SPEAKER_03: 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. The Angie's List you know and trust is now Angie.
SPEAKER_04: 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: Wedding season is in full bloom. And if you've been wanting a straighter smile, look no further than Bite. Bite offers clear teeth aligners that help you transform your smile from the comfort of your home. Or wherever you'll be this time of year. Forget the endless trips to the dentist. Bite's clear aligners are doctor-directed and delivered straight to your doorstep. Just take an impression mold of your mouth, preview your 3D smile, and order your all-day or at-night aligners. Bite also knows that wedding season is expensive enough as it is. Their aligners cost thousands less than braces. It's time to let your smile shine. Get started on your smile journey 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 to get over 80% off your impression kit.
SPEAKER_05: Black perspectives haven't always been centered in the telling of America's story. Now we're taking center stage. Introducing NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of Black-led stories from NPR's podcasts. Search NPR Black Stories, Black Truths wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03: Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's not a coincidence that the more we're learning about meat production and its impact on the planet, the more meat alternatives we're seeing on the market. And we've talked to founders in this space before, like Pat Brown of Impossible Foods or Ethan Brown, no relation, of Beyond Meat. If you haven't heard those episodes, you should definitely go back and check those out. Just search for Ethan Brown, How I Built This, Pat Brown, How I Built This, and you'll find them. My guest today is also working in the alternative meat space. His name is Esher Ben-Shitrit, and he launched his company, Redefine Meat, back in 2018 outside of Tel Aviv in Israel. And unlike other companies, Redefine Meat is using 3D printing technology to create plant-based beef, pork, and lamb, products that really look and taste just like their animal-based counterparts. In fact, I've tried a Redefine Meat steak, and I was blown away. Esher grew up in Israel on a kibbutz, surrounded by family and nature. His father worked with turkeys, and his mom took care of dairy animals. And when Esher left the kibbutz as a teenager, he eventually got a law degree and then an MBA and went to work at Hewlett-Packard in Israel, where he first started to learn all about printing. And while he was always ambitious, he never thought of himself as an entrepreneur or a risk-taker. His plan was to work in a steady corporate job, advancing gradually and slowly.
SPEAKER_01: One of my closest mentors, he told me once that I should become a CEO one day. And in order to become a CEO, you need to be first a product manager, because then you're a CEO of a product. So I went to HP to become a product manager of a product. And what was the product you were looking after? I was in charge of basically helping packaging companies print packages that are made very fast and can be personalized. So they can write your name on the chocolate package, which is a very, very difficult technology, very exciting business that nobody knows exists because nobody understands all of these big industries that are behind the scene of all of our consumption.
SPEAKER_03: So you were there for, I think, about five years, or four or five years at HP. And while you were there, you met a guy named Adam Lahav, from what I read, who would eventually become a co-founder. And he was also working in printing?
SPEAKER_01: So he was a product manager, and he did the same revolution in the field of flexible packaging. So your Cheetos, your Doritos, everything that comes in a bag, pouches. He developed and launched and sold the first digital production printing press for pouches and flexible packaging in parallel. So we had a parallel path. Got it.
SPEAKER_03: While the two of you were there, did you ever talk to each other about starting your own business? No.
SPEAKER_01: We actually talked about how we are not the type of people that are going to start our own business and that we are corporate, we are really good in corporate. That one day we will both be CEOs or senior managers in big companies. This was the vision then. That was your goal? It was our belief, our belief that we are limited, that we don't have this ability to take risks. We also became fathers at the same time. But we were also very frustrated because we were 30 at that time. And I told Adam once, we have 40 more years to work. What are we going to do in these 40 years? So you guys are 30, still very young, but you're feeling like you're old.
SPEAKER_03: But your goal, your ambition, because you were not a risk taker, right? Because a lot of people think that entrepreneurs are risk takers, and they jump out of airplanes without parachutes, and it's not actually true. But you really don't define yourself as a risk taker, and your path was like, I'm just going to keep doing this, and maybe I'll become a senior leader at HP, or maybe I'll become a senior leader at another company. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And also, why would I take a risk when the career path is so amazing and so successful, and it's actually quite interesting what I'm doing. I met great people all over the world. I went to conferences. I could live the life that I thought were right for me, which was so different than my life of my parents that basically do what they want to do and not what anybody or the corporate world defines for them to do.
