Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz HIBT Lab! New Culture: Matt Gibson and Inja Radman About this episode It’s hard not to love cheese: feta, brie, gruyère, parmesan, pepper jack, mozzarella, asiago...it’s all delicious! But there’s a downside — cheese production is quite taxing on the environment, with dairy cows being one of the leading contributors to carbon emissions worldwide.
That’s where Matt Gibson and Inja Radman step in. They’re the founders of New Culture, a company developing real dairy cheese, but without using cows or any other animal product.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Matt and Inja discuss their innovative and sustainable approach to cheese-making, and the partnerships they’ve secured with major food distributors to roll out their product starting next year. Plus, we hear how Matt and Inja first connected on LinkedIn, deciding to launch a company together from across the world before ever meeting in person.
This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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5:13 Guy Raz? Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So industrialized animal farming can be incredibly environmentally destructive. According to the UN, the meat and dairy industries produce 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. You've heard us talk about this before on the show. That is as much as all cars, commercial trucks, planes, and ships combined. And believe it or not, when it comes to specific foods, industrialized, mass-produced cheese is one of the worst offenders. Which I know it's hard to hear, because we love cheese. Well, this is a problem that two entrepreneurs, Matt Gibson and Inja Rodman, decided to take on. But there was just one problem.
5:55 Guy Raz? They felt like most plant-based vegan cheeses just didn't cut it. They don't melt in the same way. And they wanted to see if they could make something with a bit more cheesy deliciousness. But how do you make cheese with all of that cheesy goodness without a cow? Well, to answer that question, Matt and Inja founded their company, New Culture. They're now manufacturing a dairy protein called casein. It's what gives cheese many of its cheesy qualities, like the ability to stretch and melt and become gooey. And they're making casein without any animals.
6:30 Guy Raz? Right now, New Culture is working on its first product. It's a mozzarella cheese that plans to roll out to pizzerias in 2024. Matt and Inja actually met over the internet. They grew up on opposite sides of the world. Inja in Croatia and Matt in New Zealand, where he was never far from the dairy industry. And in 2013, after working for a tech startup, Matt was inspired to take his career in a new direction, pursuing this new field of meat alternatives. But all he needed was a co-founder.
7:01 Speaker 01 For any startup to be successful, you need a really strong co-founder. And for me, I knew I needed a co-founder that was super strong on the science, but also was completely aligned from a values point of view. And I remember talking to a colleague and I said, how do I find a co-founder that I require these very specific attributes? And that person said, hey, look on LinkedIn, be a recruiter. So I bought LinkedIn Premium. I had no geographic restrictions and I just started searching. And I had a little three-sentence pitch that I would send people that had the right backgrounds. And I would have these conversations with people. I'd tell them what my vision was.
7:44 Speaker 01 I had a little document that I would share with them. And I was doing this for months and months and months. And one day I came across Inja's profile.
7:53 Guy Raz? Wow. All right, Inja, you were, well, living, I think, in the UK at the time. You're originally from Croatia and you had graduated. You'd done a PhD at Cambridge in molecular biology. You get this sort of unsolicited note on LinkedIn from this guy in New Zealand, saying, hey, I want to create a cell-based ag company, like make alternative animal products. What did you think when you got that message?
8:23 Speaker 02 Um, I know it sounds crazy and it was actually kind of crazy, but that's exactly what happened. And um, you know, it's important to understand where I was at the time in my life. I was working in London uh in consulting in business in a very different field. I left academia by that point. And in this moment in time, I felt I had no purpose anymore. And I wanted to find that purpose again. And so I was at the time when Matt contacted me on a really strong personal journey of um, reading endlessly, you know, international uh climate reports. Um, I was really obsessed actually with um, understanding food problems, climate problems, food waste and waste problems.
9:07 Speaker 02 And so when Matt contacted me, I started to apply for jobs in this field. Um, but not thinking of a startup anymore, you know, going more for policy government. And so it was out of a blue message. It was so different and it said something like, you know, I'm starting Clean Dairy Company. I didn't even know what Clean Dairy meant. I had to Google it and it just was different. It caught my attention. Uh, there was this photo of a guy jumping um, out of plane with a parachute. Matt was doing like skydiving.
9:37 Guy Raz? That's his, it was his LinkedIn profile picture.
9:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's his LinkedIn profile picture and all the other messages I was getting were some, you know, corporate recruiters and um. Yeah, it definitely stood out and I thought, wow, let me hear what this guy has to say.
9:51 Guy Raz? Huh. All right. So the two of you uh start talking and and how does it go from two people from opposite sides of the world talking about a business idea to to actually meeting up in person and bringing it to life? Like, how did you decide, you know, what what you first wanted to do together?
10:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I was very open with Inja when we first met. I said, I want two key things for your culture to be a success. One is to find an amazing co-founder. Check. The second thing is to get into this incubator program called IndieBio. It's a biotech incubator program. So there's been some pretty amazing companies that have come out of it. But what had made it famous was really it was the incubator program where some of the key companies that we know today, especially in the cultivated meat space um went through.
10:38 Guy Raz? Hmm.
10:39 Speaker 01 And so Inja was game, just as I was, to pack out bags and and be in San Francisco at least for four months, which is how long the program is for. And we'll see if we can actually make this work.
10:52 Guy Raz? Wait, so this is, just out of curiosity, Ania, I mean, it's a huge leap of faith to found a company with like a lifelong friend. Because we've done many, many of these episodes in our show where those friendships unravel, right? This is somebody you would never, you didn't know. This is a complete stranger, right?
11:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:10 Guy Raz? And of course, you know, you're talking and you've got video calls and, but I mean, you are going to move to the United States and join this incubator and leave your job. What, what gave you faith? Like, what, what was like the intuition you had to trust that Matt was the person to do this with?
11:29 Speaker 02 Matt, he was just so impressively immersed into this space. You know, he knew everything about every company that came out of this space. He, he really told me all these inspiring, you know, stories around how people can today make food using this technology. And to be honest, to me, I was a protein scientist my whole life. So my whole academic training, my research was on protein science and protein engineering, not for food, but for neuroscience, for biomedical application. And as I said, I was looking to work in something really meaningful in battling climate change. And here was this guy telling me that, hey, today, all the technology in molecular biology
12:11 Speaker 02 that, you know, you've been using in your academic career, people are now trying to repurpose to make food proteins. And that was mind blowing to me. And it was just so unique. It seemed so serendipitous that I could use my actual academic training and background that I could go back to using that to now work on these problems that I deeply care about and that I want to dedicate my life to. And it just seemed like such a, you know, once in a lifetime opportunity. And it seemed like a great risk and it seemed very crazy. And, you know, I had to tell to my parents and friends overnight that, hey, I'm leaving my job. I have to find someone to give this flat to. I have to sort my whole life out overnight and I'm going to do this.
12:53 Speaker 02 And frankly, they thought I was crazy and, and they, they thought this was a spam and, you know, is someone going to murder you? And like, honestly, it was, it was pretty intense at the time, but I just had this very strong drive and motivation and trust in Matt and the way he approached this problem and how honest and genuine he was through the process, that I just knew I had to do this.
13:16 Guy Raz? Yeah. So let me ask you that. Why cheese? I mean, first of all, I'm not, this is not a critique. I love cheese. I'm just curious. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you could pursue. And we talked about on the show before that, you know, obviously livestock production accounts for like 15% of global carbon emissions.
13:37 Guy Raz? Meat, obviously, is a huge part of that. Presumably dairy is a significant part of that. So why did you decide to focus on cheese?
13:46 Speaker 02 You know, our mission and vision is focused on impact, right? And the understanding which foods are the most unsustainable to produce and where we could have the biggest impact by displacing them. And then second, really important thing for us was understanding where, you know, in this opportunity of dairy alternatives, where have plant-based alternatives done fair justice? Where they've done really good job displacing dairy products from the market? And when you look at those two angles, it becomes very obvious how big of a, of a challenge cheese is. So cheese is one of the most unsustainable food products, not just dairy products.
14:28 Guy Raz? Yeah.
14:28 Speaker 02 Globally, and many people don't know this, frankly.
14:31 Guy Raz? Yeah, I was reading that it can take like, something like 30 to over 60 bathtubs full of water to make a single block of cheese, which I didn't know. It's a lot of water.
14:41 Speaker 02 That is correct. You will see milk, right? It's mainly liquid. You basically shrink that liquid to, to something that's just, you're extracting solids from it. That's what cheese is.
14:50 Guy Raz? Right. Because I think milk is like 90% of water, right?
