Milk Proteins without the Dairy - Adam Tarshis and Dr. Cory Tobin

Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast. Now, if you spend a few minutes on social media, you'll find that everyone from new accounts to prominent and influencers are decrying the development of artificial versions of animal products. From cultured meat to vegan cheese, there's this manufactured outrage around building the molecules that biology designed, but doing it in a lab rather than something that walks on 4 legs, or I guess 2 legs. But some states have even outlawed these kinds of animal product substitutes, things like cultured meats and other types of molecules or other types of food substitutes. The thing is that animal agriculture takes up space, it's expensive, it requires a lot of resources like water and feed. It takes so many kilograms of, of feed to make a kilogram of animal protein. So there's a lot there that we really have to think about in terms of long-term sustainability. But save the hate mail. My family raises poultry, we raise pigs, I get it. This isn't an anti-animal ag rant. Instead, it's really a call to use all technologies, every tool on the table to expand access, especially for the food insecure. And there's a lot of people who also choose non-animal alternatives, things like vegans, folks who, who just don't want animal products, or some people just wish to save a few bucks by buying a product that costs less to produce. And so that's something someone like me, I mean, it's perfectly fine. But what if there was an intermediate between the field and the fermenter? What if there was an animal quality product that could be created in the plant itself? It's been done before in things like plant-based meats, but they never quite right, but we may be getting there. So today's guests are the next volley in that discussion. So today's guests are Dr. Corey Tobin. He's the co-founder and chief scientist, and Adam Tarschys, who's the co-founder and CEO of Mosa Foods. So welcome to the podcast, guys.

Thanks so much, Kevin. Good to be here.

Yeah. So let's start with the solve. Let's start with the problem to solve. Cheese isn't broken. Okay. So, so, so why do we need to fix that?

So you're right, Kevin. Cheese, cheese isn't broken, but the way we make the protein behind cheese, it, it's hitting a wall. So the dairy industry is one of the most efficient food systems we've ever built. A modern Holstein cow produces almost 6 times the milk of a cow from 100 years ago, from the 1920s. But we've gotten there by pushing the animal right up to its physiological limits. And we're seeing the cost of that. So declining fertility, declining longevity, so animals just aren't living long, declining herd health. So overall, the herd is far less healthy than it was. 50, 80 years ago, and dairy still represents almost 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So we're not trying to replace cheese or even replace dairy. We're trying to give dairy manufacturers a second source for one of the most— well, the most important protein in cheese and other dairy products, which is micellar casein, and a source that doesn't depend on cows biological ceilings or fluctuate with weather, but probably most importantly, costs less. So, so that less than, than what a cow can produce the same protein for. So that's the problem that we're solving.

And you mentioned the molecules, micellular casein. So give me an idea of how this fits into the fundamental structure of cheese. And what is it that gives cheese its desirable products or processes and properties, like how it melts, the mouthfeel, how it stretches, the squeaky Cheese curds, that kind of thing?

Yeah, sure. So the cheese is made of 2 primary, primary components. One is casein and one is fat. And here we're not trying to solve the fat portion of it, but when you start with milk, you add an enzyme called rennet, which causes the casein to all aggregate. And in the process, it sort of traps all the fat as it starts sticking together. And as all those things form into a solid, solid-ish mass, you end up with like the gooey, stretchy, somewhat hard substance that we all know as cheese. And so it's primarily casein and fat. Casein is 4 different proteins: alpha S1, alpha S2, beta, and kappa casein. And they are intrinsically disordered proteins, so they don't have any well-defined structure. Like, you're not going to go and crystallize it and shoot X-rays through it and get like this cool— 3D model and like deduce how it works based on its 3D structure. They primarily stood together through hydrophobic interactions and ionic interactions. And alpha and beta are— they kind of form like the center of the casein micelle. And kappa casein is like partially hydrophobic, partially hydrophilic, and forms this like shell around the outside, which Prevents the casein micelles from all just aggregating all the time into one solid protein precipitate.

Yeah. So maybe we should drill down on that a little bit because we talk about micelles and I don't know that most folks out there are familiar with what that is. I think people in chemistry certainly are, but micelles, we typically associate with like lipid bilayers that surround some sort of something, right? Like we talk about basically a droplet, you know, that fat that would encase something on the inside that's hydrophobic. And so what's happening here, you mentioned that these are molecules, the caseins have hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts, so water-loving and water-fearing sides. And so how are they coming together to encase fats? And tell me a little bit more about the structure of what's up here.