SPEAKER_03: It's interesting because a lot of the entrepreneurs and founders we have on the show worked in corporate environments and found that they could not work in those environments because they couldn't deal with the meetings and the rigidity and the rules and the bureaucracy. But it sounds like you actually were comfortable in that world, like you could navigate that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think it's very easy because it provides you with a lot of comfort and a lot of security, and also you tell yourself the story of why this is right for me, what is the reason that I'm very good at that, and not where your creativity or your dream can come into reality because that's not an option. You need to say my passion is really growing the amazing field of making printers more profitable. So you need to believe in that until you find what is really right for you, until you find this individual calling or purpose that you say, then it's not a risk. Then if I don't pursue this path, I'm risking something big. But I was the guy actually that killed for a lot of people the startup dream because I was very good in explaining why every startup will fail. Oh, so when people come to you and they'd say, Eschar, I have this great idea.
SPEAKER_03: I want to talk to you. You'd say, well, it's not going to work. You were the guy that was saying that to people. I was very good at that because also it's very easy.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So you were at HP for a few years, and then I guess you went to another company called Highcon, which was a startup that at that time was using 3D printing technologies, I guess, to create foldable boxes. And presumably that move was to become, I don't know, maybe eventually become the CEO of that company? Yes, but it's also more fundamental.
SPEAKER_01: When my son was born, immediately I started thinking differently in what I'm doing. And I said, let's go to something smaller. Let's go to something that is different and not really be stuck in the corporate ladder. But I went to something that was already, I went straight into being a VP marketing of a startup that I thought is going to grow dramatically. Really, really amazing people with a big dream and the culture of 100 people. It wasn't a tiny startup, but this culture of we're doing something that will change the world.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. All right. So, you've been working for two years and obviously learning a lot about 3D printing. So tell me, I mean, you're a guy who's not a risk taker, you're a corporate guy, you are going to become a CEO. But you decided to take a big risk and start your own company. Tell me the genesis of this idea of thinking like, maybe I should start my own thing. How did that even begin?
SPEAKER_01: So it's an intersection of two elements in my life. Actually, the real decision to take the leap into the deep water was when my second son was born. When my second son was born, I just quit my job without a plan. There wasn't a plan. It wasn't that I knew we're going to start Redefine Meat. That is one element. The other element is that I stopped eating meat. So I was a big meat consumer. Really, you would ask me 10 years ago, what is my hobby? I will tell you, meat is my hobby. Because I love cooking and I spent a lot of time, we used to have a family restaurant and I used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking. And I became fascinated about finding the best meat and getting connections to the best butchers and getting notified when they slaughter a three-week-old lamb. And when my son was born, I stopped eating meat. I started feeling bad. Why? Tell me why you stopped eating meat. So there's a lot of reasons why people stop eating meat. For me, it was the fact that you're eating somebody else's kid. I looked at my son. I have now three boys and I said, I don't want to be eating somebody else's child. The other element, I took my son to the dairy farm. I still like to take my kids to the dairy farm. And when I was a kid, the dairy farm was romantic. It's the place where milk come from and you have these amazing creatures. Now it's really sad because you see the separation of calves from the mother cow and you see the pain and you see the suffering and you see the agony and doing it with your kids and explaining, so why are the kids there and the mother there and what is happening to the kids and what will happen to the mothers later on. It's really sad. And my brain made this connection between what I'm eating and the living creature that I know more than the average person. So let's just step back for a moment and talk about part of the big picture around meat
SPEAKER_03: in general, meat consumption. And I say this as a meat eater. I eat meat this weekend and I do eat it. But I was reading about the carbon footprint of beef in particular and it just kind of outweighs every other animal. For every kilogram of beef, 100 kilograms of carbon emissions are produced. And for poultry, it's about 10 kilograms. So it just completely overshadows all other kinds of meat production. So beef is really long term is a big problem. So part of this idea, I guess, not just for you, but with other plant meat companies is to solve this problem, to enable people to eat meat without actually doing the damage that meat production does.
SPEAKER_01: 100%. And the challenge is that everybody is aware of the fact that beef consumption doesn't make any sense. Most of the food around the world goes to cows and not to human beings. The water, the cows basically are population of 1 billion that eats more food and consumes more water than all of the human population. And we continue to raise these animals because they make a really tasty food product. Not for nutrition. You can have nutrition by eating lentils or chicken, which is more effective. You can eat pork, which is not good for the environment. But we just enjoy so much eating beef because it's so complicated, because it's so rich, it's so special, and almost every culture around the world elevates beef more than any other food product. And it's an expensive food product. And we buy more and more of that and the prices are increasing. And the environment is paying a higher burden. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So that was it. It was simple as that. And I guess you're thinking about, could there be something in plant-based meats that I could do?
