Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Seren Kell: One kind of fun example of this is actually the story of Quorn, the mycoprotein that is used in the Quorn company’s products. Essentially in, I believe it was the ’70s, they were like, “Let’s go and find some fungal strain that we might be able to use as a food source.” And they went out and did one of these screening approaches to go and test in different environments: Can we find a cool fungus that might be able to grow, and might have really great nutrition, and grow relatively efficiently high-protein content, and all the rest of it? And the final strain — the fusarium strain that was ultimately used, and then was selected and improved upon — I think it was found at the bottom of the garden in a shed of one of the researchers who went out and did this. And that was almost half a century ago. And that is the strain that Quorn uses.

Who’s to say there aren’t many others, and many better ones out there that we just haven’t discovered yet in biology?

Luisa’s intro [00:01:08]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners, this is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

I was extremely excited to get to speak to Seren Kell about making proteins without factory farming — I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day alternative proteins would be as tasty, cheap, and convenient as traditional meat, dairy, and egg products.

Seren and I talk about:

• Why fermentation — so, using the same process as we use for beer and yoghurt but to make protein substitutes and their ingredients — is a surprisingly promising technology for creating delicious alternative proteins
• The main scientific challenges that need to be solved to make fermentation even more useful. (Seren’s background is in biochemistry, so we get into some of the nitty-gritty details of the science here).
• The progress that’s been made on the cultivated meat front, and what it will take to make cultivated meat affordable.
• How people can use their careers to contribute to replacing factory farming with alternative proteins.

Without further ado, I bring you Seren Kell.

The interview begins [00:02:22]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Seren Kell. Seren is Senior Science and Technology Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, where she works with scientists to develop, fund, and promote research on alternative proteins. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Seren.

Seren Kell: Thank you for having me.

Why alternative proteins? [00:02:36]

Luisa Rodriguez: So we’ve done interviews with Leah Garcés, who’s the CEO and president for Mercy for Animals; Lewis Bollard, who’s the program director for farm animal welfare at Open Philanthropy; and several others — including GFI’s President and Founder Bruce Friedrich — which are basically all about how to end factory farming or animal agriculture. And for anyone who hasn’t listened to any of those episodes on this topic before, I recommend you check one of those out before listening to this one, as we’re mostly going to launch right into your work without rehashing arguments against factory farming.

But just to give a bit of context, what do you see as the basic case for alternative proteins?

Seren Kell: Essentially, if you look at our current global food system, animal agriculture and its associated inputs is a leading driver of so many of the world’s most pressing challenges. If you look at things like animal welfare, climate change, other forms of environmental degradation, food security, and public health — things like antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic diseases or pandemics — intensive animal agriculture is one of the leading drivers, if not the leading driver, for all of these issues. And that’s not looking to change anytime soon.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah, I am always surprised, when I learn more about the statistics, to learn that it seems like animal agriculture is just this horrible, horrible thing — that whatever problem you look at, it’s there, making things much worse, and is a pretty big share of many of these problems. Like climate change: it feels like less of a secret or unknown fact now, but I feel like a few years ago I learned about the share of carbon emissions that come from animal agriculture, and it’s just huge. It’s one of the main things — it’s not like a little side thing; it’s like a key thing — which I found kind of mind-blowing. And it seems like that’s the case for loads of issues, including animal welfare, which I care a lot about personally.

Seren Kell: Yeah. On that climate point, one study found that if we literally eliminated fossil fuels overnight, we still couldn’t meet our Paris Agreement targets unless we addressed animal agriculture globally. And this is really the untapped source of emissions — which, as you referenced, gets far less attention.

Luisa Rodriguez: Which is wild. I don’t feel like I personally have it anymore, but I do feel like there’s a narrative that many people have, that’s like, “I should stop driving cars. I should stop flying on planes. That’s how I can reduce my own personal contributions to carbon emissions.” But a huge, huge part of your personal emissions will be eating meat, some kinds of meat more than others. But it just feels like I still want that narrative to be more well known.

Seren Kell: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess we agree that animal agriculture causes lots of harm, so why work on alternative proteins as opposed to other interventions? For example, things that might make animal agriculture less of a contributor to climate emissions, or that might improve welfare conditions for animals in factory farms?

Seren Kell: Our thinking behind this essentially is that we haven’t been very successful historically in addressing this problem through basically telling people what to eat or asking people to reduce their meat consumption. And if we look at what actually drives consumer decision making around what they choose to buy and eat, it is, for the vast majority of people: taste, price, and accessibility. It just isn’t concerns around health or climate change. Those things are accessory factors, which might nudge people if taste, price, and convenience are already being met, but most people are not compromising on those first three. And unfortunately, it just is the case that alternatives to meat right now, for the vast majority of people, are not quite there yet on those three metrics.

So I think with that being true, we need to provide something which people actually want to eat, but is far more sustainable and far more humane. And that really is the driving theory behind alternative proteins. I think alternative proteins as an intervention into reducing the harms associated with animal agriculture, it’s not a silver bullet. I think there are complementary approaches; I won’t speak to various interventions specifically targeting things like animal welfare or specifically targeting the usage of antibiotics. I think alternative proteins has an advantage, where you’re just essentially trying to displace the problem that is the cause of all of these issues, and therefore it seems a lot more scalable than other interventions. But that’s not to say that I think it’s one or the other.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, you’ve pointed at this fact that I am super curious about, which is that alternative proteins aren’t there on taste, price, and convenience.

I think it was something like a decade ago, maybe a little less time, that I learned how awful factory farming was. I realised that animal agriculture had huge negative impacts on the environment, and started hearing about really exciting developments in the science of alternative proteins. I guess we should flag that “alternative proteins” is just kind of a broad bucket that captures not just alternatives to meat, but also eggs and dairy. So I started hearing about these, and was very excited about them, and even started hearing about cultivated meat or clean meat, which is this approach to creating meat from cells without using animals. And that blew my mind. It all just felt extremely exciting.

And now I guess it feels like lots of time has passed — and this isn’t meant to be a criticism of the industry at all, because I think the industry is full of brilliant and well-intentioned people — but I just feel kind of surprised and curious about why we’re not there yet. What is the challenge?

Seren Kell: I would probably say two things in response to that. The first would be to actually just slightly push back on the idea that the sector has moved more slowly than it might otherwise have done, or that we might have hoped it would do. If we actually look at how much technological progress and how much these products have improved over the course of a decade, it is quite phenomenal — especially relative to how much investment and resource has actually gone into the space.

So to ground that in just one data point around cultivated meat, for example: Professor Mark Post from Maastricht University unveiled the world’s first cultivated meat burger in 2013. That burger cost $330,000 to produce. And a decade later, cultivated meat has now been approved for commercial sale in the US. That was earlier this week, and it will now very soon be sold to consumers and restaurants.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, fair enough. That’s pretty incredible.

Seren Kell: Yeah. I think if you look at the amount of investment and how that’s cashed out in terms of genuine product development, I think that there has actually been a fair chunk of growth, given it’s science and technology. Science and technology takes time, and a decade actually isn’t so long in relative terms.

But I don’t want to present it as if this is great, and everything’s going as fast as it should be. I think that’s absolutely not the case. The scale of the challenge, and what needs to happen in order to be able to genuinely scale this sector and provide a meaningful alternative to animal agriculture, is still going far too slowly in those terms.

And the success of this sector really actually just isn’t inevitable. We need scientists, we need resources, we need businesses moving into this space. We need governments and policymakers to be supporting this space, and providing a fair and transparent path to market and an enabling environment for the sector. And none of these things are guaranteed. Alternative proteins needs to be treated as a sector in the same way as other sectors — like solar panels or electric vehicles or wind farms — have been treated. And there have been some improvements over the last few years on that front, but nowhere near as much as it needs to be when you actually look at the scale of what needs to happen.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so the case is, on a fraction of the resources, there’s an industry trying to get alternative proteins going, but it sounds like it’s quite underfunded relative to the environmental stakes. So we’ll come back to all the progress we’ve made on cultivated meat. I do feel really excited to hear more about that.

What makes alternative proteins so hard to make? [00:11:30]

Luisa Rodriguez: But before we do, you’ve pushed back on the idea that we haven’t made much progress. Do you have a sense of what the hardest things about this are? Is it that it turns out taste is just a way harder science problem than we realised?

Seren Kell: Yeah. So if we break down this taste, price, convenience — if we see this as these are the things that matter for consumer uptake — and we actually look into the constituent parts of that, like what things need to happen such that sustainable proteins or alternative proteins can compete on those grounds, taste is a big one.

Taste is really, really hard. There’s a bunch of reasons why — I’d love to dive into the technical side of what those are — but it is just really hard to take ingredients from the plant kingdom or the fungal kingdom and create products which kind of fully recapitulate the experience of eating animal protein. It’s not impossible, and the progress that has been made is pretty amazing, but there’s a lot of underlying science there around understanding animal sciences and meat sciences to actually understand what is the thing that we’re trying to replicate here — and then all of the crop sciences and the other underlying disciplines that are relevant for trying to engineer that from other ingredients. Taste is a big one there.

Price: There are a few things that go into price. GFI works a lot with the commercial sector to try and bring other companies into the space — for example, such that they’re leveraging their resources to do things like scale up the production of alternative proteins so price can come down. But this is a new sector. New sectors involve a lot of R&D. R&D is really expensive, and that can influence how quickly things like prices can actually come down.

And then the accessibility point: There’s a lot of things that go into this, but regulation is a really big one. Are you actually allowed to sell this? Applying for regulatory approval of a product is not quick. I said that with cultivated meat we had our proof of concept in 2013 — and we’ve just had regulatory approval in the US a decade later. And I presented that as this really quick thing. That is a really quick thing. It maybe doesn’t sound like a quick thing, but for regulatory approval of new food products, that is really exciting and worth celebrating.

