First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Animal Rights Activist is Changing the Meat Industry

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1:12Scott, have you ever considered going vegetarian? No, until literally recently. I'm, a couple of things. I have a very big dog, a Great Dane, and I've been seeing these TikToks with people stroking their cows. And these cows look kind of dog-like and my Great Dane is just so sensitive and emotional that it started getting me feeling about just how inhumanely we treat animals. So I'm not thinking about going vegetarian, but I am thinking about moving meat consumption from three times a day to maybe once or twice a day. Have you always felt this empathy for animals or is this a new thing because of TikTok?

1:46Well, I like to think I've always felt a little bit of empathy for animals, but something about having a beast, a really big dog and realizing it's probably not that different than many of the animals that we, I mean, basically just abuse and slaughter. So yeah. And I don't, I'm not sure I bind all the health benefits. I, you know, I don't know, maybe that's the problem. I've been eating beef my whole life. But I mean, the reality is it's not that vegans are animal lovers. They're plant haters. And I love that. Do the environmental and sustainability concerns around meat and our production of meat, does that play into your decision at all?

2:24It should, but it doesn't. And it's not what's driving it. I'm just, I don't want people eating my dog or anything similar to it is the bottom line. And like methane, deforestation, climate change, yeah, it all, you know the data. It's probably one of the best things you can do for the world is move from meat-based to plant-based calories. But my considering moving to a non-beef diet is just a function of, you know, my recent kind of concern or increased empathy or inability to ignore what it is we do to animals.

3:01Welcome to First Time Founders. Here's a statistic that might shock you. In the U.S. alone, we kill 4 ,000 cows, 14 ,000 pigs, and a million chickens every hour. And every year, those numbers continue to grow. Now, we don't often cover animal welfare on this podcast, but it's an integral piece of one of the most important and rapidly evolving industries in our economy, namely the food industry. My next guest is a food entrepreneur and also one of the foremost animal rights activists of our time. As a high school student, he founded Animal Outlook, a nationally recognized animal advocacy organization.

3:42Later, he wrote the national bestseller Clean Meat, and most recently, he decided to start a company. With$27 million in funding, five patents, and a 9 ,000 liter bioreactor facility, this founder is well on his way to accomplishing his company's mission. Make meat without killing animals. This is my conversation with Paul Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of The Better Meat Co. Paul, thanks for coming on and joining us. Ed, great to be with you. Where are you zooming in from? I am based in and I'm zooming in from and live in Sacramento, California. We often call it the farm-to-fork capital of the country.

4:26However, given that I work in the fermentation space, I prefer to call it the fermenter to fork. Oh, very good. How long have you been there? I moved to Sacramento about six years ago, and I wish that I had some really awesome business reason for doing that. But the truth, because we know each other so well, Ed, I'll confess to you the truth. The truth is I moved here for a woman who is my wife. Oh, very nice. And so it was a good idea. But I also started a company at that same time here in Sacramento. And so we've put down our roots or more literally concrete and steel here in Sacramento. Oh, I love it.

5:06Well, let's get right into it, because we've got a lot to talk about. So, I mean, this podcast is, I want to say, four or five years old. We've had guests on to talk about basically every topic you could think of. But for some reason, and I think this speaks to mine and Scott's and our team's own ethical uneasiness with this topic, we have never discussed animal welfare on this podcast. But I look at the numbers, and the numbers are staggering. So just from my understanding, we kill 650 million sheep, one and a half billion pigs, and 75 billion chickens for meat every year. And those numbers have tripled in the past four decades, while the human population has only doubled.

5:51So in other words, the average human is now consuming more meat than at any time in human history. Now, I want to be upfront early with you, Paul. I am a meat eater. I have eaten meat my whole life. But I look at these statistics and I'm shocked by the scale and the proportion of death and suffering that we continue to levy on animals and at a rate that continues to increase. So let's just start with a very general question for you. How did we get here? Yeah, sure. So, Ed, I agree with the sentiments that you're expressing, although I wonder how much the numbers matter, right? So if you said there's 75 billion chickens who were killing every year, if it was 45 or 25 billion, those are obviously hugely different numbers.

