Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
Cultivated caviar and foie gras may soon hit your plate, with Yossi Quint of Ark Biotech
Yossi Quint is the founder and CEO of Ark Biotech, a startup focused on computational bioprocessing in the cultivated meat industry.
In this episode we talked about:
🧬 Ark's role in accelerating the development of cultivated meat products
🏭 How the bioeconomy could reshape traditional geographic advantages in food production
🌍 The global landscape of cultivated meat regulation and its impact on industry growth
🇺🇸 The potential consequences of state-level bans on cultivated meat in the US
💼 The decision to pursue entrepreneurship over activism for maximum impact
#CultivatedMeat #CleanMeat #AltProteins #BioProcessing #ClimateTech
Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Yossi Quint is founder and CEO of AR Biotech, a company that's, as he puts it, helping breakthroughs break through. Ark's focus today is on computational bioprocessing in the cultivated meat industry, but the technology looks like it can reach well beyond that. I reached Yossi in Cambridge as in Harvard, not Cambridge as in Cambridge. Hey, please take two seconds to rate this podcast so more people can find it on your platform. Do it now, it would be really appreciated. Thank you so much. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here. Yossi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, it's great to be here. You are the founder of Arc Biotech, where one of your catchphrases is that you help breakthroughs break through, and I love that. What does it mean concretely?
Yossi Quint:There's so much incredible science that's happening in labs all over the world, like every day. Scientists are having breakthroughs, are creating things that can revolutionize and change the world for the better, and yet so little of this science goes from the lab into consumers' hands directly or indirectly. Unfortunately, most of it starts in the lab and stops in the lab, and one of those reasons is that scaling up, making more of the product and making it cheaper is really hard to do, and, specifically, it's really hard to do bioprocess, and so I started ARK to help these companies that have done incredible innovation get from that moment of innovation and some of that incredible work that's done in the lab into the marketplace faster through creating better bioprocess tools.
Ryan Grant Little:And your background. I mean, you're a relatively recent grad class of 2017 from Princeton, of 2017 from Princeton. When I looked at your academic degree I mean this was after I watched some YouTube stuff with you, read some of your interviews and I was like this guy's for sure a scientist himself. But you've got a bachelor's of arts, which I was super surprised to see. And I'm curious what did you study and how did it lead you to where you are today? And so that's kind of like a leading question actually to ask you what brought you up. I mean, what was the inspiration to build ARC? And then I'm going to ask you some more questions about kind of the product and stuff like that itself.
Yossi Quint:So when I was in college, I actually I chose to go to Princeton because I really wanted to study math and Princeton has this eminent math department. But when I got there I had just taken a gap year and I was in Jerusalem, surrounded by religious conflict, and I got really intrigued by the role that religion plays in some of these biggest geopolitical issues, or just massive, massive change in the way it impacts people. And so my first semester I took a religion course and I really loved it and I ended up studying religion. I also took a lot of other courses like computer science, operations research and financial engineering, and I was part of Princeton's first ever entrepreneurship minor and in that entrepreneurship minor I focused on alternative proteins and I did my capstone work and a lot of projects related to the alternative protein space, including.
Yossi Quint:I wrote a paper where I interviewed Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, and I actually got my worst grade in all of college on that paper. The professor thought that Impossible Foods was frankenfood it would never take off. No consumer would ever want to touch it. Tad actually asked me if I could send him a copy of the paper and I was so embarrassed by my professor's comments that I never sent it to him.
Ryan Grant Little:I'm sure he's read worse.
Yossi Quint:I think he's been a lightning rod for a lot of comments like that, but I had the opportunity to understand the role that entrepreneurship can play in shaping really important industries. I took a small detour after college that I went to become a quant researcher at a quant hedge fund, where I did modeling and I saw the power of algorithms and data-driven decision-making and enabling and empowering people to not just make a good decision but to make an optimal decision at incredible speed. And I still had this itch to do something that was more related to alternative proteins, more related to creating positive change in the world, and so I went to become a consultant at McKinsey, where I had the opportunity to work with a number of alternative protein companies and had the opportunity to lead a project that was related to biomanufacturing. And during that work I was really wowed by the incredible science that was being done, by the incredible impact that the startup was having or could have on the world. But when it came to scaling up their process from getting from something that worked really beautifully in the lab, something that could touch consumers and drive global impact, there was this real chasm of bioprocessing and, at least for this company, it was about how do I actually scale up my process in a cost-effective way to a size that was large enough to make a difference, and I was really intrigued by this problem and thought that this is the most impactful thing I could possibly do with my life.
