When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat

Redefine Meat co-founder and CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit long had aspirations to lead a company, though he never imagined taking the risk to start his own. But learning about the environmental harms of mass beef production, plus having to answer his kids’ questions about what happens to baby cows at certain farms, was enough to convince him to say goodbye to corporate life and join the plant-based revolution. This week on How I Built This Lab, Eshchar recounts his path from product manager to marketing executive to Redefine Meat — the company he launched in 2018 to commercialize 3D-printed, plant-based steaks. Today the company’s printed beef, lamb and pig alternatives can be found across Israel and Europe, with imminent plans to enter the U. S. market. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson and edited by John Isabella, with research by Chris Maccini. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobilefuels.com for details. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's not a coincidence that the more we're learning about meat production and its impact on the planet, the more meat alternatives we're seeing on the market. And we've talked to founders in this space before, like Pat Brown of Impossible Foods or Ethan Brown, no relation, of Beyond Meat. And if you haven't heard those episodes, you should definitely go back and check those out. Just search for Ethan Brown, How I Built This, Pat Brown, How I Built This, and you'll find them. My guest today is also working in the alternative meat space. His name is Eshchar Ben Shitrite, and he launched his company, Redefined Meat, back in 2018

• 5:50Guy Raz?

  outside of Tel Aviv in Israel. And unlike other companies, Redefined Meat is using 3D printing technology to create plant-based beef, pork, and lamb, products that really look and taste just like their animal-based counterparts. In fact, I've tried a Redefined Meat steak, and I was blown away. Eshchar grew up in Israel on a kibbutz, surrounded by family and nature. His father worked with turkeys and his mom took care of dairy animals. And when Eshchar left the kibbutz as a teenager, he eventually got a law degree and then an MBA and went to work at Hewlett Packard in Israel, where he first started to learn all about printing. And while he was always ambitious,

• 6:33Guy Raz?

  he never thought of himself as an entrepreneur or a risk taker. His plan was to work in a steady corporate job, advancing gradually and slowly.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  One of my closest mentors, he told me once that I should become a CEO one day. And in order to become a CEO, you need to be first a product manager, because then you're a CEO of a product. So I went to HP to become a product manager of a product.

• 6:56Guy Raz?

  And what was the product you were looking after?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  I was in charge of basically helping packaging companies, print packages that are made very fast and can be personalized. So they can write your name on the chocolate package, which is a very, very difficult technology, very exciting business that nobody knows exists, because nobody understands all of these big industries that are behind the scene of all of our consumption.

• 7:22Guy Raz?

  So, all right. So you were there for, I think, about five years, or four or five years at HP. And while you were there, you met a guy named Adam Lahav, from what I read, who would eventually become a co-founder. And he was also working in printing?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  So he was a product manager and he did the same revolution in the field of flexible packaging. So your Cheetos, your Doritos, everything that comes in a bag, pouches. He developed and launched and sold the first digital production printing press for pouches and flexible packaging in parallel. So we had a parallel path.

• 7:57Guy Raz?

  Got it. While the two of you were there, did you ever talk to each other about starting your own business?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  No, we actually talked about how we are not the type of people that are going to start our own business and that we are corporate, we are really good in corporate. That one day we will both be CEOs or senior managers in big companies. This was like the vision then.

• 8:19Guy Raz?

  That was your goal.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  It was our belief, our belief that we are limited, that we don't have this ability to take risk. We also became fathers at the same time. But we were also very frustrated because we were thirty at that time. And I told Adam once, we have forty more years to work. What are we going to do in these forty years?

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  So you guys are thirty, still very young, but you're feeling like you're old. But your goal, your ambition, because you were not a risk taker, right? Because a lot of people think that entrepreneurs are risk takers and they jump out of airplanes without parachutes and it's not actually true. But you really don't define yourself as a risk taker and your path was like, I'm just going to keep doing this and maybe I'll become a senior official, senior leader at HP or maybe I'll become a senior leader at another company.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, why would I take a risk when the career path is so amazing and so successful? And it's actually quite interesting what I'm doing. I met great people all over the world, I went to conferences, I could live the life that I thought were right for me, which was so different than my life of my parents that basically do what they want to do and not what anybody or the corporate world defines for them to do.

