat and not eat animals? And thought about, we must be able to do this. And then I started to think about, well, what would it mean to create the fat? And what would it mean to create certain cuts of meat? And didn't really know that other people were already working on this. And one in particular, Dr. Mark Post in the Netherlands, was somebody who actually about 15 years before that, I had worked in the same lab with, also doing cardiac research. And he had gone on to create the world's first hamburger in this way. And he organized the first conference about this. And I was just riveted. I'd never been to the Netherlands. I didn't know why I was so interested in this whole field, but I just went. And it was incredible because nobody knew how many people were going to show up, what it was going to be like. And there was a very special energy in the room there. And it was truly an event that changed everything for me.
SPEAKER_06: By the way, are you vegetarian? Are there of you vegetarians?
SPEAKER_08: When I moved to San Francisco, I slowly reduced my consumption of meat. I think that it's something that even since I was a child, I never really felt comfortable with the fact that when my parents would feed me chicken, that that was a chicken.
SPEAKER_06: And Justin, are you a vegetarian by any chance?
SPEAKER_09: I would say I'm a conscientious meat and seafood eater.
SPEAKER_06: And I say this with no judgment. I eat meat. I'm a meat eater. But I understand this idea of feeling conflicted about it because we know that there are huge environmental consequences to it. And also there's this moral conundrum. You're actually killing an animal. It sounds to me that you already, both of you, had some of those issues in your mind.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, definitely. I think for me, I started learning about our food system and really in a great deal of depth, going back to some of the time I spent in Afghanistan, which is one of the most food insecure places in the world. And I got back to the US and dug pretty deep. And it was clear that at some point, eating meat and seafood at the rate we are is not going to work anymore. For all the reasons you mentioned, there's environmental reasons, there's humane reasons, there's economic reasons. But yeah, I think for me, I have a couple of small kids and really, how do you have that conversation? That this isn't for free and it isn't limitless. That's how we do it at our house. But at the same time, I really like to have a hamburger on the 4th of July and on the barbecue once in a while and a steak once in a while and fish on a fairly regular basis. And so I think there's just a lot of people out there that are in this really difficult place where you're trying to juggle your values and your instincts. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: All right, Justin, Aria, stick around for just a moment. We're going to take a quick break. We come back more about the founding of wild type. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.
SPEAKER_02: The Angie's List you know and trust is now Angie, and we're so much more than just a list. We still connect you with top local pros and show you ratings and reviews. But now, we also let you compare upfront prices on hundreds of projects and book a service instantly. We can even handle the rest of your project from start to finish. So remember, Angie's List is now Angie, and we're here to get your job done right. Get started at angie.com. That's A-N-G-I, or download the app today.
SPEAKER_00: Have you been hiding your smile this summer? If you've been wanting a straighter smile, it's time to give Bite a try. Bite offers clear teeth aligners without the high cost of braces or endless trips to the dentist. With Bite, you'll be able to transform your smile from the comfort of your home. Your clear aligners are doctor-directed and delivered straight to your doorstep. All you need to do is take an impression mold of your mouth, preview your 3D smile, and order your all-day or at-night aligners. It's truly that simple. They even accept insurance and HSA FSA dollars. Sun's out, smile's out. Get started on your smile journey this summer by visiting bite.com and use code WONDERY at checkout to get your at-home impression kit for only $14.95. That's B-Y-T-E dot com code WONDERY.
SPEAKER_06: Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm speaking with the founders of Wild Type, a company that grows real salmon, but without the salmon. Aria, when you started to...the gears in your head started to turn around. Cell cultivated meat. At the time, it's not that long ago, 2015, 2016, there weren't that many companies out there growing cells. How did you land on maybe trying this with seafood?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it wasn't actually seafood at first. We made...we went through a whole exercise, much like the exercise for which companies we'd start, about all the different kinds of meats and seafoods that we could make. And a couple of the axes on which we plotted this were cost and controversy. And if you imagine the kinds of meats that would be in the extreme upward right quadrant for that, things like foie gras would be pretty much at the top of the list. And foie gras is a really interesting meat as well. And the reason is because it's relatively homogeneous in terms of its texture, and it's actually also predominantly one cell type. So it's not fat cells and liver cells, it's mostly liver cells that have just been exposed to a lot of fat. And this was the first thing that we wanted to work on.