Luisa Rodriguez: I am pretty interested in what you said about taste being a hard scientific challenge. And since your focus is on the science stuff, I would actually love to know some of why. Maybe it’s just because I’m so far from the problem, it’s probably just kind of magical thinking, but I’m like, we have a rough sense of what’s in animal proteins and we have a rough sense of what tastes like certain other things. Why can’t we just use ingredients that are roughly similar molecules, or the same molecules that come from different sources, and combine them in a way that makes the plant-based thing taste like I want it to taste?

Seren Kell: I mean, I think that is the basic theory. What you’re saying is exactly right, and that is the thinking which has underlied a lot of the developments that have been happening in the plant-based sector. Maybe I’ll pick one example to dive into. Think about fat. This is a simplification, but it’s not actually that much of a simplification to say that fat is a lot of the reason why meat tastes good. And fat is quite complicated in terms of how it is layered throughout animal tissue, how it is encapsulated, what that means for how it behaves when it’s cooked, and how it feels when you put it in your mouth and bite into meat. It’s just a really big part of the experience of eating meat and why people find meat tasty.

And it’s really hard to find direct functional equivalents of animal fat in the plant kingdom. If you look at all of the plant-based products that we see in supermarkets now, they are often using things like palm oil or coconut oil. Those are ingredients which exist at a reasonable scale globally, and there are reasonably well-established supply chains, so that’s what people are using for plant-based meat. But it just doesn’t at all really behave in a way which is similar to animal meat when you cook it. Because it’s not encapsulated, it just kind of bursts, and the burgers are kind of greasy: it doesn’t hold the fat within it and kind of explode in your mouth when you put it in your mouth.

Luisa Rodriguez: What exactly does “encapsulated” mean?

Seren Kell: You can imagine it effectively encased in bubbles. And those bubbles don’t burst when it cooks, but they might burst when you put it in your mouth, let’s say.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. But plant-based fats tend not to be surrounded by bubbles, and so they do burst when cooked?

Seren Kell: Yeah, or they can kind of leak out during the cooking process. Exactly. It’s why a lot of plant-based meat can look a little bit greasy in a way that animal meat doesn’t.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So I guess plant-based and animal-based fats are different, and they behave differently when cooking and in your mouth. And I guess the science is just really hard to make plant-based fats behave the same way. Maybe I was overly optimistic that we could just make plants do all the things that animal products do. Is it just random that there are no plants that make fats that act the way animal fats do?

Seren Kell: Coconut fat is on the closer end because it is less unsaturated, so it does behave slightly more solid at room temperature. But yeah, this is just that plants and animals are very different and have different biology. I think it’s probably worth diving into hybrid products later on; I think there are genuine solutions to this. But to go back to what you said about being too optimistic, I don’t think these are things that can’t be solved. It just requires researchers and resources to solve it, and there hasn’t been as much as there needs to be in order to solve it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are there basically just a bunch of problems like this? Like, there’s fat, and I don’t know what other structural components there are to these kinds of products, and we just have to go at them one at a time and figure out how to make plants do the things that animal products do?

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly. If you think about texture, animal proteins tend to be fibrillar, which means that they’re arranged in long sheets, whereas plant-based proteins tend to be globular. Again, there’s a challenge there: How can you essentially work with and manipulate plant proteins such that they behave like fibrillar proteins? And there are a few different technologies which have been borrowed from other parts of the food industry to do that.

To give an example, a technology called extrusion, I think that was originally developed to make things like Coco Pops — but it turns out that it works relatively well to texturise plant protein. That’s where you start with your concentrated, let’s say, soy protein, and turn that into something that looks like a Beyond Burger. You need to texturise it such that you have that kind of meaty, chewy structure in that product.

And that’s just a total black box. We don’t really understand what’s going on as part of that process. The industry has been really creative and reappropriated and tweaked around the parameters with that — and that is the major texturisation method used for most products on the market — but it wasn’t developed for this; it wasn’t optimised for this. And it would be great to have more research looking into alternative texturisation technologies, or ways to breed crops which have proteins which are just functionally better suited for plant-based meat applications.

Luisa Rodriguez: Maybe I’m just underestimating the extent to which a lot of the scientific questions here are more mysterious and black boxy than I would have guessed. I think I would have thought that chemistry had solved more things like how can we encapsulate some kinds of fats when they’re not encapsulated to begin with.

Seren Kell: Yeah. And another thing I would just add on that point, in addition to being able to do a thing with a proof of concept, alternative proteins as an application has quite unique drivers: It’s food; it’s a very high-volume and relatively speaking low-cost product. So a lot of the solutions which might work just will never work for alternative protein applications. And because you’re producing such high volumes of this, it’s displacing food. You need to be able to have solutions in which there can be well-established global supply chains to actually produce that at scale. So those are other considerations which can make this difficult as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, there’s this unfair thing where animal agriculture was slowly scaled up over decades as the population grew, and alternative proteins have the challenge of meeting global demand from basically nothing. And so maybe it’s the case that we’re actually very close to making alternative proteins that taste pretty similar, but figuring out ways to make them for billions of people is a whole another challenge that the animal agricultural industry didn’t have to do at the same pace.

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly. But that does provide an opportunity, right? I think we’ve hit a lot of essentially diminishing returns from how efficient animal agriculture can be. In the meat industry, they refer to it as the “carcass balancing” problem: you’re producing whole animals, but only some fraction of that animal’s biomass is ultimately high value and something which people want to eat directly. How do you bring value from the rest of that animal?

And you’re right. There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we’re just so early on with alternative proteins and there’s so much white space, it’s actually just really exciting to know that we can keep on innovating and being far more efficient than this existing technology — which, fundamentally, is just quite inefficient. You’re feeding animals a bunch of food to then extract a small fraction of their biomass to then eat that.

Animal agriculture takes up 83% of farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories. So the current system just is so wasteful. And the limiting factor is that you’re just growing a bunch of food to then feed a third of the world’s crops directly to animals, where the vast majority of those calories going in are lost to animals existing. We often talk about chickens as being the most efficient animal we have in intensive animal agriculture for converting calories in to calories out — and even with chickens, it’s a 9:1 conversion process. It’s just so much more efficient to just consume plants directly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And my impression is that you’ll lose some of that energy or some of those calories while you make alternative proteins, because you’re still doing some stuff like extrusion and other things I don’t understand to make them palatable. But it sounds like it’s probably much less than the amount of loss you get from just making a chicken live — producing all the feathers and the brain and heat that a chicken does to survive, but that we don’t end up getting any value from.

Seren Kell: Yeah, that’s right.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you think that cheap and widely available alternative proteins are going to be enough to end or at least massively reduce the impact of animal agriculture? For example, to like 5% of current per capita animal meat consumption? Or do you think other conditions are needed?

Seren Kell: I feel very optimistic. When you ask consumers, “Are you reducing your meat consumption?” or “Would you like to reduce your meat consumption?” you get a high proportion of people who say, “Yes, I would” or “I would like to” — essentially, “…if I’m not having to compromise on taste, price, and convenience.” I think those three are definitely necessary in order to reduce consumption of animal products.

I don’t want to commit to saying it’s sufficient. I think other things will potentially matter. I think alternative proteins have to be something that people are familiar with. It needs to be integrated into specific cultural contexts and specific people’s cuisines. I think other things do matter. It’s important that the narrative around alternative proteins, politically and in the public, is a positive and fair one. But yeah, I think it’s certainly necessary in order to see that transition.

Why fermentation is so exciting [00:24:23]

Luisa Rodriguez: I want to talk about some of the specific alternative proteins GFI is working to promote. So I think there are three kinds of alternative proteins: there’s cultivated, fermentation, and plant-based. I think we probably all have a basic sense of what plant-based proteins are. But can you give me a refresher on the other two, starting with cultivated meat?

Seren Kell: Cultivated meat is essentially real animal meat. You’re producing beef, pork, chicken, and seafood, but you’re producing it directly from animal cells rather than growing entire animals and then extracting tissue from those animals. So you’re growing animal cells, you’re providing them with the same things that they would otherwise receive within an animal — the same kind of nutrients and vitamins, things like that — and then harvesting those cells to produce particular products.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, and then what is fermentation? I feel like my main association with fermentation is alcohol and yoghurt. Is that the chemical process we’re talking about here?

Seren Kell: So that is a case of traditional fermentation, which is one of the three categories that we talk about when we talk about fermentation in the context of alternative proteins. So there’s traditional fermentation, which is exactly as you described: you’re taking some kind of ingredient and using microorganisms to process that ingredient and change it in some way. But there are also two other categories: precision fermentation and biomass fermentation.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, cool. Maybe we’ll come back to those in a little bit, but just to make sure I understand. I don’t know exactly what’s happening with yoghurt, for example.

Seren Kell: So microorganisms, specifically bacteria, are eating the sugar in the milk, and then producing other ingredients or chemicals which then transform that milk into yoghurt. Specifically, they’re releasing acids which trigger this transformation into yoghurt. That is basically what traditional fermentation is: Microorganisms are taking ingredients from a starting mixture of food; then consuming some part of it, producing various other chemicals; and through that process is transforming that product into something slightly different.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that makes sense to me. Is it the case that whenever you’re doing fermentation like this in the case of alternative proteins, you are doing a similar thing? You’re taking an input ingredient and then getting out a product? Or is it also the case that you’re sometimes just making ingredients for products?

Seren Kell: It can be both. Fermentation is essentially just using microorganisms in weird and wonderful ways to transform inputs into a particular output of interest. So that output could be a very specific ingredient — it could be a vitamin, or it could be a particular protein — or in the case of biomass fermentation, you’re actually eating the microorganism itself.

So if you think about Quorn, one of the largest alternative protein companies in the world, you’re not eating a plant: you’re actually eating a fungal mycelium — so this product, mycoprotein, you’re eating the actual microorganism, and that is the meat itself.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s the product. OK, so those are the three things. And do you have a take on which will be a bigger share of the market in, say, 2050? Cultivated, plant-based, or fermentation?

Seren Kell: I think firstly, it’s probably worth grounding in what the size of the market could look like. Some research has shown that with government investment, plant-based and cultivated meat could be about 22% of the market by 2035.