• 9:29Guy Raz?

  It's interesting because a lot of the entrepreneurs and founders we have on the show worked in corporate environments and found that they could not work in those environments because they couldn't deal with the meetings and the rigidity and the rules and the bureaucracy. But it sounds like you actually were comfortable in that world, like you could navigate that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's very easy because it provides you with a lot of comfort and a lot of security. And also you tell yourself the story of why this is right for me, what is the reason that I'm very good at that and not where your creativity or your dream can come into reality. Because that's not an option. You need to say, my passion is really growing the amazing field of making printers more profitable. So you need to believe in that until you find what is really right for you. Until you find this this individual calling or purpose that you say, then it's not a risk. Then if if I don't pursue this path, I'm risking something big.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  But I was the guy actually that killed for a lot of people the startup dream because I was very good in explaining why every startup will fail.

• 10:32Guy Raz?

  Oh, so when people come to you and they'd say, Esther, I have this great idea. I want to talk to you. You'd say, well, it's that's not going to work. You were the guy that was saying that to people?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was very good at that because also it's very easy.

• 10:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah. All right. So you were at HP for a few years. And then, and I guess you went to to another company called Hicon, which was a startup that at that time was using 3D printing technologies to, I guess, to create like foldable boxes. And presumably that move was to become, I don't know, maybe eventually become the CEO of that company?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's also more fundamental. When my my son was born, immediately I started thinking differently in what I'm doing. And I said, let's go to something smaller. Let's go to something that is different and not really be stuck in the corporate ladder. But I went to something that was already, I went straight into being VP marketing of a startup that I thought is going to grow dramatically. Really, really amazing people with a big dream and the culture of 100 people. It wasn't a tiny startup, but this culture of we're doing something that will change the world.

• 11:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you were there for about two years and obviously learning a lot about 3D printing.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  So so tell me, I mean, you're a guy who's not a risk taker. You're a corporate guy. You are going to become a CEO. But you decided to take a big risk and start your own company. Tell me the genesis of this idea of thinking like, maybe I should start my own thing. How did that even begin?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  So it's an intersection of two elements in my life. Actually, the real decision to take the leap into the deep water was when when my second son was born. When my second son was born, I just quit my job without a plan. There wasn't a plan. It wasn't that I knew we're going to start redefine meat. That is one element. The other element is that I stopped eating meat. So I was a big meat consumer. Really, you would ask me 10 years ago, what is my hobby? I will tell you meat is my hobby.

• 12:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Because I love cooking and I spent a lot of time. We used to have a family restaurant and I used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking. And I became fascinated about finding the best meat and getting connections to the best butchers and getting notified when they slaughter a three week year old lamb. And when my son was born, I stopped eating meat. I started feeling bad.

• 12:52Guy Raz?

  Why? Tell me why you stopped eating meat.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of reasons why people stop eating meat. For me, it was the fact that you're eating somebody's else's kid. I looked at my son, I have now three boys, and I said, I don't want to be eating somebody's else's child.

• 13:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  The other element, I took my son to the dairy farm. I still like to take my kids to the dairy farm. And when I was a kid, the dairy farm was romantic. It's the place where milk come from and you have these amazing creatures. Now it's really sad because you see the separation of calves from the mother cow. And you see the pain and you see the suffering and you see the agony. And doing it with your kids and explaining, so why are the kids there and the mothers there and what is happening to the kids and what will happen to the mothers later on? It's really sad. And my brain made this connection between what I'm eating and the living creature that I know more than the average person.

• 13:43Guy Raz?