SPEAKER_06: So that sounds like a great idea because it's so cruel. We know to produce foie gras, you're force feeding ducks and geese. So it sounds like a great idea. You could cultivate it through cells. So what happened? Why didn't you pursue that?
SPEAKER_09: So we were able to make some foie gras, a fairly small amount, and people tried it. I remember the first person that we invited to try it was a friend of ours in San Francisco, and it was a tiny amount, so small that it was almost difficult to really taste. But we did it, and we did it in relatively short order, probably from start to finish in just a handful of months, really. But even then, I think we started having these conversations about, okay, well, this is really interesting, but are we gonna really have an impact on the planet by working on something like foie gras, which most Americans have probably never had, and how many people actually consume these products? And I think at that point, we started looking a little bit more broadly and a little bit more globally and thinking about, well, what does our species eat? And so it was a very quick transition, I think, for us after we made that initial proof of concept.
SPEAKER_06: All right, so you guys realized that to have an impact, you really have to tackle something that lots of people eat. So you essentially decide to pivot from foie gras to fish. Is that the conversation you started to have, Arya?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. That's exactly how it happened. We started to realize that what we didn't want to be creating was a company that just made fine food for fancy people. And instead, we wanted to stay true to what the mission was, which was to use this method of growing seafood and growing meats to actually have a positive environmental impact. And it was around this time that our focus did shift in terms of thinking about what could we do with this method. And it very quickly turned to seafood, as Justin described.
SPEAKER_06: All right. Help me understand how technically you did this. I mean, Arya, you had access to a lab, so were you kind of just – was there like a little corner there that you were just kind of playing around with cells and, I don't know, salmon cells? Tell me how you started to do it.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, San Francisco was one of the few places at that time where you could actually rent lab space by the hour. And we applied to be able to be part of one of these areas. And it was in San Francisco. It was actually very close to the university. And for the first time ever, we had our own lab. And I should say that at this time, we still had our day jobs. And in my case, I had two. So I was still working as a researcher. And I would also work overnights in the hospital in the intensive care unit. And this was something that Justin and I would do on nights and weekends. We would get these eggs into these dissections and learn in just the most incredible way what these cells loved in terms of nutrition, how we could get them to thrive, what conditions would be optimal to grow them in. And when we think about food, it's for the most part muscle and fat. And so we started by just growing cells. Wow.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, Justin, you guys were – the challenge you were trying to solve for was this idea of sustainability. We know that we're running out of seafood. We know that we're overfishing. And not just that, we know that the fish we're consuming today is full of microplastics, that every time we ingest fish and I think even land animals, we're consuming plastic. Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_09: There are a couple of real challenges with seafood. As you pointed out, it's almost impossible to find uncontaminated seafood anywhere in the world. And you mentioned microplastics. The number that I can't get out of my head is five grams or the equivalent of a credit card worth of microplastics that go into our bodies every week. And not just that, there's mercury and antibiotics and parasites, and the list goes on and on. And with seafood, unlike a lot of the other types of meats that we eat, it's not about eliminating these things. It's about minimizing them, right? Which is why FDA has these guidelines for young kids. I remember at my kid's first six-month appointment, the doctor asked, hey, are you giving your kids seafood? I said, yeah, yeah, why? And she said, well, it's very nutritious for them. Omega-3s for their brain, yada, yada, yada. But by the way, don't give them more than two fistfuls of it, right? So you have this paradox where you've got this delicious, nutritious protein that's contaminated by all the stuff that we've dumped into our oceans. And at the same time, we have wild fish populations flat or plummeting with just basically across the board for almost every type of seafood that we eat. And then we have fish farms. There have been issues like in the Puget Sound, for example, where Atlantic salmon was being farmed. We've had some nets break, and these invasive species are out competing with the native species, right? So Chinook and Sakai and Coho and so on. So there's been a big movement to kind of get away from this open net farming. And so the confluence of those things means strongly rising demand with pinched supply means some of our healthiest, most nutritious seafoods are only going to become further and further out of reach of many people.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. All right, so you know that there is a challenge. There's still a challenge to be solved here, but you guys are in a lab, and you are trying to grow a piece of salmon, right, initially. And Ari, what about that first piece of salmon? How long did it take before you had something that you could actually eat? I think it was the better part of a year before we could actually try it.