14:54 Speaker 02 Exactly. Yeah.
14:55 Guy Raz? Yeah, because I make yogurt and when I, I'll put in like a gallon of milk into my pot and then you get like three pints of yogurt out of that.
15:01 Speaker 02 Yes. And cheese is even worse, right? Because you are actually completely shrinking that milk product down to what is valuable, what matters, which is the solids in it. So first big problem is that unsustainability of dairy cheese production. And it's not just water use that is where it's really ridiculous, but also greenhouse gas emissions and land use. Cheese is the third worst product globally of all food products to produce, after beef and lamb.
15:27 Guy Raz? Wow. After beef and lamb. Wow.
15:30 Speaker 02 Exactly. So for us, you know, that was really striking. And then second thing that exacerbated this problem is that Matt and I were both personally eating a lot of alternatives, but it was obvious that people were not buying and eating plant-based cheese. That was not a category that took over.
15:47 Guy Raz? Right, because it's just not that, well, I mean, some of the cheese spreads are fine, like the cream cheeses. But yeah, I mean, I actually once made cashew cheese. And it's, you know, it's pretty good. But yeah, it doesn't, let's be honest, it just don't generally do the same thing that cheese does.
16:04 Speaker 02 It does not. And you know, from the scientific point of view, we could immediately identify, there was this clear relationship of like, what was lacking? What is the hero ingredient? And, you know, turns out that nature is so smart and miraculous. And it created these casein proteins. So it's a, it's a group of proteins that are found only in mammalian milk in nature. And really, these proteins directly are responsible for making cheese cheesy, for making cheese able to melt and stretch and give it all of these properties that we love about dairy cheese. They inherently come from this casein protein.
16:45 Speaker 02 So that really focused us and told us, we have to be solving the cheese puzzle. This is like where we can have biggest impact.
16:53 Guy Raz? We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Matt and Inja on how exactly they're developing this cheese without the use of any animals. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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20:49 Guy Raz? Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guests are Matt Gibson and Inja Rodman, two strangers from different parts of the world who in 2018 decided to work together on the first animal-free dairy cheese, and they completely uprooted their lives to do it. All right, so the two of you meet for the first time in San Francisco in 2019. This is the evening before the two of you start in this biotech accelerator. And that's it. Like, you're going to be there for four months. And I think neither of you at this point, or maybe I'm wrong, had you actually been in a lab working on this problem, like physically working on trying to make this work? Or were you going to start trying at that point?
21:35 Speaker 01 Um. Well, I had done some very basic experiments in my parents' kitchen. So if you can call that lab work, then you know.
21:45 Guy Raz? Yeah, no, fair enough.
21:46 Speaker 01 And I basically, what I tried to do is to say, well, can I actually make a reasonably tasty cheese product? If I just start with casein protein, I add some fats, I add some water, kind of reconstitute milk, and then take it through the cheese baking process. You know, will that give me something that resembles cheese and something that's relatively tasty? And it does. So that was one thing that I did at home that I've been very excitedly telling Andy about. And actually sent to Indi Bio as part of our application, this tiny little cheese I had made in my kitchen that, you know, wasn't actually refrigerated when it was sent to them. So I'm happily, they didn't get sick when they ate it two weeks later. But um, there was been some very basic things done.
22:29 Speaker 01 But really, the the majority of the core work that we did on the cheesemaking, on the casein protein production was all done in those four months at Indi Bio.
22:39 Guy Raz? Let me kind of ask you about the the science of this for a moment. And obviously, I'm not a scientist. We we had Pat Brown of Impossible Foods on the show a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about the leg hemoglobin, um, you know, in the nodules of the of the soy plant, that that was a key component of producing a meaty kind of texture in Impossible Foods. And that sort of that bleeding, um, you know, what it looks like it sort of bleeds is obviously not really blood. And and maybe that's not a great parallel, but essentially, casein, right, this casein protein found in in dairy, in animal dairy products, you can actually make this casein protein without requiring an animal. You can make it outside of an animal.
23:21 Speaker 02 Correct. You can absolutely make this casein protein not requiring an animal. And that is what we are doing. There is a very interesting fact in the natural world that all creatures or organisms, we speak the same language, you know, it's a language of genetic information of our DNA. And what that really enables us to do is to use. That same language in a slightly different way. To employ these tiny little microorganisms, you know, they're the organisms that have been on earth for as long as we we almost know it. And we can instruct them and encode them to not produce just what they usually do.