If you look at how you would break that market up, I think it’s actually quite tricky to distinguish it, or it’s almost the wrong way of looking at it. One reason why that’s true is that often these technologies are producing particular ingredients which you’re then using in a different technology. Hybrid products are basically going to be quite likely a real thing, so it’s kind of hard to delineate between the three pillars, because they’re actually just massively enabling one another.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. So you won’t have like veggie burgers and Quorn chicken nuggets, which are fermentation, and cultivated meat in a way that doesn’t rely on any of the other two. You’ll have all of these three kind of streams of protein creation, I guess, mixing and matching to create products that end up going to market and being more delicious and more cheap.

Seren Kell: Exactly. So that’s one reason, that there’s this question of hybrid products. And there are some really great examples that are already being explored with that, by the way. For example, using cultivated fat in a low volume in a plant-based burger to make that plant-based burger just taste a lot more like an animal burger.

Luisa Rodriguez: Love it.

Seren Kell: And then I think another reason why it’s somewhat hard to predict is that it’s quite likely that these different production pillars or these different verticals will just appeal to different consumers in different ways.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, of course. Some people are going to be like, “Eww, cultivated meat sounds weird, but Quorn chicken nuggets are totally fine.” And then other people are going to be like, “I want to be eating chicken cells” and so they’ll be really into cultivated meat.

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s quite likely going to be the case.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, then maybe framing the question slightly differently, I’m curious if one of these approaches is particularly exciting to you?

Seren Kell: So the way that I fell into alternative proteins was very much via hearing about cultivated meat and exploring that sector. In reality — and since I’ve joined GFI and learnt and understood a lot more about the other two pillars — I genuinely am equally excited about the potential of all three, and what they can do to support one another as well. For example, I think fermentation is a really exciting enabling technology for alternative proteins in general, and then as a way of producing alternative proteins in its own right as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, interesting. That is not what I expected you to say. I guess I have just heard loads about cultivated meat, and it’s just this kind of sexy sci-fi thing that makes me feel like we’re about to be living in the future. And I know next to nothing about fermentation, which just makes me excited to learn about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: So actually, let’s dive in and talk a bunch more about fermentation. To start, I guess you’ve said that there’s traditional fermentation. My impression is that that’s been around for a very long time. How has fermentation evolved over time? And can you say more about the role it’s going to play in accelerating the rise of alternative proteins?

Seren Kell: Yeah, sure. So fermentation has been an incredibly useful method of processing and preserving food for literally thousands of years. So beer, bread, tempeh, sauerkraut, kimchi, et cetera: those all involve traditional fermentation. And now we are seeing scientists and companies applying both traditional fermentation to alternative proteins specifically, but also other ways of using microorganisms which fall under this bucket of fermentation: biomass and precision fermentation. That can be to produce very specific functional ingredients — things like fats or flavour molecules or vitamins — but also to produce actual meaty protein itself that has the same taste and texture of animal products.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are there good examples of traditional fermentation being used for alternative proteins in particular?

Seren Kell: One way in which it’s helpful is that it can essentially improve the taste of plant-based ingredients.

To give a specific example of this: if you’re using legumes — for example, peas — as your plant-based ingredient, it can often have this kind of beany taste, this kind of strange, odd taste associated with it. That’s one way in which fermentation can come in handy. So if you ferment, let’s say, fava beans, that can reduce that beany taste. And that’s actually what one food manufacturer, Foodiq, have done. They’ve launched this fermented fava bean ingredient where they’ve used fermentation.

Here’s another example: MycoTechnology is a company that is performing traditional fermentation of things like pea or rice or chickpea. And again, because they fermented it with a particular fungus, that’s now really improved the taste profile and added tastes like meatiness and savoriness and certain umami flavours to the product.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. I just have this feeling that fermentation is magic. It’s like you have some random starting ingredient like beans, and then you put it through a yeast, and then the yeast makes it taste meatier and less beany, which is just extremely cool.

OK, how about biomass fermentation? What’s going on there?

Seren Kell: Biomass fermentation is a similar concept: you’re feeding microorganisms whatever they need to grow. But rather than the main biomass being the plant ingredient, it’s the actual microorganism. So you’re essentially just leveraging the fact that they can grow incredibly quickly and produce a lot of high-quality protein very quickly, and actually consuming them directly.

There’s some pretty impressive examples of this. There’s another biomass fermentation company called ENOUGH Food, and with a factory that they’re currently building in the Netherlands, they’re aiming to deliver 50,000 tonnes per year — which is the equivalent of about a cow’s worth of protein every two minutes, which is very cool.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s incredible. Given the amount of time it takes to make a cow in the world, that does seem incredibly efficient. Are there any other cool examples of that?

Seren Kell: Another one that jumps to mind is a company in Finland called Solar Foods. They’re essentially using electricity, air, and water as the inputs to then produce a load of high-quality protein.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. So what’s the microorganism there?

Seren Kell: So you’re taking water, using electricity as an input and carbon dioxide as an input to then produce the ingredients which the bacteria will then consume.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. That is super cool. Do you know what the output is? Is it a protein that then gets used as an ingredient for an alternative protein down the line?

Seren Kell: I think that at least in the first instance, they were producing this very high-protein powder. I’m unsure whether their strategy is to produce it to use it as an ingredient and sell it B2B to food manufacturers, or whether they would actually develop animal product alternatives using that bacterium at the end.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, but it’s basically you’re putting bacteria in a tank, you are also putting water and carbon dioxide in the tank, and then you’re electrifying it, and that gives the bacteria the ingredients it needs to produce a bunch of protein-powder-like stuff. Which again, just sounds like magic. That’s really cool.

Let’s talk about precision fermentation. What’s going on there?

Seren Kell: Precision fermentation is really interesting. Again, you’re using microorganisms, but you’re using them essentially as miniature cell factories to produce very specific ingredients.

And this is not at all unique to alternative proteins. Just to give a couple of examples of this, a while ago, most people got their insulin from the pig industry; it was extracted from pigs. That is no longer the case. The vast majority of insulin that diabetics use is produced via essentially this process. So they’ve taken a yeast, given it the instructions it needs to produce human insulin, and then they are growing in a tank, producing lots of the insulin, and then the insulin is purified out. It is clean, it does not have to come from a pig slaughterhouse, and it’s a much more reliable process.

It’s also been a thing in the food industry for a while. A lot of our vitamins — for example, B12 for supplementation — come from precision fermentation. Rather than extracting it from some source or trying to synthesise it chemically, we’re just using biology to do it very efficiently and very quickly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great. Amazing. I guess it sounds like the key difference is rather than eating the organism in its entirety, or doing this traditional thing which gives you a kind of soup at the end, you are giving the microorganism a specific ingredient, and then it’s producing a specific ingredient as the output. And that’s the thing that I guess makes it precise. Are there examples in the alternative protein space that are particularly cool?

Seren Kell: There have been a few really exciting examples of this. First of all, Impossible Foods essentially pioneered precision fermentation and produced heme. Heme is an ingredient which is naturally present in animal tissue. It’s in your blood and my blood. And they’ve essentially taken the instructions for producing heme, and are expressing it through precision fermentation, and then using that as an ingredient in a plant-based burger. So it’s the reason that the Impossible Burger kind of bleeds and has this kind of bloody look, and it’s supposed to be responsible for that meaty taste that you have with the Impossible Burger.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. So in this case, they’ve got something like a yeast and they give it something probably with iron in it, and that yeast is able to convert it to heme, which it sounds like historically has only been available through animal tissue, and now we just get it without animals.

Seren Kell: Some other exciting examples of precision fermentation are, because you have total freedom to decide which proteins or which fats or which particular ingredients you want to make, you can also just make real animal proteins. To give an example of this, we’re seeing some companies taking yeast and giving them the instructions to make things like whey or casein — which are the major proteins in cow’s milk — and then using that to produce genuinely real animal-free dairy: ice cream or yoghurt or cheeses, things like that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Oh, cool. So you can still make that but without a cow, by just producing the ingredients and combining them.

Seren Kell: Yes. Exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Awesome. I love that. I’m into fermentation. I’m sold. This is good. But yeah, I’m curious, overall, what is it about fermentation that made you more excited once you learned more about it?

Seren Kell: I think it’s just really cool for a bunch of reasons. It’s familiar to the food industry. It’s incredibly efficient — and as part of that, you have really quick R&D cycles compared with animals or plants, because microorganisms can grow much quicker. It already operates at massive scale in food or biopharma. It’s not constrained by land in the same way, which means that you can produce food in areas which historically have had very little food production. There’s a lot of opportunity from a circular economy perspective. Microorganisms can basically be quite flexible about what food they eat, so there’s a lot of potential to basically leverage waste byproducts or nonconventional foods.

Luisa Rodriguez: So the circular aspect of that is like, you can take waste from one part of the food industry and give it as an input to another part of the industry? Because the organisms involved in fermentation will just be like, “Yeah, I’ll eat that. I’ll turn that into something more useful for you.”

Seren Kell: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I guess the last thing is just a wider point: this is massively, massively untapped. We don’t know a huge amount. I guess one way of looking at it is you often hear this quote, “We know less about the bottom of our ocean than we know about the surface of the moon.” I have no idea how true that is, but that’s the kind of thing that you’ll sometimes hear. And I think with fungi, there is a similar kind of sentiment there. It’s just really unexplored, and there’s just a huge amount of white space within biology — which means that I think there’s just a huge amount of potential and a lot of great things that we might learn the more that we understand about fungi in the future.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. So it’s efficient, it’s untapped. There’s a lot of potential because we don’t know all of the uses of some of these microorganisms. And I guess it’s familiar to the food industry. So then how do these products compare with respect to their environmental impacts?

Seren Kell: If you just do a standard life cycle assessment of fermentation as a process, you do have massive savings in terms of land use and greenhouse gas emissions and water usage and other metrics that are important for environmental impact.

Just to give a couple of examples of this: Quorn’s fermentation-made protein has a carbon footprint 70% lower than chicken. And I should say that chickens are a hard benchmark, because chickens are incredibly efficient from an environmental perspective, compared with beef, say.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, 70% does sound huge. Are there other examples where fermentation has been leveraged to address environmental challenges?

