How I Built This with Guy Raz - When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

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 & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca 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 found a lot of the food. And we've talked to found 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 Eschar Ben Chitrit, and he launched his company, Redefined Meat, back in 2018, 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. Eshahar 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 Eshahar 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, 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. 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.

And what was the product you were looking after? 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.

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. He was also working in printing. 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. Got it. While the two of you were there, did you ever talk to each other about starting your own business? 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. That was your

goal. 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 30 at that time. And I told Adam once, we have 40 more years to work. What are we going to do in these 40 years? So you guys are 30, 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 leader at HP or maybe I'll become a senior leader at another company. Yeah, and also why would I take a risk when the career pass is so amazing and so successful and it's actually quite interesting

what I'm doing. I met great people all of 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. 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. 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 individual calling or purpose that you say, then it's not a risk. Then if I don't pursue this path, I'm risking something big. 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. Oh, so when people come to you and they'd say, Ashkar, I have this great idea.

I want to talk to you. It's not going to work. You were the guy that was saying that to people? I was very good at that because also it's very easy. Yeah, yeah. All right, so you were at HP for a few years, and then I guess you went to another company called Highcon, 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. Yes, but it's also more fundamental when 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 a 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. Yeah. All right. So you were there for about two years. and obviously learning a lot about 3D printing. 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? 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 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 were 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.

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. Why? Tell me why you stopped eating meat.

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 kid. I looked at my son. I have now three boys and I said, I don't want to be eating somebody's else child. 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 mother are 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. 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 meat and general meat consumption.

And I say this as a meat eater. I eat meat this weekend and I, you know, I do eat it. But I was reading about, you know, sort of the carbon footprint of beef in particular. particular, and it's just, it just kind of outweighs every other, you know, animals. Like for every kilogram of beef, 100 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. So part of this idea, I guess, not just for you, but with other plant meat companies, is to solve this problem. But,

and to enable people to eat meat without actually doing the damage that meat production does. 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 cows basically are one billion, population of one 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. 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. Yeah. So 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? When I quit my job from Hykon with two boys, I had many options. The most immediate options 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. We're going to take a quick break,

but when we come back more from Eshkar 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. When I was a kid, I used to love building with Legos and Lincoln Locks. I would spend hours working on these elaborate creations, these villages and towns. And looking back, I realized how that kind of play really helped me build confidence and develop a sense of wonder and creativity.

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sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app. And it's totally free. Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Eshhar Ben Shitrit, who back in 2018 quit his job without a plan to join in on the growing momentum around plant-based meat alternatives. 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. 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. 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.

A 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, but complexity is the number one benefit. There's no added cost for complexity. So essentially, I mean, for anyone who's tried 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.

You're thinking, well, maybe giving your background a 3D printing, maybe there's a way to actually 3D print a stake that actually replicates a stake 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. It's totally different beasts. And also, I didn't have experience as a technology. I had an experience in conferences, making presentation. Right. 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. But it's naive beginning led to something serious that we didn't plan necessarily. So this is 2018 and you are like literally with syringes injecting just the 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 fat. So was that what you were doing? You were just squeezing these different components onto, 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? How did you know? How do you know all the secrets? So I had this intuition that that is true, that meat is comprised of muscle, fat, and blood. 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 my rump steak, what do you think about my rump 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 level of sophistication, but I saw I have some crazy ability to follow a wild idea. All right. So you and Adam Lahav, who is 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, you know, that you could serve to people. Where did you go? Did you start in Israel or did you find a lab somewhere else? 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. Yeah. 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. 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. 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? 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. We wanted to see what kind of things we can create with 3D printing that a normal food company cannot develop. And the first thing 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 stake one day. It was very exciting and we thought that that's it. 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 a 3D printer to every restaurant around the world. 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.

On demand, no waste, just in time. Personalize your steak. We had the habit of demoing people a steak that they would cut and their name will 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. So I know that you guys raise here about $6 million in seed funding in 2019, and that probably got you to a place.

where you could develop something that was, you know, 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 stake, 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 you know that that intramuscular that muscular kind of you know the the 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 yeah so at some point of time

the citron we actually raised on the blood just the fact that our blood component was very very tasting very impressive and the blood was basically water and and and soil sauce and different flavors. Yeah, it was a little bit more advanced than that. We found a collaboration with a flavor company that is called Givodon, an amazing strategic partner. And we were able to develop this gush of blood that when you put in your mouth, taste like what comes out of steak. And we were able to show the steak and explain, once we combine those together, you'll 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 meats or 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. I remember there's a nice video of a mother giving her kid a bite of our product. And then I told her, you know, it 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 raise more money and also started working more with chefs. Once we were more confident, we started going to this Michelin Star chefs and butchers. I want to ask you about that in a sec. But you basically, 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 them.

meat and selling the meat. 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 the 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 him, 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 out 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 biggest meat company, you're not selling the technology. You're selling meat. We're going to take another short break,

but when we come back more from Eschar 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 Eshhar Ben Shitri, 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 two really famous chefs, both Michelin-Star chefs, Marco Pier White and Ron Blow.

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. 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 brazed 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 I've been in the kitchen. 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 these gets pitched every day from a plant-based company. So how did you get to him? A small, you know, company based outside of Tel Aviv going to him and saying, hey, try this. How'd you do that? 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, I 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... And it's not. 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 Perewhite, when you came to Ron Blau, by the way, very early on in the process, we told him, 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.

And we did it with them, but we also went to butcher's. 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. By the way, Marco is incredible. It'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. But you're essentially constantly trying 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. 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 tenderlo and 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. So the next version of that was how we are not only doing this fibrillness, chewiness of short rib, but how can the product stand alone on the plate?

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? The question is more what is the benchmark? So today, if we do a blind taste into 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 ourselves wagyu meat, so the highest price

meat. Cobra beef. It's just super premium meat, yeah. Yeah, so of course, we cannot compete in a blind tasting and we want. We believe that in three years from now, we can also provide a bagu 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. 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 as she, not eating in a bun, eating with a knife and fork. 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 improve 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 Rebi, which is a year from now, we can go to U.S. mainstream steakhouses.

At what point will these products be available in grocery stores? Eventually, in order to become the world biggest-made company, we need to be everywhere that we need is found. But we think that the way to reach consumers and the way to improve our products is through restaurants. 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 Missionistar Restaurant and the caterers. Somewhere next year, a year from now, we'll start rolling out to more retailers in Europe 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. 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? 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 kilograms of feed for every kilogram of meat. 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, millions of dollars of scale. And we're talking about tens of millions of dollars to reach a relatively decent scale and lower price point. 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.

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. So in, you know, in sort of five years from now, where do you want to be? Where do you imagine you'll be? 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 minstrage and our steak. And we have, sizable business in the USA from restaurants in retail. But the idea is, if you look, even 10 years from now, out of the 20 biggest meat companies around the world, one company or two companies 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, 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 needs 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 a tough journey to do what we're doing. But the potential is so amazing.

The potential is so unique, so incredible. It's something 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 the world's biggest meat company, it's just the beginning. Eshchar ben Shitrit, thanks so much. Thank you, guy. I enjoy it a lot. And thank you. It's an honor. That's Eshhar Ben Shitreit, 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 Carrie Thompson and edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Messini and music by Rumteen Arablewey. Our production team at How I Built This includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Carla Estevez, Ramelewood, and Sam Paulson. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.