24:02 Speaker 02 But we can actually instruct them and tailor them to produce casein protein for us. And so what people have been doing for years, you know, if you think of, for example, probiotics or cultures in yogurt. People have been isolating from various places on earth, you know, from all kinds of lakes and ponds and nature.
24:21 Guy Raz? Right.
24:21 Speaker 02 And collecting and harvesting and storing these microbes and then cultivating them for actually thousands of years. And so we can literally go and and buy microbes that people have been collecting like this. And we can get that DNA instruction, we can insert it into the microbe. And grow and cultivate microbe in various conditions. This is what's called precision fermentation. Where we really tweak and tailor the nutrients and oxygen and energy, everything to this microbe to be optimal for it to produce. Our very valuable hero ingredient, which is the casein protein.
24:55 Guy Raz? So you essentially can direct these microbes to produce casein, which is is sort of identical in its DNA. It's structured to the casein found in, you know, in dairy milk.
25:08 Speaker 02 Correct. So we can exactly use the DNA information. That a cow would use to produce its own casein that you will find in milk that turns into cheese. And we can use that same information without actually ever seeing a cow, without ever touching the animal.
25:24 Guy Raz? Wow. Let me ask you about what you can do. Once you have produced the casein, like essentially you can make any cheese from it, right?
25:33 Speaker 02 You can make any cheese from it, and it goes even further than that. You can make any dairy product. In, you know, far superior way than you can make with any other alternative on the market. And you can make any cheese in the world you can think of using casein protein. Which makes you empowered, but you know paralyzed that where to start.
25:54 Guy Raz? Yeah, like you can make blue cheeses, you can make.
25:58 Guy Raz? Parmesan cheeses, hard cheeses, you can make brie, soft cheese, I mean, anything.
26:02 Speaker 02 Yes, because all cheeses are actually made in a very similar way, you know.
26:07 Guy Raz? Right. Starts with milk.
26:08 Speaker 02 Exactly.
26:10 Guy Raz? All right. So you decide mozzarella and I'm assuming because mozzarella is probably the best selling cheese in the US or obviously used on pizzas. Is that, is that right?
26:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. So mozzarella is definitely the best selling cheese in the US, very much thanks to pizza. And also as a cheese itself, mozzarella is really quick to make. I mean, you can start with milk and make a mozzarella in 30 minutes. You know, if you compare that to like a Parmesan where you can sometimes wait 12 months until you, that is ready to consume. From this idea of, okay, let's iterate this experiment, let's see if it tastes good, let's try again. We could have that cycle time incredibly quick for mozzarella. Now pairing that with the gigantic market size that it is, we felt like mozzarella was the biggest opportunity for us in a way that we could solve very quickly because
27:02 Speaker 01 we can experiment quickly, we can make the cheese quickly, and we can improve it very quickly.
27:08 Guy Raz? And so you decide that we're going to start with like a buffalo mozzarella ball, like a wet mozzarella ball, or more like the drier mozzarella that, you know, you shred and you throw on a pizza?
27:19 Speaker 02 It's interesting you ask that because we, we played with both ideas. And in the early days, while we were at Indie Bio, we were fully focused on what's called fresh mozzarella. So that like very moist ball of mozzarella.
27:31 Guy Raz? Yeah.
27:31 Speaker 02 And, you know, that was coming from the fact that that was so challenging and so exciting to make. It was like a queen of cheeses. And frankly, my bias being Southern Croatian and raised on very close to Italian diet.
27:45 Guy Raz? Yeah.
27:45 Speaker 02 But that, again, what, what was our mission? Why are we doing this? We want to displace large amount of cheese that comes from animals as soon as possible. And we realized that just when we were finishing Indie Bio and a few months down the line. And we said, well, if we pivot to low moisture mozzarella, so the product that you can actually store for longer, that can have longer shelf life, that you can shred, and that is the most consumed cheese in this country, we can have that impact.
28:13 Guy Raz? Yeah, I guess one of the huge advantages of being involved in an incubator like that is they have like a demo day for investors and you guys were able to raise a seed round, three and a half million dollars out of, out of your time there. So you clearly impressed people with, with this cheese that you, you made and presumably people sampled it. And then the pandemic happens. So I have to imagine 2020.
