Startup Series: SCiFi Foods
This week's guest is Joshua March, Co-Founder & CEO of SCiFi Foods, formerly known as Artemys Foods.
SCiFi Foods is on a mission to empower humanity to eat sustainably. It's working on the next generation of meat alternatives by cultivating meat. To replicate the full flavor profile and aroma of meat, SCiFi Foods uses cell-based meat, growing real muscle and fat outside of the animal in bioreactors. Then they combine plant-based meat with the cultivated animal cells, enabling the team to create a more meat-like taste and texture. SCiFi Foods is working to increase the efficiency of production and decrease the cost of bio-engineered meat.
Before SCiFi Foods, Joshua founded Conversocial, a customer experience platform that helps brands develop meaningful relationships with their customers at scale, and iPlatform, a social application company that was one of the world's first Facebook Preferred Developers.
In this episode, Joshua walks me through his motivations for starting SCiFi Foods, the alternative meat landscape, and how SCiFi Foods fits in. Joshua and I talk about the differences between software and biotech entrepreneurship, what critics have to say about cultured meat, and how to scale alternative meat production. He also explains the stage of the company, where it is in its go-to-market, and what is coming next. It was great to learn more about the world of alternative meat and Joshua's journey.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded February 18th, 2021.
In Today's episode, we cover:
SCiFi Foods' mission and the problem the company is tackling
The driving force that sparked Joshua to start SCiFi Foods
The impact of traditional meat on the environment and state of meat consumption today
The pros and cons of various solutions that exist from plant-based to lab-grown to sustainable and regenerative agriculture
Why and how changing technology is easier than changing behavior
What critics say about cell-based meat
SCiFi Foods' approach when considering staging, timing, capital, and entering the market
Creating a Direct to Consumer Brand and how Joshua thinks about that as SCiFi Foods prepares to go to market
How SCiFi Foods has navigated the landscape of traditional Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, especially when investors are not well versed on the technology
The target customer and how SCiFi Foods' product stacks up to the competitors
Key differences between software and biotech entrepreneurship and what kind of capital the company is looking at when scaling biomanufacturing
The future of SCiFi Foods and what success looks like for the company
What individual changes people can make to reduce emission from meat production
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Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Today's guest is Joshua March, cofounder and CEO of Artemys Foods. Artemys Foods is a new company on a mission to accelerate the world to a sustainable future by developing new sources of animal products without the animal. They're working on the next generation of meat alternatives that combine plant based meat with cultivated cells, enabling them to create a more meatlike taste and texture than anything on the market today.
We have a great discussion in this episode about how and why and when Artemys Foods came to be. We talk about what motivated Joshua to start the company in the first place. We talk about the food and agriculture sector and the alternative meat landscape generally. We talk about some of the existing players and the competitive landscape as well as some of the gaps and things that are suboptimal about the current solutions. And we also get into the Artemys Foods approach, where they are in their development, what's coming next, their long vision, and if they're successful beyond their wildest dreams, what it is that they've achieved. Joshua, welcome to the show.
Joshua March: Thanks, Jason. Great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Great to have you. I'm so excited. We probably spoke, pandemic times, I lose all track, but I'm thinking it was probably three or four months ago. And really excited about what you're doing and excited to learn more about it as well. So why not do it on camera?
Joshua March: Absolutely.
Jason Jacobs: Audio, I should say.
Joshua March: Yeah. [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: [laughs]
Joshua March: Yeah. Time does all kind of blend together, endless back to back Zoom calls.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I mean, this is just audio, although we can see each other. But I've got this thick beard, and I swear I just shaved it [inaudible 00:03:34].
Joshua March: [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: And already, it's thick again, so I think it's just, it grows fast, but not that fast. It's just some pandemic time at work. So let's just take it from the top. What is Artemys Foods?
Joshua March: So we are a relatively new company working on the next generation of meat alternatives. So a lot of people are familiar with plant based meat, products like the Impossible Burger beyo- companies like Beyond Meat. Those are products that replicate the flavor, the taste, the look of a burger, of a beef burger, but made 100% with plants. They're much better for the environment, and they've persuaded a lot of additional people, kind of hardcore flexitarians, to eat them instead of eating meat.