So I guess I'll start with what's the structure of casein in milk. as you normally find it. And so the casein forms these structures called micelles, which have a hydrophobic core. So they're all the hydrophobic portions of the proteins are sort of on the inside of this thing. And kappa-casein forms this protective shell around the outside. And the entire structure is like roughly spherical, but not— never perfectly spherical, around 200 nanometers in diameter and composed of—

Okay.

Roughly 20,000 protein molecules in each micelle, and there's— these things are all floating around in the milk independently. And the little kappa-casein hairs, as you might see in a textbook, kind of prevent all the micelles from aggregating together all the time.

Okay.

Then during cheese manufacturing, you basically cut off part of the kappa-casein, which triggers them to start aggregating together. And in the process, they start grabbing all the fat the fat globules from the milk and form this big chunk.

So, Kevin, one of the important things to note here is the casein micelle itself doesn't actually contain fats. So, casein is primarily protein and then bridged by calcium and phosphorus. So, you have all these proteins that come together to form a casein micelle. It's many micelles in milk, that when treated with an enzyme used during manufacturing, commonly called rennet, that kind of cleaves off the little protein spikes that exist on the surface of the micelle, that allows lots of protein micelles to aggregate together. And when they do that, they capture the fat that's in the milk, and you get a structure called cheese curd that forms the basis of a lot of the different dairy products that we like to make. So the casein micelle itself is primarily protein. Casein proteins, the 4 we talked about, and then calcium and phosphorus bridging interactions. And then the aggregation that traps fat is a chemical process that happens during manufacturing where you're— the micelles are aggregating around fats in the milk.

Okay, so this is really cool. I never knew this before. I knew that— I knew all the parts and all the players, right? But I never knew how it came together. So really what you're looking at with the casein molecules is that They're maybe even more like a net, like a, like a network, like a big structure that as they begin to act, they have certain projections that keep them from aggregating, but the rennet actually cleaves that off. So now they can aggregate. And as they aggregate, they grab fats that are present in the process. Do I have that right?

Exactly.

Absolutely. And it forms a gel. Milk is an amazingly complex chemical structure. It's, it's incredibly cool. And you generally don't You don't get to see that. But when you're— when you make the gels that form the basis of cheese and other products, you see all of that magic happening.

Okay, so I think I get it. So these are all things that are present inside the milk. They come through, you know, with a cow or whatever you decide to milk. But this has been done to some degree in fermenters. So you can produce casein and other— I guess it's a microbial through yeast or bacteria somehow. How is it produced now? for things like the casein powders and the dietary supplements? And why is that insufficient to create the functional micelles the same way that you can do it with your company?

Yeah, I get— if you're going to talk about like cost of scaling this, this is where plants, plants come into it. The fermenters, you can definitely make casein protein with fermentation. Totally a thing. There's companies that are doing it. We've just never seen anyone be able to do it at scale and beat the price of a cow. It's possible it might happen in the future, but I'm not betting on it.

2 things on that, Kevin. So, you asked about the— now, if I went to a GNC health store and I bought micellar casein, I'm actually buying milk that's been basically filtered and dried down. So, all of the casein that people are generally consuming And by the way, the whey protein that people are consuming, because if you're a bodybuilder, you're consuming both. And we add wheys and caseins to other things as protein enhancers, but that's all coming from cows. So all of the casein that's used today primarily, or 99.999% of it, is derivative of animals. It's coming from cows. There are the two main ways that we can make things without the animal is, as Cory was saying, fermentation, where we do it in tanks using yeast and other fungus, or in plants. And the sole reason to do it in plants is not really a chemical or biological benefit, although those are there. It's just cost. It's that when you work with plants, you get to leverage the agricultural row crop scale that exists today on 80 to 100 million acres of soy in the US, another 200 million acres in Brazil. So, it really all comes down to scientifically, you can do it in a number of different organisms. But, if you have to make a lot of it, and for food-type scales, as you know, we have to make a lot of this stuff, you really need to find something that can do it as cheap as possible. And that's row crops.

