Revolutionizing the Seafood Industry with Brandon Chen and Michael Selden of Finless Foods

Well, we just had a fascinating conversation with Michael Selden and Brandon Chen from Finless Foods and Thinless Foods is on an incredible mission. That is so interesting. We learned so much from this conversation.

Yeah, this is another area of science that I am just so excited about because we are definitely facing a food crisis as a species and there are so many companies out there working to fix this and Finless Foods is definitely the forefront. They're working on creating cell cultured tuna, which will solve a lot of problems. We'll talk about those in the episode, so stay tuned. But it is a fascinating and such an up and coming field of research and we're really excited to dive in.

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We're your host, Karina and Allison, thank.

You both for being here. We are so excited about this whole topic. So we always like to start though with career paths. So if you don't mind, we'll start maybe. Brandon, what did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now? And how did you get there? And I want both of you to answer this question eventually.

Yeah, Karina, thank you for the question. I have to go down to my memory lane 46 years ago when I was 7. Of course, think about being a doctor, lawyers, engineer, architect. But you know, this day I'm a doctor of philosophy, not a doctor of medicine. I think there's a few biology laboratory classes that kind of just opened my eyes and I've been just being fascinated by it throughout my career. So, so that's how we ended up here thinking, hey, research science is really exciting. And always think about how can we leverage biology and biotech in general to solve a lot of challenging issues we are facing as a humanity these days.

Yeah, that's great. Michael, how about you?

I was sort of a little bit on the scientist track, or at least my parents would say that because I really like to do analytical work in general. And as a kid I really liked to sort of like think of things in that way. Um, but I think I, I probably wanted to be a computer programmer when I was a kid, but part of that was sort of like projecting a little bit. Like I, I was not really allowed to play video games or watch TV as a kid. And so I thought they were very cool things to do. And so I wanted to be a video game programmer despite the fact that I had basically not played video games. I just thought that that was exciting.

That's all right. Because I mean, tons of guests want to be astronauts even though they hadn't been into space.

So it's, you know, it's a surprising amount of people who come on and say they wanted to be an astronaut. Like, it's a very high percentage of our guest.

That's fascinating. I think I'm too claustrophobic for that. I don't know if I could like cram myself into the tiny space that would require to me for that.

Yeah, I feel that I was one of those kids who wanted to be the astronaut. And then I realized that I am very claustrophobic and also terrible at math and physics. So I had a lot going against me on that. But all the same. So what are you both doing now? Can you give us an overview and tell us kind of about your exciting company and all the things you're doing?

I think most recently, you know, in the past four years being with the famous food to develop this new type of the food we call the cell cultured food, specifically seafood. And famous food is focusing on tuna particularly. Being just extremely excited about developing this type of the crew with technology. So leading teams, working on R and D, working on different way to improve whole process and also working on the regulatory path for this type of food in the United States and as well as some other country as well. So that's kind of where we are this day. But before that I was industry related to procedure, fermentation, therapeutics, synthetic biology, but in general just biotech in as a themes throughout my career in the past 20 years. Ish.

Yeah. I have so many questions as we get into this about Finless foods and the regulatory hurdles and all of that. Um, Michael, what are you up to at Finless and you know, what's your perspective on that?

Yeah, so I have a background in biochemistry and molecular biology. I've done a whole bunch of odd jobs. I was a translator for a bit. I was a high school chemistry teacher for a bit. And then, you know, as somebody with a biochemistry undergrad, I started looking at grad school and started off looking into this field of creating animal products without animals. I've always been an environmental activist and I know that animal agriculture is a really heavy part of humanity's footprint on the environment. So finding a Way by which we can create good food for people that actually is better for the planet motivated me a lot. And especially going to a university with a big focus on agriculture, going to UMass Amherst, which is a land grant university, so there's a massive agricultural biotechnology program that really influenced me. So I started off doing a PhD, but then was approached by some venture capitalists who basically said, hey, this whole, you know, growing meat outside animals thing, do you think that you can do this well on your own or do you want to do this for the big team behind you? And I said, well, obviously a big team would be significantly better. They said, well, you should start a company then if you want to do that. So I brought in my best friend, now 13 years, Brian Weyrus, who's my co founder, also a biochemist, and we founded finless back in 2017. Um, we managed to bring on a lot of really brilliant and incredible people like Brandon along the way, who's now just a total pillar of our company in every single way. And yeah, like Brandon was saying, we make cell cultured bluefin sashimi. So it's seafood with no mercury, no plastic, no ocean ecosystem destruction, and no animal cruelty. And we do this by just growing the meat outside of the animals. We took a small cell sample, pulled it out of the tuna, and allow it to basically do what it already wanted to do, but just instead of doing it inside of an animal, we let it do it outside of an animal. Day to day. I do investor relations and general strategy. I'm CEO, so I work with Brandon, but not really like on the bench or like on, on the technical team. And it's just been a really, really cool and interesting journey. I don't have a background in entrepreneurship and it's, it's been really, really cool to learn that as I've gone.

