Pushkin.

Meat is expensive.

It's costly, and it's costly in a few different ways, on a few different dimensions.

For one thing, it just costs a lot to grow a cow or to go out and catch a wild salmon.

Also, meat is costly for the environment.

Cows are absurdly large contributors to climate change and habitat loss.

Wildfish stocks are declining.

Fish farming is associated with pollution.

Also, a lot of what farmfish are fed is wildfish, which in turn adds to the decline in wildfish stocks.

As a result of all this, people are trying to figure out how to make food that is like meat but does not require growing and killing animals.

Plant based fake meat has been around for a while impossible beyond, but I would argue that a limiting factor is right there in the name plant.

There is another strategy, a strategy that is technically harder, that's not as far along, but that in the long run might be more promising, growing meat from animal cells without ever growing the animal.

I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.

My guest today is Justin Kolbeck, Justin is the co founder and CEO of a company called wild Type.

Earlier this year, wild Type started selling what they call cultivated salmon at a few restaurants around the country.

The key ingredient in cultivated salmon is cells that originally came from a real salmon, but are grown in a metal vat, kind of like the way you brew beer.

Justin's problem is this, how do you grow salmon cells in a vat, turn them into something that looks and tastes like salmon, and sell that for the same price as wild caught salmon.

Justin started off by telling me about this thing that happened about a decade ago.

He was visiting his friend Aria Elfinbine at Aria's lab in San Francisco.

Aria is a cardiologist and he was growing heart muscle cells in his lab.

What was really interesting about that visit is Ari and I were both having a conversation about what's the best way to make food.

Should we think about a plant based approach or should we use cells?

And it was an active debate because at the time, Impossible Food it was rolling out at Momofuku in New York.

There were lines around the block.

People were really excited about what plants could do, and he showed me under the microscope a dish with beating human cardiomyocytes.

So these are human heart muscle cells, and at the cellular level they have a pacemaking ability, so they beat just like our heart does.

Each cell sort of regulates itself.

To be the cell.

Yeah, like this is way before it becomes the full organ.

This is just like the most basic building block of the human heart.

And that was a hugely impactful moment for me, because you know, Ari had kind of always told me, hey, cells know what to do all the way down to the most basic level.

They are programmed to become the building blocks of our of our various parts of our body.

But seeing it beat was really an incredible moment for me, right, And also it made the feet of turning cells into meat.

Sorry that that rhymed a bit I didn't intend it to, did it seem a little bit more doable, quite honestly, right, Like, here are these scientists that are growing functional human beating heart cells for therapeutic purposes.

Making a non functional piece of meat just for human consumption seemed not trivial by comparison, but a bit easier like, if.

You could literally grow human heart self that beat on their own in the lab, surely we could make just a slab of dead salmon for people to eat.

Yes, exactly.

And you know, and I wouldn't say that all of my doubts went away in that moment, but I did get it.

I understood the sort of power of what this technology could do.

So you were already by this time thinking about food, and in particular thinking about alternatives to traditional meat.

Like why why were you too thinking about that at that time?

I think we came at this from slightly different angles.

Ari and I.

So my most recent overseas assignment as a foreign service officer was in a place called Paktika, Afghanistan.

At the time I was there, which was two thousand and oh, boy, ten to eleven, it's a long time ago now, Afghanistan was the third most food and secure country in the world, and the place where I was, which was on the eastern part of the country right on the border with Pakistan, was one of the most food and secure provinces in that incredibly food and secure country, and I saw people do incredible things to feed their families.

It was non inconsequential part of why a lot of people signed up to become members of the Talban quite honestly, to get a paycheck and essentially be able to feed their family.

I came home from that assignment thinking a lot about food security, and so when Aria started talking to me about the power of this technology, I got really excited because it was at least part of an answer to a question that had been tumbling around in my head, which was where's all the food going to come from for the next three billion people that are going to show up on planet Earth?

And by the way, they all want to eat more like us here in North America, So a lot of meat, a lot of dairy, a lot of seafood.

And it seemed like a very compelling, interesting, partial solution to that.

So, okay, so you have this in your mind, you see the beating heart cells through a microscope, right, and then what like, how do you get from there to deciding to start a company to make salmon out of cells?

So the first thing that I needed to get over internally was does as technology have promised?

And it was clear to me that it did.

The second thing was, Okay, well, can we actually do it?

And can we make enough cells to cook something up and put it in our mouths and chew it.

And so that's what we did.

And so at the end of twenty sixteen we started talking to potential for lack of a better word, rent a bench locations on the West Coast.

We ended up at this great place that at the time was called QB three.

