Ethan Brown discusses the mental shift and technological breakthroughs behind Beyond Meat's plant-based meat production. He explains how the company approached the challenge of creating meat alternatives that could compete with traditional meat on taste and texture.
Now, was there a particularly impactful technical or product breakthrough that you can share? Something that really made beyond meat?
Click.
So.
So I think it was two things. One, it was this mental concept. We knew that there was a massive issue with the amount of livestock on the Earth's surface, right? Enormous. Right. And you go to any great land grant university in the United States and they'll have really good meat science departments and those textbooks in there and those professors in there will focus on how do you increase the efficiency of the model, right? And you can continue to tweak it and try to make it more efficient. But at the end of the day, we, I think, have reached the point of diminishing returns in that. And in fact, the consumer is rejecting efforts to make animal agriculture more efficient, whether it's gestation crates or other means, and of course, the crowding and all the things we know now about disease. So you had to take a step back and say, okay, we don't just want a faster horse, we want something entirely different. And so you had to rack your brain about that. And I've talked about before, if you really want to be useful in something, marinate in the problem. You know, just get into the problem, let it consume you. Think about it all the time. And I've quoted him many times, Edward Edwin Land, he's very good at this. You have to lose yourself in this issue. And if you can kind of get it to the point where it's taking up all your mental energy, your brain often will find a novel way to think about something. And so what started to occur to me was that we were fixated on the origin of meat, right? And we said it has to come from a chicken, cow or pig. That's what we know as humans or some other animal. You know, the history of agriculture, 12,000 years, that's kind of been what we've done. History of meat consumption 2 1/2 million years before even the Homo sapiens and our predecessors comes from an animal, right? But what if we just asked what meat is? Right? And meat is, is a knowable entity. It's five things. It's amino acids, it's lipids, it's trace minerals, it's vitamins and it's water. None of that stuff is mysterious. Actually, if you think about the origins of life, amino acids and lipids are everywhere. If you think about primordial soup, that's kind of what that stuff is, right? And so it's all around us. The animal is simply a way of organizing it, right? So you can't get hung up on. It has to come from an animal. You can start thinking about its composition, you make a breakthrough. And so then you had to start looking for, okay, what's the technology I can use to create a piece of meat directly from plants? It turned out that some guys that I connected with the University of Missouri were doing something very interesting with some pretty established technology which was high moisture extrusion. But what they were doing was varying the inputs of heating, cooling and pressure, the parameters rather of heating, cooling and pressure to restructure the animal protein, sorry, the plant protein into the same general structure of animal protein. So they were converting the architecture of plant material without adding any chemicals or anything, just using heating, cooling and pressure into the structure of muscle. I said, what? That's what I wanted. And it was very nascent and they hadn't commercialized it, but they were willing to work with me and that was a godsend.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
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