Yeah, was that daunting when someone was like, oh, that's a great idea, just start your own company? I mean, can you talk about sort of that transition a little bit?

That's a big, that's a big thing.

To just jump in and do.

I was given this shot, you know, some investors were basically like, we'll fund you. And I was like, to be clear, I don't know what I'm doing. So we went through this accelerator which basically is like, well, if you're somebody who understands science, we will teach you business. We think it's much easier to teach business to scientists than science to business folks. And yeah, I feel confident now. I really enjoyed what I'm doing. I feel capable. I'm advising a few other companies. I've done a lot with a few different accelerators in terms of advisorship and I've really enjoyed finless. I'm you know, six years, seven years in now. And like now I do know what it. But it was daunting at first. I mean it sort of was a lot of like fake it till you make it. You know, an investor will be like, we want to do this specific thing and throw out some terms and I'll be like, I'll think about it and then I'll go home and look it up. Because I just had no idea what they were saying. And that was a lot at the beginning of the company. Contrast that to now where I have a very firm idea of like where we're going and what I want from people. And it's been really cool, but it's just taken a lot of like admitting I don't know things when I don't know things.

I think that's really important though. And I love your point about teaching business to scientists. We do a really similar thing, we teach recruiting to scientists because the science is the really long drawn out thing that you need to learn. Right. That, that really was what, the first 29 years of my life basically. And then the recruiting piece or the business piece, that's so situational and that is something that you can pick up. And I've certainly gone through some of those same struggles. I did not see myself owning a business and now here I am 10 years in and I am not the same person. So I can certainly empathize with that journey. Um, what I didn't have to do, which I'm very interested in talking about with you, is I didn't take any external funding because different scale. I have a, a small recruiting team. How did you go about thinking about the investor pieces? Now that's one of the hats you wear is investor relations. And you said you were in a really great incubator ecosystem that helped you to learn that. And so how did they help you with that?

Yeah, so we went through an accelerator called IndieBio. Indie Bio is in San Francisco. It's just one of the world's biggest biotech accelerators. And they had like a really intense crash course on just like every aspect of running a business. And it was very intense. I mean it was like four kind of closer to six months long of just you're there every day, all day. You're doing 16 hour days like for months and months and months. It's very brutal. But I mean, when you're done with it, you understand a lot better what you need to be doing. And in terms of investors, I mean, we look for people who are passionate about our space and our mission. Our mission is to create a future for seafood where the ocean thrives. And we want people who are in on that. We also look for people who have expertise in places where we're trying to grow. So people who know how to build a big food company. You know, for a very long time we've really been a company that's just a bunch of scientists in very highly technical fields. So that doesn't mean we have a lot of experience in the food world. We're also looking for people who can bring us to new geographies and we have a big push to bring us to Japan. And so we're looking for the right partners there in order to help us transition from just being an American company to being an international company that functions in really the heart of the tuna industry globally. So it's really like looking for people who know things that you don't and who are bought in on your mission and the general trajectory of the company. And I think those are the three things you should look for that I look for when finding investors.

Finding investors is a really interesting thing to talk about. But another thing that I'm super interested in is how you build your team around your mission. I mean, this is a very mission driven company. You have very awesome goals and how do you find that that helps when you're bringing people in? How do you maintain that mission throughout, you know, an employee's journey with finless.

That mission actually, Michael, Brian, you work on it with Hover Impact, you know, advisory report altogether, right, as a whole team to set up the mission that serve as north star of the company throughout and throughout our recruiting process, onboarding, even training how to build a team. This is kind of our guiding star altogether. We always point back to this particular mission statement. Are we aligned? Are we setting our goals to achieve our mission? Right. So with that in mind, we distill it down to additional company core values that we can discuss, like how they actually permeate throughout the organization and guide our communication team, building how we conduct science and business together.

So when you're building that team out from, you know, the entry level folks through the folks that are working, you know, externally, how do you think about their, how they're communicating that mission? Because we, you know, we did talk a little bit about terminology offline, but you know, I think it's really important mission and it needs to be communicated in a almost PR way.

Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, not just the PR way, but also kind of like how that impact not just, you know, our work, but personal life and much bigger so the human race in general, multi generation. Right. I think we purposely put it up front in the job description company website, everywhere you can see. And we realized people join fuelless food for that purpose and they feel good. Not just good, actually proud of it. And that's all I heard. Like, hey, I come to fitness food because of your mission.

I could see that. Yeah.