So that's a really good spot to take a break. We'll just talk about the idea of scaling, but also the quality of the molecules that are being scaled on the other side of the break. We're speaking with Dr. Corey Tobin and Adam Tarshis from Mozza Foods and how we're producing molecules that are relevant to cheesemaking in vitro or in bacteria or however, in planto. I get confused in the contrasting between all of them. This is the Talking Biotech Podcast, and we'll be back in just a moment. And now we're back on the Talking Biotech Podcast. We're speaking with Dr. Corey Tobin. He's the co-founder and chief scientist at Motza Foods, and Adam Tarschys, who's a co-founder and CEO. And we're talking about how to design molecules That are useful in things like cheesemaking, but doing it in plants. And before the break, we were talking about the beginning phases of molecular farming and how we can begin to amplify these really critical proteins inside the plant rather than in other types of systems, strictly for the idea of scale and cost. So when you guys started this in 2018, we didn't hear a whole lot about this. It seemed like, you know, dairy proteins were in fermenters, not so much in a crop plant. But so walk us through that. I mean, you mentioned before that it's a question of scale, but what is it about doing this in plants that you can't do with precision fermentation?

Yeah, I mean, precision fermentation can do all the same biochemistry and protein expression that we can do in plants. We're all made of the same kinds of molecules, the same DNA. What really comes down to is how much does it cost to grow a kilogram of this protein? And so that's why we ended up with plants, because it it affords us that scalability. But it's not super simple to just like, you can't just like take the gene for casein proteins, like stick it in and be like, oh, we're done.

Yeah.

Put it in the field. In order to form a casein micelle, you have to, I think Adam said this earlier, you need calcium phosphate bridges between the casein proteins. Without that, they don't They don't self-assemble into the correct micellar structures. And in order to form those calcium phosphate bridges between the proteins, you have to have post-translational modifications on the casein proteins themselves, primarily phosphorylation. So there's a bunch of serine residues within the casein proteins which need to have phosphates added to them. And there are kinases, like proteins that add phosphates to other proteins called kinases. And so, we have to, for one, co-express the kinase from cows called FAM20C along with these things and make sure they all end up in the same spot inside the cell. You need all the caseins, you need the kinase, it needs to be functional, it needs to be adding the phosphates to it. You've got to get the pH right. And so, we target the proteins to specific compartments within the cell. There's this organelle called the protein storage vacuole, which is a dedicated nutrient storage reservoir.

Okay.

in the developing embryonic tissue. And so we put all the proteins in there, the pH is good, there's enough calcium and phosphate in there. You put the kinase in there, it all starts interacting, and the casins come together and form micelles. And so we actually have pictures of micelles inside the protein storage vacuoles. And you can see that we have them labeled with the kappa-casin on the outside and the alpha-casein on the inside, and it makes this nice little ring. It's a really cool picture.

Yeah, that's really neat. So you're really exploiting what we have selected as an outstanding protein storage thing, the soybean seed, right? I mean, this is— that's what a seed is, is a big protein and fat storage and carbohydrate storage reservoir. So that's really neat. But it still seems to me that you're trying to— you had to get a whole bunch of things to kind of align here. You know, not only do you have to have these different proteins expressed it in the right proportion, but then you're adding a kinase to it too. And was this the kind of thing where you did it and say, let's see if it works and it worked? Or is it the kind of thing that's taken a lot of tweaking and slow iterative process of making it get better and better?

It's definitely been a slow iterative process from the very beginning. I don't think there is like I don't think there was any single day where there was, like, a eureka moment where we're like, oh, we've unlocked the mysteries or whatever. And I mean, part of it was self-inflicted. We chose to go through different stages where we're going to try to achieve this, to de-risk the research programme. We're like, okay, let's prove to ourselves that we can actually form a mycelium in a plant. And it's not always like, if I had all the information today, I could, I could do it much faster, but it's like the process of like making sure you can do this part and then, okay, let's lock that in and do the next part. Like, I think we initially tried to just prove to ourselves that we could actually make a micelle inside of a plant. And we decided to do that before actually like increasing casein expression. And so it's like, okay, we need to make casein micelles inside the plant, but we don't have very much casein to begin with. Like we're not expressing very much of it. Which then makes it harder to even take a picture of a casein micelle because there's not much of it in there and you're trying to look through the tiny viewfinder of electron microscope to try to find this little nanometer-sized thingy. And so step 1 was make a micelle. We did that. Then step 2 is let's make lots of micelles. And that itself has also been an iterative process where there's never one day where we're like, oh, we've unlocked the casein expression problem. It's like you just start tweaking things one thing at a time and it makes a little bit of an improvement or you're like, you'll double the casein expression and you tweak this promoter and you double the casein expression and just like over the years you build up all these small wins.