6:35But to the average person, our minds are not equipped to grapple with such astronomical numbers because in our evolutionary past, there was no need to think about numbers in the billions. And so we don't really have an emotional difference to us when we hear 25 billion versus 75 billion. At the same time, it's important to remember that these are individuals. These are animals who feel pain and suffering with every bit as much intensity as our dogs and cats do. They are often smarter than our dogs and cats. And the only reason that we subject these animals to such cruelty and violence that we don't typically subject dogs and cats to is because of the way that we view them differently.

7:15Not because of anything inherent about them. It's just because we view them differently. And of course, in some cultures, they do view dogs as food, just like in some cultures, they are horrified by the thought of cows being food. But the difference is how we perceive them. And now, to me, the real concern, yeah, I'm concerned about the number of animals who are being used, and that's a major environmental point, right? Like, because it takes so much land and water and greenhouse gas emissions to raise all these animals for food. But I think the bigger concern for me is just how much suffering they endure.

7:44If you think about the U.S. alone, 99 % of the animals who we raise for food are raised on factory farms. We have this myth about animals being out in bucolic pastures. That's really not true. for the vast majority of animals, nearly all of them who we raise for food, they're living inside of typically windowless warehouses packed beak to beak where they are living in their own feces. They can barely move. And in the case of the chickens who are raising for food, they've been selectively bred to grow so big, so fast that many of them can't even take more than a few steps before they collapse underneath their own unnatural bulk.

8:19And so even if they were in really bucoic, beautiful settings, they would still be prisoners in their own bodies because they're so big that they're in constant pain. So then when you consider the fact that, you know, we take nearly all of the egg-laying chickens in the world and confine them in cages where they can't spread their wings, or we take pigs and lock them in cages where they can't turn around for their whole lives, and you recognize that these are customary agricultural practices. It's not a case of a few bad apples. It's not a case of just, you know, some rogue farmer. that customary agricultural practices are so inhumane toward animals that if you were to subject dogs or cats to those practices in the United States, you would be criminally charged with animal cruelty.

9:00And so part of the reason why I think it's so important that we develop alternatives to meat and eggs and dairy is just that we cannot satiate humanity's demand for these products without inflicting wide-scale torture on animals. And even independent of the number of animals, which is, again, astronomical, it's just a torturous existence for them, and we shouldn't be doing it. We'll get to the Better Meat Company, which is your company, in a moment. But I first want to just explore your career in this industry, which dates back, actually, to when you were in high school. At the age of 14, you decided to become vegan.

9:36And then you started this non-profit organization, Compassion Over Killing, which is now known as Animal Outlook. How did that all begin for you? What was the inspiration behind launching this career in animal protection and animal advocacy? I have a lot to thank my mom for. She worked at a local animal shelter when I was growing up, and so I was sensitized to the plate of dogs at least. And so, you know, we always had like three or four of these dogs from the animal shelter on our house, and they were like siblings to me, right? They weren't just pieces of property. They were like real siblings.

10:08And so back in the early 90s, somebody showed me a video of animals inside of factory farms and slaughter houses. And I remember thinking as I was watching these animals, you know, being hung upside down, having their throats cut, and I was thinking, what if those were my dogs? You know, what would I do? And of course, the answer is that there's nothing I wouldn't do to prevent that. And so I started thinking, well, if I wouldn't want it to happen to my own dogs, why would I want it to happen to any animal? And there was no animal protection club in my high school. So I started this one called Compassion Over Killing that over a period of years transformed into a national nonprofit organization that I ran with offices on both coasts.

10:44And eventually that led me into a career of lobbying for animals in the state legislatures of the country, and then eventually into authorship about the alternative protein industry. And finally now to running my own alternative protein company designed to recreate the meat experience without animals. So that's the past 30 years of my life, Ed, pretty much summed up in like two minutes there. That was a good summary. I want to kind of pivot to one thing that I know that you speak about a lot, which I find fascinating and also very true, which is that you have said that exploitation actually rarely ends because we decide that it's immoral or that it's socially unjust.

11:25And your point has been that it almost always ends because of some sort of technological innovation that makes it irrelevant, makes the exploitation obsolete in some way. Could you take us through what you mean by that? Think about it like this. For thousands of years, the fastest way to get around was by whipping horses. So we basically had horses as our forced laborers, and they worked under threat of violence. And nobody stopped whipping horses because they cared about horses. In fact, if you go back to the mid-19th century, there were all types of animal welfare campaigns to get better conditions for horses.

