Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz Reimagining seafood production with Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck of Wildtype (2022) About this episode When Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck met in 2011, they had no intention of starting a business. Aryé was a cardiologist, and Justin was a diplomat who had lived in countries all over the world. But their chance meeting at a dinner party led to a deep friendship focused on working together to change the world. Through regular Saturday morning brainstorming sessions, they settled on pursuing a scientific approach to growing meat for human consumption.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Aryé and Justin discuss the problems with modern seafood production and how their company, Wildtype, hopes to revolutionize the industry by using stem cells to cultivate real, sushi-grade salmon... without harming any actual fish.
This episode was produced by Chris Maccini and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar.
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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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5:11 Guy Raz? So the How I Built This Lab team is taking a little time off for the summer, but don't worry, we'll be back in your feed with fresh How I Built This Lab episodes in just a few weeks. Meantime, I hope you enjoy one of our favorite episodes from last year with the founders of WildType. It's a company working on lab-grown salmon, just like the real thing, without the actual fish. So I hope you enjoy it. Here it is.
5:40 Guy Raz? Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. All right, so a lot of us have made the decision to either cut back or completely cut out meat from our lives. For some people, it's a moral issue around harming animals. For other people, it's health, and for me, it's because of the environmental impact of meat consumption. But I still eat meat, and I still eat seafood. And admittedly, I have occasional pangs of guilt, knowing that I'm contributing to a bigger problem. Livestock production is a huge contributor to global carbon emissions. Our oceans are being overfished, and the huge amount of microplastics floating deep
6:23 Guy Raz? in the sea are making their way into our fish and consequently into our bodies. So a good question to ask is, do we need to kill animals to create meat? Well, until recently, the answer was, of course, don't be ridiculous. But with advances in stem cell technology, we are coming much closer to a different answer. And that's a starting point for a company called Wild Type Foods, based in San Francisco. Wild Type was started by two friends, Justin Kolbeck and Aria Elfenbein. Justin was a foreign service officer who spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Aria is a biologist and a trained cardiologist.
7:06 Guy Raz? But together, they ditched their careers to pursue the idea of growing real salmon without killing a single fish. Wild Type is not a plant-based substitute. The company grows real salmon from real salmon cells to form real cuts of sushi-grade fish. And while you can't find their products in grocery stores or restaurants just yet, Wild Type is part of a growing number of companies hoping that, within a few years, cell-cultivated meats will become just as common as those plant-based substitutes. Aria Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck are with me. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
7:44 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thanks for having us.
7:47 Guy Raz? Let me start with you, Arya. You were, you are, a cardiologist.
7:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:54 Guy Raz? Right? Justin, you were a State Department employee. You were, you've lived in countries all over the world. First of all, how did the two of you meet?
8:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a, it's a funny story about how we met. We met in my first year of internship. So this was after I'd finished medical school and was just starting to, to train as a doctor. And there, there was a dinner that both Justin and I were invited to. And, and the idea of this dinner is that nobody knows anybody else at this dinner, except the person who is hosting it. And I, I had never been to a dinner like this.
8:29 Guy Raz? You were at Yale, right?
8:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
8:31 Guy Raz? Postdoc work, and Justin happened to be doing an MBA at Yale at the same time.
8:35 Speaker 01 Right.
8:35 Guy Raz? It was around 2011, is that right?
8:37 Speaker 01 Exactly.
8:37 Guy Raz? Okay.
8:38 Speaker 01 And it was, for me at that time, somewhere between 80 and 100 hours a week in the hospital. But, um, but something about this invitation and something about the possibilities of just what could happen at a dinner where you don't know anybody else at this dinner.
8:54 Guy Raz? Right.
8:55 Speaker 01 Really intrigued me and, and I went. And, and that's when I met Justin, I ended up sitting next to him at this dinner.
9:03 Guy Raz? And Justin, you were doing an MBA. Tell me what you were thinking about doing. I mean, you, you had been at the State Department and been a Foreign Service Officer. Clearly you were thinking, maybe I'm gonna make a change. But what were you thinking about, about maybe doing?
