The Better Meat Co.: We're Brewing a Better Bite

of Meat!

In a world where our population is skyrocketing, yet our planet remains the same size, the strain on Earth's resources is becoming ever more pronounced. A significant portion of this strain comes from our food systems, particularly our consumption of meat. Enter Paul Shapiro, a visionary on a mission to transform the way we think about meat. As the CEO of The Better Meat Co., author of the groundbreaking national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, and a five-time TEDx speaker, Paul is leading the charge in reinventing meat for a more sustainable future. Recognized as one of the most admired CEOs by the Sacramento Business Journal in 2023, Paul Shapiro is not just envisioning change—he’s making it happen. Join Delivery Rank as we dive into his insights on the future of food, the role of innovation in addressing environmental challenges, and how The Better Meat Co. is reshaping our food-print for the better.

What inspired you to focus on fermentation as a method to create mycoprotein for meat alternatives, and how does it compare to other protein production methods in terms of efficiency and sustainability?

Think about it like this: It takes more than a year of feeding a cow before you get a steak. It takes five months of feeding a pig before you get pork chops. It takes about 40 days of feeding a chicken before you get nuggets. If you're running a fermentation process like we do at The Better Meat Co., we can feed our microorganism for less than one single day before we get Rhiza mycoprotein. In other words, from the time we inoculate our fermenter to the time we harvest it, if we're running in a batch, it takes about 17 hours. This creates one of the most efficient and delicious meat alternatives you can imagine. The protein that comes out after that 17-hour process is not only extremely meat-like in its texture, but it also has more protein than eggs and is a complete protein. It contains more iron than beef, more zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas, and more fiber than oats.

In other words, you get all the benefits of meat—texture, protein, iron, zinc, and so on—but without the drawbacks like saturated fat, cholesterol, animal cruelty, and a heavy environmental footprint. This really is one of the most efficient ways to produce protein.

Now, I love plant proteins, but just think about what you have to do to make, let's say, a Beyond Burger. You've got to grow a field of peas, harvest the field, and mill it into a flour. That flour is very low in protein, so you need to fractionate and isolate it by stripping out the fiber and fat, concentrating it down into a plant protein concentrate. Now you've got a very high-protein powder, like what an athlete might take as a supplement, but you still don't have the texture of meat. So you have to extrude it, which is a fancy way of saying you apply lots of pressure and lots of heat. Then you get your hero ingredient: texturized pea protein. After that, you add maybe 15 other ingredients, and you get a burger.

This is why plant-based meat today is typically more expensive than animal-based meat, even though the plants they're made from are cheaper than meat. For example, peas are obviously much cheaper than beef, but a Beyond Burger is much more expensive than beef. That's because they're not using whole peas; they're using a tiny fraction of the pea that has been subjected to numerous processes. Now, I like the Beyond Burger. I eat it, and I think it's very good. But if we want to bring down the price of alternative meat and improve the texture, switching to mycoprotein fermentation is a really good way to do it.

Can you walk us through the journey of transforming the concept of The Better Meat Co. into a successful business? What were some of the key challenges you faced in the early stages?

First of all, we're certainly not a successful business yet. We're still in the early stages. I co-founded this company 6 1/2 years ago with the express intent to help the food industry use fewer animals. Our goal is to help the biggest food companies reduce their use of animals, thereby decreasing their footprint on the planet, improving animal welfare, and enhancing public health.

When I first had the idea to do this, I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. I wasn't an MBA graduate, I didn't have a PhD in microbiology or food science, and I didn't have millions of dollars to invest in venture capital. It was unclear to me how I could make this work. So, I asked a couple of people I knew if they wanted to quit their jobs and start a company with me. Those people were Joanna Bromley, who did have a Harvard MBA, and Adam Yee, who is a food scientist. I was very grateful that even though the company didn't have a name, didn't have any money, and was just an idea, both Joanna and Adam quit their jobs, moved to Sacramento, and helped launch this company.

The challenges and obstacles we have faced are innumerable, whether it's a lack of funding, technological hurdles we need to overcome, or regulatory obstacles. There’s always an endless list of challenges to tackle. But, there have also been numerous highlights from running our company—creating new technology, receiving patents on the technology we've developed, forging partnerships with many of the biggest food companies on the planet, building a functioning fermentation plant that demonstrates the capacity of our technology, and assembling some of the brightest and most talented people under one roof to advance food products that can help reduce humanity's footprint on the planet. These are some of the things of which I'm most proud. However, we still have a long way to go.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz started a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz, and Ben Horowitz wrote a book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. He says in the book that when you found your own company, you will sleep like a baby—because you're going to wake up every two hours and cry. That has been my experience for the last 6 1/2 years. Yes, there are innumerable challenges, but I run the company with the conviction that, even though it may feel as if I'm beating my head against the wall time and time again, I believe the wall will break before my head does. That belief is what keeps me going.

I have a piece of artwork that I commissioned on my desk, which shows Sisyphus, the hero from Greek mythology who is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill over and over, only to have it fall down repeatedly. However, in the portrait I have, Sisyphus is finally triumphant. He has made it to the top of the mountain, rested the boulder at the summit, and is resting next to it. That's what I envision for my life—to achieve the goal we’ve set for the mission of this company, which has been the driving force of my life for the past 30-plus years. That mission is to reduce the amount of suffering on the planet by decreasing the number of animals used for food. We're making real progress, but we still have a lot more to do.

