SXSW Startups: New Age Meats
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 1, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Social and Culture, which will pitch at 11 am Saturday, March 9, New Age Meats makes meat from animal cells instead of animal slaughter. They can craft meat to be tastier, healthier, and more sustainable than any other meat.
Brian Spears, Cofounder and CEO, spoke about his San Francisco-based company.
Can you tell us a little about your process?
Last July, we met a young pig named Jessie at a farm in Marin, just north of San Francisco. We took a tiny biopsy from her, went back to our labs at IndieBio, and separated out the stem cells. The cells multiplied for several weeks in a nutrient-rich broth. When we had enough cells, we induced half to muscle, and the other half to fat. Combined, we had ground pork. Our chef took that pork and made sausage, which we fed to 40 people.
At scale, we’ll have cell banks so we won’t need to go back and get cells from an animal. We’ll be able to multiply and induce those cells in large cultivators. The facility will look like a brewery — for delicious meat. That’s why our first experience will be in a brewpub, where customers can see beer brewed on one side, and pork on the other, in the same type of reactors. We want consumers to see how the sausage is made.
What is your competitive advantage?
Our company has been designed from the beginning on a platform of automation hardware and data science. Why is this important? Our industry’s biggest challenge is to create a production method for meat that’s substantially less expensive than the closest comparable system — the biopharma industry, which sells very expensive products.
We need to iterate through thousands of protocols — or recipes — to make our cells healthy and delicious, while also creating a new scaled manufacturing environment. That means we need to run a ton of experiments, and we need to do them faster, in parallel, while selectively choosing the best to run. That requirement isn’t met by doing science in an old school, academic, bespoke method. A platform of automation hardware and data science is the best tool we have available to engineer biology, and we’re the only company building it in our space.
How and when did your team come together?
I met my CSO/cofounder Andra Necula in November 2017 through the help of the biggest nonprofit in our industry: The Good Food Institute. For months, both of us had been interviewing other potential cofounders to start a cultured meat company. Andra was part of the London-based accelerator, Entrepreneur First, and I was living in the Bay Area. While she and I worked to define our technical vision, we also had long conversations about our values. We formed this company to create a better place for all the world’s inhabitants by improving our environment, human health, and animal welfare. Once we clicked, I flew to London, where we worked for several months. In May, we accepted IndieBio’s offer to join their life sciences accelerator, so we moved to San Francisco, where we’re still based.
We both had started multiple organizations previously. In Austin in 2008, I cofounded Sixclear, and led it until 2016. Sixclear automated the research labs and production environments of customers like NASA, Cisco, GE, and various US National Labs.
Tell us something about your previous experience at SXSW.
I lived in Austin from 2004 to 2016, and attended SXSW every year. It was the annual best week of my life. SXSW captures the imagination, and places you in a room with people working on the coolest things on the planet. Do you want to chat with them? It’s easy, walk up after the session and ask them questions. Make a connection. There’s almost nobody who’s inaccessible. In the evenings, I would relax with local beer, watch amazing bands, and learn from people all over the world. I loved it, and I can’t wait to come home!
What are you hoping to get out of attending SXSW 2019?
We want to tell people that cell-cultured meat is coming, and that it’s tastier, healthier, and more sustainable than the meat we currently eat. We can use all the help we can get, so we’d love to meet up with investors, influencers, potential team members, partners, and fans!
What aspects of the startup experience do you enjoy most and least?
My role as startup CEO is ideal for me. I’m insatiably curious and love to learn and understand how an entire system works. Professionally, I did years of systems engineering in my last industry. My pet fascination is to visit countries and explore how the interplay of history, national identity, and culture influences daily life.
To found a startup, you have to see the entire ecosystem: what new technology can you incorporate into your product? How will the public respond? How will regulators react? What about incumbent industries? How do you build the right team to maximize excitement and creativity? Once you understand this system, your role is to convey the parts that matter most to distinct audiences: investors, team members, customers, the general public. Paint a future picture of a better world, and put them in there. Inspire them to join you. What could be a better job?
What do I like least? Bad tools. Being forced to used broken processes and outdated systems, whether from your bank, government agencies, or backward healthcare companies. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for startups to improve all our lives!
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