And they probably stay because of your values, which I'm also really interested in hearing about.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that the like creates a lot more of a community and in a culture than not having that exposing. I think that obviously when you first start a startup you don't like write out your culture and your values generally. But actually I think it is pretty good to start it like fairly soon after that, like maybe just co founders. It's not necessary, but once you have like a few employees on board, it's good to really build that out. And I'm happy that we did build it out because we're, you know, only a few people over 22 full time, but still having values has been really helpful and having like cultural touch points, we can point to that and be like, look, we're acting this way because written down it's one of our values. That's how we operate here. It just really helps because, you know, everyone operates differently. And having something written down that people can all agree on is good in part because it means that like you will hopefully write something down that doesn't appeal to every single person on earth. There are some people who will look at your values and be like, I don't want to work that way. It doesn't mean that these are bad people or they have bad values or anything, but it's good to just find fit and just for people to self select out of it by seeing that, saying that's not for me and moving out of it because that also creates buy in from the people who stay. The people who are really interested in that are just like, yeah, this is me, this is how I want to work. And it's one more reason to be invested, to stick around even if things get tough, to like stick it out and to make sure that things work. And that's been, I think a really huge thing for us.

So you are in a really interesting growth stage right now where you have your first pilot plant and you're really scaling up. Can you talk a little bit about that and the challenges with, you know, starting manufacturing and things like that?

That's a great highlight of where we are in terms of. Now we have a proof of concept prototype technology we can produce in our pilot facility. Now, how can we scale up? Right. So set a capital availability aside that they come into a much bigger question first, what is the scale? We are looking at the location and how can we actually dial in a lot of the sustainability factor, the energy, the water you use into this particular site. Right. So that take a whole lot of expertise. Not just finless food, but also outside a consultant. Right now, another element I want to highlight in terms of scalability and scale up is technology mature enough to do that. And we feel like we can do that. Right. So with that in mind, we set out to build a facility first in Northern America once we. In parallel tracking our regulatory approval so we can reach out to the much bigger market compared to our current pilot facility.

And you were talking about getting multinational here as well. What are the challenges there if you are going to move into other markets?

It is challenging, especially if you're building something new. I mean, we've had a lot of challenges in just getting prototypes to Japan. Like we're trying to build partnerships in Japan. We're trying to set up like R and D in Japan. Instead of production in Japan, you do need to bring the stuff that you make in order to actually build partners other than. Because if you don't, you're like begging them to fly across the Pacific and see what you're working on. And it's challenging. It's challenging because it's new. There isn't like a specific. It's been very difficult to find the correct pathway to bring it into Japan. And it's like delayed. Like I've been delayed on a trip to Japan. I was supposed to be there a month ago, still here. And we're still trying to figure out how to make this work. So it's. It's challenging. That said, what's nice about it is that not nice that the challenges themselves are not nice. But it has really helped us actually start to work with people on the other side of the water. You know, we actually now have Japanese partners who are actively working on facilitating getting our prototypes into Japan. This is helping us understand, like what it's like to work with these people and what kind of agreement we want to work on with them. You know, what parts of our production process should we be off boarding to people. What parts of our R and D process should we be doing JVs on? Should we be getting investment and from. From who? I think it's actually been really clarifying in a lot of ways, even though I kind of overall wish it wasn't this frustrating.

And so just to clarify, the market in Japan is really strong because of the seafood use. Is that why you've chose Japan or is there another reason beyond the market?

Yeah, I mean, Japan has always been a leader in a lot of different ways, but in terms of seafood especially, so almost 80% of the bluefin tuna market globally is in Japan. That makes it a really important market for us.

We had spoken previously and you shared something really interesting with me. And it really highlighted my ignorance to why this is so important. Now when I think about why this is so important as how it would impact the ocean, I think about overfishing, right. And I think about the trawling and all of that. But you were telling me about the process of actually getting tuna into the US and the back and forth, and I thought that was fascinating. Can you share with everyone sort of the process of how you do transport tuna and the impact on the environment of that?