And there's no roadmap. Molecular farming is a new space. We've done it in non-food crops for pharmaceutical type products, but at very, very, they're looking for very, very small amounts of whatever molecule that they're looking to build. We need lots and lots of it, and so it's it's it's a difficult process. And not only that, but then you have to look at the different proportions of the caseins. So we just don't need a lot. It's not one protein. We don't need a lot of this. And by the way, in a in a in a mycel from a cow, each protein each casein is at different proportions: one three one three. And so now it's not just about having a single promoter that drives our genes. We have to have different promoters that drive at different. At different amounts to get the right amount of each casein that comes together. And Kevin, I'll say one thing for all the listeners out there. If you ever want to make a protein, do everything else before you start looking at plants because they are the absolute worst to work with. They're difficult to engineer. They take forever to grow. The only thing is it's just, it's the cheapest way to make protein. And so, when you finally come down to it, if you got to, like I said before, if you got to make a lot of stuff, This is the way to do it. And at food scales, it's why molecular farming makes so much sense.

I totally hear you. I have yeast envy because I do, you know, years ago when I used to do a lot of work in transgenic plants, I could do transgenic yeast and have an answer tomorrow, you know, or 3 days from now. 18-hour cycle. It's amazing. Come on, you know, but, you know, but let's go back to the plant question. You're using soybeans and, you know, is there another way that you could do this? And is that just a really good plant for making protein because it's stable or whatever? Or, you know, why choose soybeans rather than something like potatoes and grab them out of the ground? You know, what's a better— I grow potatoes and I really like growing potatoes, but what is a better— is there a better plant out there that is better at sequestering and expressing proteins? Or does soybean really give you a toolbox and a system that really works for this kind of metabolic engineering?

Corey, can I take the kind of businessy side of it? And then you can take— it's not businessy, but then you can take the chemistry. So, Kevin, believe me, we looked at everything. So, we went, I mean, early in the days of Motsu, we really looked at every possible crop that we could work with. And soybean hits the mark for 3 primary reasons. One, it is a protein powerhouse. It just already makes a lot of protein. Potatoes are great. They're just really great at making starches, not so much at making proteins, but there are a lot of other crops that can make protein too, but soybeans make a lot of them. Second, it's a self-pollinator, which means that wind and insects generally are not pollinating soybean plants. And when you're working with a specialty crop or a new GE crop like we are, being able to keep it where you plant it is a very important part of the process and an important part of segregation and stewardship that will, you know, that are important to us. So self-pollinators generally allow you to ensure that the genetics in your plants stay where you put them. And then soybean's also a fairly weak plant when it comes to engaging itself in areas where it's not meant to be. So volunteer soy is generally not what you'd see when you drive up and down cornfields and wheat fields and, or farm fields in the Midwest. You see lots of volunteer corn because it's a party plant and it'll, it's coming up through the soybeans, but— Soybeans are weak. They don't survive winters well. And so again, it comes back to safety and being sure that the genetics in our seeds stay where we want them to stay. Cory, I don't know if there's a biology component you want to talk about.

Yeah, I mean, there's biological reasons why we chose it too. For one, we needed a plant that actually had some tools built up for us already. You could imagine that alfalfa might be a good choice to do this in too. It produces a lot of protein. But if you go and try to look for genetic transformation protocols of alfalfa, it's very, very slim. And I didn't want to have to build every single tool along the way to get this done. I need a genome. Soybeans had a genome already done. I needed transformation methods, just tissue culture methods. And another thing that helps with soybean is that a large portion of the proteome in the seeds is derived from less than 10 genes. And you might get this a little bit later, but if you need to produce a lot of protein, like recombinant protein in the plant, you need to knock down some of the existing genes to free up resources to make your proteins. And if the proteome is, if it Like, endogenous proteome is comprised of just 10,000 proteins at all equal amounts, and you have to knock down like, you know, 1,000 genes to free up resources for your stuff. It's just not— it's not a tractable problem. Whereas with soybean, it was, you know, roughly 10 genes you could work on and eliminate those, and you freed up like 50% of the proteome. And so that was really appealing to us.