  So let's just step back for a moment and talk about, you know, part of the, I think, part of the big picture around, around meat in general, meat consumption. And I'll say, I say this as a meat eater, I ate meat this weekend and I, you know, I do eat it, but I was reading about, you know, sort of the, the, the carbon footprint of, of beef in particular. And it's just, it just kind of outweighs every other, you know, animals, like for every kilogram of beef, a hundred kilograms of carbon emissions are produced. And, you know, for poultry, it's about 10 kilograms. So just, you know, completely overshadows all other kinds of meat production. So beef is really. Long term is a big problem.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  So part of this idea, I guess, not just for you, but with other plant meat companies, is to solve this problem, to enable people to eat meat without actually doing the damage that meat production does.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  100%. And the challenge is that everybody is aware of the fact that beef consumption doesn't make any sense. Most of the food around the world goes to cows and not to human beings. The water, the cows basically are 1 billion, population of 1 billion, that eats more food and consumes more water than all of the human population. And we continue to raise these animals because they make a really tasty food product. Not for nutrition. You can have nutrition by eating lentils or chicken, which is more effective. You can eat pork, which is not good for the environment. But we just enjoy so much eating beef because it's so complicated, because it's so rich, it's so special.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Almost every culture around the world elevates beef more than any other food product. And it's an expensive food product. And we buy more and more of that, and the prices are increasing. And the environment is paying a higher burden.

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So it was, that was it. It was simple as that. And I guess you're thinking about, could there be something in plant-based meats that I could do?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  When I quit my job from Hicon with two boys, I had many options. The most immediate option was to find a new job. But there was this notion of maybe there is a revolution in plant-based meat, and maybe this is my purpose. My purpose is to take part in this revolution.

• 16:07Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, more from Eshchar about his leap into the plant-based meat revolution. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 18:36Guy Raz?

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• 18:54Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Ashar Ben Shitrite, who, back in 2018, quit his job without a plan to join in on the growing momentum around plant-based meat alternatives.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So I actually emailed both Impossible and Beyond and told them, you should start working on 3D-printed meat, and I want to be the guy to do it. And they didn't answer. But it was more on how do I get into this industry? So what is my reason to contribute something to this industry that I want to be a part of? And it was a nice story. I know printing. I know 3D printing. Maybe there is a story we can tell of how 3D printing can help, and then I'm the expert. And who else in the world is a 3D printing expert that has a passion for meat reduction or avoidance of meat, that is willing to devote 10 years of his life for that? And it's probably me.

• 19:46Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, I guess you reached out to a few companies, right, to propose this idea around 3D-printing meat, and you don't hear back. But this, I mean, this opportunity seems big, too big to ignore. So tell me more about your thinking during that time.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  At that point of time, nobody was talking about steaks. It was considered science fiction, moonshot. How can we make a steak out of plants? A burger makes sense, sausage, chicken nugget. But a steak is the most complicated food product that we eat. And there is no food technology that exists that can reach to this level of complexity. And 3D printing has a lot of disadvantages, a lot, a lot, a lot. But complexity is the number one benefit. There's no added cost for complexity.

• 20:32Guy Raz?

  So essentially, I mean, for everyone who's too shy to impossible meat or beyond meat, it's not easy, but it's relatively easy to replicate ground meat. You can, you know, it's been done for a while. But making a steak, actually trying to replicate a steak with the, you know, all of the different intramuscular layers, it's very hard to do.

• 20:55Guy Raz?

  You're thinking, well, maybe, given your background in 3D printing, maybe there's a way to actually 3D print a steak that actually replicates a steak, to actually use plant-based materials to do this. But your experience in 3D printing was with hard materials, right? I mean, 3D printing with food materials is a totally different beast, I imagine.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  It's totally different business. Also, I didn't have experience as a technologist. I had experience in conferences, making presentation.

• 21:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And the first few months playing in my kitchen, actually squeezing different protein stuff out of syringes to emulate 3D printing. And I even bought a 3D printer for quite a lot of money out of my pocket that I didn't know how to operate for six months. It was a very, very immature way of starting a business. But it was also fun and also was very honest. Because I thought that by this creation in the garage, I will come up with a revolution that will change the world.

• 21:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  But this naive beginning led to something serious that we didn't plan necessarily.

• 22:03Guy Raz?