But they're still not persuading the vast majority of meat eaters to change their daily habits. Generally, the reason is that while those products are really great compared to, like, the previous generation of veggie burgers, they still don't really taste like an amazing beef burger. They're way better than anything that came before, but they're still not really there yet.
Fundamentally, the reason they're not there yet is that they just lack the proteins, the fats, all the things that are actually in meat to create the flavor of it. In order to solve that and create meat products that actually replicate the full flavor profile and aroma of meat, we're using cell based meat, so growing real muscle, real fat, just growing outside of the animal in bioreactors. And we're using those combined with plant based ingredients to create meat alternatives that are really, like, the massive step up from the status quo today in terms of flavor and experience.
Jason Jacobs: And how did this all come about, and why?
Joshua March: I've been obsessed with this idea that we shouldn't have to grow an entire animal to get a small bit of meat for more than a decade at this point. I first came across the concept of it actually reading a, an Iain Banks sci-fi novel in my early twenties.
And it just immediately struck me when I read this that if we can make this a reality, if we can get meat onto the technology cycle, where every year we're able to increase the efficiency of production and decrease the cost, then that's something that could really change the world. It really just became an obsession of mine, and I was busy doing other companies at the time in, in the software space. But I stayed very involved.
About seven years ago, Mark Post did the first cell based meat, or cultured meat. There's the whole thing about terminology. Cell based meat burger. And a number of startups started to come around, and I became a, a donor to an organization called New Harvest, which has been funding academic research in the space for a while, and I'm still a donor there today. I became a, a small investor and advisor into some of the companies and was quite involved supporting it on the side.
And a number of things happened over the past three, four years. One, I just started to s- feel a really strong conviction that I wasn't seeing companies in the space really solving what I saw as the biggest problems around bringing cell based meat to market, which is namely, how can you do this really cheaply and at scale?
And I also just started to get this really strong feeling that the world was just going in, like, such a bad direction from a climate change perspective that if there was something that I could do that I felt could have a really major impact on that direction, that I felt almost a kind of moral obligation that I needed to go and do it.
The conviction around those two things kind of came together, which allowed me to step down at my previous company where I'd been almost a decade as CEO, and found Artemys.
Jason Jacobs: What's the issue, or what are the issues, with regular meat? And also specifically, what are the issues from a climate standpoint?
Joshua March: Yeah. First of all, people may not realize this just kind of being in their little Twitter bubbles in America, but meat consumption globally has, A, risen just dramatically across the world over the past 30 years, and it's forecast to continue rising dramatically. Just in India alone, meat consumption is going to growing by 100% in this decade. And so meat consumption is rising dramatically.
Meat generally is a pretty inefficient way of getting calories. You have to feed a lot of calories into an animal, support the life of that animal. It's releasing a lot of energy over that life. And then you get a small percentage of it out as edible calories.
And people talk about this kind of feed conversion ratio, and there are different ways of calculating exactly what that ratio is. But basically, everyone agrees that beef is absolutely the least efficient way [laughs] especially of making meat. Depending on how you look at the math, people have reported a feed conversion ratio of, like, 33 to one, i.e., you're putting in, like, 33 edible calories and you're getting, like, one out.
And you're supporting the life of an animal over multiple years. During that time, especially an issue for cows, they're giving off methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, and there's a lot of energy expenditure involved in everything around. If you do the full life cycle analysis of industrial animal agriculture, growing a huge amount of crops, there's land use changes. People are cutting down the rainforest to grow the crops that have been feeding the cows, giving off methane, transporting it around the world.
And so the FAO think that industrial animal agriculture is responsible for about 14.5% of global emissions. And if you look at the trends, there's a lot of positive trends happening around renewable energy, battery storage, electric cars, which are dropping energy usage in other parts, while meat consumption is just going to be doubling. [laughs]
And so that percentage, if we don't really make a change, that percentage is just going to be going up and up and up, and it's going to become a bigger and bigger problem. So it's really something we have to get a handle on and have to figure out a better way.
Jason Jacobs: Maybe talk a little bit about the different buckets of potential solutions to this problem. So I mean, you mentioned plant based. You mentioned lab grown or cultured. So are those the primary ones? Or are there any others that I'm missing? And it'd be great also just to maybe talk briefly about the differences between those approaches.