28:37 Guy Raz? You guys are just, maybe in some ways it was a good year for you because you didn't have to focus on, you know, I mean, you could just kind of sort of get your head down and be in the lab and work on the product.
28:48 Speaker 01 Well, you would think that. I mean, things were, things were looking really good, right? As you mentioned, we'd closed our seed round, we were building the team. It was really exciting what we had planned for the next 12 to 18 months. And then the pandemic happened. And so that was really what paused the lab work because none of us had labs at home and we couldn't do any experiments in. And it was actually a really tough time. And you know, and you can comment on this far more than me, but we so much work planning, experiments, analyzing data, really making sure that when we came back to the lab, we knew exactly what to do. And when we did come back to the lab, three months later,
29:32 Speaker 01 it was one of our most productive and successful few months in the lab because everything just worked so well because so much planning and thought had gone into it.
29:41 Guy Raz? All right. So, so now you're spending all this time really sort of creating this first product. And by the way, this is the product that will come out soon. And I know you've subsequently raised a lot more money because I mean, this is a cash intensive proposition that you guys have gotten into. Tell me about the cheese. Is it indistinguishable? I mean, if you were to blind taste test it, do you think most people would be fooled?
30:08 Speaker 02 We do that, Guy, all the time, actually, internally and for our guests. There's been so many people who have actually tasted our cheese and their responses have been mind blowing. And the responses have been that it is indistinguishable or nearly indistinguishable to the dairy cheese. So with food products, there's always room for improvement and getting feedback from consumers, which we're really excited to be doing this year and next year. But with limited feedback we could get so far, we're really proud with where the product is today.
30:42 Guy Raz? Now, there are obviously other companies who have been working on this. And some of them focus on like ice cream and yogurt. Again, you go to the ice cream aisle, at least in California now, and it seems like there are more plant-based ice creams than dairy milk ice creams, which is, you know, that's another conversation. But like, it seems like everyone's making oat ice cream and cashew ice cream and, you know, all these alternatives now. You're making a dairy product, dairy cheese, right? But what's different about how you're making it versus some of these other companies that are also making, you know, animal-free dairy products?
31:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, I think, as Inja mentioned previously, we're making casein protein. Now, there's actually two classes of dairy protein in milk. That's casein protein and whey protein. A lot of companies that are looking to do some of the things what we're doing, creating animal-free dairy, are focused on whey protein. Whey protein is a great protein, super functional. You can make a lot of delicious ice cream and yogurt and cream cheese, but it is not a cheese-making protein. Casein protein is uniquely what gives cheese the stretch, the melt, that texture that we will love.
32:02 Guy Raz? Right.
32:03 Speaker 01 And the reason why not as many companies are focused on casein is because it is an incredibly difficult protein. It is super complex, super unique. And you have to really spend a number of years just solving all the problems that casein protein brings to the microbes, to the fermentation, to the recovery, to start to get it to work. And from day one at New Culture, we essentially said, our focus is cheese, therefore our focus is casein, and we're going to place all our bets on casein. We're not going to give ourselves any outs. We're not going to hedge our bets, we either succeed in casein or we fail as a company. And I fundamentally believe, for a problem as difficult as casein, you have to have that mindset. You have to focus 100%.
32:46 Guy Raz? We're going to take a quick break, but when we return, more from Matt and Inja about the steps they're taking to bring their animal-free products to the global market. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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34:44 Guy Raz? Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guests today are Matt Gibson and Emilia Rodman, who founded the animal-free dairy startup New Culture in 2018, and they're looking to take on the massive global dairy industry.
34:58 Guy Raz? So all right, so let's talk about the rollout here because I think you've got a product. It's ready to go, but obviously there are, I have to imagine there are some regulatory steps that have to be taken as the FDA and other agencies have to make sure it's safe and so on, so forth. When can the public, you know, try this cheese?
35:19 Speaker 01 Next year. We are planning to launch our cheese into food service. First of all, into some select restaurants early next year. Really excited for that. We've been lucky to, to work with really amazing chefs, but the goal is to first launch into restaurants with chefs and then expand nationwide from there.