To be clear, I don't do any of these things, but people do. Even when we catch tuna in United States waters, typically that is shipped across the Pacific to Southeast Asia for processing because the labor is significantly cheaper, and then is shipped back across the Pacific to America for sale. Not fantastic for the environment to ship something across the planet twice. But also it's just, it's less fresh. You have a higher degree of spoilage. It's just worse from every perspective. But if you're a chef in the us you have two options. You can either buy a whole tuna, which is a six foot long animal, you need base in your kitchen in order to be able to chop that up into usable pieces. And you need someone on staff who knows how to do that. If I'm a chef and I know how to make, you know, nigiri, that does not mean I know how to process a six foot long animal. And those are two sort of separate skills. And, but that's the way you can actually have it fresh. The other option for yourself, if you are a sushi chef in the United States, you can buy a saku block which are like this big. You know, they're, they're a piece of meat that's rectangular and that's pre processed. But that's the stuff that's gone across the ocean and Back twice. So that stuff is much more convenient. You don't need to have someone on staff who knows how to process a fish. You don't need the amount of space necessary to have a six foot long animal get chopped up in your kitchen. But it's not fresh. And so that's what's cool about Finless is that we can give these chefs both. So people ask like, wow, consumers buy this and we have our reasoning. But actually one of the things that's interesting about us is that our customers are chefs, operators and restaurant owners. And these people have a whole different set of like, why they would buy this or not. And this is a huge reason for them. They can get fresh fish that's actually produced locally that they don't need to have all this specialized stuff on staff in order to make use of. And so we have an advantage in that way beyond just the like, we have no mercury, we have no plastic, we're better for the environment stuff.

I mean, that's fascinating. I really had honestly probably just never thought about it. It just wasn't on my radar to think about like, how does the sushi actually get here when I order, you know, tuna sushi? And that is just really enlightening.

There's a million things like this. You know, global supply chains have been like this really wonderful thing in terms of like making our lives better in a lot of ways. But we don't realize, I think, how complicated they are. You could probably have somebody explain this exact same thing to this entire room of people, but about a computer or about whatever else is sitting on my desk, and I would have no clue. There's just so much complexity in this, which is cool. Built this like big industrial society where we have this incredible division of labor. Everyone has a very, very specialized thing that they know how to do. But it also means that there's just a ton of complexity associated with all this and a lot of knock on effects that might not be great for the environment.

I think this was really highlighted during the pandemic when we really did hear a lot about the global supply chain and shipping. And I think there are some, you know, some things that came out of the pandemic that probably give you some good talking points where people can relate to finally relate to these problems. Because they were national news, international news.

Yeah, exactly. I like that there's been like increased awareness around ocean in general. Around the ocean. Because it is really important. I mean, people don't realize, I think that like the ocean is currently where 50% of our carbon is sunk. So if the ocean ecosystem is destroyed via something like overfishing, that means that we will double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which is catastrophic for the planet. And people are becoming more and more aware that it's like there aren't oceans. There's one ocean, it's one ecosystem. And if we kill one part of it, it starts spreading and killing more of it. Actually protect as much of it as we can. Um, so that's been a cool development in the past few years. I think people are paying more attention to that. I think people are noticing the effect of massive supply chains on everything that we do. I mean, I think a lot of people remember, you know, the boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal and people realizing, like, wait, one boat getting stuck means like, everything is messed up globally. And it's like, yeah. And that. That's not just one. There's a few choke points like that. And people have, like, written a lot about it and the challenges associated with it. You actually have people who have, like David Harvey, who predicted a boat could get stuck in that canal and it would stop all global supply chains, predicted that like five or six years prior. And he was like, this is an issue. And so it's like, it's not like we don't know where these things are. And so it's good that people are starting to think about where they are and how they can affect it.

Brandon, I have a question. When we talk about complexity, is it impacting your work? How is AI impacting your work? Is it adding complexity? Is it making things better? How are you using it?

Very great question. I would say it's adding on top of what we've been doing. Because traditionally science being done, of course, by human, human mind. We process tons and tons of information from research to literature, try to come up with hypotheses to approve it or disapprove it, right? So that iteration is much, much longer now with AI with a much better, for example, language module with able to do the data analytics much faster, that basically help science to shorten that iteration, right? So we can do multiple rounds of the hypothesis testing and, you know, advance our science much, much faster. So we are in the trajectory to actually incorporate that into our data analytics going forward, understanding that we still have a lot of science to do going forward.

It's very exciting to see. So you were mentioning regulatory challenges earlier. Can we dig into that a little bit? I'm not familiar in the least with how foods get approved and what that process is. And I think that will be unfamiliar to a lot of our listeners who are more on the biotech space and they're thinking about therapeutics which are a little different.