9:17 Speaker 01 I had just finished an assignment in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, which is on the, on the Pakistani border. I was on something called a provincial reconstruction team, which is essentially what it sounds like in terms of the goal. And I had always had it as a life goal to get a graduate degree. Kind of the first person in my family to go into college and then being able to, to get a graduate degree seemed...
9:44 Speaker 02 Like something that I was very passionate about. And so I decided to take some time off from the State Department and do an MBA at Yale because it was this mission-driven school. And that really appealed to me, that it wasn't just about going on and working in an investment bank, but maybe having a big impact on the world, which is what drove me into the Foreign Service to begin with. And so, to be honest with you, I showed up at school and I met these people that had started companies that were making, it was basically like a netting that went over a bassinet, and it would help reduce the incidence of child malaria. And so, somebody who had started a company, employed all these peoples, having this huge impact on the planet, just had a really big effect on me. And that was
10:27 Speaker 02 sort of the mindset I was in when I sat down next to Aria.
10:31 Guy Raz? Aria, you were a cardiologist, and you were doing, you already had your medical degree, and you're doing residency at Yale. I mean, you were clearly on the fast track to becoming a prestigious cardiologist, maybe having an appointment at a university. When you had met Justin in 2011 at that dinner, was that where you thought you were headed?
10:55 Speaker 02 Absolutely. So I had finished medical school, I had done a PhD mostly in Japan around the same time and in the same place where the discovery was made that we could create stem cells from ordinary skin cells that completely revolutionized the world of science. And I absolutely thought that my career would be one that would stay within academia.
11:23 Guy Raz? The research you mentioned changed the entire conversation because it used to be that you had to cultivate stem cells from fetuses, and there was a lot of ethical debate around it, right?
11:32 Speaker 02 Exactly.
11:32 Guy Raz? And this research showed that you could cultivate stem cells through skin.
11:38 Speaker 02 Right. And you know, prior to that, there was a moratorium on research in the United States on stem cells and the future of of understanding how these incredible cells grow, develop and communicate with each other was really in question because of this. And so this this incredible discovery really changed everything. It took all of those moral issues off the table.
12:00 Guy Raz? Yeah.
12:00 Speaker 02 And all of a sudden now, we could understand how a cell becomes a neuron, or a liver cell, or any other part of the body, essentially adopt different careers for themselves.
12:13 Guy Raz? So you were really on on this path to becoming a heart doctor and really also doing research around therapy for, you know, for those with with heart ailments.
12:22 Speaker 02 Right.
12:23 Guy Raz? Meantime, Justin, you know, you're maybe taking some time off from the State Department, where you had worked in the developing world, getting an MBA, and then maybe going back into that world. The two of you meet at this dinner and what, you instantly connect that night?
12:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, it's it's rare when you're an adult to to make new, deep friendships, I have found.
12:44 Guy Raz? Yes, it is, yeah.
12:45 Speaker 02 And, you know, to to me, this this felt like one of those rare opportunities where you can really, you know, connect with someone who would be a lifelong friend. And I don't think Ari and I were initially thinking about, hey, let's go start a business together. It was more, you know, a great deal of mutual respect, really different backgrounds. I had a great deal of curiosity about the work that he was doing. And, you know, we'd get together on the weekends and talk about things that we were interested in. And this idea started percolating a little bit, this sort of entrepreneurial spark, I guess. I remember very clearly, we were having coffee in New York City one morning. We had this,
13:28 Speaker 02 we had this friend who came to us and said, like, let's come up with 100 ideas for businesses. And maybe most of them would be really bad. And, you know, we sat down, Ari and I, and sort of started penciling out some ideas, not because we were serious about starting a company, because it sounded like a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning. And through that process, hearing each other think about what really matters to us, you know, the silly ideas that we came up with on that list started to fall away. And I think pair back into something that would later become Wild Type, something that the two of us are extraordinarily passionate about.
14:04 Guy Raz? Justin, what were the kinds of business ideas that the two of you were talking about? I mean, were you sort of listening to what Aria was working on and saying to yourself, "Hey, this is interesting. The stem cell stuff is really revolutionary. Maybe there's something there"? Or were you talking about business ideas that were completely unrelated to that?