Yossi Quint:If I could enable more incredible scientific innovations whether that's cultivated meat, other more pure plate climate things or even medicines that could change people's and improve people's lives, if I could enable this technology to get into consumers' hands, that's probably the most impactful thing I could possibly do with my life. And so I quit my job and, as you mentioned, I don't have a scientific background, but I knew I needed to have an incredible scientific co-founder, and so I spent six months really searching the world for the right person. I spoke with over 40 different scientific leaders literally across the world maybe five different continents, literally across the world, maybe five different continents and I had the real opportunity to meet ARC's CTO, zhang Kuang, who is probably one of 20 people in the entire world who has really led an industrial cell culture operation and is also just an Edisonian genius and creative thinker who just every day comes up with brilliant new ideas of how can we actually create bioprocess tools to help these innovations reach the masses.
Ryan Grant Little:How do you run a process like that, looking for a co-founder? I mean, it's got to be some combination of structure and serendipity. What does it look like?
Yossi Quint:Yeah, it was a lot, a lot of cold outreach messages. I started by going to my network, which is always a good first step, but the role I was looking for was super niche and, even though I had a good network, I was not finding the quality and relevance that I was looking for. I ended up actually hiring a technical recruiter out of my own pocket, and that person also had no success and eventually it was just me sending out hundreds of cold emails, linkedin messages, going to some conferences, and in the end, it was a cold LinkedIn message that attracted Zang.
Ryan Grant Little:Wow, that's incredible. So that's the serendipity bit there, I guess. Why don't you talk a little bit more about what ARK does? I mean, it's like largely working with modeling for cultivated meat, but why don't you fill us in and also a bit about kind of what the actual products and services that you have?
Yossi Quint:Yeah, At the core. We're creating computational bioprocess tools to help companies again get from whatever scale they are to their desired scale at a better outcome, faster, and we do this through two product lines. The first one is hardware bioreactors, which are the vessels that cell culture has grown in, and the second one is software to help scientists make better data-driven decisions. On the bioreactor side, we've developed a few really novel technologies, both to change how bioreactors are mixed, to change the control strategy, to change how data is generated and saved. Holistically, our bioreactor systems enable scientists to have more fine-tuned control and be able to grow things that might be more difficult with traditional bioreactors, which are called stir tanks.
Yossi Quint:Stir tanks- are like a blender and if you've ever used a blender, you know that they're really loud and the impeller, the blending mechanism, goes really really fast as you get to bigger speeds, as you need more power into the system to create more mixing, and this is a problem both when you get to really large scale, so if you want to produce a tremendous amount of cultivated meat or some other bio product. But it's also a problem for cell lines that are very shear sensitive, and so some cells, even at small scales, don't like the mechanical shear from the impeller, and so we've created an alternative mixing mechanism that uses gases to create a much more gentle mixing mechanism, and it's also very scalable, and so it preserves the gentleness regardless of scale. So if you have a process that works at one liter or 10 liters, the size of a water bottle or a keg of beer, it's also going to work at 10,000 liters or 100,000 liters, the size of a small swimming pool or a large swimming pool.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah. So I mean you're pretty opinionated about bioreactor design and I noted that you're not a fan of stirred tanks. And, funnily enough, I mean I've got a story about that as well, because about 12 years ago I lost a lot of money with a pressure vessel that was using a stirred tank. And I remember thinking I don't know anything about this stuff from the technological perspective. But I looked at him like isn't that propeller too small for the size of that tank? And you know, hydro or fluid engineers and stuff are looking at me like what you know? What do you know about that? And you know, a million euros later that was indeed the case. And so the scalability of this, exactly right. I mean, like with a blender, if you imagine that you can't just multiply a blender by 1000 and hope that it's going to perform in the same way. So I'm with you that gases are probably a smart way to kind of do that kind of mixing. So that's the kind of physical side of things as well.