  So this is 2018 and you are like literally with syringes, injecting just lines of what, like, I don't know, different fats? And like, you know, basically, most plant-based meat is made from pea protein or wheat gluten proteins or, you know, there's got coconut fat and, you know, different vegetable fats. So was that what you were doing? You were squeezing these different components onto a, I don't know, a piece of parchment paper or something? And just trying to let it dry and then do another layer? Like, how are you doing it?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  How did you know? How do you know all the secrets? So I had this intuition that is true, that meat is comprised of muscle, fat and blood.

• 22:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  And I tried to develop the muscle, fat and blood separately. So I took soy protein, I bought in a health store soy protein and some pure gluten and some pea protein. And I tried to blend it with beetroot. And I made the fat out of coconut fat. And I took water and beetroot and some flavors like soy sauce. And I called it blood. And then manually, I injected layer by layer. Even one of those creations, I posted on a Facebook group of meat lovers. And I said, this is our, this is my ram steak. What do you think about my ram steak? It was inedible. It was not something you can eat. But when I show this to people. I don't think they were excited about the technology or the levels of sophistication,

• 23:29Speaker 01

  but I saw I have some crazy ability to follow a wild idea.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  All right, so you and Adam Lahav, who was your co-founder, who you had met at HP, you decide to start this company. It's going to take a lot of money and a lot of research to get this right. You knew something a lot about 3D printing as a product manager, but you had to find, presumably you had to find some scientists to work with to help you start to get something, even some kind of prototype that is, that you could serve to people. Where did you go? Did you start in Israel or did you find a lab somewhere else?

• 24:16Speaker 01

  We did something very Israeli. We didn't have money, so we hired young people that would help us learn something new, that had an interesting background. So we hired a food engineer, a 3D printing guy, a maker and a chef. This was the team. And it wasn't the team to crack the technology for the long term.

• 24:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  But it's the team to understand what are our gaps, what are we missing? And then this team is amazing, they're still in the company. We found two people. One is our VP of Research and Development, and he's a physicist, so not related to food. But he actually knows how to take wild technological ideas and make them into reality. And the second is our CTO that has a background in tissue engineering. So he made meat in the lab. And then he went to 3D printing. And all of these people, they really, really care about the planet. So they all eat meat, they all actually love meat, but they care about the planet and care about doing something that has an impact far beyond just technology and a business.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And when we told them the story, they quit really, really great jobs and joined us. That's amazing, that's something that can happen in Israel, especially when you combine technology and sustainability.

• 25:31Guy Raz?

  So how did you make the first products that you could actually test on people? I mean, given that you had utterly failed in 2018, not utterly, but what you made in your home was inedible. How did you start to get it to a place where you could actually make something that was edible?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  The first thing, we needed a lab. I have a friend that worked with me in HP, that his family operates labs that you can rent. And they gave us a lab for almost free, and we set up shop there. And then we started just sourcing, buying every protein, every flavor compound, every fat that we can, and building a 3D printer that can manipulate these products. So we built our own printer. We built a machine from scratch. And we tried to build different structures and see how the different structure impacts your experience, the flavor. So how this element of 3D printing can manipulate something in food. We didn't try to make a steak. We didn't try to make something tasty.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  We wanted to see what kind of things we can create with 3D printing that a normal food company cannot develop. And the first things that we developed were not tasty, and they were not meaty, but they showed anybody from food science that this is something new. This is a new property of food that we can create by this combination of 3D printing and the different components that we had. And then we accelerated things, because at that point of time, it was very clear that this can become a steak one day. It was very exciting, and we thought that that's it, that our job is done. We filed a patent for that, and we thought, that's easy. Now, only thing we need to do, like, six more months in the lab, and then we will sell

• 27:15Speaker 01

  a 3D printer to every restaurant around the world.

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  The idea was, you would basically, the business was going to be the printers, not the meat. You would sell the printers to restaurants, and then they could print meat, print their own plant-based meat on demand.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  On demand, no waste, just in time, personalize your steak. We even, we had the habit of demoing people a steak that they would cut, and their name would be inside. They couldn't eat it because it wasn't tasty, but it was very impressive that we can control the shape of the steak from the outside and from the inside.

• 27:46Guy Raz?