14:22 Speaker 02 This is so embarrassing, but why not? I mean, this makes for interesting radio, right? We had a few ideas on there. Just to give you a sense of the range, like, one of them was of an idea to create a new kind of neti pot that we would call the schnozzle. And the idea was, you know, doing a neti pot is actually very good if you're feeling congested. But it's kind of gross, right? You're like-
14:48 Guy Raz? The water goes in one nostril and out the other. Yep, I've been there.
14:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're like hanging your face over the sink and flushing your nasal cavity.
14:56 Speaker 01 And also, what innovations have been brought to the neti pot in the last 1,000 years?
15:00 Guy Raz? Yeah.
15:01 Speaker 01 And what could we do to make it extra special?
15:03 Guy Raz? I love that.
15:04 Speaker 01 So we would sometimes on the weekends get modeling clay and come up with all kinds of different designs and ways that this might work and all the things that we could do to make the neti pot so much better than it already is.
15:16 Speaker 02 The thing that was missing, I think, for both of us was a real hook that tugged at our heartstrings, right? That's something that we cared a lot about. And yeah, I think that conversation really started back in earnest in 2015 when we first started talking about this particular idea.
15:35 Guy Raz? All right, so 2015. Aria, where did the idea for cultivating meat, where did it come from?
15:44 Speaker 01 I had one of these rare vacations that they would give us in residency and went back to my childhood home of Australia and was in the far north parts where there used to be a lot of rainforest, a lot more than there is right now. And today, a lot of it is agricultural land. And was just kind of looking around and thinking about everything I had learned about, not just stem cells, but- What modern agriculture means, particularly when it comes to beef. And and I just, you know, kind of asked this question of can we still eat meat and not eat animals?
16:28 Speaker 01 And thought about like, you know, we must be able to do this. And and then I started to think about, well, what would it mean to create the fat? And what would it mean to create certain cuts of meat? And didn't really know that that other people were already working on this. And one in particular, Dr. Mark Post in the Netherlands, was somebody who actually, you know, about 15 years before that, I had worked in the same lab with, also doing cardiac research. And he had gone on to create the world's first hamburger in this way. And he organized the first conference about this. And I was just riveted. I, you know, I'd never been to the Netherlands.
17:13 Speaker 01 I didn't know why I was so interested in in this whole field. But I just went. And it was incredible because nobody knew how many people were going to show up, what it was going to be like. And there was, there was a very special energy in in the room there. And it was truly an event that, you know, changed everything for me.
17:33 Guy Raz? Hmm. By the way, are you vegetarian? Either of you vegetarians?
17:38 Speaker 01 When I moved to San Francisco, I slowly reduced my consumption of meat. I think that it's something that even since I was a child, I never really felt comfortable with the fact that, you know, when my parents would feed me chicken, that that was a chicken.
17:56 Guy Raz? And Justin, are you a vegetarian by any chance?
17:59 Speaker 02 I would say I'm a conscientious meat and seafood eater.
18:03 Guy Raz? And I say this with no judgment. I eat meat. I'm a meat eater. But I understand this idea of feeling conflicted about it because we know that. There are huge environmental consequences to it. And also, there's this moral conundrum. You're actually killing an animal. So it sounds to me that you already, both of you, had some of those issues in your mind.
18:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, for me, I started learning about our food system and really in a great deal of depth, going back to some of the time I spent in Afghanistan, which is one of the most food insecure places in the world. And, you know, got back to the US and dug pretty deep. And it was clear that at some point, eating meat and seafood at the rate we are is not going to work anymore. Right? For all the reasons you mentioned, there's environmental reasons, there's sort of humane reasons, there's economic reasons. But yeah, I think, you know, for me, I have a couple of small kids and, you know, really, how do you have that conversation? Right?
19:05 Guy Raz? Yeah.
19:05 Speaker 02 That this isn't for free and it isn't limitless. Right? That's how we do it at our house. But at the same time, I really like to have a hamburger on the 4th of July and on the barbecue once in a while and a steak once in a while and, you know, fish on a fairly regular basis. And so I think there's just a lot of people out there that are in this really difficult place where you're trying to juggle your values and your instincts.
19:30 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right, Justin, Arya, stick around for just a moment. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more about the founding of Wow Type. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents.
