When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat

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3:10And we've talked to founders in this space before, like Pat Brown of Impossible Foods or Ethan Brown, No Relation, of Beyond Meat. And 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 Eshar 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.

3:51In fact, I've tried a Redefine Meat steak, and I was blown away. Eshar 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 Eshar 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. One of my closest mentors, he told me once that I should become a CEO one day.

4:32And 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. So, all right.

5:08So 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. He was also working in printing? 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. While the two of you were there, did you ever talk to each other about starting your own business?

5:48No. 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 like 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.

6:26But 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. 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.

7:02I 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. 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.

7:31Yeah. 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.

8:09But 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, Eshkar, I have this great idea. 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. Yeah, yeah. All right, so you were at HP for a few years. And I guess you went to another company called Hycon, which was a startup that at that time was using 3D printing technologies, I guess, to create foldable boxes.

8:42And 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. 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 of we're doing something that will change the world yeah all right so you were there for about two years and obviously learning a lot about 3d printing um so 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.

9:41Tell me the genesis of this idea of thinking like, maybe I should start my own thing. How did that even begin? 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 were going to start redefining 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.

10:23And I became fascinated about finding the best meat and getting connections to the best butchers and getting notified when they slaughter a three-week-year-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.

10:57And when I was a kid, the dairy farm was romantic. It's the place where milk comes 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 are 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, you know, part of the, I think, part of the big picture around meat in general, meat consumption.

11:38And I say this as a meat eater, I eat meat this weekend, and I do eat it. But I was reading about, you know, sort of the carbon footprint of beef in particular. And it just kind of outweighs every other, you know, animals. Like for every kilogram of beef, 100 kilograms of carbon emissions are produced. And, you know, for poultry, it's about 10 kilograms. So just, you know, 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.

12:26100%. 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 one billion, population of one 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.

13:07Almost 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. 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? When I quit my job from Hycon 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.

13:52We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Eshar about his leap into the plant-based meat revolution. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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16:39Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Eshar Ben-Shitrit, who back in 2018 quit his job without a plan to join in on the growing momentum around plant-based meat alternatives. 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.

17:19And 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. All right, so I guess you reached out to a few companies, right, to propose this idea around 3D printing meat, and you don't hear back. But this opportunity seems big, too big to ignore. So tell me more about your thinking during that time. At that point of time, nobody was talking about steaks. It was considered science fiction, moonshot. How can we make a steak out of plants? A burger makes sense, a sausage, chicken nugget.

17:58But 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, but it's relatively easy to replicate ground meat. You can, you know, it's been done for a while. But making a stake, actually trying to replicate a stake with all of the different intramuscular layers, it's very hard to do.

18:40You're thinking, well, maybe given your background of 3D printing, maybe there's a way to actually 3D print a stake that actually replicates a stake, 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. It's a totally different beast. And also, I didn't have experience as a technologist. I had experience in conferences, making presentations. Right. And the first few months, playing in my kitchen, actually squeezing different protein stuff out of syringes to emulate 3D printing.

19:20And 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. 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 this naive beginning led to something serious that we didn't plan necessarily. So this is 2018, and you are literally with syringes injecting just lines of what, I don't know, different fats and like you know basically most most um plant-based meat is made from pea protein or wheat gluten proteins or um you know there's got coconut fat and and you know different vegetable fats so was that is that what you were doing you were just 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 are you doing it how did you know how do you know all the secrets So I had this intuition that that is true, that meat is comprised of muscle, fat, and blood.

20:31And 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 rump steak. What do you think about my rump steak? It was inedible. It was not something you can eat. But when I showed 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.

21:20All right. So you and Adam LeHav, 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 you had to find, presumably, you had to find some scientists to work with to help you start to get something, even some kind of prototype that is, you know, that you could serve to people. Where did you go? Did you start in Israel or did you find a lab somewhere else? 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.

22:11So 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.

23:08That's amazing. That's something that can happen in Israel, especially when you combine technology and sustainability. So how did you make the first products that you could actually test on people? I mean, given that you had utterly failed in 2018, not utterly, but what you made in your home was inedible, how did you start to to get it to a place where you could actually make something that was edible? 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.

23:59So 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.

24:41And then we accelerated things because at that point of time, it was very clear that this can become a stake one day. It was very exciting. And we thought that that's it. That's 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 a lab, and then we will sell a 3D printer to every restaurant around the world. The idea was you would basically, the business was going to be the printers, not the meat. You would sell the printers to restaurants, and then they could print meat, print their own plant-based meat on demand. On demand, no waste, just in time, personalize your steak.

25:19We even, 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. So I know that you guys raised here about$6 million in seed funding in 2019. And that probably, you know, got you to a place where you could develop something that was, you know, 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.

25:57Essentially, what you were trying to do was through different layers, right, 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 the, you know, that intramuscular, that muscular kind of, you know, the grain of the meat. and 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. Yeah, so at some point of time, the citron we actually raised on the blood, just the fact that our blood component was very, very tasty and very impressive.

26:37And the blood was basically water and soy sauce and different flavors. 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 round. And then when we, in COVID, before we launched, we did this large scale tasting.

27:09So we gave about 1 ,000 people in two days blind tasting of some products. Some were mincemeat, 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 was a nice video of a mother giving her kid a bite of her product. And then I told her, you know, it's made from plants, 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.

27:47It'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 chef and butchers. 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. 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.