Land of money & ideas
How the Bay Area became a global hub in the biotech revolution taking fake meat mainstream
When Michael Selden and Brian Wyrwas, two biochemists who met at the University of Massachusetts, arrived in San Francisco last month, they not surprisingly found the search for an apartment to be quite difficult.
However, they found it much easier to find their new lab bench in a basement in the SoMa district.
The two originally planned on a university setting to develop a method to culture fish fillets from animal cells. But they realized that they could move a lot faster, and tap into more resources, in the private sector, says Selden. Their fledgling company, Finless Foods, landed an investor in IndieBio, a San Francisco biotech accelerator — and then settled into its lab space beneath IndieBio’s offices.
The current goal of Finless Foods: to produce a simulacrum of bluefin tuna fillet to help relieve the pressure on the prized, but severely overfished, species.
Animals have little to do with the future of meat, milk and eggs, argue Selden and Wyrwas — and similar new companies and their funders. Instead, that future belongs to scientists who can hack yeast cells to produce egg whites, torque plant proteins into muscle like fibers and grow slaughter-free “duck” or “chicken” in factories.
If this future comes to pass, the global hub for innovation will be here in the Bay Area. The region that popularized farm-to-table cooking is now rethinking factory farming.
The money flowing toward alternatives to animal agriculture in the past four years has been notable: Impossible Foods, the Redwood City company that makes plantbased burgers, has raised north of $180 million from funders that include Bill Gates. Modern Meadow, a New York firm that cultures leather cells, has taken in $53 million.
Those are just the marquee companies. Operating on funding in the six-figure and low seven-figure range are newer enterprises like New Wave Foods (high-tech plantbased shrimp), the aforementioned Finless Foods (cultured seafood) and several “meat breweries,” including Clara Foods and Geltor, which ferment yeast cells to express egg whites and collagen, respectively. Most are based in the Bay Area; in fact, several, including Geltor and New Wave Foods, share office and lab space in San Leandro.
One of those San Leandro companies is Memphis Meats. To get an idea of how fastpaced — and well-funded — the alternative-meat industry is, consider Memphis Meats. In June 2015, Uma Valeti, a cardiologist in Minnesota, emailed his first venture capital firm with a proposal for a business making cultured meat. The technology had been proven to work in a laboratory setting, but bringing cultured meat to home cooks was — and remains — years away.
“Within an hour they were on the phone,” Valeti says. “They really loved the idea and wanted us to move to the Bay Area.”
Valeti and co-founder Nicholas Genovese moved to San Francisco just three months later, in September 2015. Since then, Memphis Meats has attracted more than $3 million in seed funding, according to Crunchbase, a business information site.
The very company that lured Memphis Meats to San Francisco, SOS Ventures, has been a major factor in turning the Bay Area into the hub for animal-free animal products. Sean O’Sullivan’s $150 million fund operates six accelerators around the world. One of them is IndieBio, and 25 percent of IndieBio’s participating companies, says chief science officer Ron Shigeta, are working on food.
Among the technocrat billionaire set, Bill Gates isn’t the only one to invest money in high-tech meat alternatives. Google co-founder Sergey Brin helped fund the Dutch research that produced the first lab-grown hamburger in 2013. Obvious Ventures, backed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, bought into Beyond Meat, a Southern California plant-based meat company. Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of investors at the Milken Institute, a Santa Monica think tank, last year that replacing livestock with plant-based meat is No. 1 on a list of technologies he predicts will change the world.
The payoff that they are chasing is almost unfathomably huge. “Almost everybody eats meat,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, an advocacy group working to end industrial animal agriculture. “It’s a $200 billion market in the United States alone.”
At the moment, plant-based meat represents one quarter of 1 percent of that. Even if it reached parity with plantbased dairy (soy and nut milks), sales would be $20 billion a year — in the United States alone.
The scale of the endeavor to reinvent the meat supply — and the profits it promises — are enormously enticing to Silicon Valley, or at least the valley’s idealistic view of itself. “(These) venture capital-
ists are interested in making the world a better place through the allocation of venture-capital resources,” says Friedrich. “And plant-based meat are the solution to the two big questions in agriculture. The first one is: How do we feed 9.7 billion people by 2050? The second one is: What do we do about climate change?”
When Uma Valeti comes out with phrases like “This is one of the biggest technological leaps for humanity,” it sets the eye a-rolling until another part of the brain freezes it mid-rotation: What if he’s right?
After all, raising animals for meat and dairy accounts for 14.5 percent of all humanproduced greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report on livestock and climate change.
Perfect Day Foods, which is developing what seems like an oxymoron — animal-free milk based on yeast-fermented cow milk proteins — says it has the potential to use up to 65 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and 84 percent less energy, 98 percent less water and 91 percent less land than traditional dairy production, according to an analysis by the University of the West of England.
Memphis Meats claims that its cultured meat eliminates the risk of e. coli contamination on the slaughter floor, as well as widespread antibiotic use on farms, which has been shown to contribute to antibiotic resistance.
British financial executive Jeremy Coller, now the world’s biggest investor in new meat alternatives, argues that scandals involving tainted meat, animal-welfare abuses and antibiotic resistance have already destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of capital for those who invest in the conventional livestock industry.
Coller says that investors like him, as well as companies like Memphis Meats, are flocking to Silicon Valley because of its record in starting groundbreaking industries. “Incubators like IndieBio, accessible and affordable lab space, and networks of angel investors and venture capital (all) provide an infrastructure for all these startups,” he says.
Talent, Shigeta adds, is another draw. Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UC Davis are all located in or near the Bay Area. The size and breadth of the biotechnology sector here, anchored in part by Genentech, offers companies the intellectual bricks on which to build a company.
Tim Geistlinger, chief technology officer of Perfect Day Foods, agrees that each job opening attracts candidates from the world’s top universities. “They realize it’s their future they’re fighting for,” he said in March at the Future Food Tech conference in Burlingame.
For now, most of the products remain a futuristic abstraction. It’s very difficult to get even a taste of them, and the companies are highly secretive about the specifics of their research. Visits to the lab are forbidden, even to journalists.
The secrecy may be attributed to intellectual property issues but also the aesthetics: The future that many of the Bay Area’s faux meat producers envision — meat grown in a lab, gelatin made in a tank from genetically engineered yeast — is exactly the opposite of the pastoral idyll the sustainable food movement has been pushing for four decades: Small family farms where chickens and pigs cavort in the sun until the moment they are given a merciful death. Wild fish allowed to prowl the oceans until they’re snatched out of the water.
That vision, says the Good Food Institute’s Friedrich, may be a beautiful one, but it’s too limited, at far less than 1 percent of total meat sales. The vast majority of industrial animal agriculture involves confinement and giant manure lakes and stockyards that can be smelled for miles.
With factory farming, says investor Coller, “we’ve been treating animals as objects.” To those in the meat-alternative market, cows and pigs will soon become an outdated technology.