12:03The ASPCA and other animal welfare groups that were founded in the 1860s and 70s were really founded for the purpose of trying to get better conditions for horses. They wanted resting hours, Sabbath days where they could be rested for a whole day, mandatory watering stations and so on. And yet it wasn't those animal welfare campaigners who really liberated horses. It was Henry Ford, you know, through the creation of the car or what was then called the horseless carriage. He liberated horses in a way that nobody ever dreamt of. Like these animal welfare campaigners weren't even trying to liberate horses.

12:37They were trying to just ameliorate some of their suffering. And as a result, we now consider a horse-drawn carriage a relic of an archaic past. Similarly, for thousands of years, we lit our homes with whale oil. And even if you go back 2 ,000 years ago, the Romans rendered some species of whales extinct in their waters because they whaled them to such a vigorous degree. In the end, it wasn't humane sentiment or sustainability concerns that freed whales from harpoons. it was the invention of kerosene, which is a cleaner, faster and cheaper way to light our homes. We used to live pluck geese, which is a torturous thing to do, but that's how we wrote letters.

13:15Nobody stopped using quill pens because they cared about geese. They stopped because metal fountain pens were invented and it was an easier way to write. And so the question is, if we used horses and whales and geese for thousands of years and then quickly stopped using them, might the same be true for chickens and pigs and cows, where we were using them as food sources for thousands of years. And then within a matter of decades, will we find new ways to create the same experience where we can enjoy high protein, delicious foods that don't require subjecting these animals to this type of torment?

13:45Which I think brings us nicely to your company, the Better Meat Company, which you started back in 2018. I mean, you had a long career in advocacy and nonprofit work. And it sounds like you might believe that actually technological innovation starting this company would be a more effective way to protect animals. Would that be right? Yeah, I certainly hope so, Ed. That's the goal. So I think that it's very unlikely that humans are just going to give up carnivory and switch to lentil soup and hummus wraps and bean and rice burritos. That would be awesome. I would love it if people did that. Those are great foods to eat.

14:23But humans seem to really like meat. Meat demand is going up, not down. And that's because people are escaping poverty. So in China and India, you have hundreds of millions of people who have left poverty and joined the middle class. And one of the very first things that people do when they escape poverty and join the middle class is they eat more meat. And of course, we want people escaping poverty, needless to say, but there is a side effect. And that side effect is a much heavier environmental footprint. And so the question is, can we feed all of these people, the 8 billion of us who we have today, and there's going to be another 2 billion of us joining the planet between now and the year 2050.

14:57So 25 years from now, we're going to have another 2 billion people on the planet. And, you know, we don't have another celestial body to farm. We're not going to be farming the moon. We're not going to be farming Mars. In the next 25 years, we're going to have one celestial body to farm, and that's planet Earth. And we've already deforested a huge part of Earth just to raise animals for food. The number one cause of deforestation is raising animals for food. The number one cause of wildlife extinction and biodiversity loss is raising animals for food. And a leading cause of climate change is raising animals for food.

15:28In fact, according to the United Nations, the animal agriculture industry contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the entirety of the transportation sector combined. More than all cars, more than all planes, all trains, all boats, all combined is animal agriculture. And so the question is, how can we actually reduce the number of animals who we are using for food in a way that still allows people to enjoy the foods that they really crave. And I believe that trying to recreate the meat experience without animals is the way to do it. It's similar to needing to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

16:00But while it would be great if people wanted to walk and bike more, people really seem to like cars, right? People seem to like driving. And so we need to create cars that don't rely on fossil fuels. Well, similarly, it would be great if people want to eat bean and rice burritos, as I mentioned, but most people want to eat meat. And so we need to create the meat without the animals. And that's what my company, The Better MeCo, is seeking to do. I think when people think of meat alternative companies, the first two that come to mind, I mean, for me, would be Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But I know that Better Meat is quite different.

16:32So tell us what you're doing at Better Meat and tell us what you're doing that other meat alternative manufacturers are not doing. Well, first of all, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have done a very good job. They've helped to develop this industry in a way that just hadn't happened prior. And we all owe them, I think a great deal of respect. But what they're doing, as you pointed out, is different from what the Better Meat Code does. So Impossible and Beyond both make plant-based meat, meaning they're taking plants and converting them into things that look like animal meat and taste like animal meat.