SPEAKER_08: And I'll say that once we had grown enough that we could try it for the first time, it was probably one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced. I mean, it really tasted like nothing. I mean, truly, I couldn't even describe it. And it's because we realized that cells on their own, they don't know how to spontaneously organize into a piece of sashimi, for example. They need structures, and they need to follow cues from their environment to organize in this way to create all the complexities of texture and flavor. And in that moment, we realized that we were still very, very far from having anything resembling a viable product. All right, so you guys, finally after a year, you have your first sample, and it sucks.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it just doesn't taste good. Was that disheartening? Or did you feel like, okay, because that feels like a long time to basically wait, and then it sucks. Totally.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean, along the way, we were learning a lot. And I think what gave us hope in that fairly dark moment was that at the end of a year, we felt like we really had our arms around how this would scale. And I think that was the biggest thing that the two of us were grappling with, right? There were these sort of two fundamental questions in the early days. One, can we do this? And can we eventually make a product that is really good? And we hadn't answered that question at that point, as I already said. And two, could this ever scale and turn into a big business that can even begin to be a drop in the ocean of the colossal amount of seafood that is consumed globally? And I think through that process of that first year, both of us became a lot more convicted that we could do this, that this could actually work. And it was for some pretty obvious reasons in retrospect. So for example, roughly half of a fish's weight gets thrown away or discarded between the time it's caught and the time it shows up on your plate, right? Things like fins and bones and so on that we don't consume. So out of the gate, we had a 50% advantage over conventional seafood.
SPEAKER_06: If you were growing exactly what would be consumed. That's right. Yeah, no waste. Wow. So you're trying to get a sort of working prototype going.
SPEAKER_06: What change did you make that enabled you to actually grow something that tasted pretty good, that would taste like raw salmon?
SPEAKER_08: You know, I wish I could say it was one particular thing. So there are many ways to approach something like this. There could be a way to think through how can we create the highest density of cells, for example. How can we work through the scaling challenges first and then deal with the flavor and textural complexity afterwards. And a lot of our debate in the early days was, how do we do this? How do we do this to create a product quickly enough in the beginning so that people can see what the promise is, but still give us the space to iterate upon that and actually perfect what is such a difficult product to create in the end. And salmon is a great example of a very versatile fish that can be created in many preparations that we're very used to seeing as, for example, minced salmon in a salmon roll or lox on a bagel or salmon filet or sashimi. And so having that vision for what this could become as the product got better, I think was a big part of slowly improving all of the different characteristics that made the product better. All right, so 2019, June of 2019, you have finally really gotten to a place where it's
SPEAKER_06: ready to debut. And you guys grew salmon sashimi, so raw salmon, and you were ready to serve it to a group of diners. I read the cost for one salmon roll was $200, so this is not sustainable. It was a start. And what did people think at that dinner when you served it? What was the response from people?