As the author of Clean Meat, how has the reception of your book influenced the way people perceive alternative proteins, and how has it shaped your approach at The Better Meat Co.?

When I wrote the book Clean Meat, I had never published a book before. There was a lot of hubris involved in doing it, and I didn’t know what to expect. I got very fortunate, though—the book did much better than I ever anticipated. It was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and on NPR, and it debuted on The Washington Post bestseller list. It truly was a transformational moment in my life.

One of the things I learned in researching and writing the book is that the people who are starting companies in this space—many of whom are quite successful—are not superheroes. They’re mere mortals, people just like you or me. Before researching the book, I thought that the people who start companies must be these demigods with some magical skills that I lacked. But in writing the book, I came to realize that many of these people had even less experience than I did, yet they were running their own companies. I was inspired by that. It made me think even more highly of them, knowing they were ordinary people succeeding in running businesses to try to render the exploitation of animals in our economy obsolete. That was a big learning experience for me.

I believe the book had a substantial impact on the way people view alternative proteins. It made clear that this technology is as necessary as alternatives to fossil fuels. Yes, we need to wean humanity off our reliance on fossil fuels and switch to cleaner forms of energy like wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and more. At the same time, we need to wean ourselves off factory farming of animals. There are many ways to do this: animal cell culture (what's called clean meat or cultivated meat) is one way, plant-based meat is another, and mycoprotein fermentation is yet another. We need to accelerate all of these technologies. While the book focuses primarily on cultivated meat, the movement is toward the same goal regardless of technology—how do we switch to a cleaner protein system, just like we need to switch to a cleaner energy system?

Because I believe that the fermentation of mycoprotein is among the most promising ways to do this in an efficient, near-term way, that’s why The Better Meat Co. is focused on mycelium production. I’m a big believer in plant-based and cultivated meat, but plant-based has faced many challenges, including price and taste, and cultivated meat, as promising as it is, isn’t likely to be on fast-food menus until the 2030s. That’s a long time to wait, whereas mycoprotein is scalable today. That’s why The Better Meat Co. is focused on this, even though I remain optimistic about both cultivated and plant-based meat.

What strategies do you believe are most effective in shifting consumer perception and acceptance of hybrid and fully animal-free meats?

Hybrid meats need to be portrayed as an enhancement, something better than traditional meat. When hybrid meats are presented as a "less meat" product, they typically don't perform well in the market. However, when they're marketed as a superior meat product, they tend to do much better.

For example, consider Perdue's very successful line, Perdue Chicken Plus. Perdue Chicken Plus is a 50/50 hybrid of chicken and plant-based ingredients. The Better Meat Co. supplies them with the plant-based ingredients for that product, and consumers perceive it as an enhancement—it's Perdue Chicken Plus. They get chicken plus the added vegetable nutrition they want their kids to consume.

On the other hand, some brands have released products that are marketed as "less meat" options, almost as if they're sacrificial products. These products contain less meat, and very few people are willing to pay the same or more for something they perceive as having less value. It's similar to going to Jamba Juice and being asked if you want to boost your smoothie with matcha, hemp seeds, protein powder, or something else. You're willing to pay more because you perceive it as a better smoothie, not a "less" smoothie. The same principle applies here. Hybrid meats need to be marketed as better than purely animal-based meat.

As for plant-based meats and other purely animal-free products, I believe it's important to market them primarily based on how good they taste. While those of us in the industry work on these products to protect animals, the planet, and public health, these are not the key motivating factors for most consumers. Most people buy food because they like the taste and because it offers good value. Therefore, these products should be marketed primarily on their taste, with the additional benefits as secondary considerations. The key message should be: "This tastes really awesome."

In your view, what does the future of food look like in the next decade? How do you see the role of mycoprotein and other alternative proteins evolving in that landscape?

For a long time, the word "protein" has been synonymous with a hunk of flesh from a once-living animal's body. However, that's changing, and over the next decade, it will evolve even more. We’re going to have a much more diverse definition of what protein is. Yes, there will still be slaughter-based protein, but increasingly, we’ll begin to think of protein as a far more interesting and diverse array of options—protein from plants, fungi, animal cell culture, algae, and more.

I don’t believe humanity is going to stop craving protein, but we will become less reliant on animals as the primary source of it, given how inefficient they are at converting crops into protein. As a result, we’ll see a kinder, more sustainable food industry as this shift takes place.

I also think there will be fascinating, novel culinary experiences that no one has thought of before. Imagine, for example, having a "meat maker" on your kitchen counter. You could order tea bags full of fungal spores, put them into the machine, and come back the next day to freshly brewed protein, right on your countertop—just like a bread maker or an ice cream maker. Similarly, you might go to a restaurant where, instead of brewing their own IPA in the back, they’re brewing meat just for your dinner. Talk about local, artisanal, and small-batch—that would be quite a meal to experience. I would love to do that myself.

And if humanity ever figures out how to escape from our pale blue dot, we won’t be bringing along a Noah’s Ark. If long-distance cosmic travelers want meat, they’ll have to grow it. Technologies like mycoprotein fermentation are among the most promising ways we will be able to produce protein for astronauts in space too.

To read more about The Better Meat Co., please visit https://www.bettermeat.co/