SPEAKER_01: When I quit my job from Haikon with two boys, I had many options. The most immediate option was to find a new job. But there was this notion of maybe there is a revolution in plant-based meat, and maybe this is my purpose. My purpose is to take part in this revolution.
SPEAKER_03: We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Eshhar about his leap into the plant-based meat revolution. Stay with us. I'm Eshhar When I was a kid, I used to love building with Legos and Lincoln locks. I would spend hours working on these elaborate creations, these villages and towns. And looking back, I realized how that kind of play really helped me build confidence and develop a sense of wonder and creativity and curiosity. So fast forward to today, and my kids for years have really enjoyed the incredible selection of projects. From KiwiCo, everything from solar powered vehicles to robots, it's absolutely amazing the options that they have. KiwiCo projects are designed by a team of educators, makers, engineers and rocket scientists who brainstorm hundreds of ideas to create the most exciting, age-appropriate and educational projects. KiwiCo gives kids the tools to learn new skills, build new experiences and make connections to the broader world. Redefine learning with play, explore hands-on projects that build creative confidence with KiwiCo, get 50% off your first month plus free shipping on any crate line at kiwico.com.com. That's 50% off your first month at kiwico.com. 90% of startups fail. 90%! Just 10 out of every 100 last. In order to succeed, startups need grit, talent and the ability to perform at the highest level. That's where Mercury comes in. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey. A modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. To eliminate the hurdles that come with traditional banking. To offer a product crafted to help you scale with safety and stability. To go beyond banking and provide access to the foremost investors, operators and tools. Because when you can operate with confidence, building your company becomes an art form. Join over 100,000 companies banking with Mercury at mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust. Members FDIC. One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app and it's totally free. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Eshhar Ben-Shitrit, who back in 2018 quit his job without a plan to join in on the growing momentum around plant-based meat alternatives.
SPEAKER_01: So I actually emailed both Impossible and Beyond and told them you should start working on 3D printed meat and I want to be the guy to do it and they didn't answer. But it was more on how do I get into this industry. So what is my reason to contribute something to this industry that I want to be a part of? And it was a nice story. I know printing. I know 3D printing. Maybe there is a story we can tell of how 3D printing can help and then I'm the expert. And who else in the world is a 3D printing expert that has a passion for meat reduction or avoidance of meat that is willing to devote 10 years of his life for that? And it's probably me.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So you, I guess you reached out to a few companies to propose this idea around 3D printing meat and you don't hear back. But this, I mean, this opportunity seems big, too big to ignore. So tell me more about your thinking during that time.
SPEAKER_01: At that point of time, nobody was talking about steaks. It was considered a science fiction moonshot. How can we make a steak out of plants? A burger makes sense. A sausage, chicken nugget. But a steak is the most complicated food product that we eat. And there is no food technology that exists that can reach to this level of complexity. And 3D printing has a lot of disadvantages, a lot, a lot, a lot. But complexity is the number one benefit. There's no added cost for complexity. So essentially, I mean, for anyone who's tried impossible meat or Beyond Meat, it's not easy,
SPEAKER_03: but it's relatively easy to replicate ground meat. You can, you know, it's been done for a while. But making a steak, actually trying to replicate a steak with the, you know, all of the different intramuscular layers, it's very hard to do. You're thinking, well, maybe giving your background a 3D printing, maybe there's a way to actually 3D print a steak that actually replicates a steak, to actually use plant-based materials to do this. But your experience in 3D printing was with hard materials, right? I mean, 3D printing with food materials is a totally different beast, I imagine.