17:01And the way that you do that, let's just take Beyond as an example, their star ingredient is a texturized pea protein. So how do you get that? Basically, you grow a field of peas, you harvest a field of peas, you mill it into a flower. That flower is very low protein. And so you have to You strip out the fiber, strip out the fat, and then you concentrate it down into a pea protein powder that an athlete might take as a supplement. But that powder, while being proteinaceous, is not textured like animal meat. So then you subject it to something called extrusion, which is a fancy way of saying lots of pressure, lots of heat.

17:30And as a result, you get a texturized pea protein that has a more animal-like texture and you add other ingredients to it and you get the Beyond Burger. Now, that's fine. I like the Beyond Burger, but there's a lot of things to do to get a pea to look and taste like beef. That's why the Beyond Burger is more expensive than slaughter-based beef, because it's not just made of peas, which are obviously cheaper than beef. It's made of a tiny portion of the pea, and all these other processes happen to it. So what we at the Better Meat Co. do is we don't rely on plants at all. We're relying on a different kingdom entirely of microbial fungi, otherwise known as mycoprotein.

18:04And the mycoprotein that we grow here in Sacramento is textured like meat naturally. No processing entailed. It simply happens through fermentation. And so we have a three-story tall fermenter where inside of it, there is a fermentation occurring that transforms these microscopic spores into foods that look and taste like animal-based meat. They have that texture and straight out of the fermenter without any isolation, fractionation, extrusion, none of it. Just simply in its whole food, all natural, unprocessed state, you have a mycoprotein that not only is textured like animal meat, but has more protein than eggs, more iron and zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas, more fiber than oats, and it naturally contains vitamin B12.

18:46In other words, you get all the things about meat that you want without the things about meat that you don't want. Saturated fat, cholesterol, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, and more. And so this is a promising way to make a whole food, all natural, all meat ingredient that can not only compete on texture, but also can compete on price because it is a whole food. We'll be right back.

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21:30We're back with First Time Founders. It sounds like you get basically the best of both worlds with this fermentation process using fungi. two things. One, how did you find out about this? And how did you know that this was the idea to pursue when you wanted to start a company? And two, why isn't everyone doing this? Why wouldn't Beyond and Impossible start using your process? There's a company called Korn, Q-U-O-R-N, in Britain that for the last 25 years has been doing something similar. Now, they use a different species and a different process, but still they're using microbial fungi to create high-protein products.

22:09And it's a good product. I like it. I eat it. But it doesn't really taste like meat. It tastes good if you like it. I liken it to tofu. Not that it tastes like tofu, but it's like if you like tofu, you like tofu and you eat tofu because you like tofu, right? You're not eating it because you can't tell the difference between it and beef. You obviously can. You just you happen to like tofu. And the same is so with corn, Q-U-O-R-N. I think if you like corn, you eat corn and that's that. But I wondered, was there a different species or a different process that could create a more meat-like experience because corn has been marketed to vegetarians.

22:43And, you know, those are people who don't necessarily think it needs to be a spot-on replacement. They just want something that tastes good and has a lot of protein. You know, corn has built a very successful business. They sell several hundred million dollars worth of product every single year, but it's all based on one organism. And so, and they control about 99 % of the microprotein market today. So, imagine if you only ate pork and you didn't eat chicken or beef or turkey or fish or anything, right? And yet the world of animal protein is very diverse. All of those species I just mentioned have different flavors, different textures, different nutritional profiles, and so on.

23:14And the same is so with plant-based proteins, right? Imagine if you only ate pea protein, you never ate wheat or chickpea or fava bean or soybean or whatever. Those are all different, right? And the same is true with microbial fungi. There's thousands of species out there and they all have different nutritional profiles, textual profiles, growth rates, and so on. And so what we did in the early days at the Better Meat Co. was basically screen large numbers of strains to see which ones were the highest protein, fastest growing, and most meat-like texture. And then we developed a process around those strains.

23:44We were awarded numerous patents for our technology. And then we built a pilot facility here in Sacramento to prove this technology can scale outside of the lab, which we've now done. And the next step for us is to raise the capital needed in order to build a full-scale commercial production facility, which is the next thing that we intend to do. Now, to answer your second question, Ed, about why other companies don't do it. First of all, it's very hard. We're talking about biotechnology here. It's not just like you can set up a farm and grow mushrooms, right? This is not like that at all. We're growing microbes and we're growing them inside of large stainless steel fermenters, sometimes known as bioreactors.