Seren Kell: Yeah, if you do a like-for-like comparison with beef, your savings are obviously going to be a lot better than compared with chicken. So if you produce whey protein via precision fermentation, that causes 97% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than if you’re taking it from a cow directly. That’s another life cycle assessment that’s been done of a particular product.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, that’s amazing.

Seren Kell: But I think it is worth talking about the fact that not only is fermentation just less resource intensive overall, but back to that point about being able to upcycle waste side streams from other industries. There is this big opportunity for broader sustainability benefits there.

So I can just give a couple examples of what that could look like in practice. For example, there’s a German fermentation startup called Mushlabs that is collaborating with a brewery to use essentially spent grain from the beer production process as the food that they then feed to their mycoprotein.

Luisa Rodriguez: Super cool.

Seren Kell: Yeah, it’s really cool. We’ve actually funded a project through our Research Grant Program where researchers are taking corn husks, which again is another waste agricultural byproduct —

Luisa Rodriguez: Must be a huge byproduct.

Seren Kell: Yeah, and again using that as a potential feedstock or food for their microorganisms to consume, and just getting high-quality protein at the end of that process. And there’s a bunch more research that can be done. Oyster mushrooms, one paper suggested recently, could grow on just hydrated wood pulp, which is an incredibly abundant side stream from the paper industry. So there’s just a lot of opportunities there.

Luisa Rodriguez: It feels very like we’re living in the future, where we’ve figured out how to use all of our waste to make other good things and we’ve just solved a bunch of sustainability stuff.

The technical challenges involved in scaling fermentation [00:44:38]

Luisa Rodriguez: So one of the challenges with fermentation has to do with what’s called “target selection” — can you explain what that is?

Seren Kell: Target selection is really most relevant in the context of precision fermentation, where you’re trying to make a really specific protein or fat or ingredient of some kind — that is essentially the target. So it’s just choosing what it is that you want to be making through precision fermentation.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so it’s like the target outcome thing is whey or whatever, and you want to figure out which of those things are important to make. What’s the key question there that needs to be answered? Is the thing that’s hard about it just that there are a billion options, and it’s not totally clear which ones we can make really efficiently using fermentation?

Seren Kell: Basically, yeah. Part of the challenge is you’re staring at this blank canvas, and as you say, there’s a near infinite number of different compounds or ingredients that might be helpful to be making, to use as ingredients in alternative proteins, and we just don’t know what they are.

So talking before about animal sciences and meat sciences: what is it that makes meat or egg or dairy taste or behave in a certain way when you’re cooking and eating it? So there’s that element: just actually understanding what are the useful things that might be helpful to include in a product. And then there are some other factors as well, like can you already get that thing easily from another place? Does it happen to exist in a plant, for example? Or is it really hard to manufacture? Or is it just not very abundant in nature? In which case, it might be something that you would want to produce through precision fermentation.

And it’s hard, because what you choose will ultimately impact what the process looks like. And with all kinds of food production, but especially so in precision fermentation, what really matters is the economics of production. Because really, to compete with animal-based proteins, you need to be able to increase the efficiency of actually producing that particular ingredient, so that you can do it in a sustainable and productive way at scale.

Luisa Rodriguez: So what does the process of trying to work out which targets to choose look like? Is it like scientists going through all of the possible things you need for these various products and being like, “Which one do we have clever ideas for making?”

Seren Kell: Basically, yeah. Computational biology can be really supportive of this. So you can use multiomics approaches. You can do high-throughput screening in silico to look at all the proteins that are produced in this type of cell — let’s say a muscle cell in this type of animal, and some of those might be useful for taste and flavour. But yeah, basically the goal is to do it in a high-throughput way. And that is just often quite hard to do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. It’s not like looking at ingredients on packages and being like, “Maybe we could make this more efficiently.” It’s like computational biology looking at probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of proteins produced and being like, “How can we use that or a similar thing? Which ones are relevant to this food science?”

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly. That’s one major element of it. And understanding the metabolic pathways involved in producing that thing. And again, there’s a computational side to that. What’s likely to be efficient? What’s going to be really complicated for your yeast to make? Does it involve a bunch of different steps, and it’s just going to never be economic to be doing that? Or are there some easy wins that are relatively easy to make and might have a lot of functional value? What does it look like to make those?

Luisa Rodriguez: What a cool puzzle.

Seren Kell: Yeah, it’s very cool. As with a lot of things, I think better computational approaches to just speeding up a lot of these things can be super valuable.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, we’re going to talk about the skill sets relevant to these careers later, but it hadn’t occurred to me that computational versions of these sciences are super important. But I guess that makes sense. There are, as you said, near infinite ingredients, and you probably aren’t going to find really brilliant ways of synthesising them by picking through them one by one.

Are there other hard things about target selection, or other clever approaches people are taking to work on it?

Seren Kell: One other thing I would add is that you don’t have to be constrained by what already exists in nature. You can be actually designing new proteins or new small molecules that might have some functional value. And again, it would take a long time to be actually testing those with real physical stuff. So can you be testing their functionality through some kind of computational model? That’s potentially really exciting. But there’s a lot of work that would go into doing that, and not that many people are actually doing that for alternative protein applications.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s something like you can be creative, you can know that yeast tends to make this kind of thing, and you can be like, I actually want it to make a slightly different kind of thing. And then is that something you do through genetic modification?

Seren Kell: Yeah, it could be through direct modification of the gene itself in your production host, or it could be in a slightly more passive way — essentially leveraging evolution, just screening a bunch of different yeasts and seeing if they’re naturally producing different versions of different targets and then selecting for the ones of interest. It’s what can be referred to as directed evolution, essentially just speeding it up a little bit.

Luisa Rodriguez: So another challenge is trying to figure out which microbial strains to use for fermentation, which I think basically is like, Do you use a particular kind of yeast? Do you use bacteria? Do you use some specific cell line? Can you explain what the challenge is there?

Seren Kell: Yeah, so it is exactly as you said: it’s which organism are you using as your production host in your process? One way of looking at it is precision fermentation isn’t really a new technique. In other industries it might go by different names, like “recombinant protein production” or “synthetic biology,” but it’s an established technology. And there are a bunch of what are called “workhorse strains”: go-to production hosts that are used. There’s reasons why people would start to converge on using similar strains: they start to become more familiar; people start to characterise them better; there’s fewer regulatory barriers because it’s just well understood, whereas there are barriers to commercialising new host species.

But there basically is no reason why, from a scientific perspective, we should be limited to a very small number of strains which are well characterised by other industries. We’ve slightly hit diminishing returns in terms of how much better we can make those strains. And it would just make a lot more sense to go out there and explore the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not more, strains that we may not even have discovered, but still could go out and find out what they’re doing and just leverage whatever biodiversity they actually have. And again, now that we have these high-throughput screening and characterisation tools, it does actually really merit essentially just recanvassing all of the known microbial species to see what their suitability would look like for this application.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. I’m realising I kind of have a sense of what you mean by “high-throughput”: I think you mean something like you can do a thing computationally to do it really quickly and efficiently, and get loads of results about which strains or which targets seem good. Is it something like that?

Seren Kell: That’s exactly right. You’re predefining the kinds of things that you think might be useful traits about what you’re looking for. So whether that’s the actual strain, the host organism, or whether that’s the target molecule or ingredient that you want to be producing, and then you are screening all of the data we have already — and that might be things like the genomes, the metabolisms, the known signalling pathways — within what is known of these existing microbial species out there, and seeing what comes back. So, yeah, it’s basically like comparing and contrasting different traits really quickly using computational data.

Luisa Rodriguez: So it sounds like the challenge here, which I guess is also just an opportunity, is that there are probably billions of bacteria, fungi, yeast out in the world, and we can just look at all of them and be like, “Are any of these creating the kinds of things we need to make alternative proteins taste better or make an ingredient more cheaply?” So let’s just explore them all and find the best ones. Which is just pretty amazing.

Seren Kell: There’s a couple of nice examples here actually. One kind of fun example of this is actually the story of Quorn, the mycoprotein that is used in the Quorn company’s products.

Luisa Rodriguez: I love Quorn.

Seren Kell: Yeah, I find Quorn really tasty. Essentially in, I believe it was the ’70s, they were like, “Let’s go and find some fungal strain that we might be able to use as a food source.” And they went out and did one of these screening approaches to go and test in different environments: Can we find a cool fungus that might be able to grow, and might have really great nutrition, and grow relatively efficiently high-protein content, and all the rest of it? And the final strain — the fusarium strain that was ultimately used, and then was selected and improved upon — I think it was found at the bottom of the garden in a shed of one of the researchers who went out and did this. And that was almost half a century ago, if I’m getting the dates right. And that is the strain that Quorn uses.

Who’s to say there aren’t many others, and many better ones out there that we just haven’t discovered yet in biology? And fungi especially are just amazing and can be very well adapted to quite extreme environments. There are certain microorganisms that live at the bottom of the sea and so can deal with really high temperatures, or can consume as their food quite strange sources. They can be very flexible, which means we could feed this thing methanol or hydrogen or carbon dioxide, and it will just turn that into protein because — through totally independent evolution elsewhere — it’s evolved to just do some really cool chemistry.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. That’s amazing.

Seren Kell: Yeah, it’s just like the world is the oyster.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, cool. I love the story about the Quorn fungus being found in the garden shed. I also am slightly horrified by it. I’m like, oh god, I eat Quorn chicken nuggets at least weekly and now I’m just picturing them as the fungus in someone’s back garden dingy shed.

Seren Kell: I think the strain that is being used industrially has come a long way since that initial one. They have done a lot of work optimising and improving upon it. But it does speak to how we should really go out there and see what’s already there, and then through all these new technologies can also just massively improve upon once we have identified a strain that we want to start with.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. I love that. That’s a really good example. Are there any other examples?