Yeah, it is a bit of a different process. We're still working with fda, so that part at least is shared among us and other biotech companies. And yes, I mean, for a while there wasn't really a regulatory process to get approval for a cell cultured product in the U.S. singapore stood up a regulatory system a few years ago and they were the first globally to do that. The US system got set up within the past two years and is now up and running, which is cool. It's a joint effort between FDA and USDA in terms of the creation of the system. And a lot of what you're doing is attempting to show that what you're making is really not different from what people are currently eating. And we firmly believe that. I mean, we took real cells from a real tune up, pull them out and feed them real ingredients that are pretty similar to what these cells would be eating inside of the body of an animal. And so we're sort of proving out or like explaining to the regulators that our process is similar in every way and that also we're using, you know, ingredients that are already generally considered to be safe. And so it's just sort of like working on precedent of like, hey, like tuna's on the market. We're essentially that these ingredients that we're using are safe to eat in terms of the things that we feed the cells. So that we don't think there's any like concern around those things. And then demonstrate that we actually have a scaled up bio process that is reproducible so we can actually continue doing these bioreactor runs with our bluefin cells and that pretty much know what's going to happen every time. It's a controlled process. We're not just doing things at random. And those are some of the things. And of course, on top of that, you know, in terms of proving or, or arguing that things are similar enough, you have to do a nutritional analysis to make sure that you're actually getting people the same nutrition. Because you want to call it bluefin, you know, it does need to give the same general nutritional benefits. Otherwise FDA or USDA would argue like actually this isn't bluefin because you can't sell something and have it have different nutritional qualities. That's not fair to the consumer. We have an easy case along a lot of those lines because we're just using tuna to make tuna. But yeah, it's rigorous. You know, we do have to do a significant amount of testing, and we do have to submit to a significant amount of conversation. We think that's good, to be totally clear, like, we want to be vetted. I don't think that companies should just be able to shove whatever food product on the market and call it whatever they want. I think that that is bad. And so I like that that FDA is really vetting us, asking us questions, and making sure that we're on the up and up, because, you know, that in the end is advertising for us. You know, basically saying, hey, FDA approved this. It's not just something that we're saying is safe in order to make money. You know, obviously we're in this for the environment, but FDA is just in it for safety, and they think it's good. But Brandon's really working very closely in that process. Anything you want to add there, Brandon?

That's pretty much sums up everything. And we see this as sort of collaboration of all the members in industry and at the same time, helping the FDA group to understand our unique processes and the safety profile of our product.

That makes a lot of sense. Are you going to expect that when you work with other countries? I know Japan is, you know, what you're working with right now, but obviously the whole world would be ideal if they could. If you could sell your product. In all countries, are there different standards? Does the FDA standard kind of carry across borders? What's that process look like?

Does not carry across borders. A lot of countries do look to the FDA in terms of, like, creating their own systems. You know, we are speaking with multiple people in multiple geographies who are not, like, we trust FDA a hundred percent because obviously they're their own countries that have their own, like, wants and needs and things they want to work out. But they definitely are looking at that as a model because it is a system that exists. They're looking at the US they're looking at Singapore, and they're saying, what parts of this process are working for our country or would work for our country, and what parts do we not want to take? And I. I think it would be cool to honestly be a part of those conversations. We're not. Which is good, right? They shouldn't just involve private companies. But I think it would be really interesting to be a fly on the wall there, just to sort of see, like, what changes they want to make to the process or what they want to keep, because it's just so far outside of my wheelhouse. But Yeah, I mean, even there are some things that get kind of dicey. Like, people wonder, why are you putting your production plant, you know, your pilot plant and then your first production plant in the United States? Wouldn't it be cheaper with that in Mexico, where a lot of other production happens? And our answer to that is there's no import export law for this. So there's actually no way then we could make it somewhere else than import it into the country legally. It has to be here. And so, you know, that's kind of a disadvantage in certain ways, but it's just interesting. So as this industry grows, I think this will get significantly cheaper, significantly more efficient, and part of that will be regulatory systems getting stood up in different geographies.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast podcasts. Back to the show.

At what point in time when you started Finless do you bring in regulatory and fda? Like, you have the idea and you start building it out and you start creating the technology. And at what point do you need to start bringing in governing bodies and getting approval for things?

We started doing trips to Washington very soon after we started. I think we were there 2018, 2019, like maybe a year or two after we got started. We knew that we had to build regulatory concerns into our process from the get go because you do not want to build a product all the way out. And I'm sure a lot of pharma people listening to this can resonate with that. That just doesn't work. And you have to start from, you know, six months prior or eight months prior or something like that. So, yeah, we've been, we've been building in that from the start because we've needed to and because, you know, regulatory is a big challenge to get through. Takes a long time and you don't want to add time onto that by like making silly mistakes that you could have foreseen by just talking to people.

I want to pivot a little bit into destigmatizing some of the food issues.