SPEAKER_01: It's totally different beast, and also I didn't have experience as a technologist. I had an experience in conferences, making presentation. And the first few months playing in my kitchen, actually squeezing different protein stuff out of syringes to emulate 3D printing. And I even bought a 3D printer for quite a lot of money out of my pocket that I didn't know how to operate for six months. It was a very, very immature way of starting a business. But it was also fun and also was very honest, because I thought that by this creation in the garage, I will come up with a revolution that will change the world. But its naive beginning led to something serious that we didn't plan necessarily. So this is 2018, and you are like literally with syringes injecting just lines of what,
SPEAKER_03: like, I don't know, different fats and like, you know, basically most plant-based meat is made from pea protein or wheat gluten proteins or, you know, it's got coconut fat and different vegetable fats. So was that what you were doing? You were squeezing these different components onto a, I don't know, a piece of parchment paper or something and just trying to let it dry and then do another layer? Like how were you doing it?
SPEAKER_01: How did you know? How do you know all the secrets? So I had this intuition that is true, that meat is comprised of muscle, fat, and blood. And I tried to develop the muscle, fat, and blood separately. So I took soy protein I bought in a health store, soy protein and some pure gluten and some pea protein, and I tried to blend it with beetroot and I made the fat out of coconut fat. And I took water and beetroot and some flavors like soy sauce and I called it blood. And then manually I injected layer by layer. Even one of those creations I posted on a Facebook group of meat lovers and I said, this is my rum stick. What do you think about my rum stick? It was inedible. It was not something you can eat. But when I show this to people, I don't think they were excited about the technology or the level of sophistication, but I saw I have some crazy ability to follow a wild idea. All right.
SPEAKER_03: So you and Adam Lahav, who is your co-founder, who you had met at HP, you decide to start this company. It's going to take a lot of money and a lot of research to get this right. You knew something a lot about 3D printing as a product manager, but presumably you had to find some scientists to work with to help you start to get something, even some kind of prototype that you could serve to people. Where did you go? Did you start in Israel or did you find a lab somewhere else?
SPEAKER_01: We did something very Israeli. We didn't have money, so we hired young people that would help us learn something new that had an interesting background. So we hired a food engineer, a 3D printing guy, a maker and a chef. This was the team. And it wasn't the team to crack the technology for the long term, but it's the team to understand what are our gaps, what are we missing? And then this team is amazing. They're still in the company. We found two people. One is our VP of research and development, and he's a physicist, so not related to food. But he actually knows how to take wild technological ideas and make them into reality. And the second is our CTO that has a background in tissue engineering. So he made meat in the lab. And then he went to 3D printing. And all of these people, they really, really care about the planet. So they all eat meat. They all actually love meat. But they care about the planet and care about doing something that has an impact far beyond just technology and a business. And when we told them the story, they quit really, really great jobs and joined us. That's amazing that something that can happen in Israel, especially when you combine technology and sustainability.
SPEAKER_01: So how did you make the first products that you could actually test on people?
SPEAKER_03: Given that you had utterly failed in 2018, not utterly, but what you made in your home was inedible, how did you start to get it to a place where you could actually make something that was edible?
SPEAKER_01: The first thing we needed a lab. I have a friend that worked with me in HP that his family operates labs that you can rent. And they gave us a lab for almost free. And we set up shop there. And then we started just sourcing, buying every protein, every flavor compound, every fat that we can, and building a 3D printer that can manipulate these products. So we built our own printer. We built a machine from scratch. And we tried to build different structures and see how the different structure impacts your experience, the flavor. So how this element of 3D printing can manipulate something in food. We didn't try to make a steak. We didn't try to make something tasty. We wanted to see what kind of things we can create with 3D printing that a normal food company cannot develop. And the first thing that we developed were not tasty. And they were not meaty. But they showed anybody from food science that this is something new. This is a new property of food that we can create by this combination of 3D printing and the different components that we had. And then we accelerated things. Because at that point of time, it was very clear that this can become a steak one day. It was very exciting. And we thought that that's it. Our job is done. We filed a patent for that. And we thought that's easy. Now, only thing we need to do, like six more months in the lab, and then we will sell a 3D printer to every restaurant around the world.
SPEAKER_03: The idea was you would basically, the business is going to be the printers, not the meat. You would sell the printers to restaurants and then they could print their own plant-based meat on demand.
SPEAKER_01: On demand, no waste, just in time, personalize your steak. We had the habit of demoing people a steak that they would cut and their name would be inside. They couldn't eat it because it wasn't tasty. But it was very impressive that we can control the shape of the steak from the outside and from the inside.