Joshua March: First of all, I would be remiss if, without mentioning, what can you do about the cows themselves? So there are some people who just argue, "Well, look, if you're pasture raising cows and you're circulating the cows in a regenerative agriculture way, then actually, you know, it's kind of net negative from a carbon impact."
And that's true. However, you need a lot of land for that, and that accounts for a pretty tiny percentage of the cows that are reared in the US. The vast majority are in concentrated feeding lots, which also have just a lot of polluting, even outside of, like, the greenhouse gas emissions, also just have a terrible polluting impact on the, the local environment. And you don't see that same carbon benefit if you're doing corn fed and everything else.
So while there is this rural ideal of saying, "Hey, couldn't everyone just eat less meat? And the meat that we do eat, let's make sure it's pasture raised and it's not bad for the environment. And you could pasture raise them on areas that are hard to farm." That would be great. It's not going to happen on any time frame that is relevant enough for actually combating climate change. Meat consumption is too high.
My general view on the world is that fundamentally, it's easier to change technology than it is to change behavior. And with meat consumption just rising so fast around the whole world, we need something that has much bigger impact on a short time frame than just trying to persuade people to eat less meat and get it from better sources.
There's also some work to reduce the methane emissions by c- from cows by, like, feeding them certain, like, seaweeds and stuff like that. We've got to do everything [laughs] and hopefully, that will maybe make a bit of a dent. It's dubious w- how much exactly it will work, because that methane emission is a core part of how the cows are creating the, transferring grass into meat calories.
So in terms of alternatives, what can we do? We mentioned earlier there's plant based meat which is on the market today. Plant based meat is where you are generally texturizing some kind of plant protein, so taking, like, pea or soy, getting isolates, and then putting them through some k- form of extrusion so they're creating longer proteins, replicate the texture of meat more accurately.
And this is key to the new plant based meat like Beyond and Impossible. And then generally, you're combing that with some plant based fats, with colorants, and various other things in order to try and replicate the experience of meat.
Now, in Impossible's case, they also have this special ingredient called soy hemoglobin, which is from the roots of soy. And this is a protein that replicates and is very similar to a protein that's found in animal muscle and human muscle called myoglobin, which is an iron carrying protein, which the primary thing it does is really, it's responsible for the pigment and the color of meat and the fact that when you see raw beef it's, like, this bright red.
And then it changes color as it oxides and as you cook it, it browns. And it's very hard to replicate that color change with pure plant based colors, so it's a kind of special thing for Impossible that they have that protein.
Outside of that, a lot of the recipes are kind of pretty similar. People sometimes raise some kind of health concerns about saying these foods are very processed. Generally, they are processed in the sense that they're, like, purified proteins and starches and fats combined together. Nutritional science is a whole other ballgame. We don't want to go too far into that.
I'd say my general take on that is from a health perspective, it's better to eat whole foods. I wouldn't say that eating purified plant proteins is negative for you. It's more like neutral. It's kind of like having a protein shake. It's better to have a real meal but, like, it's not going to hurt you.
But it's hard to replicate the full textural and flavor and aroma experience of meat because it just, like, lacks all of those proteins and fats and all the other things that create that. And that's where cell based meat comes in.
Cell based meat is where you're growing real muscle, real fat outside the animal in bioreactors. It's kind of the ultimate solution, right, because you can actually fully replicate everything about real meat. Nutrition, to the aroma, to the texture, the fats, like, everything.
The challenge there is, how can you do that in a cost effective and scalable way? Because the technology we have for growing animal cells today, which has largely come out of the bio pharma industry, is very expensive. Any food product, even if it's a really premium food product, is still fundamentally pretty low cost compared to, like, bio pharma products. And that's a big thing that people are solving in the industry.
Jason Jacobs: So now, coming back around to the Artemys approach, so maybe talk a little bit about the initial nugget that led you to start the company, and then how you thought about entry point, staging, timing, capital. Like, I don't know. I mean, s- start anywhere you want, but I'm just trying to get my brain around both how you are planning to go to market but also where you're at today.
Joshua March: You know, I obviously have to be a little careful about exactly what we're doing technically that's different and unique. There's a lot of IP in the market, and people are doing different things.