  So I know that you guys raised here about $6 million in seed funding in 2019, and that probably got you to a place where you could develop something. That was maybe ready to test on people, on meat eaters. And you launched in the middle of COVID in July of 2020. I think your first product, the Alt Steak, came out. And just sort of explain this to me. Essentially, what you were trying to do was through different layers, right? Different micro layers of printing this steak. The result would be something that kind of pretty much replicated or got as close as possible to a real piece of meat with the

• 28:27Guy Raz?

  that intramuscular, that muscular, kind of, you know, the grain of the meat. And when you cut into it, there's that chewiness. You essentially got, as far as you could tell, as close to that as anybody had gotten.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so at some point of time, the seed round, we actually raised on the blood. Just the fact that our blood component was very, very tasty and very impressive.

• 28:52Guy Raz?

  And the blood was basically water and soy sauce and different flavors?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little bit more advanced than that. We found a collaboration with a flavor company that is called Jivodan, an amazing strategic partner. And we were able to develop this gush of blood that when you put in your mouth tastes like what comes out of steak. And we were able to show the steak and explain, once we combine those together, you will have this experience of biting through fibers and having juiciness created. That was the seed round. And then when we, in COVID, before we launched, we did this large scale tasting. So we gave about 1,000 people in two days, blind tasting of some products. Some were mince meat, so some were not using additive manufacturing. But it was the first time we gave people a steak. And it was very, very encouraging to see consumer reaction, kids.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  I remember there is a nice video of a mother giving her kid a bite of her product. And then I told her, you know, it's made from plants, the steak, actually the steak. And she told me, don't tell him what is an actual steak. He doesn't know what he's eating. And of course, investors saw that it's not only a technological promise of patents and a mush. It's something that people are now starting to eat and get excited about. And then we raised more money and also started working more with chefs. Once we were more confident, we started going to this Michelin star chefs and butchers.

• 30:15Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about that in a sec, but you basically, it sounds like you abandoned this plan to sell 3D printers. That original concept you kind of pivoted and said, no, let's just focus on making the meat and selling the meat.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a big pivot, but it happened in one minute that basically created a new, more like a business aspiration to the company. We were speaking with one of the largest beef companies in the world with a management team. And we had a presentation about our technology and what we're doing. And they asked me, so how can we collaborate? And I told him, you know, actually, we don't want to collaborate with you. We want to be you. And they said, what do you mean? We told them, yeah, we want to be the world's largest meat company. And they stopped and they applauded. They say, okay, that's the way of thinking. And when we came up to this meeting, we started saying to everybody, we're going to become the world's biggest meat company. This is what we're going to do. And if you're the world's biggest meat company, you're not selling the technology, you're selling meat.

• 31:09Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another short break, but when we come back, more from Eshchar on his goal to make redefine meat the largest meat company in the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Eshchar Ben Shitrit, who realized the best way to grow his plant-based meat company is to work with people who know a lot about food. As you started to get more attention, you eventually developed a partnership with

• 31:53Guy Raz?

  two really famous chefs, both Michelin-starred chefs, Marco Pierre-White and Ron Blauv. Marco Pierre-White from Britain, very, very famous chef. And I saw him do a video saying that the first time he tried it, he was kind of blown away.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing I wanted to understand was the construction of it. And so I snapped it and I tasted it. And it reminded me of braised cheek of beef. I thought, this is genius. And I did say, it's the most clever thing I've ever seen in my 45 years of being in a kitchen.

• 32:30Guy Raz?