35:44 Guy Raz? Right. So here, here's a question, right? I mean, the, the dairy industry, and understandably so, is very protective over what qualifies for being dairy. For the last, I think 20 years, or maybe longer, 40 years, milk consumption has been on a decline in the US for sure, and probably other countries around the world. And so, you know, what's called dairy, what's called milk, you know, that's been an issue. What are you going to call the product? Are you going to call it, just call it cheese?
36:13 Speaker 01 That's a good question. And, you know, that's something that, not in the new culture, but a lot of companies in this space are working through together. What can and can't we call it, based on what the current regulations are? You may have seen the FDA just came out with guidance on what the plant-based industry can call milk and-
36:31 Guy Raz? Right. And you can now call almond milk, milk?
36:34 Speaker 01 Yes. And I think we're really excited through early conversations with the FDA and, and, you know, they understands that this is fast becoming the future, right? This is where the food industry is heading towards. And you know, they're starting to recognize that. And so we're hopeful that there'll be more clarity around labeling and naming for um for us and other companies in this field going forward. By launching a food service, it's not so much of a concern for us as it would be if we launched in retail. Um, you're gonna see on the menu a new culture pizza um or new culture cheese. And that's different from a labeling point of view than going into a grocery store and and sort of going to the cheese shelf and seeing what those cheeses are calling themselves.
37:19 Guy Raz? Right. But I mean, I mean, so essentially you are going to to kind of lean on the brand name. So, you know, made with new culture cheese. And I guess people could ask what that is. But I mean, i- if if a plant-based cheese made out of cashews or whatever is sold, I think it's it's clear, right? I mean, in your view, do you think you need to differentiate it? Do you think you need to make it clear that this is not an animal product? Or do you think it's better to just put it out there and, you know, let people buy your block of cheese or another block of cheese?
37:53 Speaker 02 We do think it's very important actually to to differentiate it. And we are currently talking about, as I said, a novel category that doesn't exist. It's a third category. And we tend to call it animal-free dairy. And those two things can seem contradictory at first, but what animal-free means is that it's free of any source or origin of coming from animals. It doesn't come from animals. What dairy means is that our protein is bio-identical to dairy product found in milk. And while that gives it all these beautiful traits and amazing advantages, it also means that, you know, people who are allergic to natural dairy, dairy from animal milk will be equally allergic to our dairy.
38:38 Guy Raz? Right.
38:38 Speaker 02 So frankly, we have to call it dairy and make sure that the consumer understand that there is a real dairy protein in there. It just doesn't come from animals. And equally, our product is a vegan product because it does not require any animal to be involved in any way in that process. So this is not fully a plant-based category. This is this novel third category. And we as a field with other companies are probing and working on that nomenclature. But currently, the name we mainly use is animal-free dairy.
39:11 Guy Raz? You know, I'm curious about the sort of the overall industry, right? I mean, as I mentioned, dairy products have been on the decline overall for a while. Obviously, not necessarily cheese and yogurt, but people have just consumed fewer dairy products in the United States and even in other countries. And that's not for environmental reasons, they're just for a variety of reasons, just not. How do you think the sort of the animal-free dairy world, like your products, fit into that picture?
39:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, one thing for sure is that a lot of dairy products have been reducing in consumption. Cheese has actually bucked that trend and is increasing. And so from going out and speaking with consumers and speaking with chefs, PCLs, you name it, it's clear that there was such a want and often need for a animal-free product that actually functions like cheese, that actually stretches, that actually melts, that actually tastes like the real thing. And there's a wave of anticipation for that. And we're also very realistic in understanding that this is a long-term game.
40:26 Speaker 01 I mean, there is a lot of people we'll classify as early adopters that will immediately gravitate towards what we're producing. So people like me that are vegan, people that are lactose intolerant, people that are super-conscious of the environmental footprints of their food consumption. But at the end of the day, a lot of people, all they care about is the price, the taste and the convenience of the food products that they're consuming.
40:52 Guy Raz? Yeah.
40:52 Speaker 01 And that's where we eventually do want to get to. Our goal at New Culture is to create a cheese where no matter who you are, no matter what dietary restrictions you have or what you believe in, you'll just want to consume your culture cheese.