But, you know, at a high level, first of all, the products we're creating will be a combination of plant based ingredients and cell based ingredients, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but mainly it's around how quickly can we get to market? And how much can we remove some of the scientific and technical risk around creating the cells?
Um, and that's been a core focus for our technological planning and research planning, is how do we really minimize the scientific risk, especially in terms of, like, novel hardware that's required? So we've created a plan that allows us to scale up with as much standard hardware from the bio pharma and the fermentation industry as possible and minimizes novelty. And that's part of the reason for doing the combination approach that we're doing as well as s- to help mitigate some of the cost challenges in growing animal cells.
And what we've found is that we can really, by taking that approach, we can create products that just taste amazing. [laughs] Burgers, basically, that taste way better than anything plant based on the market. That's a key part of what we're doing.
The other part of what we're doing is that we really believe in the power of synthetic biology, the modern tools that have come to us in recent years that allow us to control the behavior of living cells and get them to act in the ways that we want. So we're really using all of the latest cutting edge synthetic biology tools in order to make sure that we have cells, animal cells that can really be grown at low cost and really large scale. And that's another core part of what we're doing.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. You haven't mentioned on this pod, but in some of our prior discussions, you had mentioned your intent to build a direct to consumer brand. Was that a hard decision? Was there much debate around, if you have the tech, do you go to market with your own brand? Do you license and empower lots of b- brands to bloom? Like, how did you think about that, and how do you think about that?
Joshua March: I think about it on a couple of axes. My goal here is to build a company that has a, a massive impact on the world. For us, that's going to mean multiple products, multiple generations of products, keep iterating, keep improving, expanding into a lot more than just our first product of ground beef.
I think the best way to do that is to do the hard work of building a consumer brand. We actually do think there's a lot of opportunity around real D2C. We also will be distributing via restaurants and retail, but we'll be a branded product within that. And so that's part of the core reason is just, like, do that hard work so that we can keep releasing new products into those distribution channels.
On a more kind of just practical perspective, the market's also very nascent today. There's a growing handful of funded cell based meat companies. There's certainly some major plant based meat players. But the B2B market for cell based ingredients is very nascent today, and by nascent, I mean essentially non-existent. [laughs]
Yeah. That will change over time as the industry becomes more mature, but right now, I think the fastest way to get to market is to be vertically integrated and to get to market quickly. There may be opportunities in future, but I think it's hard to build a B2B market when you don't have any customers.
Jason Jacobs: Don't disclose anything confidential, but how do you think about phasing in key stages as you take a business like this to market?
Joshua March: One of the key things for creating any novel food product is you're going to have to get it approved by the regulators. The first part right now is really about product development and getting to relevant cell lines and the process, the biomanufacturing process that we'll want to take to the FDA and the USDA and say, "Here's what we're doing and how we're doing it. Here's why it's safe." And get that approved for sale to consumers.
The first part is a kind of R&D and product formulation and preparation step, and then there's going to be a regulatory approval step where we'll be submitting a dossier to the FDA and getting facilities licensed by the USDA in order to be able to bring the product to market.
The USDA and the FDA have a joint framework for approving cell based meat products. They're being very engaged, interacting with companies in the market, and being very supportive of the industry. But that said, no one as of yet has gone through and finalized that process with the FDA and the USDA in the US.
We have some questions about, how quickly can that be? Six months would probably be the fastest. And certainly, active engagement with regulators is super, super important.
Jason Jacobs: From a bandwidth and expertise standpoint, is that expertise that exists on your founding team? Or how have you gone about getting guidance and navigating that regulatory landscape, since I would imagine that a lot of traditional Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors maybe don't have experience in that regard?
Joshua March: First of all, we brought on a regulatory consultancy, a major consultancy firm that has a lot of expertise bringing novel foods to market and working with regulators. And they've helped us create our engagement strategy for the regulators and the timeline and exactly what we need to do. We'll also be bringing on specialist regulatory counsel, lawyers in DC who understand all the legalities of working with regulators.
It is a major cost to have all those experts bringing in something that you need. I have an undergraduate law degree, so I can get my feet wet a little bit, but certainly as we grow, we'll need to bolster our internal team on that side as well.
Jason Jacobs: Let's fast forward. Whether it's six months or 12 months or 18 months or whatever the timeline, so once that approval comes, what next?