Ryan Grant Little:And let's stick on that for a moment, because there's some interesting things you've said about this as well, that like, on the one hand, it's really important to be able, from the industry perspective, to scale up and that we need. It's not going to work with incremental changes. We need like massive step changes in this industry. And I think the quote that you had was that the biggest bioreactor in the world which was it from Samsung, if I remember correctly in South Korea could produce less meat in a year and cultivated meat than Tyson Foods, which is one of the major slaughter companies, could produce in a day. So I mean that's really interesting from that perspective.
Ryan Grant Little:But on the flip side, you've also said that units as small as 2000 liters can lead to profitability. So it's like some I mean some of this is mixing the technical and some of it is the kind of market side of things. But I'm curious kind of what you think the dynamics are at play here. You've mentioned before scale automation, robust media supply chain. What are just kind of some of your thoughts on what needs to happen, maybe from a technology perspective for cultivated meat in particular, because that's a pretty key part of your business to succeed?
Yossi Quint:Yeah, so cultivated meat? There's not a single solution or there's no single bullet For cultivated meat to succeed, or maybe to take a step back. The single biggest barrier today for cultivated meat is not unit economics, it's not taste, it's regulatory approval. The single biggest barrier today for cultivating meat is not unit economics, it's not taste, it's regulatory approval. And so a lot of incredible technological progress has been made. A lot of incredible supply chain progress has been made. Companies are producing products that taste delicious and that are at a competitive price point in their final form, but are not at market because there's not regulatory approval. And so oftentimes we like to focus on the economics or some other characteristics and have this debate around scale up, scale out with the right size, and these are the right questions to be asking from the technical team. But as an industry, the issue today is regulatory approval, assuming regulatory approval is not an issue, or just focusing in on the economics or the technical side.
Yossi Quint:If I was running a company's bio process, it's really about finding the right solution for the product that you're offering. If you're growing caviar or foie gras, it may be that there's just not. You're only going to be offering into the fanciest restaurants in the world, and so you don't need a tremendous amount of product and the price point that you are going to sell the product for is much higher, and so in those cases you could have a bioreactor that's much smaller and still be profitable and produce enough to meet demand. On the other hand, if you're producing a chicken nugget or aiming to be a supplier to McDonald's like Tyson Foods, in that case you definitely need bioreactors that are hundreds of thousands of liters and you need an entire farm of those, just because there's so much demand and you're producing a commodity product that needs a commodity price point. To achieve that commodity price point or to just have the lowest COGS possible, either to maximize profitability or to meet market pricing, then it's really about bringing together the optimal bio process and a really robust supply chain with cell lines that can support high densities. And so when we think about cultivated meats pricing, or at least on the cost side of the equation, as you mentioned, there are really three things it's the cell line, the media and the bioprocess, which is the recipe and the thing that the cell is growing.
Yossi Quint:When it comes to the cell line, you're really playing with a few parameters, or there's a few knobs. The first knob is how does this thing grow? Does it need to grow on something? Isn't it an adherence cell line, or can it grow in suspension? Is it a single cell, suspension? Maybe an aggregate cell line? If it is single cell or aggregate, it's often an easier and cheaper process.
Yossi Quint:The second knob is what media does this cell line need to experience growth and to experience higher growth? Some cell lines just require more media components that are expensive than other cell lines, and so if you're able to develop a cell line that inherently requires cheaper or fewer media inputs, that's another way to save costs. And the third lever is just how much can this cell grow? At what density does it peak On the media supply chain?