Seren Kell: Yeah, another one jumps to mind. So there’s a research institution in Finland called VTT and they’ve been doing some really cool examples of this kind of work. One recent output that came from that was they developed a new strain of Trichoderma, a type of filamentous fungus, and with this strain they were able to produce essentially ovalbumin, which is one of the proteins that we find in chicken eggs. And this strain is now producing that, which is great.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are there any other areas of research that seem important to making fermentation even more valuable?

Seren Kell: We touched on it earlier, but there’s this huge opportunity with fermentation, which is that you can potentially use a bunch of different things as your feedstock or your food for the process, your carbon source — which might be waste products, or might not be competing with food for people, or might be kind of upcycling things that we really need to get rid of for some other reason. And that’s an opportunity.

But there’s obviously a lot of research that goes into identifying what that could look like, and which strains would make sense, and what are the actual inputs that we think would make sense from an economic perspective, and what do the existing supply chains look like for these things. So that’s obviously quite an interdisciplinary question, but there’s also a huge technical component. Back to that kind of wood pulp example: it seems like it would be really convenient to find a way to find value from wood pulp, and produce actual high-quality human protein from that. OK, which strains would do that? What are the conditions? What conditions make sense such that it actually adds up from an economic perspective and it’s not still essentially a bit of a loss? And all of that stuff just takes a lot of trial and error, and a lot of modelling as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: To what extent are companies going out and looking for waste products and being like, “That is this huge untapped resource. Nobody wants it. We can get it for cheap. And if we can find a way to turn it into something valuable for alternative proteins, then we just get this kind of magical product that makes use of this thing that was garbage.” Is that, to some extent, the process? Like, what are all the industries that have waste products? Let’s figure out which waste products have anything potentially relevant to alternative proteins and then start working on the science for how to make those kind of conversions.

Seren Kell: I think that’s basically right. A lot of this work is still quite early, and so most of what I’m seeing is happening in academia — so people doing these kind of mapping exercises and publishing papers saying, “here are a bunch of waste side streams,” or partnering with companies in joint collaborative research projects to try and answer those questions.

An example of that, not actually in the fermentation space, but in cultivated meat, is one project that’s happening in the UK right now, which is looking at essentially the potential involvement of the UK’s agricultural and farming community in cultivated meat production. One part of that research project is essentially just doing this: going and mapping out all of the waste products that are currently produced in British agriculture.

These would be silly examples, but let’s say cabbage stems are just left to rot in the field, but they contain a bunch of protein and carbohydrates, et cetera. Looking at what the actual nutritional or functional composition of those outputs are, and seeing if they could be used in cell culture media — which is one component of cultivated meat production, and the most expensive component of cultivated meat production. But that seems like a really promising project to me. Like, go and find what is already available.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s a great example. Any other research questions that are important and interesting in the fermentation space?

Seren Kell: This is maybe less a research question, but it is just worth emphasising as a massive priority, which is the question of infrastructure. So fermentation takes place in essentially these big steel tanks. And they do exist elsewhere: beer brewing, pharmaceutical industry — like vaccine production, antibody production, things like that — but most of the infrastructure which exists globally wasn’t developed for fermentation for food applications.

And that just means that there’s a shortage of what’s actually going to be needed in total if fermentation is going to meaningfully displace meat production, and what’s there just isn’t particularly appropriate for this use case. It’s too expensive. In the pharmaceutical industry, you’ll do one fermentation batch and then you’ll just throw it away because the stringency requirements for maintaining sterility are so high, and you’re producing low-volume, super-high-cost products, so the economics mean it just makes better sense to literally just chuck this thing away, which is so wasteful.

But for food that just doesn’t work. So you need big tanks which can be cleaned and which are reusable and which can have a really high throughput of ingredients going in and product coming out, and efficient downstream processing pathways for this application. Just building it so it actually makes sense. And there’s a huge shortage of this. It’s really expensive. When you have an industry where much of the activity is happening in startups, there just isn’t the financing available for companies to be building this themselves. And often they need to be scaling up what they’re doing — so what they need they wouldn’t actually need for such a long time, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to buy it or build it.

Luisa Rodriguez: To do it now.

Seren Kell: Exactly. And that’s where there is a massive role for public investment: to build pilot plants which can be shared between different companies to come and rent it for a certain portion of their R&D process.

Luisa Rodriguez: So there are loads of open questions. It sounds like just a cool field to be in right now, with loads of really interesting puzzly research. Are there any things that we’ve nailed or succeeded at lately in this space?

Seren Kell: The flashiest development has been using a precision-fermentation-produced ingredient in an alternative protein product which is being sold at high scale: the Impossible Burger. That’s flashy in the fact that it’s happening at a very large scale.

I think there are lots of little wins happening in universities and research institutes all around the world in different ways. There are a lot of exciting things happening on the question of trying to diversify feedstocks. The default for this technology in other industries is just pure glucose or sugar. It would be better if one could use feedstocks which wasn’t useful for other industries or wasn’t expensive or wasn’t competing as an ingredient in other places.

Luisa Rodriguez: So those cabbage stems, for example. If we could find a waste product or just something where there wasn’t a huge demand for the thing separately. So we’re mostly using sugar. Are there any ideas for other things to use?

Seren Kell: People are trying lots of different things. There are people trying to extract sugars from these waste side streams. There are people who are using nonorganic carbon feedstock: that’s when you’re thinking about things like just carbon dioxide. The companies Solar Foods in Finland and Air Protein in the US are essentially using carbon dioxide as the source of carbon to then build the biomass for the fermentation. So those are examples of companies who are actually doing it and scaling it up.

But yeah, lots of different wins. So much to explore and see what it could look like. And obviously there is a regional factor here, like what is actually being produced in this country versus this country, and what times of year, and what would the logistics look like for transporting that. Do you need to colocate your fermentation facility with this entirely separate farm or industrial factory for some entirely different thing? Every company will have a different journey, but there is just a massive backbone of academic research that needs to be done to see what it could look like technically to be able to do this efficiently.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I loved that. Again, I knew almost nothing about fermentation, and I feel like fermentation is just this magic thing where you take some random stuff, give them to a bunch of microorganisms that I never think about, and they make incredibly valuable products that I wouldn’t have guessed or that seem really hard to make in other ways.

Seren Kell: I like that summary. I really like that summary.

Progress in cultivated meat [01:06:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: Good. Let’s talk about cultivated meat next. What’s the overall story of what’s happened with cultivated meat over the last decade?

Seren Kell: You could say that the explosion of activity kicked off proper in the year 2013. There had been little bits and pieces and projects that had been happening prior to that — some in the context of feeding people in space, some in other contexts — but really in the year 2013, this was a defining moment in the field, where Professor Mark Post at Maastricht University developed a cultivated meat burger. Which was then cooked in London at this big demonstration to show that this is a real thing; this is something that can be done and ought to be pursued for reasons of climate, for example. That burger cost $330,000 to produce. So it was very much saying this is possible, but was clearly pointing to the fact that a lot of research and development would need to happen in order for this to be a viable alternative to consuming animal protein directly.

So that was in the year 2013, and then a decade later, we have now recently had cultivated meat passing through regulatory approval in the US, in addition to it already being approved for consumption in Singapore. So that feels like a big moment, 10 years later. Not only can we do this thing, but very soon in the US and also in Singapore, people will be actually eating this in real restaurants.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That is wild and incredible. Have there been any kind of landmarks along the way, breakthroughs in the science or something that stick out to you as a big win for cultivated meat?

Seren Kell: I’ll speak to maybe updates about the ecosystem first, and then dive into particular technological breakthroughs, because it’s probably worth grounding it in these other data points that show how this field has grown.

I guess the first thing is just how many people and who is doing this. Back in 2013 and for the following few years, it was a really tiny number of academic scientists and startups. In 2017, when I first heard about cultivated meat, there were definitely fewer than 20 companies in the whole world who were trying to actually work on this. That’s changed. It’s become much more sophisticated as an ecosystem as more funding has come in. There’s now about 150 companies worldwide, 30 of those in Europe. And it’s not just lots of new startups trying to develop cultivated meat products; there’s just a lot more specialisation — more B2B companies, people working on and solving very particular aspects of the process. These are just nice signals that the industry is developing into more of a mature sector.

And then another signal at the ecosystem level is the fact that, for the vast majority of time that people have been working on cultivated meat, it’s been really dominated by the private sector: VC-funded R&D happening in a closed environment in, relatively speaking, quite small startups. That is starting to change. We’re seeing a lot more open access research, we’re seeing a lot more government funding, and actual public support going into research happening in universities, where the research is published. That means that the entire industry can benefit from it, and it means that there’s a lot more transparency into what the technology can and currently does look like.

So those are all some really nice, positive changes that we’ve been seeing as the sector has developed over the last few years. And one particular culmination of that in Europe was last year, there was a landmark investment from the Dutch government to a big cultivated meat consortium, so a collection of companies and researchers, and that was in the value of €60 million. That’s the biggest public investment into the space in all history. And that was a really great signal, again, that this is something that governments should take seriously as part of meeting their climate agreements, as part of meeting the benefits that can come to them as a country in terms of economic development and things like that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Did they say much about their reasoning? Was it basically that this seems important for climate reasons? Also, we want to be part of the growing industry, because it may not yet be, but it’s going to be economically valuable for us to have a big stake. And they basically decided getting in early is like a sensible and good-for-the-world thing to do?

Seren Kell: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, every country has additional contextual factors that explain why they have or haven’t really leant into cultivating meat. So the Netherlands just is essentially the Silicon Valley of food innovation globally. There’s this particular region called Food Valley, Netherlands, and that is where all the big food companies have big research and development activities.

Luisa Rodriguez: I had no idea.

Seren Kell: Yeah. I don’t know off the top of my head exactly, but they’re one of the countries that exports the most food, and for a tiny country it is quite amazing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That’s quite shocking.

Seren Kell: And there are other reasons which would explain it. Obviously Professor Mark Post, the man who essentially demonstrated that this was possible to a large audience, he was a Dutch professor based at a Dutch university, so it’s somewhat them maintaining the innovation that really came from Dutch science.