Now it's called NBC Biolabs in San Francisco.

They have a few of them now.

But what was incredible at the time is you could rent for I think the price was eight hundred and fifty bucks a month.

You could have dedicated bench space.

It wasn't much.

It was like the size of the dust that I'm sitting at now.

But is it just full of mad scientists with weird o dreams cooking things up?

What's going on in there?

Yeah?

And other than us and one other person who was also working on some food applications, everybody was working on biotech, healthcare type of stuff, right.

And the advantage of this place is at the time Ri n I still had full time jobs and we were funding this from our savings and from our salaries, so it didn't cost a lot to get up and running.

We had access to like millions of dollars of state of the art equipment that we could rent.

And so, you know, we spent the first part of twenty seventeen trying to find some animals that we could isolate sales from, right and that included you know, obviously fish, which we ended up working on, but also some chicken.

In the early days, it was just a little bit easier to get a hold of fertilized eggs, for example, which are full of the kinds of sales that you need for starting a selling the purposes that we need them for, you know.

And I remember when we grew our first real full dish of chicken muscle cells.

It was before we you know, at the time, we were like literally going fishing to like find a fish, and you know it's called fishing and not catching.

So you know, we went fishing a few times and we weren't able to get any fish.

We were like down there in the San Francisco docks talking to fishermen and being like, hey, I know you just caught this fish.

Can you cut us off a little bit so we can see if we can find some life cells.

But while we were doing that, because we always and we can talk more about this.

We always saw seafood is like the real place we needed to focus.

We were working on in parallel some of these kind of poultry cell lines, and the first big aha moment for me was, you know, we got in a very small format, you know, just like your simple dish.

We got chicken muscle cells to grow and then and I had this video still to this day of them like kind of spontaneously contracting like our muscles, still, right, And just like our muscles, if you give them the right kind of environment, you can get them to grow and to be bigger and all of that.

And so eventually we did find a place where we could reliably get like fish cells because, as you might imagine, you didn't come upon the ideal cell line the first time around.

That's not how science works typically.

It took us a while, and it was actually a fish that Aria dissected on Christmas Eve of twenty eighteen that became the starter yeast effectively for the cells that were that were making and putting into products today.

It was a salmon.

It was a little salmon, a little salmon.

So why did you choose?

You said, you always knew you were going to do seafood, Like, why did you choose seafood, Why did you choose salmon?

Yeah, look, there are a couple of reasons.

One, we wanted to focus on a big potential price, not just price like in the monetary sense, but a place to have a really big impact.

And seafood is our species, the human species number one source of animal protein, you know, not driven by us here in North America, but largely by other countries around the world.

And so that was one consideration and the other onse and Ari and I felt pretty strongly about this.

In the early days, a lot of people were really getting interested in the plant based movement.

You know, there were certainly those who cared about it from like a sustainability perspective, but I think there were a lot of people that were just like, Wow, I can have a burger and it's going to have like lower saturated fat, and maybe this is healthier for me than a beef broger.

Right, And for seafood, there was a really clear reason for people to switch, which is nobody likes to find a parasite or a worm in their sushi, and it is absolutely ubiquitous.

Nobody likes the heavy metals that are present in fish.

I think seafood is just this really complex thing where you like ask people like, hey, what's better farm fish or wild caught?

You'll get all kinds of different answers, and you know, some of them may or may not be based on any kind of factual base.

But it's complicated, right, And so the idea was like, let's just remove all of that complication and just make the purest, cleanest seafoot on the planet.

And that was kind of our north star for a long time.

Okay, so it's late twenty eighteen.

You get your first cells out of the original salmon that is the father or mother of everything else, right, So let's just step back at that moment and talk about the context of this broader technology of working with cells.

I mean, it is the thing people had been working on for some time, right, both in a medical context and in a like can we grow meat from sales context?

What was the existing arc on the food side of people trying to grow meat from cells at the time you started.

Interestingly, the very first demonstration of this technology was a NASA funded project by a researcher I believe in New Jersey whose name was Morris Benjaminson.

And he grew goldfish cells outside of the goldfish as a proof point that, you know, because the basic question they were trying to figure out is, Okay, we've got astronauts on long distance space missions, or maybe we're colonizing Mars one day.

We're sure as hell not grazing cows on Mars.

It's just not going to be a thing.

So and you know, we're not going to be able to ship up on rockets huge amounts of heavy meat for people to eat, right, So what are we going to do?

Right?

And I think that was the original impetus for exploring this kind of technology is can we just make me essentially on a spaceship that's traveling through space?