SPEAKER_03: So I know that you guys raised about $6 million in seed funding in 2019. And that probably got you to a place where you could develop something that was maybe ready to test on people, on meat eaters. And you launched in the middle of COVID in July of 2020. I think your first product, the Alt Steak, came out. And just sort of explain this to me. Basically, what you were trying to do was through different layers, different micro layers of printing the steak, the result would be something that kind of pretty much replicated or got as close as possible to a real piece of meat with that intramuscular, that muscular kind of the grain of the meat. When you cut into it, there's that chewiness. You essentially got, as far as you could tell, as close to that as anybody had gotten.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so at some point of time, the seed run we actually raised on the blood, just the fact that our blood component was very, very tasty and very impressive.
SPEAKER_03: And the blood was basically water and soy sauce and different flavors.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a little bit more advanced than that. We found a collaboration with a flavor company that's called Jivodan, an amazing strategic partner. And we were able to develop this gush of blood that when you put in your mouth, tastes like what comes out of steak. And we were able to show the steak and explain once we combine those together, you will have this experience of biting through fibers and having juiciness created. That was the seed run. And then when we uncovered, before we launched, we did this large scale tasting. So we gave about 1000 people in two days blind tasting of some products, some were minced meat, so some were not using additive manufacturing. But it was the first time we gave people a steak. And it was very, very encouraging to see consumer reaction, kids. I remember there is a nice video of a mother giving her kid a bite of a product. And then I told her, you know, it's made from plants, from the steak, actually the steak. And she told me, don't tell him what is an actual steak. He doesn't know what he's eating. And of course, investors saw that it's not only a technological promise of patents and a mush, it's something that people are now starting to eat and get excited about. And then we raised more money and also started working more with chefs. Once we were more confident, we started going to this Michelin star chefs and butchers.
SPEAKER_03: I want to ask you about that in a sec. But you basically, it sounds like you abandoned this plan to sell 3D printers. That original concept you kind of pivoted and said, no, let's just focus on making the meat and selling the meat.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a big pivot. But it happened in one minute. That basically created a new, more like a business aspiration to the company. We were speaking with one of the largest beef companies in the world with the management team. And we had a presentation about our technology and what we're doing. And they asked me, so how can we collaborate? And I told him, you know, actually, we don't want to collaborate with you. We want to be you. And they said, what do you mean? We told him, yeah, we want to be the world's largest meat company. And they stopped and they applauded. They say, OK, that's the way of thinking. And when we came up to this meeting, we started saying to everybody, we're going to become the world's biggest meat company. This is what we're going to do. And if you're the world's biggest meat company, you're not selling the technology. You're selling meat.
SPEAKER_03: We're going to take another short break. But when we come back, more from Eshhar on his goal to make Redefine Meat the largest meat company in the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Eshhar Ben-Shitri, who realized the best way to grow his plant-based meat company is to work with people who know a lot about food. As you started to get more attention, you eventually developed a partnership with two really famous chefs, both Michelin-starred chefs, Marco Pierre White and Ron Blauve. Marco Pierre White from Britain, very, very famous chef. And I saw him do a video saying that the first time he tried it, he was kind of blown away.
SPEAKER_02: Well, the first thing I wanted to understand was the construction of it. And so I snapped it and I tasted it. And it reminded me of braised cheek of beef. I thought, this is genius. And I did say it's the most clever thing I've ever seen in my 45 years of being in a kitchen.
SPEAKER_03: And I should add, I've tried it. It's actually amazing. It tastes and feels like a short rib. These guys, you know, get a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of plant-based meat products out there and there's a lot of competition. It's a very competitive space. And even the idea of getting shelf space in the supermarket just seems daunting. How did you convince them to try this? I mean, someone like Marco Pierre White has these, gets pitched every day from a plant-based company. So how did you get to him? A small, you know, company based in, outside of Tel Aviv, going to him and saying, hey, try this. How did you do that?
SPEAKER_01: I think there are two reasons. One is humility. So in plant-based meat, there's a lot of companies, including some of our friends, that say we have a perfect replacement for meat. You have the same texture, the same flavor, the same everything that you expect from meat. And then you take a bite and you see what is the distance. So we say, and it's not incredible. Meat is so amazing. It's been developed through, you know, millions of years of evolution. So assuming that we are already there, we're not there. The second, the passion to really listen. So when we came to Marco Pierre White, when it came to Ron Blau, by the way, very early on in the process, we told him, take a bite. Tell us what's wrong in this product. Don't tell us how amazing it is. Let's start selling it in all of your restaurants. Just be a partner on making this really great. And we did it with them. But we also went to butchers. We also went to the people that know intimately this connection between meat and the consumer. And we told them, just tell us the honest truth. Not only, by the way, Marco is incredible. He's also poetic. And he has this philosophy around the world. Ron is brilliant in combining flavor. But every cook in every catering that we work with has a lot of criticism on our product. And we listen. We don't say, no, no, you're mistaken. We say, OK, maybe in the next version, we actually need to add some more bite and some more fat and to make the flavors more natural. But you're essentially constantly trying to change it and shape it.
