HIBT Lab! New Culture: Matt Gibson and Inja Radman

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2:08Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So industrialized animal farming can be incredibly environmentally destructive. According to the UN, the meat and dairy industries produce 14.5 % of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. You've heard us talk about this before on the show. That is as much as all cars, commercial trucks, planes, and ships combined. And believe it or not, when it comes to specific foods, industrialized mass-produced cheese is one of the worst offenders, which I know it's hard to hear because we love cheese. Well, this is a problem that two entrepreneurs, Matt Gibson and Enya Rodman, decided to take on.

2:48But there was just one problem. They felt like most plant-based vegan cheeses just didn't cut it. They don't melt in the same way. And they wanted to see if they could make something with a bit more cheesy deliciousness. But how do you make cheese with all of that cheesy goodness without a cow? Well, to answer that question, Matt and Inya founded their company, New Culture. They're now manufacturing a dairy protein called casein. It's what gives cheese many of its cheesy qualities, like the ability to stretch and melt and become gooey. And they're making casein without any animals. Right now, New Culture is working on its first product.

3:27It's a mozzarella cheese it plans to roll out to pizzerias in 2024. Matt and Inja actually met over the internet. They grew up on opposite sides of the world, Inja in Croatia and Matt in New Zealand, where he was never far from the dairy industry. And in 2013, after working for a tech startup, Matt was inspired to take his career in a new direction, pursuing this new field of meat alternatives. But all I needed was a co-founder. For any startup to be successful, you need a really strong co-founder. And for me, I knew I needed a co-founder that was super strong on the science, but also was completely aligned from a values point of view.

4:11And I remember talking to a colleague and I said, how do I find a co-founder that I require these very specific attributes? and that person said, hey, look on LinkedIn, be a recruiter. So I bought LinkedIn premium. I had no geographic restrictions and I just started searching and I had a little three sentence pitch that I would send people that had the right background. And I would have these conversations with people. I'd tell them what my vision was. I had a little document that I would share with them. And I was doing this for months and months and months. And one day I came across Inyo's per fall.

4:48Wow. All right, Inyo, you were living, I think, in the UK at the time. You're originally from Croatia, and you had graduated. You'd done a PhD at Cambridge in molecular biology. You get this sort of unsolicited note on LinkedIn from this guy in New Zealand saying, hey, I want to create a cell-based ag company, like make alternative animal products. what do you think when you got that that message um i know it sounds crazy and it was actually kind of crazy but that's exactly what happened and um you know it's important to understand where i was at the time in my life um i was working in london uh in consulting in business in a very different field i left academia by that point and in this moment in time i felt like had no purpose anymore and I wanted to find that purpose again and so I was at a time when Matt contacted me on a really strong personal journey of reading endlessly you know international climate reports I was really obsessed actually with understanding food problems climate problems food waste and waste problems and so when Matt contacted me I started to apply for jobs in this field, but not thinking of a startup anymore, you know, going more for policy government.

6:12And so it was out of a blue message. It was so different. And it said something like, you know, I'm starting clean dairy company. I didn't even know what clean dairy meant. I had to Google it. And it just was different. It caught my attention. There was this photo of a guy jumping out of plane with a parachute. Matt was doing like skydiving. That's his LinkedIn profile picture. Yeah, that's his LinkedIn profile picture and all the other messages I was getting were some, you know, corporate recruiters. And yeah, it definitely stood out. And I thought, wow, let me hear what this guy has to say. Huh.

6:47All right. So the two of you start talking and how does it go from two people from opposite sides of the world talking about a business idea to actually meeting up in person and bringing it to life? Like, how did you decide, you know, what you first wanted to do together? Yeah. So I was very open with Enya when we first met. I said, I want two key things for New Culture to be a success. One is to find an amazing co-founder, check. The second thing is to get into this incubator program called IndieBio. It's a biotech incubator program. So there's been some pretty amazing companies that have come out of it, but what had made it famous was really it was the incubator program where some of the key companies that we know today, especially in the cultivated meat space um went through and so and it was game just as i was to pack our bags and and be in san francisco at least for four months which is how long the program is for and we'll see if we can actually make this work wait so this is just just out of curiosity i mean it's a huge leap of faith to found a company with like a lifelong friend because We've done many of these episodes on our show where those friendships unravel, right?