But then you have places like Singapore, where food security is just a really major priority. They don’t have a huge amount of land, they import a lot of their food, and so there’s just massive benefits for them to be able to produce more food in a way that doesn’t require huge amounts of agricultural land.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That makes tonnes of sense. And then on the science front, what have some of the big landmarks been?

Seren Kell: I think as part of the fact that just many more people are working on this in parallel and publishing the work that they’re doing, there have been much more of a diversity of approaches to solving some of the common technical challenges for cultivated meat. And that’s just really nice to see.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Maybe it makes sense to talk about some of those challenges, then. What are the hard things about cultivated meat at the moment?

Seren Kell: If you look at what is involved in producing cultivated meat, there are a few basic things which are true for every company or every researcher in a university who’s doing this: the cells that you’re working with, which are often derived from what are called cell lines; the bioreactors, so those big steel tanks that you’re growing the cells in; and a third thing is what we call “scaffolding.”

Scaffolding is essentially material that cells attach to grow on. So you might have it because the kinds of cells you’re working with are what are called adherent cells, which means they want to be attached to something, and they won’t grow if they’re not. Most of the cells in your body are not just floating around in free solution. They’re interacting with each other, and there are complicated interactions involved in that.

And another benefit of scaffolding is meat isn’t just a collection of cells. There’s a complicated 3D structure in terms of the relationships between the cells and the tissue types interacting with one another. So scaffolding can help try to solve some of those structural and textural challenges when you’re trying to produce real, whole-cut products — things like steaks or chicken breasts.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. The imagery coming to mind is like, if you wanted a certain area to become a thriving community, you’d build a bunch of houses and stores and then could populate it. But people don’t just wander around. You need to create little homes for the cells.

Seren Kell: Yeah. Again, I like that. I should say that a lot of the technology involved in cultivated meat existed in other industries — like regenerative medicine, growing organs outside of a body for things like organ transplants. So again, lots of this technology isn’t new, but the use case is very different. So for cultivated meat, ideally, you might want your scaffolding elements to be edible so that you can incorporate them into the final product. Otherwise, you have to harvest all the cells off this before you can process them into food.

And I should say the fourth element of developing cultivated meat, or the main kind of research area within it, is the cell culture media. This is essentially the liquid that the cells grow in that provides all of the food and nutrients and vitamins and minerals that they would otherwise be receiving in a body, and also removing things like waste products — things like carbon dioxide and other metabolites that build up during that cell’s life cycle.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. So it’s like: Which cells do you use? How do those cells get organised? How do you give them the little homes they need to attach to and thrive? How do you feed them? How do you remove their waste? And maybe there was one that I missed.

Seren Kell: There is a final one: the bioreactors themselves. People are using different types of bioreactor technology to develop cultivated meat, and there’s a lot of research that needs to be done there to make sure of the ideal sizes, the ideal ways to circulate nutrients around and remove waste products. Can you recycle cell culture media so that the overall production cost is less? Things like that. So there’s a lot of bioreactor technology and bioprocessing that’s involved as well.

Back to that $330,000 for one burger, Mark Post was growing the cells that became part of that burger at the same scale that I was doing tissue culture in a laboratory setting in these tiny little flasks. So, really inefficient. The process he was using was not the same that it would make sense to have a process at a large scale to produce meat for people to eat.

Luisa Rodriguez: Did it take him years or something to create enough?

Seren Kell: It did take a really long time. I can’t remember. At least months, I’m not sure if years. But yeah, a really long time.

Luisa Rodriguez: And then he was just layering it on top of each other to try to make a full piece, a bite?

Seren Kell: Yes, essentially. And there’s also the question of what cell types you’re using. Like, what are the cells that are in conventional meat? Muscle cells, obviously, fat cells, connective tissue cells — and there is complexity around how do you make sure that they’re interacting well with each other? Are the conditions for one cell type identical to the conditions for the other cell type? Do you want to start with other cell types which are much happier growing very quickly and just creating a lot of biomass, and then bring in a change in their conditions which triggers them to then transform into these more specialised, relevant cell types for meat? So there’s just a lot of complicated biology involved as well in actually understanding how these cells behave, and do they behave differently in different species, and things like that.

An organisation called CE Delft conducted a techno-economic assessment for cultivated meat production a couple years ago, which brought in data from a bunch of different companies in the sector to essentially model what it would look like to bring cultivated meat production costs down to something which is reasonable — essentially to pinpoint what the major research priorities are and what needs to be targeted. And essentially it came down to the cost of cell culture media.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, the media is the limiting factor. Interesting.

Seren Kell: Really expensive.

Luisa Rodriguez: What exactly is in it? Can you boil that down for me?

Seren Kell: It’s basically the food. It’s not quite this, but if you imagine Lucozade contains a bunch of sugars and salts and things that you need for your cells to be able to function. So it’s food, and then it’s other proteins which have important functional roles for directing how cells behave.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, I see. It’s like stack your cells in this way and become this kind of cell, or make friends with this other kind of cell.

Seren Kell: Or like you need to grow: you just keep on growing and dividing. And some of those components are extraordinarily expensive. All of the cell culture media, for the most part, that is being produced right now globally is for scientific research in labs or for the pharmaceutical industry. So it’s just very pricey to buy formulations which are totally free of any animal components and which function well and are at all affordable for this particular application.

So at GFI, our scientists in the US have done various analyses looking at how much the cell culture media needs to cost for it to be at all reasonable, and understanding what are ways in which one could otherwise source those really expensive ingredients in much cheaper ways and at much larger scales.

Luisa Rodriguez: And what’s the current gap? What’s the difference between how expensive cell media is right now and what it would need to be to be a viable, cost-competitive ingredient?

Seren Kell: If you’re looking at the current animal-component-free formulations on the market, you would be expecting to pay at least $300 or $400 per litre for that — whereas for cultivated meat applications, it would need to be around $1 per litre or less, ideally. So costs need to come down a lot.

There are other ways to reduce the effective cost of cell culture media. In this techno-economic assessment, there were some other possible research avenues that were suggested could be explored. Could you, for example, use metabolic engineering of the cells, such that they just require fewer of these signalling components, or they’re oversensitive to the signalling components, so you just need less of them?

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So they get like a tiny fraction of the growth hormone and then they are just like, we’re going to grow a lot, even though traditionally they’d need more of it to have that reaction.

Seren Kell: Exactly. Or they’re happy to grow in higher cell densities, so again, the total media you would need is less. There are some bioprocessing questions. So could you find ways to efficiently recycle cell culture media so that you’re removing waste products, but still able to have the value of some of the expensive components in the solution? And obviously there are ways in which you might just reduce the cost of cell culture media directly. So could you look to the plant kingdom and find things like hydrolysates? Taking things like chickpeas, processing those chickpeas into their constituent parts, and using those parts as functional equivalents of the very expensive components in cell culture media?

So there’s lots of really cool research happening in there. Actually last year, in GFI Europe, we partnered with an organisation called EIT Food, where we ran an Innovation Challenge to basically try and solve this problem. Four projects were funded off the back of that, and they were all using completely different and very cool approaches to trying to solve this problem. That was really exciting. It’s that kind of innovation that we’re hoping to see.

Luisa Rodriguez: Super cool. What are the most expensive parts of cell media?

Seren Kell: There’s a few different proteins. One of them is albumin. It has various different functions. One thing that albumin does is it binds other proteins in solution, so it has a bunch of different functions in cell culture media — not just interacting with the cells directly, but actually supporting other proteins in the cell culture media. And then there’s a couple of what we call growth factors, TGF-β and other proteins. Transferrin is another protein which is pretty expensive to produce.

Luisa Rodriguez: And that’s just because the ingredients to make those things, and the process to make them from whatever the starting points are, just happen to be really expensive right now and we haven’t figured out how to do it more cheaply?

Seren Kell: Yeah. And it’s not because by necessity they have to be or will always be expensive — it’s just that the cost incentives have never existed, because the market has always been people who are able to pay lots of money per litre and don’t use very much of it. So it’s a question of changing the economic incentives as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so really expensive right now, but no reason to think it has to stay that way. We just need people figuring out how to make them more cheaply.

Seren Kell: Yes, exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Three hundred times more cheaply. Are there any other challenges with cultivated meat that we still need to work through?

Seren Kell: In addition to the various technical challenges I mentioned, there are also the economic questions around scaling up. Specifically, it just costs a lot of money to scale up a production process like this. And for a lot of the startup companies, they just don’t have the kind of financing that they need. So one need is trying to find better ways to de-risk and support, providing the financial resources for these companies to scale up so that that can facilitate them actually getting access to the capital equipment, the infrastructure that they need at larger scales.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. How is that going? I feel like there was loads of interest in cultivated meat, and I imagine that came with more capital investment.

Seren Kell: There just needs to be much more. In 2022, there started to be more companies moving towards the demonstration scale. So they were starting to generate things like market samples, producing cultivated meat in the thousands of metric tonnes kind of scale. But obviously the final goal is to get to the industrial scale and be producing ideally millions of metric tonnes per year. More companies are getting closer to that stage, but we’re certainly not there, operating at full industrial scale.

Luisa Rodriguez: So those are some of the challenges. Have there been any big wins?

Seren Kell: I think one of the major wins from the last year really is the regulator approval for those two companies in the US.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah of course. And what’s the story there? I saw that in the news, and was like, that seems great, but I didn’t have a huge sense of how big of a barrier it was, how big of a hurdle. Was it always going to be a very hard thing? How did it happen? How huge does it feel?

Seren Kell: It feels really big. One of the biggest bottlenecks for alternative proteins being accessible is passing through regulatory approval, and it’s just never quick. And the regulatory framework in different jurisdictions can genuinely influence how much innovation happens in a space. For example, in Europe, despite the fact that Europe has been the home of much of the most exciting innovation in alternative proteins — and certainly has the scientific potential, if you look at our universities and things — a lot of companies starting in Europe, some of them are looking abroad to bring their products to market, because it’s just going to be so much slower for the regulatory approval to happen in Europe.