Yossi Quint:There's a few knobs. One knob is how can I use the least amount of this ingredient to get the same efficacy, because it might just be that you're overfeeding the cell. So one is how do I right feed the cells? Then there's how can I get a cheaper version of this ingredient, either by sourcing or by finding a one-to-one replacement that does the same thing, assuming you got the cell line in the media right? Then it's what is the recipe to feed the cell lines, to control the temperature, control the agitation rate, the power that the cells experience, the oxygenation all the things that people need, in the right format, in the right vessel, get optimal performance. And that's where we come in. And our software helps optimize that bio process and our hardware helps support peak performance.
Ryan Grant Little:Let's get into the software side of things a little bit more as well. So I mean, ai is powering lots of things right now, but I've seen it firsthand. You know how it's, specifically with cell lines and how it's done. The work that you know could take years and years much faster. So these kinds of things where it's like a huge data set, lots of combinations, lots of computational power required, but a pretty kind of rote process, right, and we're not asking it to mimic Shakespeare or something like that. So you know what are you doing on the software side. Are you building your own kind of large language model for this, or how is that working?
Yossi Quint:So our software, our off-premise we call our bioprocess co-pilot, is a high-fidelity virtual bioreactor, and so we're aiming to move much of the experimentation that's being done today in the lab or in factories onto the cloud, which enables people to run experiments instead of in days or weeks and seconds, and instead of having to wait and be constrained by the equipment you have or the people you have, you can run a thousand experiments all before you would have even set up your first experiment in the lab, and so it's radically faster, radically expands the operating space and enables scientists to run 1,000x or 10,000x number of experiments at a fraction of the cost.
Yossi Quint:You mentioned AI, and we certainly are very much exploring the latest in AI to bring in the best feature set. But one of the challenges of bioprocess is that it's really small data and the data quality is usually really really poor, and so while AI has been used really effectively on the cell line side, or even on the media side, it has not been used effectively on the bioprocess side, just given the limitations in data. And so the approach that we use primarily is called mechanistic modeling, and that's about figuring out the set of physics, chemistry, biology equations that represent what's happening in the physical world and through writing the code for what's going on physically in a virtual environment, we're able to mimic the process in a really high fidelity way.
Ryan Grant Little:There are a couple of comments that you've made. Also one in January at Tufts University at the Cellular Ag Innovation Day. Cultivated is a lot further ahead than people think, which I'd love to hear. That's seven months ago, so that's light years in this industry. And you know I would be interested, just as a kind of a theoretical exercise, as someone.
Ryan Grant Little:Most of the time when I talk to people who are in cultivated meat they're representing one specific approach and one specific product and of course, therefore, you know they're championing that one.
Ryan Grant Little:But as someone who's kind of sitting above it all and kind of looking at this and kind of running the different scenarios and I ask this totally selfishly because I'm for listeners of the podcast they'll know that my whole goal for being involved as an investor in alternative proteins is that one day I want to eat a chicken wing again, like a real chicken wing with really spicy sauce on it, and I'm going to take a week off and just get sweatpants two sizes too big, turn my phone off and that's. You know, that's going to be my best vacation ever eating a chicken wing for the first time in 18, it would be 18 years if it was today, but if you were to like centrally plan the whole cultivated meat industry, how would you roll it out? You mentioned caviar, foie gras, kind of these, like lower volume, higher price things. Would you start there, would you and this is just you as an entrepreneur If you were to choose, would you start there or would you be making those nuggets like Tyson?
Yossi Quint:That's a great question I don't have. I think there are a lot of different routes and that are all really high impact. Certainly, from a unit economics perspective, it's easy to be profitable with something that is high end, either that is the same thing, sell early as some of these high end goods just produced in a more humane, environmental fashion. Or even a new food category, like there's a company, vow Foods, in Australia that are producing a product that they also talk about being akin to Cheerios. It's just a new thing. It is animal cells, but it is not something that we could bucket into a category. And those are all great approaches because those could be helpful from consumer acceptance perspective, that could be helpful from a price point perspective.
Yossi Quint:And then the other part of me does if you're going to do it, you got to go big and go after the absolutely biggest bucket today, and that's chicken from an animal perspective, or fish from an animal perspective, or beef from an environmental perspective, and so there's not a single approach. That, to me, is the obvious one. They're all highly valuable and within each of them there's so much that we're learning as we go and also so many shared problems. Within each of them. There's so much that we're learning as we go, and also so many shared problems, like while the selling is different, and that has some important key differentiators. When we work with so many of these companies, what we find is that they share a lot more than that differentiates them.