And that's what this researcher did, and he proved that it could work.

And when was that just more or less decade nineties or nineties?

Ok, yeah, yeah, so it's a while ago.

Then a French artist demonstration where he grew some frog muscle cells that he had sort of isolated from a living frog and fed them to some people as like an art demonstration.

Somehow very French.

They must have been smoking, right, I would imagine it was like a you know, dark cafe somewhere on the chamis Luise.

Well this I don't know, but the people watched the frog was alive kind of while people were eating its cells.

Essentially.

Oh I see, So it didn't harm the frog.

They whatever scraped them cells off the frog and didn't have to eat the frog.

Yeah, exactly, something sort of like frog legs without eating that frog's legs or any frog's legs.

Yeah.

But what I loved about this is it wasn't like a scientist or biologist.

It was just an artist who saw a chance to create this like absurd setting and just see what happens and document it.

And then I would say for applications for like more serious applications toward food started with a Dutch researcher named Mark Post who made the first cultivated hamburger about a decade ago and then ate it on live British TV.

So that had happened, so people could do it, but nobody was doing it at scale or in any kind of economic way.

So what do you have to do?

Like, what are a few of the things you had to figure out?

I think a good starting point for that question is how did Mark Post make his burger?

And how much did it cost?

So that burger costs well over three hundred thousand dollars to make, just to put it into perspective.

And the way he grew it was in these things called cell factories, which are layered large imagine like a big plastic circulture dish, but like the size of a desk, and it's like ten stories tall, right, And he had stacks of these.

I've seen pictures of it, just piled up in his lab where they made this initial prototype.

So the first step was like, okay, well that's not going to work.

If we're trying to take plastics out of fish, we better not be growing it.

And he's just plastic cell hotels, right, not to mention that doesn't scale.

So the easier move would have been grow the cell so that they're sticking to a plastic box.

But you were you didn't want plastic in the fish, so you couldn't do that.

Yeah.

So look, most cell culture is done in stainless steel fermentation tanks that don't look all that different from a brew tank.

So that seems fine, right, Fine, use a metal tank instead of a plastic tank.

But get well, let's see three hundred thousand you need to basically get it to three dollars, which is how many orders of magnitude?

Right a lot thirty three hundred, three thousand and thirty thousand, five orders of magnitude.

You have to get five orders of magnitude out right.

That seems like the big job.

Also make salmine, which nobody has done.

But frankly, it's the five orders of magnitude part that seems really hard to me.

So here's how we did it, and it was it was really three things.

One it was to start with the right cells, right, like I was talking about, So train the ones they can grow in a beer brewery instead of these cell hotels.

And is that just a matter of choosing the right kind of cell?

Is it just trial and error that one didn't work, that one didn't work, Oh, that one worked.

That's right.

Yeah.

So it was thousands of experiments literally, oh wow, over two years to get the right type of cell.

Just different cell kinds to find one that would reproduce in a in essentially a beer brewing vat.

That's right, different types of salmon.

So we used Atlantic and within Pacific, we use coho and chinook and just all these other kinds just to try to change as many of the variables as we could, but we got there in the end.

The second thing was it.

Was Coho, right, the one that worked was Coho.

Is what won the contest.

The second thing.

Second thing was what we feed the cells.

So in pharma cell culture, it's not uncommon for a leader of cel feed to cost hundreds of dollars and in fact, that's literally what ours cost when we started.

A leader to cost hundreds of dollars.

That's right.

And you know, just to zoom forward in time a bit, we're at like three thousand liters scale now, so it's just not tenable and so and by the way, that feed has a lot of animal components in it, which again defeats the purpose.

Like if we're growing cells outside of an animal, let's not grow it in another animal ingredients.

So then we had to put the cells on a plant based diet and reduce the cost like crazy, right, and just to give you sent So we went from hundreds of dollars a lead to like about a buck a liter.

Now, okay, and how much meat do you get out of a leader of feed?

I guess that is that another optimization problem?

It is, that's right, Yeah, yeah, and I'll put that as a subset of the cost of the feed.

But while we were reducing the richness of the feed, essentially, we were also selecting for cells that could grow in a very healthy way at higher densities.

So we can get let's say, instead of a gram a leader, we can get ten grams a lead, or twenty grams a leader, or one hundred grams a leader, right somewhere in that range, like where we're ten or one hundred x.

Ying with some of these efficiencies would be The third thing that we had to do was to scale all this up, so move it into larger and larger cultivation centers essentially.

So that was definitely not trivial, and that was more less of a biology thing, more of an engineering thing, like how do we keep the thing sterile?