So I think it brings a lot of signalling power. I think it signals to other countries that this is a real thing, and it signals to industry and investors that regulation is not going to be a massive bottleneck, at least in Singapore and the US, so it incentivises more activity.

Luisa Rodriguez: If you make this, it’ll be possible to sell it to pretty big markets.

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great. So it sounds like we’ve been making steady progress. The first cultivated meat served cost $330,000, and I’m trying to remember what the last figure I would have heard, but I basically can’t. It felt like it was in the tens of thousands of dollars for a long time. Where are we now?

Seren Kell: Consumers have been able to buy cultivated meat in Singapore, and for those that have been, it’s been around $20 per serving. It is definitely worth me caveating that that GOOD Meat is selling them at a substantial loss due to limited production volumes and high costs.

The techno-economic assessment that I mentioned from CE Delft did identify that if there were the right public investment going into the sector and solving some of those technical challenges around reducing media costs and things like that, it showed that it could be possible to bring cultivated meat production costs down to about €4.68 per kilo by the year 2030.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. That’s amazing.

Seren Kell: Yeah. It shows that there is a pathway to get there, but it is contingent on this big “if” of public investment. If you look at where solar panels were in the 1990s, it exists, and for the sector more generally, they were available for very eco-conscious customers who are willing to pay a premium. But until there is significant public investment going into scaling up and solving some of those technical challenges, you won’t be able to have something which is genuinely accessible to most consumers and therefore making it a real displacement of the actual market.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So obviously there are science challenges to solve, but it almost sounds like the main challenge here is on the policy side: getting governments to believe that it’s worth their public investment to get the science needed done, to make cultivated meat possible at scale. And it’s not that the questions are impossible or overly difficult. It’s just that we’ve got to do the research, and research costs money. And once we do it with that money, we’ll have cultivated meat at €4 a kilo. Which just sounds incredible.

Seren Kell: Yeah, I think that’s right. Right now we have a roadmap for what making progress would look like, and what addressing the current uncertainty would look like. So we know enough to know that it is absolutely worth pursuing, and to know the scale of investment that needs to go in to pursue it. And we know enough to know that it’s not a writeoff entirely as a technology. But yeah, there is just a lot of uncertainty as to how to get there, and how to get that support from governments to get the sector there.

Luisa Rodriguez: How much funding do governments need to commit in order to get that research done?

Seren Kell: One report from the Rockefeller Foundation and BCG estimated that every single year, alternative proteins have an unmet funding need of around $40 billion. (This number is for what is needed from the private sector. For government investment, global public spending on RD&D and on commercialization needs to increase to at least US$4.4 billion and US$5.7 billion per year, respectively.)

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that’s big. It sounds like both a lot, but also, given the environmental benefits, would probably be well worth meeting.

Seren Kell: I think if you look at R&D budgets for companies, $40 billion at a global scale is actually a drop in the water compared to what is spent on other technologies.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. So we need people on the policy side convincing governments that that is a commitment they should be making.

Seren Kell: Yes. And I should say, crucially, there needs to be much more research funding going into the space, but there is also a very important role of scientists in continuing to flesh out and detail that roadmap for what the highest priority research areas and most promising avenues are to be going down. So we certainly need far more scientists moving into that space as well, but that is a function of research funding, and scientists don’t do research if there isn’t funding to pay for it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Makes sense. How are things looking on the consumer acceptance front? I imagine for many people, cultivated meat in particular seems kind of weird and sci-fi.

Seren Kell: So there are different ways that you can come at this question, because until very recently with cultivated meat, you weren’t able to test this in practice by seeing what consumers actually did. Much of the way that people answered this question was doing surveys, asking people, “How willing would you be to try cultivated meat? How much would you want to eat it?” One study showed that 80% of UK and US consumers are open to eating cultivated meat. Another study found that 66% of participants would be willing to try cultivated meat, and that included Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese speakers. GFI Europe has done some of our own research, and that suggests that 33% to 65% of consumers in Western Europe are willing to buy it.

There’s other ways you can look at this question. If you look at Singapore, people have been queuing around the block and waking up at crazy times to be able to get on the app to go and buy cultivated meat. So where we have data as to where they can, people really do want to. Obviously, that’s slightly different from everyone buying it when it’s readily available in supermarkets, but that’s a nice signal.

And I guess there is this wider point, which is that for the most part, people just aren’t eating meat because of how it’s made. For the most part, people are eating it really despite how it’s being made. And it just goes back to that original framework of taste, price, and convenience: those feel like the most important things to be actually influencing whether consumers decide to go and eat something.

GFI Europe’s work [01:32:47]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s talk more about GFI Europe’s work and how it’s helping with some of these challenges. Broadly, what does GFI do in Europe?

Seren Kell: GFI is an international nonprofit organisation, and what we do in Europe is similar to what we’re doing in the rest of the world — for example, in GFI US, GFI Brazil, GFI Israel, et cetera. Essentially, we are working with scientists, businesses, and policymakers to support that transition towards alternative proteins. So I can speak in much more detail about the science part of our work specifically, but essentially it’s working with the major actors who are important for food systems transition, and building the case for and making it easy for them to be involved in this, move into this space, support the development and scale-up of alternative proteins.

Luisa Rodriguez: And then you’re on the Science and Technology team. What is your team focusing on at the moment? What’s your top priority?

Seren Kell: So if we go back to the major requirements in alternative proteins — back to this framework of taste and price and accessibility — there are just really strong fundamental technical components to at least the first two of those: improving taste and reducing price.

And as GFI Europe, in our SciTech team, what that means in terms of what we’re trying to do is to build a really strong, well-supported, and well-coordinated research ecosystem. Specifically, we’re especially interested in open access research — so not having research happening that’s closed and kind of under IP, which might lead to a lot of duplication or potential kind of siloisation. We really want to have this brought into the public, and have lots of scientists working on this and publishing on what they’re doing.

So that’s the goal: to have a really strong and well-functioning research ecosystem doing open access research. In terms of how to do that, there’s a few different inputs that need to come into that. You need people, you need funding, and you need to ensure that for those who are working on it, that they’re actually working on the most important challenges and that they are collaborating effectively with each other. So that’s the kind of grounding of the levers that we’re trying to pull to support the research ecosystem.

Then in terms of how we split that up into actual roles or projects, it’s essentially targeting growth. So getting more scientists into the space and also building up that educational pipeline: Is there a way to bring in technical students? Do they have educational pathways? Are there courses and things that they can go and study to actually learn the science? And targeting actual well-established researchers to switch to spend some of their time working on the major research challenges. That’s the growth function.

Funding is obviously somewhat upstream of everything. You can’t do science unless it’s funded. So a major priority of ours is just getting more research funding into the space, and making sure that the funding that is available is being directed towards the most pressing research challenges.

And then the final bucket of activities in our SciTech work is supporting the research ecosystem: making sure that scientists are collaborating with one another, that they’re aware of what each other are doing, that they’re aware of the major research priorities, making sure that there isn’t a lot of redundancy and waste in the system.

Luisa Rodriguez: That seems great. Yeah, I guess it’s easy to imagine a bunch of scientists each chipping away at important separate problems, because that would be good. But in practice, probably what’s happening is like 10 scientists heard that one particular growth factor is really expensive, and they’re all trying to solve it in a way that’s just very duplication-y and not efficient. So you’re like, “They’ve got that covered. Work on something else.” That seems great.

Seren Kell: And crucially, if something doesn’t work. This is another reason that publishing research matters, and that there are conferences and ways —

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So other people aren’t exactly drawing the same experiments.

Seren Kell: Yeah. Not following the same dead ends. Exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. I guess here you’d really, really want scientists to know that a certain thing is a dead end and that you shouldn’t do it.

Seren Kell: Yeah, exactly. And then in terms of the question of what’s a major priority, going back to what the goal is — a strong and well-functioning research ecosystem — one major unit of science in universities is dedicated research centres. So not just a collection of labs or a collection of individuals, but a coordinated research effort at the level of a university or an institution who is really trying to solve a particular challenge in a super interdisciplinary way.

So this question of research centres is something that we’re increasingly interested in, and trying to understand, as an outside actor, the dials that we can be tweaking to try and support the development of these kinds of organic research centres growing to solve the major research challenges.

Luisa Rodriguez: Amazing. Well, thank you for doing that. That sounds really important. And I guess there must be a million things to work on. How do you decide which ones to focus on?

Seren Kell: One example is a project which last year a colleague in GFI undertook for a year, and this was called the More Project. Essentially it was looking at, because Europe is obviously huge and there’s a lot of work that we could be doing, and GFI Europe is very small relative to the scale of the continent of Europe —

Luisa Rodriguez: How big is your team?

Seren Kell: At the moment we’re about 25 people.

Luisa Rodriguez: And there’s loads to do. So yeah, prioritising seems important.

Seren Kell: Yeah. So there was this project that a colleague of ours undertook last year, and essentially it was taking a bunch of European countries and collecting information about these countries — like, What are their national R&D budgets? How many scientists do they have in the disciplines which are relevant for alternative proteins? How innovative do they tend to be? How much of that research tends to be quickly commercialised? Is there a big gap between academic research and industry and not a huge amount of coordination? So it was tracking a bunch of different things, the political factors and various other contextual elements.

And that essentially led to a prioritisation of which countries to target for trying to mobilise additional research funding going into the space. But it was also really helpful for flagging which countries to prioritise for that community growth aspect of our SciTech work.

Luisa Rodriguez: How so?

Seren Kell: Because research funding might increase if a government sees it’s within their other strategic priorities to support alternative proteins, but it’s also a function of the scientists themselves. If there’s enough scientists in a country working on X, that’s a signal to the government that they should be funding X, because they have scientists who can actually absorb that funding and do meaningful work with it.

So it seemed like from that mapping project, there were a couple of countries in Europe where it was more of a priority to actually focus on bringing more scientists into the community — because that was more the bottleneck for bringing research funding in than directly trying to target research funding itself. So that was one concrete example, which is really interesting.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that seems great. Are there any others?