8:01This is somebody you didn't know. He was a complete stranger, right? Yeah. And, of course, you're talking and you've got video calls. But, I mean, you are going to move to the United States and join this incubator and leave your job. What gave you faith? What was the intuition you had to trust that Matt was the person to do this with? Matt he was just so impressively immersed into this space you know he knew everything about every company that came out of this space he he really told me all these inspiring you know stories around how people can today make food using this technology and to be honest to me I was a protein scientist my whole life so my whole academic training my research was on protein science and protein engineering, not for food, but for neuroscience, for biomedical application.

8:55And as I said, I was looking to work in something really meaningful in battling climate change. And here was this guy telling me that, hey, today, all the technology in molecular biology that, you know, you've been using in your academic career, people are now trying to repurpose to make food proteins. And that was mind-blowing to me. And it was just so unique. It seemed so serendipitous that I could use my actual academic training and background that I could go back to using that to now work on these problems that I deeply care about and that I want to dedicate my life to and it just seemed like such a you know once in a lifetime opportunity and it seemed like a great risk and it seemed very crazy and you know I had to tell to my parents and friends overnight that hey I'm leaving my job I have to find someone to give this flat to I have to sort my whole life out overnight and I'm going to do this.

9:48And frankly, they thought I was crazy and they thought this was a spam and, you know, is someone going to murder you? And like, honestly, it was pretty intense at the time, but I just had this very strong drive and motivation and trust in Matt and the way he approached this problem and how honest and genuine he was through the process that I just knew I had to do this. Yeah. So let me ask you that. Why cheese? I mean, And first of all, this is not a critique. I love cheese. I'm just curious. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you could pursue. And we talked about it on the show before that, you know, obviously livestock production accounts for like 15 % of global carbon emissions.

10:32Meat obviously is a huge part of that. Presumably dairy is a significant part of that. So why did you decide to focus on cheese? You know, our mission and vision is focused on impact, right? And understanding which foods are the most unsustainable to produce and where we could have the biggest impact by displacing them. And then second really important thing for us was understanding where, you know, in this opportunity of dairy alternatives, where have plant-based alternatives done fair justice, where they've done a really good job displacing dairy products from the market. And when you look at those two angles, it becomes very obvious how big of a challenge cheese is.

11:18So cheese is one of the most unsustainable food products, not just dairy products globally. And many people don't know this, frankly. Yeah, I was reading that it can take something like 30 to over 60 bathtubs full of water to make a single block of cheese, which I didn't know. It's a lot of water. That is correct. You will see milk, right? It's mainly liquid. You basically shrink that liquid to something that's just you're extracting solids from it. That's what cheese is. Right. Because I think milk is like 90 % water, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because I make yogurt and I'll put in like a gallon of milk into my pot and then you get like three pints of yogurt out of that.

11:56Yes. And cheese is even worse, right? Because you are actually completely shrinking that milk product down to what is valuable, what matters, which is the solids in it. So first big problem is that unsustainability of dairy cheese production. And it's not just water use. That is where it's really ridiculous. But also greenhouse gas emissions and land use. Cheese is the third worst product globally of all food products to produce after beef and lamb. Wow. After beef and lamb. Wow. Exactly. So for us, you know, that was really striking. And then second thing that exacerbated this problem is that Matt and I were both personally eating a lot of alternatives, but it was obvious that people were not buying and eating plant-based cheese.

12:39That was not a category that took over. Right, because it's just not that – well, I mean, some of the cheese spreads are fine, like the cream cheeses. But, yeah, I mean, I actually once made cashew cheese, and it's pretty good. But, yeah, it doesn't – let's be honest. They just don't generally do the same thing that cheese does. It does not. And you know, from the scientific point of view, we could immediately identify there was this clear relationship of like what was lacking, what is the hero ingredient. And, you know, turns out that nature is so smart and miraculous and it created these casein proteins.