I think it's very complicated. I don't think there's like one thing that's going to actually get people over the line and understanding what we're doing. I think it's going to be like a step of comms. You know, it's going to take individual conversations with thought leaders. It's going to take normalization of these products and getting them onto the market and showing people that it's safe just by being there. It's going to take genuinely answering people's questions. It's going to take just like having these in normal settings and not freaking people out by changing too much too quickly. And then there's some people who are just never going to get on board. There's some people now who are rejecting any agriculture. You know, there's like a movement now, people who are like, we won't eat wheat because humans didn't always eat that and everything in between. So it's like you're not going to win everybody over and, and that's okay. Like our goal here is to try and make a difference for the ocean that does not require 100% of humanity to swap over to finless. If we can even get like 20 to 30% of the current tuna market, which is obviously massive for a company, but if cell cultured foods can move that over, it would be a massive, massive step in saving the ocean all on its own.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, right? I remember when like plant based meat products came out and people were like, oh, what's that all about? But see it like everywhere, right? I mean you can't go into a restaurant, at least where I am, and there's not like veggie burgers and vegan things and you know, whatever. And that's great. And I think that's really a positive for everyone and certainly climate wise. And so, I mean, I don't know, I feel like, I feel like people are a little bit more open to this because they're realizing the importance and the significance that our food choices make.

Yeah, I think, you know, the veggie burgers have become passe, they've become boring, which is great. Like, you know, it's not supposed to be some like shocking new thing that people have to feel they have to have an opinion on. The idea is just to Slide it into people's current lives and just let it sort of actually fulfill a function. And that's our goal. Like, I used to work at a nonprofit for cell cultured foods called New Harvest. We would always say we want cell cultured and synthetic biology foods to be just Oreos. Oreos are a fantastic food product because they're ubiquitous. Everyone knows what they are. You know, people who are. Are doing lots of sugary sweets, really like them, myself included. And they're vegan, and they're not vegan outwardly. Right. There's nothing on the package that says that they're vegan. Um, but they, they just realize that, like, that's the most effective and delicious way to make the thing that they want. And so that's really what we think, that that's what I want, like, food tech to do, not so much appeal to people's, like, morals and values, because I think we've tried activating people on that, and it's gotten us here, which is okay. You know, we've gotten a lot of people who are interested in pushing things forward. But I wonder how we're planning on getting, like, you know, the vast majority of people on board. I'm not sure there's a pathway to that just by appealing to people's, like, morals. I think we really do need to create things that are actually, like, cheaper, better tasting, more nutritional, and just easier to scale. And if we can do that and have those products be environmentally sustainable and don't involve animal cruelty, that's sort of like my goal in this. So I want us to be Oreos.

I mean, I do love Oreos. And I also think that part of your really compelling argument is the fresh component. I. I mean, when you start thinking about, like, wait a second, how fresh is this? That is kind of. It's a drawback to, you know, most people. You want to eat the freshest thing you can.

Fair. Even the US over 90% of our seafood is imported. So if you're eating seafood in the US you're probably not eating fresh seafood. You know, it's so funny to watch people for the first time go to Japan and they sort of have their mind blown. They're like, why is the seafood so much better not imported?

Yeah, I definitely did not realize the extent of. Of that. Because you do think there is a tuna market here in the US and you think it's caught fresh, and it is, in fact, but then it goes away and then comes back. That blows my mind.

They were talking about tuna, and that's your main focus. But where does the technology go from here? Are you sort of limiting to tuna? Is that your core focus for now, or do you see other avenues down the line for now?

You know, because we're small, we're sticking with tuna. However, yeah, we definitely want to expand. We've worked with 12 other species aside from tuna and we do intend to bring that research back out and actually expand it once we have the capacity to do so. So, you know, we're starting with tuna because it actually works with equipment that's on the market today. You can actually undercut the entire tuna market using bioprocess equipment that you can just purchase if you want to get underneath, you know, really some of the cheaper white fish or chicken or pork. You do need to move towards bioreactors that don't currently exist. People are projecting these like animal cell bioreactors that are a hundred thousand liters, which is technically physically possible, but is not currently done. Pharma like goes up to like 25,000. It can go a little bit above that. But that's kind of where things top out because at that point you're ending up with contamination concerns and a few other things as well. There's like the geometry itself. Brandon can speak more intelligently to that than I can. But basically, you know, we want to get out there with equipment that exists, get ourselves stood up, get tens of millions coming in in terms of revenue, make sure it's gross margin positive. And then from there we can start expanding into these other species that are cheaper, start using and inventing equipment that doesn't currently exist, build ourselves out into being a massive multifaceted seafood company that's not just a tuna company.

And then you can open your own sushi restaurant. And that's where people are going to come and try all of your fresh things for the first time. And I will be first on the list.

I'm a big fan of you all moving into the chicken industry because we're chicken enthusiasts. This is a little known fact. Alison and I both have flocks of chickens and I think that that's a market again. I went to a school where it was animal science. And that's an industry where I think there's a lot of reform needed as well.