SPEAKER_09: At the time, people were, first of all, just very impressed that we had managed to do this, that we showed up with a couple pounds of cultivated salmon. And the chefs that were working with the product did really a fantastic job across a number of dishes. I think we had bisque. We had it in sushi rolls, of course. We had it in a tartare. And at the very end, we brought out just a tin, like a tin of sardines, of just the product so people can try it undressed up. And so in the hands of such capable chefs, any product would be really good. But looking back on those pictures today, I can't help but cringing because it just didn't have the same visual appeal and structure that people would expect from salmon. So I think we had a reporter from Bloomberg there that we'd never met before. And when he wrote about the product, I think it was a very accurate description of where we were at the time. And this was after he tried just the unendured piece of fish. He said it was certainly reminiscent of fish in the ocean but faint. And I think that was exactly right for that moment because the structure and the texture of the product wasn't really there yet. And so it was really just the taste really at that point that we could offer. All right, we're going to take another quick break.
SPEAKER_06: But in a moment, more from Justin Kolbeck and Arya Alfenbein, co-founders of W.I.L.D. Type Foods. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Back in a moment.
SPEAKER_05: With Audible, you can enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You can take your favorite stories with you wherever you go, even to bed. Drift into a peaceful slumber with the Audible Original Bedtime Stories series hosted by familiar voices like Emmy winner Brian Cox, Keke Palmer, Philippa Soo, and many more. As a member, you can choose one title a month to keep from the entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers and new releases. You'll also get full access to a growing selection of included audiobooks, Audible originals, and more. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash wondery pod or text wondery pod to 500-500 to try audible free for 30 days. Audible dot com slash wondery pod.
SPEAKER_03: For 60 years, high net worth individuals have turned to Bernstein Private Wealth Management to help them navigate their complex financial lives. Now you can access the world class planning and investment advice we're known for by tuning into the Pulse by Bernstein. Join us twice a month as we delve into all the complexities that come with having and managing wealth. You'll get valuable insights on investing, planning, and more through conversations with wealth advisors, economists, entrepreneurs, athletes, founders, and philanthropists. We're always exploring new topics relevant to your unique and multifaceted life and talking to the people who know best how to navigate them. Learn from their stories along with industry leading advice from the professional teams that guide them. Listen to the Pulse by Bernstein for your roadmap to wealth planning. Find us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a beat.
SPEAKER_06: Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guests are Justin Kolbeck and Aria Elfenbein, the co-founders of WildType. So all right, you've got this product. It's not quite where you want it to be yet in 2019, and it's going to take a lot of money to really kind of scale this up. Right now, let's say, how long does it take from cell to piece of salmon? What is the timeframe there?
SPEAKER_08: It's about four to six weeks.
SPEAKER_06: Wow, that's fast. That's a lot faster than a real salmon. Definitely. And I guess you can compare it to a brewery, right? You basically have what would look like a brewery.
SPEAKER_08: It does look like a brewery. This is something that people always comment on when they come visit our space in San Francisco. It is grown in a similar way with similar principles. When people kind of see how it's made, it just kind of clicks. It sort of makes sense. It's like, oh, okay, you're growing cells in these steel tanks, just like the way that we grow beer or brew beer.
SPEAKER_06: And so what does it look like when it comes out of these steel drums? Or does it look like a hunk of sashimi? You can go to your fish counter at the grocery store and some of them have these big hunks of salmon. No, it doesn't look like that at all.
SPEAKER_08: That's really just the first step. And that first step is only just a couple of weeks. It's afterwards when we actually have it grow on the structures, which we call the scaffold. I see. There's a whole process there where the cells will assume different forms and mature and grow together in some cases to create these more complex structures and textures and flavors. I've seen pictures of it.
SPEAKER_06: It's amazing. I mean, it's texture and the fat distribution. It looks like a piece of raw salmon. Does it smell like salmon? How close to a fish, how close to it is at this point?