  And I should add, I've tried it. It's actually amazing. It tastes and feels like a short rib. These guys, you know, get a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of plant-based meat products out there and there's a lot of competition. It's a very competitive space. And even the idea of getting shelf space in the supermarket just seems daunting. How did you convince them to try this? I mean, someone like Marco Pierre-White has, gets pitched every day from a plant-based company. So how did you, how did you get to him? A small, you know, company based in, outside Tel Aviv, going to him and saying, hey, try this. How'd you do that?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  I think there are two reasons. One is humility. So in plant-based meat, there's a lot of companies, including some of our friends, that say, we have a perfect replacement for meat. You have the same texture, the same flavor, the same, everything that you expect from meat. And then you take a bite and you see what is the distance. So we say, meat is incredible. Meat is so amazing. It's been developed through, you know, millions of years of evolution. So assuming that we are already there, we're not there. The second, the passion to really listen. So when we came to Marco Pierre-White, when we came to Ron Blau, by the way, very early on in the process, we told them, take a bite, tell us what's wrong in this product. Don't tell us how amazing it is. Let's start selling it in all of your restaurants. Just be a partner on making this really great.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  And we did it with them, but we also went to butchers. We also went to the people that know intimately this connection between meat and the consumer. And we told them, just tell us the honest truth. Not only, by the way, Marco is incredible. He's also poetic and he has this philosophy around the world. Ron is brilliant in combining flavor. But every cook in every catering that we work with has a lot of criticism on our product and we listen. We don't say, no, no, you're mistaken. We say, okay, maybe in the next version, we actually need to add some more bite and some more fat and to make the flavors more natural.

• 34:26Guy Raz?

  But you're essentially constantly trying to...

• 34:31Guy Raz?

  To change it and shape it, you're not saying this is the final product that we sell now. Because what I tried, what was available, this kind of short rib, really had that chewiness and that bite, and it was like 95% there, you know, it was really close. And I'd never tasted anything that was like that, that was a plant-based product. But you're basically saying, we're not, you know, we might be 50% the way there already right now.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also meat is so diverse, and even beef, think about beef. You eat not only short rib, and maybe you don't like short rib, or you happen to like short rib, but what about the tenderloin, the ribeye? What about a very fatty marbled ribeye? What about a very lean cut of skirt steak that is very bloody? So meat is not a single product. Beef is not a product. Beef is a world of different cultures, different supply chains, and they are all complicated and they're all tasty, and all have different consumers that want them. By the way, you know what's the problem with the dish that you ate? The product was meant to be a steak. We wanted people to serve it as a steak and not to take it into short rib, but it performs really well there.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  So the next version of that was how we are not only doing this fiberness, chewiness of short rib, but how can the product stand alone on the plate?

• 35:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, knowing what you know about this technology, right? How long will it take, do you think, before you can create a fully plant-based steak that is indistinguishable from an animal steak?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  The question is more, what is the benchmark? So today, if we do a blind tasting to all of our products, we can choose an okay meat, including a steak, that consumers will not tell the difference. But the problem is that if you go to a steakhouse, the steakhouse where we are served, we are in a place called Beef Bar in multiple countries around the world, and the Beef Bar serves wagyu meat, so the highest-priced meat.

• 36:30Guy Raz?

  Yes, just super premium meat, yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so of course, we cannot compete in a blind tasting, and we won't. We believe that in three years from now, we can also provide a wagyu beef with the same level of marbling, the same level of tenderness and richness of flavor. So that is our aim. Our aim is to constantly increase the benchmark of how do we compete? So Israeli beef. Actually, OK1 is not the best in the world. In many cases, especially high-tech companies that we work with, they substitute meat with redefined meat. They say, "The meat that we buy, your meat is already even better." And of course, much more healthy and much more sustainable. But when we go to France, for example, the beef there and the way people consume beef, even a burger in France is a steak à shé, not eaten in a bun, eaten with a knife and fork.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  So it's more difficult to compete with our burger that is better than some of the burgers that are served in Israel in a meat restaurant. So that is the real focus. The real focus is how do you find a benchmark that every time that our product improves addresses much more consumers? So Angus steak, which is, let's say, what a lot of people in America love, we're not there yet. Once we have an Angus steak and Angus ribeye, which is a year from now, we can go to US mainstream steakhouses. At what point will these products be available in grocery stores? Eventually, in order to become the world's biggest meat company, we need to be everywhere that meat is found. But we think that the way to reach consumers and the way to improve our products is through restaurants.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  So as we improve our product and we improve our scale, we start to sell more and more to consumers directly. In Israel, we're already there. So in Israel, you can buy a range of our product in basically every store. And in Europe, it will take a little bit more time. First, we're still building the recognition of our quality and the value of what we're bringing in restaurants. And we have a lot more work to do. And we're building capacity because it's a new technology. And we develop our own formulations and products and also machinery. And it takes us time and it takes money. And we have a lot of demand for our products and not enough capacity. So we rather work with the Michelin-starred restaurants and the caterers. Somewhere next year, a year from now, we'll start rolling out to more retailers in Europe

• 38:44Speaker 01

  with the products, including our steaks. And then gradually grow until we reach also to the USA and then follow the same path. First restaurants, then retail.