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23:24 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and I'm speaking with the founders of Wild Type, a company that grows real salmon, but without the salmon. Aria, when you, when you started, the gears in your head started to turn around. Sell cultivated meat. At the time, it's not that long ago, it's 2015, 2016, there weren't that many companies out there growing cells. How did you land on maybe trying this with seafood?
23:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, it wasn't actually seafood at first. We made, we went through a whole exercise, much like the exercise for which companies we'd start, about all the different kinds of meats and seafoods that, that we could make. And you know, a couple of the axes on which we plotted this were cost and controversy. And if you imagine the kinds of meats that would be in the extreme upward right quadrant for that.
24:22 Speaker 02 Things like foie gras would be pretty much at the top of the list.
24:27 Guy Raz? Yeah.
24:28 Speaker 02 And foie gras is a really interesting meat as well. And the reason is because it's relatively homogeneous in terms of its texture. And it's actually also predominantly one cell type. So it's not sort of fat cells and liver cells. It's mostly liver cells that have just been exposed to a lot of fat. And this was the first thing that we wanted to work on.
24:50 Guy Raz? So, so, I mean, that sounds like a great idea because it's so cruel, right? We know to produce foie gras, you're force feeding ducks and geese. So it sounds like a great idea. You could cultivate it through cells.
25:02 Speaker 02 Right.
25:03 Guy Raz? So, so what happened? Why didn't you pursue that?
25:07 Speaker 02 So we were able to make some foie gras, like a fairly small amount. And people, people tried it. I remember the first person that we invited to try it was a, was a friend of ours in San Francisco. And, you know, it was tiny amount, like so small that it was almost difficult to really taste. But we, but we did it and we did it on relatively short order, probably from start to finish in just a handful of months, really. But, but even then, I think we started having these conversations about, okay, wow, this is really interesting, but are we going to really have an impact on the planet by working on something like foie gras, which most Americans have probably never had?
25:49 Guy Raz? Yeah.
25:49 Speaker 02 And how many people actually consume these products? And I think at that point, you know, we started looking a little bit more broadly and a little bit more globally and thinking about, well, what does our species eat? And so, you know, it was a very quick transition, I think, for us after we made that initial proof of concept.
26:10 Guy Raz? All right. So you guys realized that to have an impact, you really have to tackle something that lots of people eat. So you, you essentially decide to kind of pivot from foie gras to, to fish? Is that, is that the conversation you started to have, Aria?
26:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's exactly how it happened. We started to realize that what we didn't want to be creating was a company that just made fine food for fancy people. And instead, we wanted to stay true to what the mission was, which was to use this method of growing seafood and growing meats to actually have a positive environmental impact. And it was around this time that our focus did shift in terms of thinking about what could we do with this method? And it very quickly turned to seafood, as Justin described.
27:02 Guy Raz? All right. Help me understand how you, technically, you did this. Like, I mean, Arya, were you, you had access to a lab? So were you kind of just, was there like a little corner there that you were just kind of playing around with cells and, you know, salmon cells? Like, tell me how you started to do it.
27:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. San Francisco was one of the few places at that time where you could actually rent lab space by the hour. And we applied to be able to be part of one of these areas. And it was, you know, it was in San Francisco, it was actually very close to the university. And for the first time ever, we had our own lab. And I should say that at this time, we still had our day jobs. And in my case, I had two. So I was still working as a researcher. And I would also work overnights in the hospital, in the intensive care unit.
28:02 Guy Raz? Wow.
28:03 Speaker 01 And this was, this was something that Justin and I would do on nights and weekends. We would get these eggs, do these dissections, and learn in just the most incredible way what these cells loved in terms of nutrition, how we could get them to thrive, what conditions would be optimal to grow them in. And, you know, when we think about food, it's, for the most part, muscle and fat. And so we started by just growing cells.
28:35 Guy Raz? Wow. I mean, Justin, you, I mean, you guys were, the challenge you were, you were trying to solve for was this idea of sustainability. We know that we're running out of seafood. We know that we're overfishing. And not just that, we know that the fish we're consuming today... Is full of microplastics that every time we ingest fish, and I think even land animals, we're consuming plastic.
28:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. There are a couple of real challenges with seafood. As you pointed out, it's almost impossible to find uncontaminated seafood anywhere in the world. And you mentioned microplastics. The number that I can't get out of my head is five grams, or the equivalent of a credit card worth of microplastics that go into our bodies every week. And not just that, there's mercury, and antibiotics, and parasites, and the list goes on and on. And with seafood, unlike a lot of the other types of meats that we eat, it's not about eliminating these things, it's about minimizing them, right? Which is why FDA has these guidelines
29:41 Speaker 02 for young kids. I remember at my kid's first six-month appointment, the doctor asked, hey, are you giving your kid seafood? I said, yeah, yeah, why? And she said, well, it's very nutritious for them, omega-3s for their brain, yada, yada, yada. But, by the way, don't give them more than two fistfuls of it, right? So you have this paradox where you've got this delicious, nutritious protein that's contaminated by all the stuff that we've dumped into our oceans. And at the same time, we have wild fish populations flat or plummeting with, just basically across the board for almost every type of seafood that we eat. And then we have fish farms. There have been issues, like in the Puget Sound, for example, where Atlantic salmon
30:24 Speaker 02 was being farmed. We've had some nets break, and these invasive species are out competing with the native species, right? So Chinook, and Saukai, and Koho, and so on. So there's been a big movement to kind of get away from this open net farming. And so, the confluence of those things means strongly rising demand with pinched supply means some of our healthiest, most nutritious seafoods are only going to become further and further out of reach of many people.
30:55 Guy Raz? All right, so you know that there is a challenge, there's still a challenge to be solved here, but you guys are in a lab and you are trying to grow a piece of salmon, right, initially. And Ari, what about that first piece of salmon? How long did it take before you had something that you could actually eat?
31:14 Speaker 01 I think it was the better part of a year before we could actually try it. And I'll say that, once we had grown enough that we could try it for the first time, it was probably one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced. I mean, it really tasted like nothing. I mean, truly, I couldn't even describe it. And it's because we realized that cells on their own, they don't know how to spontaneously organize into, you know, a piece of sashimi, for example.
31:47 Guy Raz? Right.
31:47 Speaker 01 They need structures and they need to follow cues from their environment to organize in this way, to create all the complexities of, you know, texture and flavor. And that, that moment, we realized that we were still very, very far from having anything resembling a viable product.
32:09 Guy Raz? All right, so you guys, finally, after a year, you have your first sample and it sucks. I mean, it just doesn't taste good. It doesn't... I mean, was that disheartening? I mean, or did you feel like, okay, because that feels like a long time to just to basically wait and then it sucks?
32:27 Speaker 01 Totally. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, along the way, we were learning a lot. And I think what gave us hope in that fairly dark moment was that, you know, at the end of a year, we felt like we really had our arms around how this would scale. And I think that was the biggest thing that the two of us were grappling with, right, is there were these sort of two fundamental questions in the early days. One, can we do this? And can we eventually make a product that is really good? And we hadn't answered that question at that point, as Ari said.
32:56 Speaker 02 And two, could this could this ever scale and turn into a big business that can even begin be a drop in the ocean of the colossal amount of seafood that is consumed globally? And I think through that process of that first year, both of us became a lot more convicted that we could do this, that this could actually work. And it was for some pretty obvious reasons in retrospect. So for example, half of roughly half of a fish's weight gets thrown away or discarded between the time it's caught and the time it shows up on your plate, right? Things like fins and bones and so on that we don't consume. So out of the gate, we had a sort of a 50% advantage over conventional seafood.
33:41 Guy Raz? If you were growing exactly what would be consumed?
33:44 Speaker 02 That's right. Yeah, no waste.
33:46 Guy Raz? Wow. So you're trying to get a sort of working prototype going. What change did you make that enabled you to actually grow something that tasted pretty good, that would taste like raw salmon?
34:00 Speaker 01 You know, I wish I could say it was one particular thing. So there are many ways to approach something like this. There could be a way to think through, how can we create the highest density of cells, for example? How can we work through the scaling challenges first and then deal with the flavor and textural complexity afterwards? And a lot of our debate in the early days was, how do we do this? How do we do this to create a product quickly enough in the beginning so that people can see what the promise is, but still give us the space to iterate upon that and actually
34:45 Speaker 01 perfect what is such a difficult product to create in the end?