Yeah, so that was really my next big question is, you know, these are metabolically expensive processes, and so your metabolically engineered this thing and you're taking away the substrates that would normally be going into the cellular economy. And so really it's a question of turning down some of the major seed storage proteins so that you can have resources available to create your stuff. Is that— which ones are being turned down?

The biggest proteins in the proteome are the glycinan family and the conglycinan family. Those are at least 40% of the proteome. And then, there's some protease inhibitors, albumin, and a few other proteins in there. And so, our goal is knock down all those things. They're not useful. They're not functional enzymes that the cell is going to be missing something. They're all essentially just nutrient reservoirs and the soybeans are perfectly happy using casein as a nutrient reservoir if they need to, as they are glycine. And so we eliminate those genes and just replace them with our casein genes.

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, well, there— these are proteins that are made for the developing embryo, not necessarily for the plant itself. And then humans have co-opted this into making proteins for us, which is really what you're doing by extension.

Yep.

So, Adam, I'm sorry, I cut you off there.

No, no, no, I'm sorry. One thing to mention also is that some of these proteins that we're suppressing are also the allergenic components of soy allergens. And so not only do we create a plant that makes a protein that's a higher, much higher value protein to the food system, but we make a seed that's less allergenic from a soy perspective.

So that's also something that Yeah, that's pretty exciting because that's, that's, that is a relevant point. We know exactly what the soy allergens are. What other types of tools have you used in terms of, you know, heterologous promoters or other aspects of subcellular targeting, other ways in which you can tune a kinase? What other tricks have you used to really optimize for the production of your target proteins?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been a combination of all of the above: promoters, UTRs, post-translational modifications, knocking down endogenous proteins and copy number variation. So, like, one big thing we've been working on is increasing the number of, like, copies of our genes. And I think the core idea there is that if you put more genes in, you just get more transcription and then you get more translation and so you get more protein. And it sort of makes sense from, like, if you look at the glycine and conglycine proteins that are the majority of the sodium proteome, those are not just single genes. Those are gene families. And, you know, every member of those families contributes some RNA and some protein to it. And so I don't think it's reasonable to think you can like knock down 10 genes and replace it with 1 gene and then get the same level of protein accumulation. And so one of the big tools we use is just like increase the number of— increase the number of casein genes per genetic construct or increase the the total number of, like, the copy number of our genetic inserts.

You know, one of the things that I just totally glossed over here that I really should have asked earlier is, here you are doing these nice tweaks on soybeans to get them to produce more of these proteins. But how much protein are we talking about? And if we're like, can you put this in perspective for me? Like, per, I don't know if you talk about per acre or per bushel, but can you give me an idea of how much of this protein you can produce? And how does that translate to final product?

So let's talk grams first. So assume you have 100 grams of soy. You take soybeans, you crush them up, and now you've got 100 grams of soy. About 36 grams of that is going to be protein in your native soybean in the field. Our goal is to convert, to get the cost parity with concentrated casein that is, is made from cow's milk.

Yeah.

We have to convert about 5 grams of that The casein. So, we're not trying to increase the total protein content from 36 grams to 50 grams out of 100. We're just trying to convert the soy protein that's in that 36 grams. We need 5 grams of it to convert to casein to get to cost parity with dairy manufacturing with milk from cows. So, it Comes out to roughly the way we talk about is at about 5% by seed weight. Now, we're almost there, we're at 4% now. And by the end of the year, we'll have that 5-gram conversion. But we know we can go higher than that. And so as we go beyond that 5 grams and get to 7 or 8 grams, which is really what our target is for next year, we'll be able to undercut the cost casein from cows used in everything from cheese to yogurts to ice creams to protein powders by a substantial amount on the magnitude of 10 to 15%. So our first goal is cost parity, and we're just about there on the genetic side of things with that 4 grams. We just have to get a little bit further to the 5 gram point. And then our real target though is about 7 or 8 grams conversion, which gets us substantially less expensive than buying, than using milk to make the Using milk as the primary input to a lot of dairy products. The fun question is, how far can you take that? Obviously, we can't convert all the protein. It's not going to be 36 grams, but we're fairly confident we can get to the 11-13 gram mark where we're talking about— and this is where you really think about having to grow alfalfa and other things to feed to a cow and have that cow convert those calories into— then get the milk from the cow, how inefficient that system is. Versus just growing the thing in the plant from the beginning. So we're really excited about pushing up against, like, starting to poke and prod at what the true limit is.