41:08 Guy Raz? I think you now have about 30 employees. You've raised a bit more than almost $30 million. And I know you signed a kind of an agreement with ADM, the huge agribusiness, to help you kind of distribute this and kind of jumpstart the mozzarella and get to pizzerias. And tell me what your long-term sort of vision is. I mean, do you, do you want what you guys are producing to one day be so indistinguishable? Maybe you're already there, but to be so indistinguishable from animal-based cheese that it essentially replaces the need to make cheese from, from animal products?
41:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, our vision is to lead the global transition to an animal-free dairy future. And that is exactly what we are planning to do. We want to produce the best dairy products or to enable others to produce the best dairy products that is going to make consumers think it is a no-brainer to now consume new culture-enabled cheeses or yogurts, or you name it. And, you know, it's going to take a long time to get there. The dairy industry is gigantic, and it's going to require the help, the partnership from a lot of established food companies. And it's great to have, you know,
42:31 Speaker 01 large companies like ADM, like Kraft Heinz, like CJ's, that have clearly shown that they understand that this technology is part of the future, that, that precision fermentation-powered food products are going to become the norm in a few years' time. And they can really support us in those global aspirations.
42:53 Guy Raz? And if that happens, if humans no longer, you know, are no longer producing cheese from animal milk, give me a sense of what, what kind of impact that could have on, you know, on carbon emissions, for example?
43:08 Speaker 02 It is very clear that we are at the last precipice, last minute of trying to curb those emissions. And given that, you know, between 20 and 30% of emissions come from agriculture, and majority of that comes from animal agriculture. And again, we talked about the problem of the cow, you know? That is not so clearly spoken about, but... Cows are the animals that contribute the most of all animals to the emissions. And cows produce beef and dairy. And so really, if we can have such, you know, over simplistic, but very focused view on the future, we know that if we can displace dairy cheese and if others can help displace
43:51 Speaker 02 beef and meat from cows, we have a chance of helping curb that emission, you know? How realistic that is, we can be pessimistic or optimistic, but I wake every day with that optimistic view of looking at the data from climate scientists and hoping that we can help being on that side. And, you know, time will only tell what's gonna happen.
44:14 Guy Raz? So effectively, to actually do this, we would just need to massively, dramatically reduce the number of dairy and beef cows on Earth.
44:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. And cows never asked us in the first place to, you know, genetically breed them and cross them and overpopulate them for all these years that we have been domesticating animals. Back when we domesticated animals, that was a great idea. We found a way to kind of coexist and get some nutrients from animals that frankly, humans back at that time were struggling to get anywhere and survive. But situation has really changed for us humans who are the dominant, and you can say invasive species on the planet in many ways.
44:57 Guy Raz? Yeah.
44:58 Speaker 02 We are the ones who made all these cows and sheep and all these animals exist. And we can go back to numbers that are just sustainable.
45:06 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right, Matt, the cheese, let's say we're looking at a future where animal-free cheese is what everybody eats. After the mozzarella, what comes next? Are you gonna do Camembert? Are you going into blue cheese? You going to like, you know, Kraft Singles? Like, what's the next cheese that you can imagine going to?
45:27 Speaker 01 That is the big question. And I think the beauty of casing as well as the drawback is that it could really be anything. And the way we think about what comes next, you know, we look at the market size. So mozzarella is the biggest market. What is the second biggest market? Well, it's cheddar. We look at the complexity of how to make that cheese. And we then look at, you know, what is the state of the plant-based industry? There are certain ones that doesn't melt, doesn't stretch. Other plant-based cheeses, you could say the same thing. So we look at these three areas and then use that to decide where we go. But one thing to say is that, you know, mozzarella, it's such
46:09 Speaker 01 a big market that we do excitedly like to think, oh, what is next? But we also make sure we do stay focused on what is in front of us. Because there is a long way to go for us to be able to supply all the mozzarella that's required, not just in food service, but just in all channels. And, you know, that is going to take a number of years. And we do want to be the household name for mozzarella, you know, whether that's going into a national chain or going into your favorite local restaurant. Once we're all on the way of doing that, then we can start thinking about what comes next.
46:43 Guy Raz? Amazing. I'm Matt and you, thank you so much.
46:47 Speaker 01 Thanks, Guy.
46:48 Speaker 02 Thank you, Guy.
46:49 Guy Raz? That was Matt Gibson and Ilya Rodman, co-founders of New Culture. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy dot Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H I B T at I D dot Wondery dot com. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman,
47:32 Guy Raz? Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, and Kira Wakim. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
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