34:50 Guy Raz? Yeah.
34:51 Speaker 01 And salmon is a great example of a very versatile fish that can be created in many preparations.
34:57 Guy Raz? Sure.
34:58 Speaker 01 That we're very used to seeing as, you know, for example, minced salmon in a salmon roll, or lox on a bagel, or salmon fillet, or sashimi. And so, you know, having that that vision for what this could become as the product got better, I think was was a big part of slowly improving all of the different characteristics that made the product better.
35:25 Guy Raz? All right, so 2019, June of 2019, you have finally really gotten to a place where it's ready to debut. And you guys grew salmon sashimi, so raw salmon, and you were ready to serve it to a group of diners. The cost, I read the cost for one salmon roll was $200. So this is not sustainable. But it was a start. And what did people think at that dinner when you served it? What was the response from people?
36:02 Speaker 02 You know, at the time, people were, first of all, just very impressed that we had managed to do this, that we showed up with a couple pounds of cultivated salmon. And the chefs that were working with the product did really a fantastic job across a number of dishes. I think we had bisque, we had it in sushi rolls, of course. We had it in a tartare. And at the very end, we brought out just a tin, sort of like a tin of sardines of just the product so people can try it, you know, undressed up. And so, in the hands of such capable chefs, any product would be really good. But looking back on those pictures today, I mean, I can't help but cringing
36:45 Speaker 02 because it just didn't have the same visual appeal and structure that people would expect from salmon. So I think, you know, we had a reporter from Bloomberg there that we'd never met before. And, you know, when he wrote about the product, I think it was a very accurate description of where we were at the time. And this was after he tried just the unadorned piece of fish. And he said it was certainly reminiscent of fish in the ocean, but faint. And I think that that was exactly right for that moment because the structure and the texture of the product wasn't really there yet. And so it was really just the taste, really, at that point, that we could offer.
37:26 Guy Raz? All right, we're going to take another quick break. But in a moment, more from Justin Kolbeck and Aria Elfenbein, co-founders of WOW Type Foods. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, back in a moment.
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38:20 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guests are Justin Kolbeck and Aria Elfenbein, the co-founders of Wow Type. So, all right, you've got this product. It's not quite where you want it to be yet in 2019, and it's going to take a lot of money to really kind of scale this up. Right now, let's say, how long does it take from cell to piece of salmon? Like, what is the timeframe there?
38:47 Speaker 01 It's about four to six weeks.
38:49 Guy Raz? Wow, that's fast. That's a lot faster than a real salmon.
38:52 Speaker 01 Definitely.
38:53 Guy Raz? And I guess you can compare it to like a brewery, right? Like, you basically have like what would look like a brewery.
38:59 Speaker 01 You know, it does look like a brewery. This is something that people always comment on when they come visit our space in San Francisco. It has grown in a similar way with similar principles. When people kind of see how it's made, it just kind of clicks. It sort of makes sense. It's like, oh, okay, this is, you know, you're growing cells in these steel tanks, just like the way that we grow beer or brew beer.
39:23 Guy Raz? And so what does it look like when it comes out of these steel drums? Or does it look like a hunk of sashimi? Like, you can go to your fish counter at the grocery store, and some of them have like, you see these big hunks of salmon.
39:37 Speaker 01 No, it doesn't look like that at all.
39:39 Guy Raz? Okay.
39:39 Speaker 01 That's really just the first step. And that first step is only just a couple of weeks. It's afterwards when we actually have it grow on the structures, which we call the scaffold.
39:51 Guy Raz? I see.
39:51 Speaker 01 And there's a whole process there where the cells will assume different forms and mature and kind of grow together in some cases to create these more complex structures and textures and flavors.
40:11 Guy Raz? So, does it now, when you, I've seen pictures of it, it's amazing. I mean, it's texture and the fat distribution, it looks like a piece of raw salmon. Does it smell like salmon? Does it, I mean, how close to a fish that you're, how close to it is at this point?
40:29 Speaker 01 You know, what I'd say is that there is a wide range of salmon flavors and aromas and textures that we're used to. And I think some of the freshest salmon that maybe is just pulled out of the river in that moment can have a very mild flavor profile.