How do we ensure that we're keeping the cells happy?

Like nobody had ever studied three D fish cell culture before to the point where like we were, like, what temperature should we grow the mat Almost all cells that are grown for therapeutic use are grown at our body temperature, right thirty seven celsius, never ninety eight point seven fahrenheit.

What's the body temperature?

Of a salmon.

It's cold there, cold.

Was what whatever?

The water is?

Yeah, yeah, and they have a range that they can tolerate.

It's pretty broad actually, which is why this was an interesting question.

And so yeah, that was a big process.

But once we got it, I would say, into our first stainless steel tank, it got a lot easier.

How does that work?

By the way, so you start with a cell, how do you get from a cell to a piece of salmon that I can eat?

Yeah, So what we do is, you know, for now, we're growing cells.

Like I said, kind of the maxi bawling that we're at is three thousand liters, which, again, if you've been to a microbrewery and you like kind of peer at all those big stanless steel tanks or whatever, twenty feet tall, looks like that one of those.

One of those okay, yep, and what's going on in there?

So we've got a it's not not that complicated.

So we've got a little propeller like a literally we could have like strapped one on from a boat.

It circulates oxygen in the in the tank.

We control the pH we can control the temperature.

We make sure that the oxygen in there is sufficient.

But we're literally just stirring cells in their feed for ten days, ten to ten to fifteen days.

At that point, we centrifuge or you know, just spin at high speeds, remove the sel feed, We wash it a few times, we concentrate it kind of into pure salmon protein essentially.

So what you have first is a lump of salmon cells essentially, shapeless, shapeless, just like a goo.

It's like a goo.

Is it a orange?

Dumb question?

Is it orange?

It's not orange.

It looks like kind of the white part of the salmon, you know, like connective tissue part.

And yeah, So what we do is we then combine that with some plant based ingredients, mix it, shape it.

We actually have a heating step to make sure that we're killing off any microbes that might have found their way.

Because it's all ready to eat sushi product.

We want to make sure it's as safe as possible and slice it, package it, X ray it, and send it out the door.

So you work on this for many years and then this year, it's this spring you got something from the FDA that is called a no questions letter, So that basically mean FDA approval.

What does that mean what happened with the FDA this year.

So there's a process on the food side, and this was a process that was done for our industry, it's done for other types of food.

You submit a safety dossier, that's what it's called, so a summary of how a producing company came to the conclusion that a new food manufacturing technology, which is what we're doing, so familiar food, new technology or a new food is safe.

Right, And so you compile this dossier with lots of supporting data.

And what that did is it then kicked off a three year process of back and forth questions with the FDA.

It should be called a no more Questions letter.

That's right, That's exactly what it is.

Right, So once the questions have been satisfied, they don't have any further questions.

And you know, they issued a statement that essentially said, we agree with wild types of conclusion that the food made using this technology is no more, no less, and food isolated from a conventional fish.

Right.

That's what we were working toward, is some degree of external validation that this new and somewhat crazy sounding technology can produce food that's very, very safe.

And indeed, like we talked about a bit earlier, quite a bit safer uncertain.

Respects specifically, metal content and parasite or pathogen content.

Are those the two exactly?

Yeah?

So lysteria, for example, is a big challenge with any kind of fish, right, and because of the way that we produce our food, we're significantly able to reduce that risk.

Not to mention, heavy metals are in some cases orders of magnitude lower than what you'd find in conventional fish.

Parasites cannot grow in our environment.

So if you want to guarantee that there's no worm or parasite in your fish, like wild type, sim is literally the only optional planet Earth that can meet that.

And we don't use antibiotics, so, which are still fairly prevalent and a lot of fish farming today.

So what's your cost?

Now?

What have you gotten your cost?

Down to the way that we like to think about it is if we were at scale, what would our actual marginal cost be, right based on the inputs that we're using, And today those inputs are about ten bucks a pound.

So when you say at scale, how much bigger is that?

How much bigger do you have to be?

Like, I don't know how much more fish do you have to make.

I don't know, I don't know the right way to ask that question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, get I get your question.

So the best way to think about this is, you know, we are at micro brewery scale.

Now, how much fish do you make it a week?

We make whatever, a few hundred pounds a week, right, So it's not it's not enough.

It's not enough.

No, it's not enough.

When you say ten dollars a pound, how many pounds of fish you got to be making a week for it to have your cost be ten dollars a pound, it's more.

Like one thousand pounds a week.

Is where we need to be.

That's not crazy, that's not crazy.

It's not And the reason our costs are so highs because our volumes are low.

You know, we just launched a quarter ago.

Yeah yeah.

