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Hello and welcome to our podcast. All meet and greet where we talk to leaders in the alternative meat industry about how they're changing the way we eat. My name is Jessica Lane and I'm Gershon Modern. Today we'll be speaking with Alison Burke, an educator for the Good Food Institute, which works with scientists, investors and entrepreneurs to help provide clean meat and plant based alternatives to animal products.

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I'm Alison Burke. I'm the academic research advisor at the Good Food Institute. Legacy Institute is a nonprofit that works on promoting the plant based and clean meat industries, supporting companies that enter into those industries, and mentoring scientists and others who are interested in doing research. So I wanted to ask about the alternative meat industry. And first thing is how long has the industry been around?

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You know, technically the industry has been around for more than 2000 years in the sense that there are products like Satan, which is a wheat gluten meat replacement or tofu that have been used by cultures primarily in Asia, you know, for more for thousands of years. In terms of what we consider the more, I guess, reasons are new products like the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger.

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Those have been around for obviously a much shorter amount of time coming in at around 2012, 2013, 2014. Seems like particularly in recent years, there's been kind of more of a boom in the alternative meat industry, specifically with a lot of startups like Impossible Foods coming out in Silicon Valley. What do you think might have started this, you know, kind of new renaissance for alternative meat?

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Yeah, I mean, I think some of it is that we've been seeing advancements in our abilities to isolate proteins from plant sources and also to isolate other components of plants that can contribute to that mouthfeel that replicates meat. But I would also say that within Silicon Valley, there's just a general attitude of wanting to disrupt industries and wanting to move and move everything in the direction of technical innovation.

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So to me, that kind of makes sense that we would see beyond meat and impossible foods come out of Silicon Valley because the idea that we could disrupt something as essential as something that we eat, maybe three times a day is kind of a spur for innovation. I want to go back to that idea of this new technology of being able to isolate components of food.

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Could you go a little bit more into that? Yeah. So protein isolation is a technique that's been around for a while, but some of the innovations that the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger are able to incorporate, like isolating, came from the roots of plants that requires kind of more sophisticated laboratory techniques and isn't something that companies have been able to do previously.

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That was kind of a new innovation of being able to isolate this particular component that can replicate. So one of the big things that the class, the alternative meat class here at Berkeley has been covering is how meat really can be hurting and the consumption of meat can really hurt the environment. Could you give a little bit more input into how consumption of meat is really impacted the environment?

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Yeah. So as we see that the population of the earth continues to grow and the amount of land that's being used for animal agriculture also continues to grow. We see that we're running into just kind of hard limits on the resources of our planet in terms of land that can be used for grazing, in terms of water that can be used to feed animals.

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So we think that we're not going to be able to sustain the level of meat consumption and level of demand from the that developed countries like the United States see in their citizenry. At the same time that we see that as countries develop their citizens, eating profiles changed from one that's more grain based or more plant based to one that has more fats incorporated in it, and more meat products and more animal products similar to the diets of the United States and of Western Europe.

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So we kind of see these to competing interests, one in conserving water and conserving land, but then the other in people wanting to eat more and more meat. And so that's kind of where plant based meat or clean meat could come in as a partial solution to these problems in a way of helping us preserve some of the natural resources that currently are going toward animal agriculture.

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One thing that we have to consider also is crop diversity. Currently, the majority of plant based meat products are composed of soy or of wheat. There are actually some pea protein products as well that are more popular in Europe than in the U.S. But if we think about the vast diversity of plants that are available, we're really only scratching the surface of the types of plant proteins that we're using.

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And so could you go on to what is the protein profile of a certain, you know, vegetable or plant? just the types of proteins that can be isolated from that plant, like from a pea, for example, and then the characteristics of that protein. So how soluble is it, how big is it, how bioavailable is it, which is an important one in terms of incorporating this into a product that you're going to eat, You want to know, is it a complete protein or does it have all of the amino acids that are acquired dietary by humans?

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And when you eat that protein in a product, how much of it then is available to be digested and to be used by your body for fuel? So does it mostly have to do with nutrition or does it also like affect the taste a lot? It can affect the taste. One thing you can see is that if you have proteins that have more sulfur containing residues, for example, or proteins that require more enzymatic activity to break down, you can get different taste profiles.

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And that's also an area where there's not a lot of research into proteins from plant sources. Again, other than soy, we end up and where it would be interesting to see how tastes varied just from taking plant proteins from even, you know, different strains of beer, different strains of lentils and incorporating those into a larger product like a burger patty.

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So speaking of burgers, what are the advancements in this industry that need to happen before I can go to my, you know, local fast food joint and get an alternative meat burger, for example? What do we need to do in the lab and amongst these companies to make this a more mainstream dietary aspect of our diet? Yeah, some of it is marketing because there are, you know, the impossible burger and the Beyond burger you can find at restaurants nationwide as well as in restaurants and in countries outside the U.S. But a lot of people really don't know that they're there, haven't tried them in our store, how it's going to taste, and so then are

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unwilling to kind of give it a shot when they're out at a restaurant. But in terms of time, you need these products, you know, are out there and are becoming more numerous and more widely available. Allison, a quick question about the price point, like electric vehicles and Tesla. They originally targeted a very niche market. That was the higher paying client.

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Is this the same type of strategy for their go to market strategy that that these alternative meat companies are using right now? From what I've heard it is yeah. So you know right now where you have a chicken strip that's maybe on the order of thousands of dollars to make. No one is going to buy them. So they're not entering the market at that price point.

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But if they can get it down to around the idea where you would have like a $10 or $20 burger, that is that they would be able to demo that in restaurants that are used to higher price points. And probably some of the restaurants that we go to the Bay Area and with the idea being that they would first be targeting the market of people who are kind of early tech adopters or people who are interested in trying new products and get kind of some of that word of mouth and interest in the product before eventually hoping to be able to bring it down to a point where it's at price parity with conventional mechanics.

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And so what kind of social changes do you think also need to be made in order for alternative meat to become more accepted? Well, I think we're seeing some of it with more interest nationally in terms of climate change and sustainability and the impacts of our dietary choices. And there have been initiatives like Meatless Mondays and pushes to replace meat in certain meals during the day or other.

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You know, culinary experts have advocated eating vegetarian before sex, for example, or vegan before. So I think that as that becomes more popular just through education and awareness of how our choices impact the environment, we're going to see more of a demand for plant based foods. In terms of other social changes, though, there's still a lot of research to be done on consumer acceptance of these products.

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Well, Alison, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate your insight and understanding of the industry. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for listening in to all meet and greet. Check back in next week to hear more from leaders in the alternative meat industry.