• 38:54Guy Raz?

  And what about price point? I mean, right now, is the price of a redefined meat steak comparable to a quality steak? Or is it higher?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  It's comparable to high quality steak and the quality is not there yet. So it's a little bit a premium for the relative level of quality because the value that we bring is not just the price. So when people consume redefined meat, they want to experience something that does come from an animal that is more sustainable, that is more healthy, and they're willing to pay a small premium, not huge. It's not double the price. It's about 20, 30% more expensive and we have limited capacity. Actually, our cost of ingredients, so the cost of our input, unlike meat, is very low because meat, cows consume about 25 kilogram of feed for every kilogram of meat.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And we actually use about 30% of ingredients to make a kilo of meat and the rest is water. So on that regard, we're very efficient. Because we operate in a small scale, everything related to automation, to packaging, to capital equipment is inefficient. As we grow with that, we will become cheaper in our production and we can lower the price and we can easily become at small scale cheaper than meat. And meat today has massive scale, massive trillions of dollars of scale. And we're talking about tens of millions of dollars to reach a relatively decent scale and lower price point.

• 40:22Guy Raz?

  Let me ask you a business related question. I mean, you've raised a lot of money. This is a capital intensive product. I think you've raised, if I'm right, close to $200 million now in several rounds of fundraising. But I have to imagine, you've got a ways to go before you're going to hit profitability. I mean, maybe 10 years.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Uh, no, so we're very lucky. We invest a lot in technology and our technology is very, very complicated. But we chose a very simple set of ingredients that allowed us with a new technology to reach good scale and revenue quite fast. So we're actually selling and on the individual level product, we are profitable. The key is how much scale we need to be profitable as a company and how much we want to invest in future technology. And by being in the market and growing every month and investing in technology, we can increase the addition, the addressable market that we have. So it's not 10 years, it's two years from now.

• 41:26Guy Raz?

  So in, in, you know, in sort of five years from now, where do you want to be? Where do you imagine you'll be?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  In five years from now, we're already a big meat company. We have a presence in Europe in basically every restaurant that you can imagine because food service is a market that we dominate and we are in all the nationwide retailers with our minestrge and our steak. And we have sizable business in the USA from restaurants in retail. But the idea is, is if you look even 10 years from now, out of the 20 biggest meat companies around the world, one company or two company for sure will not rely on animals. This I have no doubt. And we want to be the first one to reach there, to have a meat business that is the distribution of meat, that is found everywhere, that consumers enjoy the product that are very healthy and very sustainable,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  like a meat company, without the animal that they slaughter. And it's a very, very challenging task because the big meat companies have been around for 100 years. But at some point of time, meat companies will not rely on animals. And the question is, who's going to do it? Somebody has to do it. We don't have a choice. It's inevitable in the sense that the plant needs it and animal need it and human need it. And I don't see a lot of companies that have this ambition because it's really tough. It's really, it's a tough journey to do what we're doing. But, but the potential is so amazing. The potential is so unique, so incredible. It's something we, we would tell our grandkids about. So this is what drives us. And five years from now is just the beginning. So we started six years ago, five years from now is 11 years in. For, for the world's biggest meat company, it's just the beginning.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Eshchar Ben Shitrite, thanks so much. Thank you, Guy. I enjoyed it a lot. And thank you. It's an honor.

• 43:09Guy Raz?

  That's Eshchar Ben Shitrite, co-founder and CEO of Redefined Meat. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click follow on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson and edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Messini and music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, Carla Estevez, Ramel Wood, and Sam Paulson. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.