SPEAKER_03: You're not saying this is the final product that we sell now. Because what I tried, what was available, this kind of short rib, really had that chewiness and that bite. And it was like 95 percent there. It was really close. And I'd never tasted anything that was like that. That was a plant-based product. So, but you're basically saying we're not, we might be 50 percent the way there already right now.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And also, meat is so diverse. And even beef, think about beef. You eat not only short rib and maybe you don't like short rib or you happen to like short rib. But what about the tenderloin, the ribeye? What about a very fatty, marbled ribeye? What about a very lean cut of skirt steak that is very bloody? So, meat is not a single product. Beef is not a product. Beef is a world of different cultures, different supply chains. And they are all complicated and they're all tasty and all have different consumers that want them. By the way, you know what's the problem with the dish that you ate? The product was meant to be a steak. We wanted people to serve it as a steak and not to take it into short rib, but it performs really well there. So, the next version of that was how we are not only doing this fiberness, chewiness of short rib, but how can the product stand alone on the plate? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, knowing what you know about this technology, right? How long will it take, do you think, before you can create a fully plant-based steak that is indistinguishable from an animal steak?
SPEAKER_01: The question is more, what is the benchmark? So, today, if we do a blind tasting to all of our products, we can choose an okay meat, including a steak, that consumers will not tell the difference. But the problem is that if you go to a steakhouse, the steakhouse where we are served, we are in a place called Beef Bar in multiple countries around the world. And the Beef Bar serves Wagyu meat, so the highest price meat. Yes, the super premium meat. Yeah. Yeah. So, of course, we cannot compete in a blind tasting and we won't. We believe that in three years from now, we can also provide a Wagyu beef with the same level of marbling, the same level of tenderness and richness of flavor. So, that is our aim. Our aim is to constantly increase the benchmark of how do we compete. So, Israeli beef, actually, OK One, is not the best in the world.
SPEAKER_01: In many cases, especially high-tech companies that we work with, they substitute meat with redefined meat. They say, the meat that we buy, your meat is already even better. Of course, much more healthy and much more sustainable. But when we go to France, for example, the beef there and the way people consume beef, even a burger in France is a steak-a-chez, not eaten in a bun, eaten with a knife and fork. So, it's more difficult to compete with our burger that is better than some of the burgers that are served in Israel in a meat restaurant. So, that is the real focus. The real focus is how do you find a benchmark that every time that our product improves, addresses much more consumers. So, Angus steak, which is, let's say, what a lot of people in America love, we're not there yet. Once we have an Angus steak and Angus ribeye, which is a year from now, we can go to U.S. mainstream steakhouses.
SPEAKER_03: At what point will these products be available in grocery stores?
SPEAKER_01: Eventually, in order to become the World's Biggest Meat Company, we need to be everywhere that meat is found. But we think that the way to reach consumers and the way to improve our products is through restaurants. So, as we improve our product and we improve our scale, we start to sell more and more to consumers directly. In Israel, we're already there. So, in Israel, you can buy a range of our product in basically every store. And in Europe, it will take a little bit more time. First, we're still building the recognition of our quality and the value of what we're bringing in restaurants. And we have a lot more work to do. And we're building capacity because it's a new technology and we develop our own formulations and products and also machinery. And it takes us time and it takes money. And we have a lot of demand for our products and not enough capacity. So, we'd rather work with the Michelin star restaurant and the caterers. Somewhere next year, a year from now, we'll start rolling out to more retailers in Europe with the products, including our steaks, and then gradually grow until we reach also to the USA and then follow the same path. First restaurants, then retail.
SPEAKER_03: And what about price point? I mean, right now, is the price of a redefined meat steak comparable to a quality steak or is it higher?