40:50 Guy Raz? Yeah, it doesn't even smell like fish at all.
40:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. It's a very subtle flavor. And a very similar thing happened when we started to think about the appearance, where there is also a wide variety of color hues when we think about salmon. And so, so these are the kinds of conversations that all of a sudden were really interesting from a culinary perspective. And it was, it was these questions that we started to elicit the help of chefs to help us answer. What feels most familiar? Is it more of what's called the saku, or the sort of blocks that are used in sushi counters?
41:34 Speaker 01 Or should we be creating more of a salmon fillet that should be cooked? And as you can imagine, it is, it can often be a very subjective assessment.
41:45 Guy Raz? Yeah. How did you, I mean, you're trying to do a very complex thing, right? I mean, the sort of the science behind it and the research behind it is highly complex. I mean, this is not a lemonade stand. I mean, we're talking about... Growing salmon from cells. How were you able to move from the lab to running a business? Because it is a business. This is not just going to lab and doing science experiments.
42:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, we're fortunate that we have, I think, a very complementary skill set. So I do have at least a little bit of background in financial modeling and consulting and things like that.
42:24 Guy Raz? Yep.
42:24 Speaker 02 So I guess the best way to think about how we divided it, to use a music analogy, to a large extent, I was and to a large extent still am today, kind of the backup singer and the percussionist. And Aria and her scientists are the lead singers, the vocalists, right? And there's a really interesting lesson here about entrepreneurship alone. It's nice when there are two people, not just to sort of divide things up as we have, but to really work through and cope with things when they go badly. And, you know, we haven't talked much about that today, but there have been way more moments when things went sideways and off the rails than when things worked.
43:06 Guy Raz? Tell me about that, because you've raised $100 million in the last four or five years. It sounds like, you know, it's been going pretty well, but what, tell me about a moment where you weren't sure whether it was going to go well.
43:20 Speaker 02 Okay, I'll give you a recent one. So one of the things that we had to do is design a vessel, a cultivator, that can grow cells at a pretty large scale. And one of the things that we wanted to do was to not order an off-the-shelf one that was made for a completely different purpose in the biotherapeutics world, but actually design one more with people who make brewery tanks, for example. And so we did it. We actually prototyped it at a very small scale and then made a medium-sized one and just recently received a pretty large one. Unfortunately, the person who assembled it made a mistake and we had some stability issues.
44:00 Speaker 02 And if you know anything about cell culture, contamination is your enemy. And so, you know, that's just one example, but that was a three-month setback. And I'd say for every success we have, you know, not just as a business, but in the lab too, there are at least 10 failures. And I think one of the big things that Aria and I have had to do is just deal ourselves to that and then help our team kind of cope with. Overcoming these routine failures that are just a big part of doing science generally.
44:35 Guy Raz? What about the pressure of financing and funding? I mean, you're far, far away from being a profitable company because you can't sell your products yet. And we're going to talk about that. That's just the reality. When you're doing something so massive, so radical, it's going to take time. Do you feel any of that pressure? I mean, you know, right now you've got a bunch of cash that you raised, but still it's like, you know, you want to bring a return to those investors. Do you feel that pressure or do you feel kind of, you know, removed from it?
45:06 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Every day. I don't think there's a day that goes by when we're not thinking about moving from an R and D company into a food production one. And it's been a longer journey than many other companies have to take. And part of it is feeling, you know, a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation to our investors and wanting to return that money to them with a nice return. But part of it is driven by the perils that our oceans are facing, right? If you are a sucker for every David Attenborough documentary, as I am, you know that, you know, if we don't seriously turn things around by the middle part of the century, we can just say goodbye to the biodiversity that exists in our oceans today. And we don't even understand what impact that's going to have.
45:50 Speaker 02 And so on one hand, you know, the pressure of returning money in a venture funded business might lead to some unintended consequences. But on the other hand, for a mission as profoundly urgent as ours, it might actually be a fairly positive one.
46:07 Guy Raz? Yeah, because time is running out.
46:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, literally. You know, I was at an event hosted by some First Nations folks up in, just outside of Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. And somebody there who grew up in the countryside would talk about the salmon runs when he was a boy. And, you know, he's probably about my age, so maybe mid 40s. You know, and he would describe it as a writhing snake. And he said it was like almost so dense you could walk on them.