And how many of your efforts have really stemmed from other than genetic engineering? So I'm a genetic engineer, love it, no problem, but I'm also heavy duty in the field. And so how much of it is management? Are there tricks you can do with planting density or with maybe colored mulches or reflective mulches or water or nitrogen or whatever to really add a further boost to this by using management techniques rather than just genetics?

I'm sure some of the farmers that we work with could talk to you about that for hours. We're not the guys. Our goal is really to engineer a seed that makes as much casein as possible. And we have a lot of really talented, knowledgeable farmers, both in the Midwest here and starting to work with South America as well, who are great at optimizing their fields. So we're excited to see how that works. Our goal is to make sure that yields from our seeds are equivalent to yields that farmers get from the seeds that they're growing with today. Management practices are constantly improving and we're excited to see things happening there, but just not something that we focus on.

No, that's cool. I'm a big fan of, you provide a genetic potential that then experts can drive to its limits. And that's where we are. I do a lot with controlled environments and I think about that all the time. So let's talk about the other important angle here. And that's when you produce a new genetic engineered product for human consumption and for release in the environment, you come into all of these regulatory issues. And so tell us a little bit more about how you can get around the issues of allergens and issues of outcrossing. And, you know, like you mentioned earlier, some stuff about, you know, soybean being kind of a wimpy plant, but how have you been working with USDA and APHIS and FDA to really kind of streamline this process going forward?

Yeah, so we've been working and had active dialogues with both agencies for more than 5 years. When we started, we knew that we were 2 things: a seed engineering company and a crop segregation company. And we have operated that way from the beginning. As you know, USDA and APHIS cares about plant pest risk and does the engineered plant pose an ecological hazard? Does it behave differently? Than a standard soybean in the field. FDA cares about food safety and consistency, allergenicity, that, you know, that the protein is consistently the same and it's repeatable. So we actually, we've been working with both FDA and USDA for the last 5 years. We submitted our first USDA petition in August of last year, and we're expecting a decision kind of June, July timeframe of this year, targeting FDA GRAS submission for the first half of 2027. So one thing to note about FDA is we're not the first to walk this path. It's well-paved. Precision fermentation companies have already received no-question letters, and the FDA has basically signaled that the production method, how you make the protein, isn't preclusionary if the protein is molecularly identical to the bovine version. And we expect to have that same path here because our protein is equivalent to what comes from a cow. And Kevin, I, you know, you asked about avoiding allergen problems and things like that. We really, from the beginning, we went at them head-on. And the way we did that is by really taking segregation and stewardship seriously. We knew that farmers like easy, clean fields, and so we knew we had to give them that. And so we spent many years developing not just a stewardship program, but also a technical platform called GrainTrac that allows us to monitor field movements of tractors, trucks, combines on fields using very low-cost equipment that we developed here. And basically track our seeds from delivery to farm through movement around the farm, on the fields, and then finally on roads to delivery points to ensure that we always know where our grains are at all times and can monitor and basically intervene when anything that could be problematic from a segregation standpoint. So Think a truck of Moza soybeans being delivered to the wrong delivery point. We don't want that to happen. We don't want our soybeans mixed with the commodity supply chain. So we monitor all of those movements. And then on the biology side, Coria is also working on seed coat engineering that will allow us to visually identify our seeds from others in the field.

Yeah, that's really cool. So, you know, and all of this is great. I'm glad you think of all these important bottlenecks and all these important public perception, potential sticking points. But, you know, there's this reality that we live in that I just don't understand, and I've been fighting it for 25 years. And that is, we have all these cool tools and all these great ideas, but still there's that public pushback that we always are going to have to navigate. And something like this one where you kind of agitate the agricultural community that says, well, this is anti-dairy, and then wellness peddlers say it comes from a genetic engineered organism. Do you guys have a good strategic communication strategy that you're formulating or have already implemented to kind of soften the landing of the product?