Rent is expensive in San Francisco.

Yeah yeah, we started with a three hundred thousand dollars hamburger.

You're most of the way there.

I think so.

But but you know, the last bit of the way is tough.

And the reason it's tough is because there's not a lot of interest I would say, among either banks or project financers to put money into capital intensive projects today, huh, and the path for us And you know, again this should not be surprising.

And that's why I'm kind of using the micro brewery analogy.

Right.

A lot of microbreweries at their scale are not super profitable.

In fact, a lot of them have gone out of business in the last five years.

There is kind of a minimum efficient scale problem with what we're doing and what a lot of other industries doing.

So your problem at this moment is finance getting You've had this sort of venture financing.

Was that one hundred million dollars that you raised to iver call that?

Is that the correct number?

Yeah, about one hundred and thirty million total.

So now you have a sort of more capital intensive that was like you get your IP lined up, you develop your product, and now you have this more sort of classic financing problem where you need is not equity finance, but like alone to build a bigger production plant.

And that's hard to get exactly.

It's it's really hard to get in twenty twenty five.

But that's what we need to do.

And you know, the thing is it's not really all that interesting or sexy at this point because it's not proving out brand new science it's just building bigger facilities and spreading fixed costs over bigger volumes.

There is a broader lab grown meat.

It's not really an industry yet, but there are a few other companies that have what is it two other companies that have been approved to sell lab grown chicken in the US?

Right?

How are they doing?

Like?

Is there some like more narrowly?

Are they struggling with the same thing you are?

Is there a sense of like, oh, maybe people don't want to buy lab grown meat, or at least not yet.

I'm not sure.

I don't have the best information about.

So the two other companies you're talking about are Upside Foods and each just they're both but also in San Francisco.

Neither of them are selling their products and restaurants today, though I can't really speak as to why that is.

It's more I'm selling in Singapore or something.

It is one of these things.

So there are two companies selling cultivated foods on planet Earth today, okay.

One is Wild Type, which is selling salmon in four restaurants in four states today in the United States.

The other is a company called val which is based in Australia and they make a cultivated quail product that's available for people to try in Singapore and Australia today and that's it.

So there's all this noise, but what it boils down to is just a couple of companies selling products in about say ten restaurants around the world.

We're at the starting line, I would.

Say, yeah, Like, why is it so small?

So first, there's a regulatory hurdle, which is really hard, and as you said, you know, there's I think five companies in the US that have cleared that hurdle.

Then there's the manufacturing side of things, right, So part of the proceeds or use of proceeds for the amount of money that we raised was to build this first of its kind cultivated seafood facility in San Francisco.

And it wasn't a trivial amount of money, right that we spent on that.

And it's really hard to scale the stuff up.

Yeah, so, and I think that's part of the reason why very few companies have actually just made it over the regulatory, the scaling, and the technical hurdles to get something into the market.

Today, I'm less hopeful than I was when we started talking.

Can ask why please, Yeah.

Well maybe I I don't know why.

It's just the vibe.

I feel like, I don't know how you're going to get that money.

How are you going to get that money?

We'll figure it out.

Look, I think no new industry, no new technology, is easy.

What we're trying to do is ambitious and it's really freaking hard, and it is not for the faint of heart, but it's important, right, Like my six year old kids, I have twins, When I hear them explain what my work is, they're like, hey, my daddy grows fish, so we don't have to kill the fish.

Like they just get it and it's obvious.

Like I think most people when you ask them, like, hey, what's the future of seafood, they're not going to tell you, Yeah, let's just pull all the fish out and have no more fish left in the sea.

Like, there's this big problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve from a bunch of different angles.

And you know, I think it's important enough that it's going to get done, and you know, one or two, maybe three companies will get through this crunch.

Right, But we're at a point now as an industry where there were one hundred and fifty I don't even know.

I don't count them all, but I've seen a number of cultivated food companies around the world.

Not all of those companies are going to make it through.

Maybe we won't.

I am very helpful, however, that we will, and very confident actually, because we're making something that people want and that the planet needs for us to continue to sustainably feed people's seafood.

And so that moment of doubt pessimism that you were feeling is just kind of wired into mine and Aria's brain, right, it comes and it goes.

We've got down moments and we've got high moments, and that's just kind of part and parcel of doing something like this.

It's hard.

We'll be back in just a minute.

Why do you feel so strongly that the world needs cultivated salmon?

I would suggest talk to a fisherman, particularly one who's been fishing for more than thirty years, about what they've seen with wild stocks.

But they're going down right.