Joshua March: Then it's about getting it to market. Obviously, a key part of what we're doing, and this is not that dissimilar to Impossible Foods, is we're going to have to scale up biomanufacturing. So that means that we can't launch at national scale in every single retailer from day one, but we'll be doing more regionally focused and targeted launches and then building out capacity and building out production plants that allow for a large scale launch over time.
I do think with food, there's a great opportunity these days with ghost kitchens and delivery apps, a lot more direct to consumer than was ever possible, which I think is a really exciting opportunity for anyone launching food brands today.
Jason Jacobs: I don't know how much you've thought through this or how much you feel comfortable sharing, but in terms of the brand positioning, the target customer that you're after, the value proposition, the price point, I'm just trying to kind of visualize what types of products we can see and where they'll be positioned relative to other products in their categories when they hit the shelves.
Joshua March: In terms of, like, who are the ideal customers for cell based meat in general, you're probably talking about young Millennials, people who are really aware of the environmental impact of eating meat and are excited about meat alternatives, but a lot of them still eat meat. [laughs] They haven't kind of made the switch over. Probably excited to try new things and have the money to spend.
One of the things you also see is that the younger someone is, the more comfortable they are with technology being used to create food. You see that obviously Gen Z are the most comfortable, people who grew up with iPads in their hands as toddlers. And so the idea of technology not being used in anything in life is kind of weirder than technology being used.
But Millennials also are, like, pretty comfortable and obviously have the spending power today. So I think young Millennials will be the key target audience to start, and obviously over time, that will shift more to Gen Z. And I think there probably will be some real generational differences in acceptance and excitement around cell based meat, which we'll see, and will just have to be a part of what we do.
Jason Jacobs: I heard you say burger before. Have you declared that burgers are where you're starting?
Joshua March: We are working on beef, one of our primary products, so ground beef and burgers and similar products are certainly one of the key focus areas.
Jason Jacobs: And you mentioned scaling up biomanufacturing, so I'm curious. How far does equity capital take you? And are there other forms of capital that this type of business will require when it comes to scaling that manufacturing or other aspects of building the business?
Joshua March: Yeah. When you're looking at real cap ex for a production facility, you can certainly finance a significant portion of that. Even, it's one of the things I've learnt, moving from software into, into biotech, even when you're building out a lab at relatively small scale and you're investing into equipment that has a high resale value, and as such, it is possible and relatively straightforward to finance most of that kind of equipment spend.
With building out a production facility, not identical, but you can probably finance, through loans, maybe 75% of the cost of a production facility. So it doesn't all have to be equity capital. Obviously, you need to have sufficient equity buffer and backing to be able to get good terms on those loans, but it certainly doesn't have to be up front from the equity.
Jason Jacobs: I know in some industries, there's this first of a kind capital gap, but it sounds like that's less of an issue in biotech.
Joshua March: Yeah. I think that's less of an issue when it comes to capital expenditure on production facilities, for sure. The bigger challenge with doing anything with biology is that it's expensive. [laughs] Equipment in the lab is expensive. Doing experiments costs money.
If you're working with cells and DNA and pipettes and media, anything you're doing i- incurs a cost in consumables, and that's quite different from software. The faster that you run in biology, and the more experiments you do, the more you have to spend on consumables. And so that's a really real factor in the budget that investors have to understand.
Jason Jacobs: What are some of the other differences of transitioning from software entrepreneurship to biotech entrepreneurship? And related, what were some of the biggest surprises?
Joshua March: I think the biggest difference is kind of the nature of knowledge. In software, things can take longer. Complex project can take longer than you planned. Generally, you know why, and generally, you can update your timeframe, be maybe pretty accurate after the first round of delays.
With biology, you don't have perfect information. You have pretty great understanding, and our understanding is increasing all the time, and understanding of DNA and, and cells and how we can make changes and how we can control them. But we don't have perfect information. We're a long way from it.
And that means that when you change a certain environmental factor or how you're working with the cells, it can have unintended consequences. You can't plan for those until you've done them. You have to actually do the experiments and then see how the cells react and change, and then measure that. So you're constantly working in an area of imperfect knowledge and having to learn through experimentation. That's really the main difference.