SPEAKER_08: You know what I'd say is that there is a wide range of salmon flavors and aromas and textures that we're used to. And I think some of the freshest salmon that maybe is just pulled out of the river in that moment can have a very mild flavor profile. Yeah, it doesn't even smell like fish at all. Yeah, exactly. It's a very subtle flavor. And a very similar thing happened when we started to think about the appearance, where there is also a wide variety of color hues when we think about salmon. And so these were the kinds of conversations that all of a sudden were really interesting from a culinary perspective. And it was these questions that we started to elicit the help of chefs to help us answer. What feels most familiar? Is it more of what's called the saku, or the sort of blocks that are used in sushi counters? Or should we be creating more of a salmon fillet that should be cooked? And as you can imagine, it can often be a very subjective assessment.
SPEAKER_06: How did you, I mean, you're trying to do a very complex thing, right? I mean, the sort of the science behind it and the research behind it is highly complex. I mean, this is not a lemonade stand. I mean, we're talking about growing salmon from cells. How were you able to move from the lab to running a business? Because it is a business. This is not just going to the lab and doing science experiments.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean, we're fortunate that we have, I think, a very complementary skill set. So I do have at least a little bit of background in financial modeling and consulting and things like that. So I guess the best way to think about how we divided it, to use a music analogy, to a large extent, I was and to a large extent still am today, kind of the backup singer and the percussionist. And Aria and her scientists are the lead singers, the vocalists, right? And there's a really interesting lesson here about, you know, that entrepreneurship alone, it's nice when there are two people, not just to sort of divide things up as we have, but to really work through and cope with things when they go badly. You know, we haven't talked much about that today. But there have been way more moments when things went sideways and off the rails than when things worked. Tell me about that, because you've raised $100 million in the last four or five years
SPEAKER_06: it sounds like, you know, it's going pretty well. But what? Tell me about a moment where you weren't sure whether it was going to go well.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, I'll give you a recent one. So one of the things that we had to do is design a vessel, a cultivator that can grow cells at a pretty large scale. And one of the things that we wanted to do was to not order an off the shelf one that was made for a completely different purpose in the biotherapeutics world, but actually design one more with people who make brewery tanks, for example. And so we did it. We actually prototyped it at a very small scale and then made a medium-sized one and just recently received a pretty large one. Unfortunately the person who assembled it made a mistake and we had some stability issues. And if you know anything about cell culture, contamination is your enemy. And so, you know, that's just one example. But that, you know, that was a three-month setback. And I'd say for every success we have, you know, not just as a business but in the lab too, there are at least ten failures. And I think one of the big things that Ari and I have had to do is just deal ourselves to that and then help our team kind of cope with overcoming these routine failures that are just a big part of doing science generally.
SPEAKER_06: What about the pressure of financing and funding? I mean, you're far, far away from being a profitable company because you can't sell your products yet and we're going to talk about that. That's just the reality. When you're doing something so massive, so radical, it's going to take time. Do you feel any of that pressure? I mean, you know, right now you've got a bunch of cash that you raised, but still it's like, you know, you want to bring a return to those investors. Do you feel that pressure or do you feel kind of, you know, removed from it? Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: I don't think there's a day that goes by when we're not thinking about moving from an R&D company into a food production one. And it's been a longer journey than many other companies have to take. And part of it is filling a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation to our investors and wanting to return that money to them with a nice return. But part of it is driven by the perils that our oceans are facing, right? If you are a sucker for every David Attenborough documentary as I am, you know that, you know, if we don't seriously turn things around by the middle part of the century, we can just say goodbye to the biodiversity that exists in our oceans today. And we don't even understand what impact that's going to have. And so, on one hand, you know, the pressure of returning money in a venture-funded business might lead to some unintended consequences. But on the other hand, for a mission as profoundly urgent as ours, it might actually be a fairly positive one.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because time is running out.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, literally. You know, I was at an event hosted by some First Nations folks up in just outside of Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. And somebody there who grew up in the countryside would talk about the salmon runs when he was a boy. And, you know, he's probably about my age, so maybe mid-40s. You know, he would describe it as a writhing snake. And he said it was like almost so dense you could walk on them. Wow. And today, hearing him talk about this, it's a trickle. I mean, literally a trickle. And that's over the span of someone like relatively young's lifespan. And if you play that tape forward, it doesn't take us to a good place. And I think that's why we are so urgently working to build this third source of seafood that can supplement wildcatch and farmed fish.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. All right. The marketplace for plant-based meat substitutes is pretty robust. But this market, the self-cultivated market, is still really new. And you have no FDA approval yet to sell your products, right? I mean, there's nowhere you can actually sell what you're making at the moment. That's right. So you do have, you can sample this, right? If you were in San Francisco, you guys, you can go and try this.