And you know, if you look at any data measurement in terms of the health of wildfish stocks around the world, it's not up and to the right.

Many of them are being fish at levels that are kind of pushing them into endangered species.

Right, if you listen or following any of David Attenborough's work, any of his recent films, I mean, he talks about the ocean.

You know, there's a real risk that will have an ocean full of jellyfish in fifty years if we're not thoughtful.

And careful and nothing else.

Yeah, plastic and jellyfish, like yeah, and let's not forget that our ocean store like ninety three or ninety four percent of the planet's carbon in the soil and the seagrass and other things.

Right.

So I don't know about you, but I get pretty nervous when I think about that delicate ecosystem being so thoroughly disrupted.

And if you think about the oceans like this is like the worst prisoner's dilemma type of thing, where you've got this common good and everybody out in international waters is doing whatever they can to pull out as much fish as possible, make as much money, and not everybody's worrying about whether that's going to be sustainable.

So that's wild caught, and I think most people get that there's a finite supply.

There's only so an efficientcye on the fish farming side.

I think what's really underappreciated is that a full third of all the aquaculture feed comes from forage fish like anchovies and sardines, which are well caught and are not infinite in supply, and there are real limitations in terms of the number of fish farms that you can put in a given area.

And that's why we're seeing the move toward on land aquaculture systems and all these other things.

So the confluence of all of that.

If you don't believe anything I said, just go look at salmon prices in real terms versus inflation over the last fifteen years and you'll see that there isn't five times faster than inflation, which to me tells me that we have a real supply problem.

Salmon getting more expensive is good for you, right, Like, if you can make salmon cheaper, then salmon can make salmon.

You'll win, yes, but the planet loses, right, And I think it doesn't.

Well, it depends, I mean, it depends on how cheap you can get it, right, Like, yeah, I don't mean to be glib, but like, fundamentally, your price to beat is the price of wild caught salmon.

Right, just as a business proposition, Like that's the sort of solar story, right, as you said, like you want people who don't care to buy your salmon just because it's cheaper, That's what I want, Right, That's the true scale, because most people don't care about any particular thing, it's just the nature of the world.

But they would rather buy cheaper salmon.

And I'm sure there's an argument that, like people don't want cultivated salmon, but I don't buy that.

Like if you look at the garbage people buy, they plainly don't care, right, And so I feel like cost is the game.

All of this is, I guess, in principle good for us, but I know myself and my team we kind of think about it at a much broader scale, which is salmon, whether we make it or it comes from a fish, healthy thing that we should be eating more of, and it's not good for society if it becomes less accessible.

That is why I've got this bur in my saddle to scale up this process as quickly as we can, and not just for the cost and profitability and all that stuff we were just talking about, but just to get it to more people and to give people a more affordable choice.

What's the salmon.

Like, now, if I got the salmon sushi at one of the four restaurants where it's would I even know?

I think it depends.

And we've actually tested this, So we've done blind taste tests for consumer and we obviously tell them that there's potentially cultivated.

We're not trying to fool anybody, but.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

When I say what I even know, I don't mean would they be fooling me?

I mean, would I be able to distinguish?

Yeah?

Yeah, And so what we what we've done is we put like a piece of our locks, you know, so like cured and smoked salmon on a little cracker, like a water cracker, and a piece of Russen Daughters from New York City, which is delicious the best.

I agree, that's our gold standard, you know, so master credit to Russ and Daughters.

And the answer is no, you know, with like a pretty high degree of like statistical significance, we don't see a distinction in liking.

Is raw salmon harder to make identical?

It's hard, yeah, And so I think obviously in the right chef hands, and you know, obviously in certain preparations, it is indistinguishable, which is a huge, huge accomplishment.

And the cool thing about what we're doing is that it's always improving.

I mean, what would you like to improve on?

In what ways would you like to make the salmon you're making better for me?

There are a couple of things.

The first one I think we've nailed in the latest recipe that we're going to be releasing soon is the texture, just like a really nice fibrous bite, you know, like when you're biting like a nice cube of sashimi.

It's part of what's great about salmon sushi, right, it's the texture.

It's like both firm but so smooth and of all the fat.

Right, that's right, Yeah, And it's hard to nail.

I think we're getting pretty darn close.

In what way is your current version that's out fall short.

On the text?

I'd say it's too homogeneous, Like you don't get this sort of like like you know, like when your teeth are like biting into like a good piece of meat, you kind of feel like the fibers ripping a bit at a time.

Like with the current version, I would say, we haven't you know, fully achieved that the thing that we're about to really is does so I'm really excited about that.

And you know, and the other thing is protein.