I think the surprising thing, for me, is really how similar [laughs] running an organization and a team is, and also how similar the core characteristics of what makes a great leader or manager are, across disciplines. I think it can be easy, even for someone going into software for the first time to, say, read all the Paul Graham posts and go, "Okay. Software engineers, they're like these special creatures that exist on a different plane of rules." And easy going into a scientific discipline to, to think the same of scientists.
And there's no doubt that what makes someone an incredible software engineer or an incredible scientist individually, as an individual contributor, is relatively unique and is quite different. But what makes a scientific leader or a software leader just a great leader and a great manager is really the same. How effectively can they communicate? How effectively can they make decisions and prioritize and support and manage their team? How good are they at setting accurate objectives and managing their team to those objectives?
And those things are really the same no matter what discipline you're working in. So it was kind of exciting and surprising in some ways, to me, just how much all of my experience had direct carryover into managing Artemys.
Jason Jacobs: And I'm bouncing around a bit, but what do the critics say about cell based meat? And is there any merit to the criticisms that they have?
Joshua March: Critics say it's too expensive. You'll never get the price to a place where it can actually compete with meat, or the technology is just too slow, expensive, unscalable, not there yet, et cetera. To those critics, I think you may be surprised just how much I agree. [laughs]
And actually, I think it's a real challenge in the industry that people aren't spending enough time really understanding the unit economics of scaling up production. I think it's really important to take lessons from the biofuel industry, where a lot of money was wasted, or at least a lot of money was spent [laughs] with companies that failed because they couldn't get the unit economics to work.
And I'm fully cognizant of those challenges, and that's, in the end, why I founded Artemys, and we did things very differently by really focusing on understanding the unit economics, and the scale up model, and what needs to be done to solve them, and how to simplify a lot of the challenges there.
So I think those are real challenges. I think there are ways to solve those challenges, not always the obvious ones. But it's something that if a company isn't really 100% focused on how they're going to solve those problems in a simple and understandable way that doesn't rely on luck or hope or third parties figuring other stuff out, that's absolutely key for me in this business. That's one.
Obviously, there will also be people who will just be resistant to cell based meat on an almost principle of it being kind of too sciencey, similar to the kind of GMO resistance that we've seen. I think that's changing.
And if you just take the Impossible burger, five plus years ago, if you'd said, "Hey, Impossible Foods are going to come out with this burger, and it's going to be made all of GMO soy, and they've got this magic ingredient that they've genetically engineered yeast to produce to make it look more like real meat and taste better. They're going to be completely open and honest about all the science, and they're going to sell it in Burger King, and no one's really going to care," you would've said, "No way."
But that's exactly what's happening, and no one really cares. There are obviously groups who can make some fuss online and are anti all GMO, but they engage with them openly and honestly. They talk about it. They talk about the safety. They don't try and hide it. They talk about the benefits to consumers. And people are like, "Okay. Cool."
It's very different from what happened with GMO and Monsanto going back a couple of decades. Essentially, the pitch was an extra profit for farmers, and there was never a communication to consumers about why it was beneficial for them. And there was a lot of secrecy. There was no engagement. People, rightly so, felt scared by it.
I think we're in a different position now where people are more comfortable with technology being used to create food. A lot of the technologies being used to edit some of these genes are the same technologies being injected into millions of people every day now with the mRNA vaccines with COVID. And I think there's just a difference in approach where if you really communicate openly and honestly about what you're doing and talk to consumers and engage on their level and talk about the benefit and the safety, then people are understanding and accepting of it.
Jason Jacobs: And if Artemys Foods exceeds or succeeds, rather, beyond your wildest expectations, what has it achieved?
Joshua March: A lot of the founders of meat alternative companies, a lot of them are vegan and vegetarian and trying to persuade more people to be like them. And I think the plant based meat has really opened up, expanded the market for meat alternatives. I think it's expanded it. Originally it was, like, vegans and vegetarians.
And what they've really done is expanded it into the next segment up, hardcore flexitarians, right, which are people who are mainly vegetarian, but they still eat a bit of meat. And those people really love the plant based meat. They like meat. They're eating meat. It allows them to get that feeling and sensation of it. That's still, like, a relatively small percentage of the meat eating population. Plant based meat is, like, 1%, 2% of meat sales in the US.