SPEAKER_08: Absolutely. The public can, right? Yeah. I mean, we can have tastings. And that's been one way in which we've been able to get just invaluable feedback about how people perceive this product, what it tastes like, what it means to them, and just how we can improve generally. But it's not something we're able to sell at this point.
SPEAKER_06: And, I mean, in theory, or maybe in practice, you could do this with any other seafood, right? Like, could you make toro? Like, could you make really, you know, bluefin tuna? Like really prized, rare fish? Is that theoretically or maybe more than theoretically possible?
SPEAKER_09: Absolutely. And we've actually already started on some of the things that are, that are, hopefully will be announced soon. And we've been taking a lot of cues from some of our early commercial partners who have expressed a lot of interest in launching with us as soon as we get that green light from FDA. And you're right, a lot of the energy and interest is on things like bluefin tuna, for example, that are really difficult to farm and are actually on the brink of extinction. And I think we're really excited to listen to more of this feedback and help meet the market where the demand is.
SPEAKER_06: So in theory, if you got FDA approval, sometime within the next two to five years, what do you do next? I mean, are you already talking to the Whole Foods of the world? Are you already talking to the Costco's or is that the next step?
SPEAKER_09: We are. And, you know, we'll start just because we'll be volume constrained, not unlike Impossible in the early days when they were first launching in places like Dave Chang's Momofuku. So we'll be, you know, probably a small handful of restaurants around the country once we get that green light. But we actually have started conversations with some of these big grocery chains. And what's been interesting is that there was a lot of interest in actually having new things that would show up that people aren't used to seeing at their local grocery stores. And I think that creates a lot of space for innovation and partnership with these big conventional food producers who have surprised us, I would say, with just how innovative and forward leaning they are on new forms of food production and technologies like ours.
SPEAKER_06: Ultimately, if this scales and succeeds as you hope it will, and I think, you know, for the plant's sake, I think we all do, do you want this to be the only way we consume seafood in the future, seafood that is essentially cultivated rather than fished or farmed?
SPEAKER_08: Not at all. You know, I think that people who are stewards of the ocean, who care about the numbers of fish that we pull out of the water every year should be rewarded for the sustainable ways in which they're fishing. I think that, you know, just as we have more humans on the planet, if we can have not just increasing choice, meaning if people want wild fish, it's there. If people want farmed fish, it's there. And if they want cultivated fish like wild type salmon, that's an option as well. Not just in terms of that increasing choice, but that there's just more traceability and transparency in the entire seafood system. I think that is a future that is, you know, the brightest we can imagine.
SPEAKER_06: Aria Elfenbein, Justin Kolbeck are the co-founders of Wild Type Foods. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at howiboughtthis and mine is at guyrozz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.rozz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablui. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Katherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coates. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. Tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's podcast, American Scandal.
SPEAKER_01: We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, events that have shaped who we are as a country and that continue to define the American experience. American Scandal tells marquee stories about American politics, like the break in at the Watergate Hotel, an event that led to the downfall of a president and raised questions about the future of American democracy. We go behind the scenes looking at devastating financial crimes like the fraud committed at Enron and Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. And we tell stories of complicated public figures like Edward Snowden and Monica Lewinsky, people who found themselves thrust into the spotlight and who spurred debates about the future of the country. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.