13:19So it's a group of proteins that are found only in mammalian milk in nature. And really, these proteins directly are responsible for making cheese cheesy, for making cheese able to melt and stretch and give it all of these properties that we love about dairy cheese. They inherently come from this casing protein. So that really focused us and told us we have to be solving the cheese puzzle. This is like where we can have biggest impact. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Matt and Inya on how exactly they're developing this cheese without the use of any animals. Stay with us.

13:57I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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18:24Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guests are Matt Gibson and Inya Rodman, two strangers from different parts of the world who in 2018 decided to work together on the first animal-free dairy cheese. And they completely uprooted their lives to do it. All right. So the two of you meet for the first time in San Francisco in 2019. This is the evening before the two of you start in this biotech accelerator. And that's it. Like you're going to be there for four months. And I think neither of you at this point, or maybe I'm wrong. Had you actually been in a lab working on this problem, like physically working on trying to make this work?

19:07Or were you going to start trying at that point? Well, I had done some very basic experiments in my parents' kitchen. So if you can call that lab work, then, you know. Yeah, no, fair enough. And I basically, what I try to do is to say, well, can I actually make a reasonably tasty cheese product? If I just start with casein protein, I add some fats, add some water, kind of reconstitute milk, and then take it through the cheese baking process. You know, will that give me something that resembles cheese and something that's relatively tasty? And it does. so that was one thing that i did at home that i've been very excitedly telling in your about and actually sent to indie bio as part of our application this tiny little cheese that i had made in my kitchen that you know wasn't actually refrigerated when it was sent to them so i'm happily they didn't get sick when they ate it two weeks later but um there was a bit some very basic things done but really the the majority of the core work that we did on the cheese making on the casein protein production was all done in those four months at ND Bio.

20:14Let me kind of ask you about the science at this moment. And obviously, I'm not a scientist. We had Pat Brown of Impossible Foods on the show a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking with the leg hemoglobin, you know, in the nodules of the soy plant, that that was a key component of producing a meaty kind of texture in Impossible Foods and that sort of that bleeding, you know, where it looks like it sort of bleeds is obviously not really blood. And maybe that's not a great parallel, but essentially casein, right, this casein protein found in dairy, in animal dairy products, you can actually make this casein protein without requiring an animal.

20:55You can make it outside of an animal. Correct. You can absolutely make this casein protein not requiring an animal, and that is what we are doing. There is a very interesting fact in the natural world that all creatures or organisms, we speak the same language. It's a language of genetic information of our DNA. And what that really enables us to do is to use that same language in a slightly different way to employ these tiny little microorganisms. They're the organisms that have been on earth for as long as we almost know it. And we can instruct them and encode them to not produce just what they usually do, but we can actually instruct them and tailor them to produce casein protein for us.

21:42And so what people have been doing for years, you know, if you think of, for example, probiotics or cultures in yogurt, people have been isolating from various places on earth, you know, from all kinds of lakes and ponds and nature and collecting and harvesting and storing these microbes and then cultivating them for actually thousands of years. And so we can literally go and buy microbes that people have been collecting like this, and we can get that DNA instruction. We can insert it into the microbe and grow and cultivate microbe in various conditions. This is what's called precision fermentation, where we really tweak and tailor the nutrients and oxygen and energy, everything, to this microbe to be optimal for it to produce our very valuable hero ingredient, which is the casein protein.

22:30So you essentially can direct these microbes to produce casein, which is sort of identical in its DNA, its structure to the casein found in dairy milk? Correct. So we can exactly use the DNA information that a cow would use to produce its own casein that you will find in milk that turns into cheese. And we can use that same information without actually ever seeing a cow, without ever touching the animal. Wow. Let me ask you about what you can do once you have produced the casein. Like, essentially, you can make any cheese from it, right? You can make any cheese from it, and it goes even further than that.

23:12You can make any dairy product in a far superior way than you can make with any other alternative on the market. And you can make any cheese in the world. You can think of using casein protein, which makes you empowered, but, you know, paralyzed where to start. Yeah, like you can make blue cheeses, you can make Parmesan cheeses, hard cheeses, you can make brie, soft cheeses, I mean, anything. Yes, because all cheeses are actually made in a very similar way, you know. Right. It starts with milk. Exactly. All right. So you decide mozzarella and I'm assuming because mozzarella is probably the best selling cheese in the U.S.