SPEAKER_01: It's comparable to high quality steak and the quality is not there yet. So, it's a little bit a premium for the relative level of quality because the value that we bring is not just the price. So, when people consume redefined meat, they want to experience something that doesn't come from an animal, that is more sustainable, that is more healthy. And they're willing to pay a small premium, not huge. It's not double the price. It's about 20, 30 percent more expensive. And we have limited capacity. Actually, our cost of ingredients, so the cost of our input, unlike meat, is very low because meat cows consume about 25 kilogram of feed for every kilogram of meat. And we actually use about 30 percent of ingredients to make a kilogram of meat and the rest is water. So, on that regard, we're very efficient because we operate in a small scale. Everything related to automation, to packaging, to capital equipment is inefficient. As we grow with that, we will become cheaper in our production and we can lower the price and we can easily become at small scale cheaper than meat. And meat today has massive scale, massive trillions of dollars of scale. And we're talking about tens of millions of dollars to reach a relatively decent scale and lower price point.
SPEAKER_03: Let me ask you a business related question. I mean, you've raised a lot of money. This is a capital intensive product. I think you've raised, if I'm right, close to 200 million dollars now in several rounds of fundraising. But I have to imagine, you've got a ways to go before you're going to hit profitability. I mean, maybe 10 years.
SPEAKER_01: No. So we are very lucky. We invest a lot in technology and our technology is very, very complicated. But we chose a very simple set of ingredients that allowed us with a new technology to reach good scale and revenue quite fast. So we're actually selling and on the individual level product, we are profitable. The key is how much scale we need to be profitable as a company and how much we want to invest in future technology. And by being in the market and growing every month and investing in technology, we can increase the addressable market that we have. So it's not 10 years, it's two years from now. So in sort of five years from now, where do you want to be?
SPEAKER_03: Where do you imagine you'll be?
SPEAKER_01: Five years from now, we're already a big meat company. We have a presence in Europe in basically every restaurant that you can imagine because food service is a market that we dominate. And we are in all the nationwide retailers with our mean, strange and our steak. And we have sizable business in the USA from restaurants in retail. But the idea is, is if you look even 10 years from now, out of the 20 biggest meat companies around the world, one company or two companies for sure will not rely on animals. These I have no doubt. And we want to be the first one to reach there, to have a meat business that is the distribution of meat that is found everywhere, that consumers enjoy the product that are very healthy and very sustainable, like a meat company, without the animal that they slaughter. And it's a very, very challenging task because the big meat companies have been around for 100 years. But at some point of time, meat companies will not rely on animals. And the question is, who's going to do it? Somebody has to do it. We don't have a choice. It's inevitable in the sense that the plant needs it and animals need it and humans need it. And I don't see a lot of companies that have this ambition because it's really tough. It's really it's a tough journey to do what we're doing. But the potential is so amazing. The potential is so unique, so incredible. It's something we would tell our grandkids about. So this is what drives us. And five years from now is just the beginning. So we started six years ago. Five years from now is 11 years in. For the world's biggest meat company, it's just the beginning.
SPEAKER_03: Escher Ben-Shitrit, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Guy. Enjoy it a lot. And thank you. It's an honor.
SPEAKER_03: That's Escher Ben-Shitrit, co-founder and CEO of Redefine Meat. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click follow on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson and edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Masini and music by Ramtin Arobloui. Our production team at How I Built This includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Carla Estevez, Ramell Wood and Sam Paulson. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to How I Built This early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. If you want to show your support for our show, be sure to get your How I Built This merch and gear at WonderyShop.com. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, it's Guy here. And while we're on a little break, I want to tell you about a recent episode of How I Built This Lab that we released. It's about the company TerraCycle and how they're working to make recycling and waste reduction more accessible. The founder, Tom Zaki, originally launched TerraCycle as a worm poop fertilizer company. He did this from his college dorm room. Basically, the worms would eat trash and then they would turn it into plant fertilizer. Now, his company has since pivoted from that and they recycle everything from shampoo bottles and makeup containers to snack wrappers and even cigarette butts. And in the episode, you'll hear Tom talk about his new initiative to develop packaging that is actually reusable in hopes of phasing out single use products entirely and making recycling and TerraCycle obsolete. You can hear this episode by following How I Built This and scrolling back a little bit to the episode, Making Garbage Useful with Tom Zaki of TerraCycle or by searching TerraCycle, that's T-E-R-R-A-C-Y-C-L-E, wherever you listen to podcasts.