I think we understand from the technologies perspective this type of the product. We always see early adapter like you both. Karina, Allison. Great. We mark it down. We're going to have you as our VIPs, but we're looking forward to slowly kind of demystify this type of the food like we talk about, right. It's not general public worry about, hey, this is, you know, gmo, this is actually non gmo. Right. It just goes through a different type of production process. It's much cleaner and address a lot of environmental challenges and issues we are facing. So with that, you know, really welcome this type of conversation out in the open and for us to share out how we do throughout the process. We have different types of procedure to ensure and safeguard our food safety issue. So that's the reason why we're going through the FDA process to seeking their approval. And so that's, I think just more of this type of conversation would help general public to better understand this is not as sort of, you know, strange or unnatural as people think. It's actually it just the next phase of how human consume food in general.

Yeah, I mean we're facing a food crisis as a species. There is enough evidence out there that I feel that hopefully public perception will be very receptive to these sorts of solutions because it's a crisis that's there's no other word for it.

I'm interested too. And obviously, you know, you haven't probably priced this out fully. I know it's going to be market dependent and stuff like that. But ultimately what is the cost going to be compared to what the cost is now like once this product is up and running and on the market? I assume that if you're a sushi chef, this is great for you.

That's the hope. Yeah. So currently bluefin tuna sells for about $20 for two pieces of nigiri. And that's on the cheap end. You know, a lot of the time you'll get bluefin, it's like omakase. So you're spending 300 to just get into the restaurant. But you know, if you're doing a la carte California at least it's usually around $20 for two pieces of nigiri. That adds up to about $200 a pound to the end consumer. We're already well underneath that at finlance. But really the number that we need to fight with is the wholesale pricing. That's the pricing that actually gets sold to the distributor and that's closer to $40 a pound. And so we're intending to be underneath that within the next two years basically as soon as we get this manufacturing facility up and running. So the next big facility beyond the one that I'm sitting in, the pilot facility will be underneath all wholesale pricing for bluefin tuna globally, or at least that's the goal from there, you know, we intend to get under the $10 a pound price point within the next few years after that. So basically by, by 2029. And that would get us underneath not just all bluefin pricing, but all tuna pricing wholesale. So we'd be under all Alcor, Skipjack, et cetera. And that gives us a really big market to play in. So basically we think that right from the get go we will be at the very worst price competitive. But we think going forward we'd be able to actually undercut entirely the entire market.

And that's really, if we're being really honest, this is where the needle is going to move. People are going to follow their wallets a lot of the time. And so that's going to drive adoption. I think one thing that made some adoption of early synthetic foods and cultured foods slower was that it was more expensive. It was not only different, but it was more expensive. But now it's less expensive. You can go in and you can buy beyond burgers for less than you can buy beef burgers now. And that has moved the needle. I wanted to touch on this article that, that you all brought forward though about building teams. Do you want to talk about how you think about building teams? It seems like this article, an entrepreneur has been pretty influential in how you think about that.

Absolutely. Building team is critical for all company, especially company at this size where you don't have yet fully established the norm or infrastructure, right? Much larger corporation. Everybody learn from their colleague, from their manager. But when we bring in fresh graduates, you know, young, enthusiastic, they don't know what is expected of them, right? What is the social norm, how we build a team, how we make a decision. So starting from scratch, I think this article really resonate with me. Some of the key points, for example, as a leader, lead by example. Because everybody emulate leader, right? And they see how your leader behave, communicate, they emulate that. Establishing clear goals, responsibility, give them a clear land to run the race. That's very critical. Otherwise nobody's gonna be successful in the company for their career.

Right?

Few other key points, you know, diversity. I really value diversity. And diversity this day has go far beyond just age, race, gender, sexual orientation. It also expand upon the different opinion, different communication style, right? How can we communicate with a different perspective and also empathize the perspective of the others. And again, empower team member really big things, give them autonomy, try not to micromanage. That's how you scale the company. That's critical. Encouraging professional development, lots of training, lots of training. So at Fearless Food we have tried to provide all sorts of different career training opportunity, communication training as well as a leadership and management training. And that's what we can do on top of just science work and to help them to develop develop their career. Not just at the famous food just doesn't matter where they go. This is going to be under their belt. They can utilize for their career growth going forward.

I love that. We'll link this article in the show notes for anybody who would like to take a full read of it. That sounds like a really great way of building the company. Thanks for sharing.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the management training? I mean so I think if I recall correctly, you guys have been 22 people at Finless, is that right?

More or less.

So that's a really robust program and thing to offer as a smaller size company is all of these training programs. How have you implemented those and who oversees these?

