Business for Good Podcast

Many listeners of this show will be familiar with precision fermentation, or turning microbes into factories to produce proteins like those proteins that have historically been produced inside of chickens and cows. Think of companies whose founders we've had on, like  Perfect Day and The Every Company . But, what if instead of using microbes as protein factories—and all the associated costs of bio...

Upon reading his obituary, Mark Twain reportedly wrote that "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Whether Twain actually wrote this or not, the reality remains that today the reports of the death of cultivated meat are indeed quite real. Yet Bruce Friedrich, the president of the  Good Food Institute , is here to tell you that he believes such reports are not based on science and are i...

If you follow the cultivated meat sector, you know that the last couple years have been tough. Some companies have gone under, others have gone into hibernation, and others have shed staff in cash-conserving layoffs. Major publications have published opinion column obituaries for this industry, yet the work goes on. Part of that work is that of  Obillion Bio , a B2B cultivated meat company which s...

No cultivated meat company has raised more capital than UPSIDE Foods. In 2022, after having already raised about $200 million in previous rounds, the company raised another $400 million in a Series C round with a company valuation north of the coveted $1 billion unicorn status. No company in the space has garnered more media attention, both positive and critical, than UPSIDE Foods. No company has...

Asia is leading the world when it comes to semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies critical for the future. In a time when several US states are  seeking to ban the sale of cultivated meat, Asia seems to be leaning into the technology, and one of the most mature companies in the space there is Avant Meats .  Founded in Hong Kong in 2018 and having raised about $15 milli...

BlueNalu is one of the better-funded companies when it comes to cultivated meat. Having raised more than $100 million, including about $35 million toward the end of 2023—a notoriously difficult time to fundraise—their founder and CEO Lou Cooperhouse is optimistic about their path to success. But as you'll hear in this episode, Lou isn't working to compete against the commodity meats like chicken,...

When you think about cultivated meat, Thailand isn't exactly the first country that comes to mind. Sure, you may think about the US, Netherlands, Israel, and Singapore. But the Southeast Asian kingdom is where Israeli cultivated meat juggernaut Aleph Farms recently announced its first commercial factory will be.  Having just received Israel's first regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat—and t...

When the New York Times recently ran an  opinion column declaring the infant fatality of the cultivated meat industry, Isha Datar, CEO of New Harvest , was quoted as saying of the sector, "this is a bubble that is going to pop." Given that New Harvest is intended to promote and advance the field, what did Isha mean by this? She expounded on that thought in a 2,000-word commentary asserting that wh...

In 2013, Dr. Mark Post  shocked the world when he debuted the world's first-ever burger grown from animal cells. Weighing in as a quarter-pounder, the burger carried a price tag of a mere $330,000—all of which was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.  A decade later, what does Mark think about the movement and the industry he helped birth?  When his burger was debuted, a grand total of zero co...

Some of the companies in the cultivated meat space are betting that massive stainless steel cultivators—think 100,000L to 250,000L—are the path to commercialization. Niya Gupta, CEO of Fork and Good , is thinking smaller.  She argues that there may be a more realistic path using a larger number of smaller tanks , void of the impellers that agitate the more conventionally used reactors in the secto...

If you listened to the  last episode , you already know that there's an updated paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that's coming out April 9, 2024. I announced in that episode that, aligning with that release, this show will be devoted for a couple months exclusively to interviews with leaders in the cultivated meat space, many of whom are profiled in the book.  And there's perhaps no person...

I'm excited to announce in this short new podcast episode that there's a new, updated, paperback edition of my book Clean Meat that's coming out on April 9, 2024. Published by Simon and Schuster's Gallery Books, the new Clean Meat is now available for preorder everywhere books are sold.  Aligning with this new edition release, for the next couple months, this podcast is going to focus squarely on...

If you've spent any time in the startup ecosystem, you start realizing pretty quickly that the US isn't alone in producing a lot of startups, but that there are some very small countries, like Israel and Singapore, that consistently punch above their weight when it comes to new company creation. In fact, Israel is often known as the startup nation, and there's even a  popular book on the topic wit...