So protein is a big part of the reason people like to eat any kind of meat or seafood, and we're a bit light there, and so it's hard to make a product that is raw with equivalent protein.

It's not obvious to me that that would be the case, Like, why is that?

Because raw fish is like eighty to eighty five percent water, and so if you want to have twenty percent protein in there, that means a lot of the protein needs to be in the water.

That's the and in a fish, that's just the way it works.

Yeah, yeah, and it's contained in the cells, for example, so most cells the water.

Yeah, that's a dramatic simplification of a quite complex problem.

But it's been a challenge and I'd say we've made some progress.

But those are the two things I would like to improve.

Let's talk about policy.

When we were just getting the mic set up today, you mentioned that you were had a press conference this morning today talking about joining a lawsuit.

What's going on?

Why were you on a press conference this morning and what were you talking about?

So Texas banned cultivated foods effective the first of September, which which was really unfortunate because you know, we picked Otoko because of the head chef is an incredible person, he's an adventurous head chef.

And this is a restaurant in Austin, Texas.

Yeah.

Yeah, And it was literally like one of five that we picked that we wanted to introduce our products to the commercial market in.

And this decision was made way before this band was even like a thought in the rancher's minds.

But this band went into effect on the first and so we had to stop selling at Otoko, which is just really unfortunate.

And this isn't the first date in the Union that has banned cultivated foods, it's I believe the seventh.

And this is being driven one hundred percent by economic protectionism, really by the cattle industry who's afraid of competition.

It does seem like an anti free market, like on its face, right, an anti free market move.

It is like, let.

People decide they want to eat cows and fish, they can, right, No, it is proposed taking away that option.

That's right, And given everything that we just discussed in that moment of pessimism that you felt, yeah, I just like they should have bigger things to worry about, right than try to ban a.

Three little companies that can't even get alone to build a factory.

Yeah.

Yeah, leave us alone, for God's sake.

And I think if most Americans heard about this, they would be pretty annoyed that now the government's telling us what we can and can't eat, And like, if you don't want our food, don't eat it.

That's fine, But that choice should be people's choices.

It should not be the choice of state legislators who got a strategically timed campaign donation.

Yeah, so your fish is still at four restaurants around the country.

Then, yeah, So luckily Yoshio Kai has a new restaurant in Aspen, so we just moved it over there.

So we're still in four and we'll be announcing a fifth one in the next couple of weeks.

So what do you have to do to get wider?

What's your ramp from four to everywhere?

Yeah?

And maybe the question to ask before that is like, why did we just start with five?

When you're making real things like what we're doing food, you don't go from It's not like software where you just like write a program and distribute to million people.

You need to ramp up manufacturing, hire people, supply chain all that stuff.

And so what we've been trying to do is go from literally zero three months ago to shipping product every week to three or four, soon to be five restaurants around the country.

Well, so should I how is that going?

Or like are you getting the fish out the door?

Is it hard to like make the fish every week?

It's some things have been harder than we expected.

Like, for example, we had we had like an ingredient provider shift their ingredient pretty dramatically.

That changed our formulation, so we had to adjust that on the fly.

So things like that that are just kind of part of any new products standing.

Up manufacturing in a way, it's like biomanufacturing, right, what you're doing exactly.

And so from here we are absolutely open to starting to ship to more restaurants as demand comes in, and we have had quite a few restaurants reach out to us and ask if they can start buying it.

That's good and is the answer yes?

Yeah, the answer is yes, And we're just kind of slotted into our production schedule.

And again, we don't want to have stock outs, right, That's the last thing you want when you're introducing the new product, somebody shows up.

They went out of the way to try this product, and it's like, sorry, we don't have it this day.

We didn't get our shipment yesterday.

And then how much bigger can you get with your current production facility.

If everything is maxed out and we tack on a little bit more capacity, which we can do.

You know, we can maybe get up to like fifty restaurants.

And then you have this step function where you need to get alone essentially to build a real industrial scale plant.

This is the ram question, Like fifty restaurants is great, but it's not at all what you're going for.

It's like what does the magnitude from what you're going for?

So how do you keep going from there?

So what I was describing is one path where we just build our own facility.

We do what we did, but just bigger, and we've got to get that finance.

That's really hard, it's not a lot of appetite.

There are two other ways you can do this.

One is we can go to a contract manufacturer that makes cells or fermented products and has spare capacity.

So instead of building it ourselves, huh, we just pay them a toll and they make it for us, the cells or even the finished product, and then we can expand our capacity.

And so that is not so capital intensive.

You don't have to have any huge upfront costs that you need to take out a loan for.