So first, thank you, by the way, for fighting this fight for 25 years because you've softened the ground for the rest of us and we really do appreciate it. Yeah, we've thought about this for a long time and I think the approach we've taken has been a couple of different ways, but one, We're certainly honest and upfront with, with everybody about what we're doing. We're also out there talking to people, regulators, farmers, stakeholders in the space well before commercialization. We're still 2 or 3 years away from products on the shelves. This is the time to have those conversations. This is the time to explain to everybody how seriously we take segregation and how much we've thought about it. There are always going to be people who are upset. For non-scientifically based reasons about anything. Everybody wants sustainability, they want convenience, but they want to argue and complain about the way that industry delivers that to them. That's a reality. But we really do try to take a very direct approach. We don't— we love the fact that we don't see ourselves competing with dairy farms. We hope that they're— we're trying to augment the supply. Cows We we won't be able to increase herd size as much as we need to, and or now improve production within a cow anymore. And so we need alternate solutions, and all of these can exist together. We actually love that that with our plants we keep the production of dairy in the farm community. It's not you know dairy farmers will continue to grow cows, but now soy farmers have a new market where they can also produce dairy proteins. Because the market continues to grow. Dairy is a huge market. It's continuing to grow. We need everything to come together and we have to augment the supplies that we already have.

That's perfect. That's a great answer. I see it all the time. And, you know, especially the— but you see all these, even the state laws against things like cultured meats and stuff. And I always just take on the attitude of, if you don't want it, don't buy it. Exactly right. But let's not arrest technology that can help the food insecure, that can provide alternates and alternate opportunities for farmers when tough times for farmers. You know, let's, let's get all the tools on the table and let the chips fall where they may, you know. And so I really appreciate your response there.

This is where these topics are tough, because my wife's not sitting next to me kicking me under the table telling me to shut up. Because we could talk about it for a long time. And yeah, we were in a, especially in the US, it's great to let the markets decide what what will be successful and not. Let's let technology try to bring things to bear that can help us feed the billions of people that we have to feed and provide as low-cost quality protein and food as we can. And that's what we're trying to do.

Well, maybe just 2 more quick questions then. So if everything works and you get out your crystal ball here and you hit your expression targets and everything launches in a couple of years and dairy farmers are into this, everybody's into this, What does the food system look like in 10 years? And what's the failure that you worry most about, scientifically or otherwise, that could be a potential hangup for molecular farming as a whole?

So, Cory, maybe I'll take, again, the business side, and you can talk about the tech side of things.

Yep, go for it.

If we hit our targets, I think 10 years out, I'd expect casein and milk to be sourced like we were just talking about, wherever it's cheapest. And most stable. Dairy manufacturers want cheap inputs and they want stable supply chains. And having diversity in those areas is great for them. So fields, fermenters, cows side by side, everything providing inputs into the food system. Cheese gets cheaper, it's more consistent globally. Food insecure markets get access to high-quality protein that they can't afford today. And the dairy industry gets de-risked because you no longer have to keep pushing a cow harder to keep up with demand. So, and which I think is a beautiful view for food systems. It's what we want in not just dairy, but all of our food systems. And I think that for me, and I'm interested to see Cory's answer too, but the thing that keeps me up at night from a failure perspective is this is a relatively new space. There are developers— we're a newish developer, one of the more mature in the market. But, and so everybody's learning as we go. This field is new. And so the space is small enough today that one segregation failure from a company that doesn't take these types of things seriously, that doesn't think about self-pollination versus wind pollination and keeping its products out of the commodity supply chain can really set us all back substantially, which is kind of what keeps me up at night. Thankfully, the science, as Corey was pointing out, is very challenging to do in plants. There is a fairly high barrier of entry technically. And so there's only a handful of folks working on this. And as a group, we're all working to ensure that there's a framework out there for people to follow. So, so, but that is, that's one of my bigger concerns.