So when we talk about training there are different types of mechanism, right? We can think about hey online programs, we can think of private coaches. However, we can also do that organically which we have done internally. Personally I oversaw that training program. So basically the idea is leveraging the experience from all the different member and have a roundtable discussion. However, as someone guide the discussion, try to hit all the topics and everybody learn from each other. Are we agreeing on those principles or we disagree if we disagree? Why? For example, when a topic I brought it up and had this discussion with all our managers at Finless who is how to have a difficult conversations, right? It commonly seems any organization top and down360 all around. How can you have a difficult conversation with your direct reports? How can you have that conversation with your boss? And what is the approach how you're going to go about first see the perspective of the other through a very empathetic goal and use that as the way to help the other party to help them to see your perspective as well. So through this type of communication you can always address a very difficult conversation without having your emotion getting involved and kind of disrupt that transparency. So this is just one example. We do this type of training organically without even spending a dime, which is what we spend just our time and sharing our experience.

I think that's fantastic and it's definitely something that I don't think a lot of companies even think about doing at the stage and the size and it is. You're right. It's so valuable for your employees who are with you and for when they move on to Other positions. That's really. I really like that.

Yeah, you sound like a great boss. And I bet your team absolutely loves working with you. I'm just curious. I mean, this is a new venture. We always like to bring the whole career thing full circle and talk about where you see yourself next, but I know that you're in the trenches right now building this out, so I guess it's more. We've already talked about maybe moving into other markets and things like that, but where do we see this company going next? Like, what's your takeover? The world plan?

Take over the world plan is get up a commercial facility. We want to break ground next year is the goal. Get something up and running as soon as we possibly can with that commercial facility. We want to end up that the facility that we have planned, we want it to be able to do over 15 million ARR. You know, really prove out that there's demand. There's demand for cell cultured bluefin, that we can produce a good quality product, ship it, and have it be legal from there. You know, once we have that up and running, I mean, we really shouldn't need venture capital. Like, the facility that we're intending to build is very modular. And the banks that we've talked to basically say if we can get one up and running, prove demand for it and actually sell our supply, we can get the next few funded off bank loans and not off venture capital. And with that, that means the company can really start to fly and not just sort of be sort of stymied by having to wander around finding the right venture partners for us. So I think after that first facility's up and running and selling, you'll see really rapid expansion and, you know, hopefully, like you pointed out, a little bit of world domination in there.

I love that. Brandon, how do you fit into that plan? How do you want to grow and scale your team?

Yeah, that's absolutely sort of the next phase of the company. Definitely be very heavily involved in terms of facility building, site selection, and also recruitment overall.

Yeah, I'm very invested in this, so please keep us updated. Maybe we do podcast round two after you have your facility up and you can tell us how it's going because I think this is so great. So probably our last question, but for each of you, Brandon, if you want to start, what is your favorite fiction or nonfiction book or just a book that you think everybody should read?

Very good question. I gave some thought. I'm going to give you two books. Kind of just resonate with me. One is actually like the child's, you know, storybook, but actually written by C S Lewis. Is it A Lion? The Witch and the Wardrobe? I read that as a child and I still like love it this day. The second book is by Daniel Goldman, a professor who wrote Primal Leadership. And both books just touch upon so many human factors. They talk about people's motivation, their drives, their fears and underlying tone to me is empathy that just thread all the needles. Like how empathy is what actually the critical factors for all those human factors.

Great suggestions.

No, Brandon's got good recommendations. In order to pick something else, I for doing business boy books, I would say I really liked Situational Leadership in the One Minute Manager. Super short. It's written for business folks, so it's like massive font and it's like not very long. But it's really a great little template on how to build up leadership underneath you in the company and how to actually delegate work effectively, which is something that is a skill and it's not a skill that we're naturally born with. It does take time to figure it out and I think people think it just kind of happens naturally. I really don't think it does. I think you need to put effort into cultivating that and also you need to teach it to the people who are working underneath you. And I think this book is a really great framework on how to learn it yourself and then actually get your knowledge disseminated so you can delegate tasks effectively and be a good manager. We're talking fiction. I think the Three Body Problem is like the coolest book I've ever read. It's Chinese sci fi. It's basically a bunch of physics problems, but it's. It's a sort of like an alien first encounter book. Super fascinating stuff. Very long, very like far reaching and starts during the 60s in China, so during the cultural revolutions. There's a little history in there as well. Just a rollercoaster read. If you're into sci fi, as most.

Of our listeners know, I'm definitely into sci fi and that's a great, great suggestion. Everyone should read. Well, thank you so much. This has been really fun. I am fascinated by the company, I'm fascinated by the whole space. I just can't. I can't wait to see what you guys do.

Thanks so much. Me too. I'm excited by the possibility of what we got going on. I'm excited by the trajectory of the company in the next year or two. You know, getting a product actually to market, pulling something new into the world is just, it's exciting and we're on the precipice of it. It's a cool time to be us.

We really appreciate you both taking the time to be here with us. We know how busy you are and this was very, very interesting. So thank you.

Thank you so much for having us on.

Thank you.

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