46:32 Guy Raz? Wow.
46:33 Speaker 02 And today, hearing him talk about this, it's a trickle. I mean, literally a trickle. And that's over the span of someone like relatively young's lifespan. And if you play that tape forward, it doesn't take us to a good place. And I think that's why we are so urgently working to build this third source of seafood that can supplement wild catch and farmed fish.
46:57 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right. The marketplace for plant-based meat substitutes is pretty robust, but this market, the salt-cultivated market, is still really new and you have no FDA approval yet to sell your products, right? I mean, you can't, there's nowhere you can actually sell what you're making at the moment.
47:20 Speaker 02 That's right.
47:21 Guy Raz? But you do have, you can sample this, right? If you're in San Francisco, you guys, you can go and try this.
47:27 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
47:28 Guy Raz? The public can, right?
47:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, we can have tastings and that's been one way in which we've been able to get just invaluable feedback about how people perceive this product, what it tastes like, what it means to them, and just how we can improve generally. But it's not something we're able to sell at this point.
47:54 Guy Raz? And, I mean, in theory, or maybe in practice, you could do this with any other seafood, right? Like, could you make toro? Like, could you make really, you know, bluefin tuna? Like, really prized rare fish? Is that theoretically, or maybe more than theoretically, possible?
48:09 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And we've actually already started on some of the things that are, hopefully, will be announced soon. And, you know, we've been taking a lot of cues from some of our early commercial partners who have expressed, you know, a lot of interest in launching with us as soon as we get that green light from FDA.
48:26 Guy Raz? Yeah.
48:26 Speaker 02 And you're right, a lot of the energy and interest is on things like bluefin tuna, for example, that are really difficult to farm and are actually on the brink of extinction. And, you know, I think we're really excited to listen to more of this feedback and help meet the market where the demand is.
48:47 Guy Raz? So, in theory, if you got FDA approval sometime within the next...
48:53 Guy Raz? Two to five years, what do you do next? I mean, are you already talking to the Whole Foods of the world? Are you already talking to the Costcos? Or is that, is that the next step?
49:04 Speaker 01 We are. And, you know, we'll, we'll start just because we'll be volume constrained, not unlike Impossible in the early days when they were first launching in places like Dave Chang's Momofuku.
49:13 Guy Raz? Sure.
49:14 Speaker 01 So, so we'll be, you know, probably a small handful of restaurants around the country when, once we get that green light. But we, we actually have started conversations with some of these big grocery chains. And what's been interesting is that there, there was a lot of interest in actually having new things that would show up that people aren't used to seeing at their local grocery stores. And I, I think that creates a lot of space for innovation and partnership with these big conventional food producers who, who have surprised us, I would say, with just how innovative and forward leaning they are on, on new forms of food production and technologies like ours.
49:48 Guy Raz? Ultimately, if, if this scales and succeeds as, as you hope it will, and I think, you know, for the planet's sake, I think we all do, do you want this to be the only way we consume seafood in the future? Seafood that is essentially cultivated rather than fished or farmed?
50:10 Speaker 01 Not at all. You know, I think that people who are stewards of the ocean, who care about the numbers of fish that we pull out of the water every year, should be rewarded for the sustainable ways in which they're fishing. I think that, you know, just as we have more humans on the planet, if we can have not just increasing choice, meaning if people want wild fish, it's there. If people want farmed fish, it's there. And if they want cultivated fish, like, like wild type salmon, that's an option as well. Not just in terms of that increasing choice, but that there's just more traceability and transparency in the entire seafood system.
50:51 Speaker 01 I think that is a, a future that, that is, is, you know, the, the brightest we could imagine.
50:58 Guy Raz? Arielle Elfenbein, Justin Kolbeck are the co-founders of Wild Type Foods. Guys, thank you so much for joining us.
51:06 Speaker 01 Thank you. Yeah, thank you.
51:09 Guy Raz? 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 @howibuiltthis and mine is @GuyRaz. And on Instagram, I'm @Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected] . This episode was produced by Chris Messina with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coats.
51:54 Guy Raz? 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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