That's right, But it is slow and you can't innovate.

So if you're working with contract manufacturers, it's like pencils down.

Uh huh.

This is the recipe, that's it.

Yeah.

Yeah, And the reality is we're still learning, we're still adjusting and going fast, which is why we haven't taken that path today, but we might.

The other option is, and we're open to this, is there are companies that can build facilities that have lots of cash and a much lower cost capital than we do, and we'd be happy to license our technology to them.

Right, And so that means the cell line and the feed and the know how to make our products well.

So like Cargil, the giant food company is actually an investor in your company, right, is that the kind of company I should be thinking of in this context?

Yeah?

Or giant seafood companies that are maxed out on their fish farms, like we would absolutely be happy to partner with them.

Uh huh.

That makes a lot of sense.

That the reality is we're trying to do a lot of things at a little seventy some odd person company.

We can't do it all, and I think we just try to be really clear out about that, and when it comes to scaling and maximizing the impact and getting this product in front of as many people as possible, we try to be really open minded about the best way to do that.

Do you think you're going to try and make something after salmon?

Yes, eventually we will, I think.

But the companies that really focused on doing one thing and one thing really well tended to do better.

Who are you thinking of the impossible burger?

Right?

They weren't trying to do like chicken shreds and the nugget and sausage like all at once.

They're like, let's make a kick ass burger that tastes pretty good.

It's made from plants.

And they did it, and I like that product.

They eat it a lot.

No, it's not for everybody, but a lot of people do it.

No, our freezer is full of many impossible meats.

Hopefully that means you're not stockpilling, but you're actually eating them.

From time to time, not out yet waiting for the apocalypse.

We don't have the big giant basement freezer.

I don't want that.

It's just a regular freezer.

But you know, they chose that path while a lot of others were like, let's just make like ten different things at once, right, And I think for us, focus is powerful, and so for now it's salmon.

But if we start to get energy from potential customers like hey, can you make us a blue crab or can you make us lobsters scallop?

Like, we would take that really seriously and we've got the right technological know how to do it.

We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.

We're going to finish with the lightning round.

Let's go.

So you were in the US Foreign Service in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Correct, Yes, What is one surprising thing that happened to you there?

I was as a guest of honor with the governor, served the head of a goat, and I had no idea what to do with it.

Like they just put the w all head in front of you and said you're welcome.

I wasn't sure if I was being hazed or honored or both.

Huh, Well, did you watch the governor and follow his lead?

No?

Because it went to me.

Oh.

I felt very self conscious about that because you know, I was about twenty years younger than the governor.

It certainly didn't feel like I should have.

Sure, I represented the United States government, but I was also thirty years old.

So is the governor of the province that you were in.

Yeah, So what did you do?

I did the best I could.

I like keeled back at jowl and went for it.

Didn't taste How was it?

No?

It wasn't good.

There's some whiskers in there.

This is this is.

Not even saying like I think it might have been hazing, because there were plenty of other parts of that goat that were delicious.

What's something you missed from that part of the world.

I missed the food, and I miss the culture of hospitality, which I think, unfortunately kind of got lost.

A guest is sacred to a lot of the push people, and there's nothing you essentially wouldn't do for a guest, even though he or she might be your putative enemy.

How did you experience that in practice?

What's an example of that?

From your experience?

There were people who I knew were active Taliban fighters who welcomed me into their home and introduced me to their relatives because that's what the customs demanded, even though you know, later that night they were probably laying IED's blown up my friends.

So yeah, it was things like that.

And by the way, it was not like duplicitous.

They were genuinely trying to extend hospitality.

Were you a spy?

I was not.

I mean, you would say that in any case.

But I had to ask, what's one thing you've learned as a diplomat that is helpful to you running your company?

Thinking before you speak?

Very good answer.

I'm still working on that one.

You know.

I didn't say anything.

Yeah, just not speaking.

I've learned just not speaking and not speaking is a great move, Like you don't have to respond.

It turns out that's one of the most powerful things you can do as a parent when you're challenged.

It's just not say anything.

Yes, you weren't a scientist when you got into this business.

What's one great thing, interesting thing, favorite thing that you've learned about cells in your work.

Cells are the most miniaturized, incredibly powerful versions of us, and they have so much potential right.

I think when we all go through biology classes we learn that cells are the building blocks of life, but like no shit, they actually are and see and seeing it, seeing it happen and assemble into things that become tissues and organs is incredible, incredible.

Justin Kolbeck is the co founder and CEO of Wild Type.

Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm.

We are always looking for new guests for the show.

Today's show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

It was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bricguherrett.

I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.