00:00:00:03 - 00:00:13:16 Keith Welcome to the Alt Meat and Greet podcast at the UC Berkeley Alt meat Lab, where students and researchers are exploring how to create healthier, humane and sustainable foods. 00:00:13:18 - 00:00:29:19 Keith My name is Keith McAleer, and in this podcast, we will interview leading researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators of alternative foods as they visit our lab. Today, we will speak with Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot from Wageningen University, professor who is a pioneer in the research of plant based meats. 00:00:30:01 - 00:00:37:22 Keith Okay, so you are here at UC Berkeley at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. What brings you here to UC Berkeley? 00:00:38:00 - 00:01:05:14 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Professor Ricardo Simonsen invited me to give a lecture in his class on Meat Alternatives. He is inviting all kinds of experts. And my role is to tell students that both the technology behind the making of currently alternatives future directions, but also stress the importance of how difficult it is to to really make a product which outperforms chicken meat, for example, on sustainability. 00:01:05:16 - 00:01:18:22 Keith Great. In your university and lab you've been working on the problem of developing meat alternatives for quite some time, I think, since 2010. So what made you be interested in working on this problem? 00:01:19:00 - 00:01:41:08 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Now, sustainability is a topic which is very close to my heart, and it's clear that large meat consumption, as we do now in the Western world, is clearly not sustainable. One route to reduce meat consumption is to create alternatives for meat, but can be alternative products like whole seed products, whole grain products, and another approach is to make products that really resemble meat. 00:01:41:10 - 00:01:49:12 Keith And the more those products resemble meat, the easier it is for consumers to replace part of their meat with those types of products. 00:01:49:14 - 00:01:59:01 Keith Great. And then since you started your lab, how has the world changed? How what have you learned in your research in these past eight years or so? 00:01:59:03 - 00:02:23:07 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot A lot of things has changed, I think, especially in the last two or three years. A lot of things has changed. Around 2010, the topic was quite exceptional. It was rare of so much interest from companies, but it suddenly changed along the past five or six years. I've said, and I think a real revolution was in 2006, and then suddenly also big companies became very much interested in this topic. 00:02:23:09 - 00:02:31:15 Keith So was there something that happened in 2016 to cause corporations to be more interested, or was it just kind of a random occurrence? 00:02:31:16 - 00:02:49:13 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot I think it's in a press conference treaty. The diet and food were first mentioned as a cause of climate change, for example. So I think people start to realize it's not only cars and planes that are a problem, but also how we make our foods. 00:02:49:15 - 00:03:15:17 Keith Yeah, so that's a very good transition to talking about the technology that you've developed at your lab. So you're very well known for working on to sell technology to develop better textures for meat. One of the big issues with plant based meat products is that they don't have the mouthfeel of regular meat. Can you tell us about how you developed this technology and how it works? 00:03:15:19 - 00:03:41:10 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Coetzee Device is simply a device consisting of two cylinders or which one of the cylinders is rotating. And as a result of that, the material is deformed. Fire, so-called simple shear flow pattern. So if you take a certain mixture in our situation, soy and gluten, you can get a pronounced fibrous structure if you place that mixture into our quantity because it's great. 00:03:41:10 - 00:03:57:11 Keith So then, you know, testers, one aspect of the problem of developing plant based meat. Has your lab worked on any of the other problems such as taste, you know, product development price or any of these other issues that are difficult in producing plant based meat products? 00:03:57:13 - 00:04:20:14 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Yeah. The next step is we have the texture and people are quite interesting about the texture. So taste is another one. That's why we collaborated in our consortium with you. For now. They are responsible. They have a lot of experience with the taste. So that's let's see how the collaboration will work. The other part is, of course, what you'll see is that our process is relatively simple. 00:04:20:14 - 00:04:40:02 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot I would call it elegant. It's just a vision that we should not completely de structure plan zero and then try to build up again. Now we should make use of the material of the full potential of the material, and just all of the structure so subtly changes. It can become much cheaper than current technology. 00:04:40:04 - 00:04:51:11 Keith So looking forward, there are still many challenges left before alternative means become very mainstream. But what are the biggest challenges that face scientists today in order to make these a reality? 00:04:51:13 - 00:05:12:11 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot I think first challenge is to make attractive products, good structure, good taste. I think there are products on the market which do not meet those criteria. Second, it should become that they should become cheaper. I think they are now quite expensive. So just for the upper class only, let's say, and again, if this product should become a success to be. 00:05:12:11 - 00:05:30:11 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Yeah. Available for everyone and theoretically, since they require less input, they should become cheaper. And the third point is that meat alternatives now heavily rely on soy and gluten, and we would like to have alternative for those ingredients. 00:05:30:12 - 00:05:35:14 Keith What have you learned from working with Ricardo over the past year on alternative meats? 00:05:35:16 - 00:06:00:14 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot What I see here of him in the Bay Area and now here for two weeks is the vibe and entrepreneurialism and really the energy of of students to to to make changes. That's really impressive. I think we can learn a lot from that. And in Europe, just start doing things. And what I hope to bring is that it's also good to think a little bit about the concept and what are the consequences. 00:06:00:15 - 00:06:05:14 Dr. Atze Jan van der Goot Isn't as easy as you think of what might be technical hurdles that you have to overcome. 00:06:05:16 - 00:06:14:07 Keith Great. So that's all we have today. So thank you very much, Professor, for visiting our lab. And we will see you again at the next next semester.