Seren Kell: Another one that jumps to mind is that there are different approaches you could take for that community growth work. So you could just go out there and cold email a bunch of academics who are in the right disciplines and say, “Have you considered working on this research challenge? Here’s why you might be particularly well placed to do that.” But as you can expect, you might get a pretty high attrition rate with that. Academics are very busy, et cetera.

So one way in which we’re trying to target moving scientists into the space is actually just partnering with big scientific platforms that have big audiences of the right kinds of scientists. So partnering with the big scientific journals like Nature Biotechnology or Cell. Or professional associations: you’ll have networks of researchers, these professional societies that are essentially just collections of scientists in a particular discipline — like the European Plant Science Organisation — so partnering with people like them to essentially just get easy access to their audience, but obviously focusing on what plant scientists could contribute towards solving alt protein R&D challenges. So that’s been one thing we’ve been focusing on, is working with these various different strategic partners as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Has your team had any wins that you’re particularly proud of?

Seren Kell: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. I think we’ve built really strong relationships with certain research funders, which has been really helpful, so we can essentially provide a service to them by providing knowledge of the major research priorities. We’ve had some really good traction, for example, with UK Research and Innovation in the UK.

Another example I would say is this joint Innovation Challenge that we ran with EIT Food. So the brief was for scientists to essentially come up with new and innovative ways to bring down the costs of cell culture media. We partnered with EIT Food, and four projects were funded off the back of that. Those projects have now had a few months to actually get underway and start doing things, and they’ve had some really good results off the back of it, and I’m quite optimistic that those projects will be able to pull in much more research funding now from other sources to actually continue that work, and hopefully bring it to market for the cultivated meat sector to be using.

Luisa Rodriguez: Amazing. That just seems like such a cool idea. I love that.

Seren Kell: So we’re getting a lot of external funding coming to the space which wouldn’t otherwise have gone to the space. And something I would touch on there is: If your goal is bringing more research funding to the space, you can have this top-down approach, where you’re directly working with and supporting research funders. But there’s also this bottom-up approach — through, for example, this EIT Food challenge that we did, or through GFI’s annual grant programme, which is a recurring grant programme. Scientists are funded, and it kind of creates this groundswell at the bottom level, where they are then much better placed and much more able to apply for followup funding from public sources in the future.

There was a really lovely example of this recently. Professor Marianne Ellis at the University of Bath — who had received some GFI funding in the past and also some funding from other organisations, I think New Harvest, for example — applied with a bunch of other academics and with a bunch of other companies in the UK. They built this large-scale consortium and applied for a big grant from one of the UK government’s funding agencies, and were successful in receiving this grant. That was £12 million from an agency that hadn’t really funded anything in alternative proteins before, but she was well placed to apply for them because she’s a chemical engineer, and they fund that kind of science. She knew what a good proposal would look like to be submitted to an agency like that.

So that was just a really nice example of the importance of having complementary approaches — top-down but also bottom-up, supporting the research community to do their own work to bring more funding into the space.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. So GFI Europe’s role was kind of providing enough initial funding that she was able to do enough work to then have a good proposal to submit that was for a much bigger amount?

Seren Kell: Yes. I should say that her funding came from our grant programme, which is led by the US team, and this wasn’t exclusive GFI funding. Marianne had been funded from other people as well. But funding researchers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to do the research, which is often true in a new research field, is a really good way to build up that momentum, such that it can then be self-perpetuating in the future.

Careers [01:45:10]

Luisa Rodriguez: It sounds like a huge part of your work involves field building, which makes you in a really good position to speak to what kinds of careers can contribute the most to advancing alternative proteins. What kinds of scientists do you need? And what will their backgrounds look like? We’ve talked a little bit about some of the required skills, but what’s the full range?

Seren Kell: I think part of the reason it’s such an exciting space is because it is just so interdisciplinary. We have different kinds of science — plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation — and a bunch of different scientific challenges within that. And then, obviously, this is food, and you’re making real products that you want people to buy and eat. So a bunch of different science areas — agricultural sciences, animal sciences, chemistry, computational biology, fermentation science. I won’t give an exhaustive list, but essentially, if someone has a background in the natural sciences, they can almost certainly contribute to addressing some of the technical challenges in alternative proteins. And we do have a list on our website of what these technical challenges are.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, amazing. We’ll link to that.

Seren Kell: And we have a list of priority disciplines as well that we can definitely share.

Luisa Rodriguez: Perfect. I imagine it might feel daunting to someone who’s like, “Great, my discipline is in that list, but I work on this other thing.” Can GFI Europe, or are there institutions that can help people transition from a related but not directly relevant field of expertise to actually contributing to some of these really important open questions?

Seren Kell: Yes, absolutely. We have developed a bunch of different resources that can help people move into this space. My main advice would be to go to gfieurope.org/science, because there’s lots of things in there and I won’t be able to talk through all of them.

We have a resource guide for newcomers to the space, which essentially overviews what the main challenges are and what the path forwards might look like. We have things like a jobs board and a talent database that people can add themselves to. We have online communities, so if you want to actually meet people and see who you should be talking with — and, if you’re already an established researcher, identify potential collaborators — we have a bunch of different mechanisms to support and facilitate that. And we also have a funding database, so if you already have an idea of a specific project, you could check out that to see what it would look like to actually get the resources required to fund it and do it. And obviously we do have our grants programme as well to fund scientists directly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Awesome. It sounds like there’s loads of support there, so that’s really cool. Are there skills besides scientist-ish shaped things that you’d be excited to get involved in the work? I know it’s not your area of expertise, but it does sound like there’s a lot of policy work that needs to be done, people convincing governments to allocate public funds for this kind of thing. So I imagine something there. Anything else?

Seren Kell: Yeah, a bunch of roles in the commercial space, so if you’re at all entrepreneurial, or you’re interested in working in a kind of VC for example, there’s a bunch of different opportunities to get involved to support alternative proteins. Teaching, education, helping to build that pipeline of scientists who can move into the space. Science comms and science communication is obviously going to be really important for this sector. Policy roles. You’ve walked through other nonprofit roles. There are bodies like GFI and others who are doing a bunch of different work to try and support the sector. So there are a range of different roles that could be part of that. And there are lots of people in this space who don’t have a technical background and are contributing a lot to the sector in social sciences as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sounds like a little bit of everything. Which makes sense, because this field is huge and ambitious and trying to change a huge part of the way the world works. But it sounds like maybe the key thing here is we’ll link to this jobs board and some of these lists, and it sounds like there are going to be lots of places where people can slot in. So that’s very cool.

How often is GFI Europe hiring? And maybe your team in particular?

Seren Kell: We often have open roles in GFI Europe. My best advice would be to just go to our website to check out whatever we have available at that particular point in time, because it obviously can change quite quickly. But do check it out because we often are hiring, and if not, you can go to the jobs board to see a bunch of other roles that are also live in the sector right now.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. And if people don’t have skills that end up seeming particularly relevant to alternative proteins, is there another way they can help?

Seren Kell: Yeah, absolutely. GFI Europe is entirely funded by philanthropy, so it is worth stating that everything that we do is only made possible by donors. So if you’re looking to support the sector through ways other than your time or your career, then that could be a really promising option for you.

The best part of Seren’s job [01:50:07]

Luisa Rodriguez: Well, that actually is all of the time we have for today. But I did want to ask you one final question: What’s the best part of your job?

Seren Kell: That’s a hard one to answer. From my perspective, it feels like the obvious thing, that I can’t not say, is that it’s having the opportunity to work on something which you care really deeply about and which genuinely is the most efficient way to address some of the biggest challenges we have right now. So that’s just deeply fulfilling.

But on the day to day, it’s the content of the work itself. So really varied projects, really exciting. If you’re someone like me, who’s interested in science and how science works and how you can drive innovation, this is the most fascinating use case to look at that in real time. And my colleagues are just amazing. I really enjoy working with the people I get to at GFI. Everyone’s incredibly warm and kind, but also just really talented and really good at what they do, which is awesome.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I imagine it’s a really lovely field to work in. It’s a bunch of people motivated by pressing problems and really interested in kind of nerdy sciency things that it sounds like you can share with them. I get the impression that lots of applied science fields can end up seeming kind of mundane or boring, but a lot of these questions just sound actually pretty fascinating and really varied, and cover loads of different subfields of these natural sciences. So it sounds like actually, if you’re a scientist, it’s just a pretty awesome thing to work on intellectually. You don’t have to sacrifice getting to work on something interesting in order to work on something meaningful.

Seren Kell: Yeah, I think you’ve put that exactly right. It’s a very new field, it’s so interdisciplinary. There’s so much low-hanging fruit conceptually in terms of what can be done. It’s not like an incredibly well-established research field, where everyone is trying to solve the same set of questions, and it’s a really crowded space, and you’re probably hitting pretty diminishing returns in terms of what a certain amount of time or resource can do. It’s just this explosion of activity, and it has a lot of creativity that is needed to solve these challenges well. So if you are at all technically minded and excited about interesting scientific questions, I genuinely —

Luisa Rodriguez: — as opposed to those people who are really excited about boring ones —

Seren Kell: Yeah, I probably shouldn’t… Well, I think this is changing now, but I think over the last few decades, it has been the case that some research fields have developed to a point where people are working on one very specific problem: it’ll be their pet protein that they dedicate their entire career to, say, or something like that. And I think that kind of thinking isn’t really going to cut it in alternative proteins. You have to be collaborating with so many people and thinking about the bigger picture. So it’s a very cool space to be in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Awesome. I love that. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Seren.

Seren Kell: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a really great conversation.

Luisa’s outro [01:53:31]

Luisa Rodriguez: All right, if you enjoyed that episode, you might want to check out our other episodes on factory farming:

• #99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
• #91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
• #20 – Bruce Friedrich makes the case that inventing outstanding meat replacements is the most effective way to help animals
• #8 – Lewis Bollard on ending factory farming as soon as possible

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire.

Additional content editing by myself and Katy Moore, who also puts together full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more — those are available on our site.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.