And my goal is to expand that market. My goal is to create products that basically, like, I want to eat. [laughs] And I'm basically someone who I'm, like, super aware of the negative environmental impact of eating beef and eating meat. But I also, like, really like meat, and I really like eating meat. Flexitarian-ish, but I'm certainly not hardcore flexitarian. I always try and get meat from regenerative and sustainably grown sources, and I spend a lot of time on that. I'm very aware of the health impacts, and I don't love eating processed foods.
My goal is basically to create meat alternatives that I want to eat and can persuade a lot of people like me to switch over a lot of their regular meat eating habits. If I can do that and really reduce the beef consumption, especially in the US, but eventually worldwide, then I'll be really happy.
Jason Jacobs: I'll try to flip the last question around a bit and say, if for some reason Artemys Foods does not make it to the promised land and fails, if you had a crystal ball, what do you think the reason that that failure was? Which one do you worry about the most?
Joshua March: It comes down to the two criticisms. Obviously, most important thing, have to get the unit economics to work. I think we have an, a, a really solid plan on how we're doing that, and we're executing quickly towards it. But obviously, that's kind of table stakes.
You could spin up a small scale facility making a small number of really expensive products, and you'll get some great marketing from it. But if you really want to have an impact, you need to figure out how to get the price down to, like, basically below the price of premium ground beef. That's kind of a ceiling. Premium grass feed price is kind of the ceiling where Impossible and Beyond came in, and it's very hard to sustain any prices above that beyond a kind of initial novelty period.
Being able to, like, get those unit economics to work is obviously absolutely fundamental. That's the key. At the same time, that's then table stakes to, like, bringing the product to market and being successful with consumers.
And then it's really about the brand and the story and positioning. How do you position this super exciting, novel ingredient? Really allows you to have that full experience of eating meat, but is new and different. Right? And what's the right way to position that in consumers' minds in a way that is exciting but isn't also completely alien? And that's going to be the big thing to succeed in, in coming years.
Jason Jacobs: And for the people that are listening to this episode, who do you want to hear from? And where do you need help?
Joshua March: I'm super excited by all the different ways that synthetic biology is being used to impact and change the food industry. I just think there is so much potential there. So I'm always super excited to hear from other companies, other entrepreneurs who are using these cutting edge new synthetic biology tools to figure out how to make the food system better. That's something that I love to hear from.
One of the things I'm definitely going to be thinking about and tackling is from a branding, from a positioning perspective, what's the best way to really get this into consumers' minds in a way that is open and honest about the science and how we're doing things, but also doesn't create an emotional feeling of it being a sciencey project? Creates the emotional feeling of this being great, tasty, nutritious, healthy, safe food product that people want to eat.
Would love to speak with other entrepreneurs and, and companies who've had, gone through a similar process with other kinds of products.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And is there anything I didn't ask that I should have or any parting words for listeners?
Joshua March: If people were going to ask, like, what could they do now, from a food consumption perspective, I do think that beef is one of the biggest contributors that us as individuals are making from a climate perspective. Reducing beef consumption, I think, is like a really positive thing.
And there are different ways you can do that. Obviously, just not eating it. You can switch some of that to plant based meat today. And if you really do want to eat beef still, I really recommend you to make sure you're sourcing it from, like, grassfed, pasture raised farms.
There's actually one farm in California, Richard's Grassfed Beef, which is the only one that's, like, certified as net negative from a carbon impact, because they do a full regenerative agriculture, and they're, like, rotating their cows across multiple pastures to regenerate the grasslands.
So I think that's one of the biggest things that all of us can do. And there are, you know, you can choose how you do it. But reducing beef consumption and reducing beef that's not from sustainable sources is something that all of us should be actively doing right now in our lives.
Jason Jacobs: And I know it's a ways out, but do you have a name yet that consumers should look out for on the shelves for when the products are in market?
Joshua March: We're still working on that. Artemys Foods is our holding company name. Whether that will be the name we take to consumers or not is still being decided.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Well, Josh, this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show, and best of luck to you and to the whole Artemys Foods team.
Joshua March: Thanks, Jason. It was great to be on.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone. Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co, note that is .co, not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now, .co.
You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