Ryan Grant Little:I like the approach in pet food.
Ryan Grant Little:So my good friend, shannon Faulkner is the founder and CEO of Biocraft Pet Nutrition.
Ryan Grant Little:You know their approach is that both from a cost effectiveness so the ideal form for providing a pet food ingredient is as a slurry, which is pretty easy to make from you know, because you're building up rather than tearing down like with slaughter.
Ryan Grant Little:So you're building up and then you don't have to go all the way up and it's really once you start trying to get this kind of scaffolding and stakes and these like fibrous things, that's when it gets really expensive and these continuous processes break down. So on that hand, on one hand, and on the other hand, her view is look, this is the consumer acceptance of cultivated through pet food might be so much higher as a place to start than going after. You know we've seen this before with plant-based, where it's like maybe don't go for people's like T-bone steaks right from the beginning or these like culturally significant things like sausages or hot dogs or something like that, and start with some other things you know, get some reps in on this and then go for the foods that are like you know that they grew up with and have these kind of very sentimental attachments to yeah no, that definitely makes sense, and another benefit of that approach is that there are fewer regulatory hurdles in pet food, and so definitely a lot to benefit there.
Yossi Quint:When I think about the cultural barriers, that doesn't worry me as much. That worries me from a regulatory perspective of culture wars and regulators making decisions coming from a place of constituencies that are adverse to this. But when it comes to just consumer sales, the world is so large and there's so many niches, and so, whether that's in Europe, like the 10 to 15% of people who identify as flexitarian and the six to eight percent of people who identify as vegetarian, and the low single digit people that identify as as vegan, and then the people who are environmentally forward or have some allergy, and so there's so many small groups that get initial market traction, to me isn't the challenge and we haven't seen it be the challenge in the cultivated space it's really can I get my product approved and can I produce enough of it to meet consumer appetite?
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, Interesting. I live in Austria, which is kind of on the fence right now, and there are bills here in parliament at the moment talking about banning cultivated meat the way Italy did, you know, not too long ago, and as we know it's. I mean, if you're in the industry you know that it's coming from lobbyists, it's coming from kind of populist points of view. There's no real like there's no real scientific reason to do it. But we're seeing it in Europe really play out. I mean, in the US. You're seeing it, seeing it state by state. Here. We're seeing it country by country, where countries like Denmark, Netherlands, UK and Germany are putting tons of money into funding this and being like, hey, this is like an exciting industry that we should be supporting, and you have other countries being like let's ban it. And it's going to be really interesting to see where the chips land.
Ryan Grant Little:I mean speaking of kind of the geographical element as well. You know, I think we saw this largely with COVID and kind of supply chain disruptions for things like meat being able to produce domestically within each country's borders. It's probably becoming more important, even if it's not front page news at the moment. You said before that the forthcoming chip war will be in biology. And from a US perspective, it's imperative that the US government ensures that these pioneering breakthroughs occur within our borders, securing our national security, bolstering our economy and safeguarding our planet. What is your sense, from a US perspective, about how front of mind that message is?
Yossi Quint:First of all, there's, just like we're at this, pivotal moment in history where what our generation decides can forever impact where bioproduced goods are, and there's generational moments or inflection points when different goods impact the world. And so, when it comes to the chips, see where all the chips are produced today and we see the impact that that has on national security. When you look at food, when you look at meat, historically meat was produced where there were large grassy plains and temperate climates, and so, if you had the right geography, you had a monopoly. So the US produced a lot of meat, parts of South America produced a lot of meat, parts of Europe produced a lot of meat. Parts of South America produced a lot of meat, parts of Europe produced a lot of meat. And while it still exists today to a large degree, or the same way, to a large degree, we are now seeing countries like in the Middle East, that are producing indoor air-conditioned farms to grow chickens, or China that's producing multi-story buildings for pig farming. And so today still, when it comes to beef, beef is still very much tied to climate and to geography, but when it comes to other things, like aquaculture, like fish, fish can now be grown almost anywhere, and we're starting to see a decentralization of fish production, and with this is a lot of dollars and national security.