Most startups are founded by entrepreneurs hopeful that their idea will be the next big thing and pad their bank accounts in the process. Yet sometimes companies are started not by enterprising capitalists, but rather by a far less likely progenitor: nonprofit charities.  That's exactly what happened when the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation decided to spin out a for-profit corporation devot...

Many times when we talk about technology that can improve animal welfare, we're talking about innovations that either have displaced or could displace the use of animals. Think for example about cars replacing horse-power, kerosene replacing whale oil, and animal-free meats displacing factory farming of animals. But can technology also be used to make better the lives of animals who are still bein...

Predictions abound for industries that allegedly will be upended by artificial intelligence, or AI. Will Uber drivers and truck drivers be replaced by AI-powered self-driving vehicles? Will writers and journalists be displaced by ChatGPT and its competitors? While many of our physical tasks have now been replaced by machines, it's possible that in the future many of our cognitive tasks will also b...

As a young man, GW Chew saw his family dying early of lifestyle-related diseases, and he thought maybe he could do something about it. With a last name like that—yes, "Chew" is his real last name—maybe GW was destined to become a chef—that's exactly what he did.  Because of his interest in Seventh Day Adventism, GW gradually became Chef Chew by experimenting with Seventh Day Adventist recipes, ult...

Did you know that nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended? And that percentage skyrockets when we're talking about teen pregnancies, more than three-quarters of which are unintended.  While teen pregnancies and teen births are thankfully at an all-time low in the US, we're still behind countries like the UK and Canada in this regard. A big reason teen pregnancies have fallen so dr...

Every time you take a step, you're creating energy. Sadly, that energy isn't captured and used to power your daily life. But what if it could be? That's exactly what Pavegen is doing. What started as a guy tinkering in his room to make tiles that generate electricity when depressed is now a multimillion dollar startup with flooring installations in more than 30 countries.  As you'll hear in this i...

You probably already know why coral reefs are so important—after all, they're home to a quarter of all marine life. But do you know about seagrass?  Seagrass not only provides habitat for aquatic wildlife, but it accounts for 10% of oceanic carbon storage, despite only taking up less than one percent of the seafloor. It also produces oxygen, cleans the ocean, protects against coastal erosion and m...

Maxime Sigouin was on the verge of homelessness, surviving on free meals from his local food bank. After getting laid off from work and having only about $30 in his bank account, Maxime struggled to figure out how he could afford to survive, let alone try to help his partner as she endured her own mentally and financially taxing fight with cancer. The answer, it turned out, was helping others. A v...

Did you know that nearly 10 percent of all CO2 emissions come from the creation of cement alone? That's more than from all aviation! We rarely think about cement despite the fact that our society would literally collapse without it. Roads, bridges, buildings, and more all depend on this material that's so ubiquitous we barely even notice it. In fact, concrete is by far the heaviest part of humanit...

Nearly all startups fail. Often even founders with a successful exit under their belts have stories of entrepreneurial strikeouts prior to or after their home run. But every once in while there's a founder who seems to have the Midas touch who just keeps winning. No, I'm not talking here about Elon Musk. Rather, I'm talking about Yves Potvin. The classically trained chef pioneered the plant-based...

A big part of what keeps you alive—among other things—is nitrogen. The plants you eat need it to grow, so for centuries farmers have been applying it to soil to make their acreage more productive.  Prior to the 20th century, nitrogen fertilizer used to come from animal feces, blood, and bones—which is still common in organic agriculture today—but most row crops these days are fertilized with human...

One day, while walking through the park and looking at all the leaves on the ground, Mira Nameth had a thought: what could she make with all these leaves? Little did she know that her momentary thought experiment would lead her down an entirely new path in life. The lifelong vegetarian had a keen interest in design and materials, and she wanted to do something good for the world. Already aware of...