And from From like a scientific genetic perspective, there's a number of ways this thing can fail, mostly resulting in us just not having a business anymore. Like if we make these plants that produce X amount of grams of casein per acre and it's going great, year 1, we have a bumper crop and we're producing tons of protein. Year 2, tons of protein. Year 3, something happens. Like we've done field trials with our plants. And everything works great. But when like the temperature is at this point, and like the, the rainfall is here, and with the casein, and something happens, and there's something goes wrong, we just don't get the yield out of it that we are expecting. And all of a sudden, we are failing to supply our customers with casein. That would be very bad for the business. With traditional soybeans, you have 100 years Of agronomic data. Everyone knows how the timing of the fertilizer application and the herbicide application and the rainfall and the weather, how all these things interact. And there's just like massive amount of literature on these things. But in our case, we're kind of paving new ground here, and there's not a whole lot of literature on casein-containing plants growing in fields. And so there's always possibility that that things don't go our way. And that the yield, for whatever reason, under some conditions doesn't, doesn't produce. And that would be not great for Moza.

Yeah, no, I totally understand. Farming happens, right? I mean, you can't predict the unpredictable. And, and as you're talking to a guy who we— my wife and I sell at farmers markets every Saturday morning, and we probably lost $10,000 in peaches this year because of a late cold snap. So I totally get that. It's also fun to think about And, you know, we don't have to really discuss it, but that there's got to be a company that does soybean breeding who has created a soybean that is absolutely horrible for the market and usual for its soybean quality, whatever, but probably would be like this monster protein expressor, you know, and just to be able to keep those things on your radar, it may get developed and you can cross those genes right into it. So a lot of fun things that can happen. But if everything goes really well, what does our timeline look like? And are there other proteins that are on your radar? Because can you make insulin? You know, are there, are there other proteins that are on your radar that may also benefit from your knowledge in casein?

So, uh, I have a question. From a timeline perspective, we're looking to have an initial product launch in late 2028. So we're still about 2 years down the road for product launch, but excited, making quick progress to that point. In terms of other products, hey, milk is such a big market. There's such a big impact to have here that we're really laser-focused on the dairy space. I will say this, Corey's pretty phenomenal at seeing, targeting, and executing on what he's after. And in the past, we've looked at egg white ovalbumin, and we've been able to produce egg whites in plants. Plants are great for simple unstructured proteins like caseins, like ovalbumins. So there are certainly other things we could go after on the food space. From a pharmaceutical perspective, soybean, open-growing soybeans probably aren't the best. Those things generally are better for the tobaccos and other non-food crops that can be grown indoors where you don't need the types of massive acreage, you know, we need, we need 1 million, 2 million acres for making lots and lots of insulin, you can do that in greenhouses, which is great. So we'll probably stick to food proteins for the foreseeable future. We've got our eyes set on cows and dairy.

Very good. So if people want to learn more about your company and your products, where do they look online or on social media?

So You can read more about us at mozzafoods.com, M-O-Z-Z-A foods.com. We're on LinkedIn also, Mozza Foods. And then on X, we're @mozzafoods and Instagram @mozza.foods. And then Corey and I can— you can find us and reach out to us at corey@mozzafoods.com or adam@mozzafoods.com. We're happy to talk to everybody.

Very cool. I absolutely love this episode. So thank you very much for joining me today. And do me a favor. When we get down to the time when this is coming out or the next big improvements happen, please reach out and let's talk again, because this is really the kind of stuff that it can be such a game changer if we get the technology exactly right and then can earn that social license to make it happen. So reach out when that happens.

Absolutely. Kevin, thanks so much for having us. And thanks for honestly promoting new technology and biotech and for fighting that hard fight to allow this industry or these industries to continue to flourish, because They're going to be doing some amazing things in the coming years.

I agree. I mean, the good old days are still ahead of us. And I'm very excited about that. And, you know, that's something that all our listeners should really get excited about as well. We've got great opportunities to be able to not just create new products for consumers, but also new crops that farmers can profit from. And this is a win-win-win situation. So what I urge you to do is if you're listening to this kind of product, this podcast, Get excited about these kind of products. Visit the websites, learn more about them, share it with your friends, promote it on social media, push back against the disinformation. The bottom line is, is that there's always going to be people who are upset about new technologies who will lay in the way of its dissemination and development. What we have to do as a science-friendly audience is take a little bit of time to push back. There's a lot more of us than there are of them. And this way, the good technologies and the companies that create them can help contribute to a more secure food future. This is the Talking Biotech Podcast, and we'll talk to you again next week.