Yossi Quint:Access to food and access to supply chains is critical, and COVID was a daily reminder for most of us of that, of going to supermarkets, not being able to access things.
Yossi Quint:But this access to goods plays out across all levels, from food to chips to medicine, and sometimes it has the opportunity to impact hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs and security.
Yossi Quint:And so what the bioeconomy and cultivating meat being a key part of this bioeconomy offers is a new chapter of decentralization, where the focus areas or the epicenters of production will not be because of geography or because of some historical precedent, but will be where people are willing to invest money in putting steel on the ground and building up industry 4.0 manufacturing around it, while ensuring a regulatory environment that is friendly. And countries like the US or countries within the European Union have a decision to make. Do I want the future jobs, the future of national security, to be on my borders, within my borders? Do I want my economy to be boosted by this, by economy, or am I going to be fearful of something or be beholden to a small, loud faction of people who are going to have these jobs be shipped overseas, forcing us to be net importers at best or at worst, in a position where some of the most important goods produced in the entire world are not accessible to us.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, I think that's very well put. For those of us who don't live in the US and don't totally understand the federalist system there, what does it mean practically speaking when Florida says we're banning cultivated meat? Does that have real legs? Can that happen state by state? And is this going to be just a patchwork of you know across the US that you're going to be able to buy cultivated burger in this town and you cross the state line and you're in handcuffs if you're eating it in the car on the way over? What does this look like in practical terms? Or does anyone know?
Yossi Quint:Yeah, the jury is still out. Both figuratively and literally, these are questions that are being adjudicated across the country. Yeah, so to be seen what this means. But at a minimum, it means that there are states where it's a really adverse environment for R&D, where companies are choosing not to locate, where government bodies are not giving grants, where universities are not doing research and where new industries are being put on hold, and where new industries are being put on hold, and so, while it is certainly disappointing for us that are in this space doing avant-garde work, it's also a real loss for these states, who are losing jobs to places that are more welcoming and more innovation focused.
Ryan Grant Little:Looking at your background and at some of the team, it feels like there's a thread also, you know, beyond the entrepreneurship side, but also kind of maybe on the activist side or like an animal rights side of things. Did you ever consider becoming an activist?
Yossi Quint:When I was younger, I really wanted to. I was always very focused on doing the thing that would be most impactful with my life. I truly believe you only live once and that we each have only a few shots at really creating a world that we're proud of and leaving the world a better place than we found it, and so, for me, activism was certainly on the table. On the table, and one of the things that changed my vantage point, was a social entrepreneurship class that I took in college with a professor, john Danner, and the course is called Social Entrepreneurship, and every class the professor highlighted a company that was creating tremendous positive impact through entrepreneurship, through bringing new products to market, and when I think about the skill sets that I have and the opportunities that I have, at least for me, I truly believe that helping more companies get their innovations to market has the opportunity to create much larger change than anything else that I could do.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so it was really an efficiency kind of consideration. I mean, that's maybe not surprising.
Yossi Quint:That's an efficient way to put it. Yes.
Ryan Grant Little:You ran it through the old noggin and that's what came out in terms of impact For listeners who would like to somehow help out with ARC's mission. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you and what could they do?
Yossi Quint:So definitely feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn. You could email me or send a message through our website, arc-biotechcom. We are always on the lookout for incredible talent. Right now we're hiring a quantitative software engineer, a modeler. We're continuously hiring other types of scientists mechanical engineers, automation engineers, commercial leaders, and so that's one way. The climate space that has a process that has cells or microbes and is looking to scale that up or to optimize that process would be happy to share more about the hardware and the software that we're building and how it can empower leading companies to get to market faster and improve their cost position.
Ryan Grant Little:Brilliant and, as always, those links will be in the show notes, Yossi. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ryan. It's a pleasure talking to you today. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, Ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