23:51or obviously used on pizzas. Is that is that right? Yeah. So mozzarella is definitely the best selling cheese in the U.S. very much thanks to pizza. And also as a cheese itself, mozzarella is really quick to make. I mean, you can start with milk and make a mozzarella in 30 minutes. If you compare that to like a Parmesan, where you can sometimes wait 12 months until that is ready to consume. From this idea of, okay, let's iterate this experiment. Let's see if it tastes good. Let's try again. We could have that cycle time incredibly quick for mozzarella. Now, pairing that with the gigantic market size that it is, we felt like mozzarella was the biggest opportunity for us in a way that we could solve very quickly.

24:36Because we can experiment quickly. We can make the cheese quickly and we can improve it very quickly. And so you decide that we're going to start with like a buffalo mozzarella ball, like a wet mozzarella ball or more like the drier mozzarella that, you know, you shred and you throw on a pizza. It's interesting you ask that because we played with both ideas. And in the early days, while we were at IndieBio, we were fully focused on what's called fresh mozzarella. So that like very moist ball of mozzarella. Yeah. And, you know, that was coming from the fact that that was so challenging and so exciting to make.

25:12It was like a queen of cheeses. And frankly, my bias being Southern Croatian and raised on very close to Italian diet. Yeah. But again, what was our mission? Why are we doing this? We want to displace large amount of cheese that comes from animals as soon as possible. And we realized that just when we were finishing IndieBio and a few months down the line, and we said, well, if we pivot to low moisture mozzarella, so the product that you can actually store for longer, that can have longer shelf life, that you can shred, and that is the most consumed cheese in this country, we can have that impact.

25:47Yeah, I guess one of the huge advantages of being involved in an incubator like that is they have like a demo day for investors and you guys were able to raise a seed round three and a half million dollars out of out of your time there. So you clearly impressed people with with this cheese that you you made and presumably people sampled it. And then the pandemic happens. So I have to imagine 2020, you guys are just, maybe in some ways it was a good year for you because you didn't have to focus on, you know, I mean, you could just kind of sort of get your head down and be in the lab and work on the product.

26:23Well, you would think that. I mean, things were looking really good, right? As you mentioned, we closed our seed round. We were building the team. It was really exciting what we had planned for the next 12 to 18 months. And then the pandemic happened. And so that was really what paused the lab work because none of us had labs at home and we couldn't do any experiments in. And it was actually a really tough time. And you can comment on this far more than me, but we did so much work planning experiments, analyzing data, really making sure that when we came back to the lab, we knew exactly what to do.

27:04And when we did come back to the lab three months later, It was one of our most productive and successful few months in the lab. Everything just works so well because so much planning and thought had gone into it. All right. So now you're spending all this time really sort of creating this first product. And by the way, this is the product that will come out soon. And I know you've subsequently raised a lot more money because, I mean, this is a cash-intensive proposition that you guys have gotten into. Tell me about the cheese. Is it indistinguishable? I mean, if you were to blind taste test it, do you think most people would be fooled?

27:43We do that, Guy, all the time, actually, internally and for our guests. There's been so many people who have actually tasted our cheese and the responses have been mind-blowing. And the responses have been that it is indistinguishable or nearly indistinguishable to the dairy cheese. So with food products, there's always room for improvement and getting feedback from consumers, which we're really excited to be doing this year and next year. But with limited feedback we could get so far, we're really proud with where the product is today. Now, there are obviously other companies who have been working on this, and some of them focus on like ice cream and yogurt.

28:28Again, you go to the ice cream aisle, at least in California now, and it seems like there are more plant-based ice creams than dairy milk ice creams, which is – that's another conversation. But it seems like everyone's making oat ice cream and cashew ice cream and all these alternatives now. You're making a dairy product, dairy cheese, right? Right. But what's different about how you're making it versus some of these other companies that are also making animal-free dairy products? Yeah. I think as India mentioned previously, we're making casein protein. Now, there's actually two classes of dairy protein in milk.