Cultured Meat and Future Food is a short-form podcast series discussing the role of plant based food, cultivated meat and food technology. The show is focused on asking industry leaders questions for an audience with a non-scientific background. Cultured Meat and Future Food is targeted towards entrepreneurs interested in the food technology space.

Chris Landowski of Onego Bio

On this episode we are excited to have Chris Landowski of Onego Bio.


Chris will be speaking at the upcoming Future Food Tech Alternative Protein Event in New York on June 27-28, 2023. Learn more about the event at www.futurefoodtechprotein.com. Use coupon code CM10 for a 10% discount on registration.


Chris Landowski is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Onego Bio, a company producing animal-free egg white proteins with precision fermentation. Chris is a precision fermentation trailblazer and one of the most influential scientists and renowned experts in the field of cellular agriculture globally. He is the scientific mastermind behind many of the technologies currently used in the field, including Onego Bio’s cutting-edgetechnology. The chosen method for producing egg white protein is based on harnessing the microflora Trichoderma reesei for protein production and Chris believes this technology is superior because of its efficiency and productivity. Prior to co-founding Onego Bio, Chris spent 15 years developing breakthrough precision fermentation platforms at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He has extensive experience in recombinant protein production and has been working with numerous players in the cell ag field internationally to translate this knowledge to enable commercial scale production of animal-free proteins. Chris has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Michigan (USA) and has done postdoctoral work in Harvard Medical School (USA) and University of Bern Medical School (CH). He has published 44 peer-reviewed publications (H-index 28 and 3200 citations), 3 book chapters, and 10 patents or patent application families.

Alex Shirazi (00:03):

Thanks for joining us on the Future Food Show. On this episode, we chat with Chris Landowski of Onego Bio. Chris Landowski is the co-founder and chief technical officer of Onego Bio a company producing animal free egg white protein with precision fermentation. Chris is a cellular agriculture trailblazer and the scientific mastermind behind the technology. The chosen method for producing egg white protein is based on harnessing the microflora, trichoderma reesi for the protein production. And Chris believes this technology is superior because of its efficiency and productivity. Prior to co-founding Onego Bio, Chris spent 15 years developing breakthrough precision fermentation platforms at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. He has extensive experience in recombinant protein production and translating this knowledge to enable commercial scale production of animal free proteins. One thing I greatly appreciate about this episode with Chris is that he breaks down fairly technical concepts into very digestible bites. Chris, I would like to welcome you to the Future Food Show.

Chris Landowski (01:09):

Yeah, well thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to, to join today. First,

Alex Shirazi (01:13):

Tell us where you are dialing in from.

Chris Landowski (01:16):

Hmm. Yes, I’m actually calling now from Helsinki, Finland. That’s a long ways away and in Europe, so Eastern Europe side. But yeah, I’m actually not from Finland. I mean, I’ve been living here a while, so I’ve been living here for about 15 years. But I’m originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Alex Shirazi (01:36):

That’s super exciting. And so tell us a little bit about your background.

Chris Landowski (01:40):

Yeah, I, I studied molecular molecular biology and biochemistry and University of Wisconsin Madison. I have then done a PhD in pharmaceutical science at Ann Arbor, Michigan and University Michigan. I have done a post-doctoral fellowship in Harvard Medical School for a few years, and I also did a continued project in burn Switzerland. So I was actually progressively moving further east and eventually I, I finished my post-doctoral work in Switzerland and I moved to Finland where I started working in industrial biotechnology and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. So that is what I had started doing in Finland about, say about 15 years ago. That’s how I came here and started kind of developing this expertise that I’ll be discussing with you.

Alex Shirazi (02:40):

That’s cool. And actually, we hear a lot about VTT when it comes to kind of novel food technologies. Can you tell us a little bit about VTT and maybe some of the programs that they have or maybe the programs that you know you are working with?

Chris Landowski (02:54):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a very interesting I think VTT is probably the biggest kind of governmental research agency in, in, in Europe or one of the biggest ones. So there’s a large government research center that is doing lots of diverse things. I mean, they’re working on, let’s say forestry. They’re working on electronics. They work on ship building <laugh>. They work on importantly industrial biotechnology. So that’s where I have been working. And industrial biotech is kind of a variety of different basically a, using cell factories to produce different interesting useful proteins or molecules for cosmetics, for food, for different applications. So that was kind of the tie that binds everything was around different cells making different products and trying to process them in a bioreactor to try to make it commercially viable because industrial biotechnology, especially in, in VDT is definitely aiming more towards the commercial side.

Chris Landowski (04:06):

So it’s not a basic research place. It’s not a university, it was a applied research organization. So that was always our, our advantage there and our kind of where we, why we were leaning. So toward, so much towards industry, which I always found interesting because that was kind of for me, something, cause I did come from academic sides is I just described from different academic labs doing basic research. But when I started working at V D T, I really enjoyed it because there was actually something applied to it. And I could see how those things that we work, we worked with a lot of companies to develop technology for different applications to make different products for them with microbes. So for me that was always very interesting because it was close to the market, you know, actually seeing something you did actually go out to the world and have an impact. For me that was very exciting and why I stayed working there for so long.

Alex Shirazi (05:01):

Do you have any examples of maybe common products that kind of went through VTT that we might have heard of?

Chris Landowski (05:09):

Well, I think that yeah, it’s always a little bit backend that we never actually made any products ourselves. We’re always developing the technology for other people. So for instance I can just give an example very generally we had once worked on making yeast strains for producing biofuels. And at that time I think they were using the corn-based sugars to make biofuels from that. So we were involved in that kind of project just recently. Actually really cool thing we have done at Bdt is that we worked with one American company where we produced a Covid 19 vaccine. So we were developing a production system for the vaccine and that actually now went into clinical trials actually with that company involved. So for me that was really exciting because that’s just something that just happened and it was very, of course impactful, will be impactful if it does manage to get approved. Something that we started working on in our lab to develop the vaccine production system. So I thought that was very, you know, exciting topic.

Alex Shirazi (06:22):

Yeah, wow. That absolutely. Yeah, that is cool. Okay, so that’s VTT. Tell us about Onego bio and how the company came to be. And, and I will say usually I ask about pronunciations beforehand, but I was actually so, so confident about the pronunciation of Onego Bioo that I didn’t, am I, am I pronouncing it right?

Chris Landowski (06:42):

You nailed it. You nailed it. You’re oh,

Alex Shirazi (06:44):

Okay. Excellent.

Chris Landowski (06:45):

Very good <laugh>. It’s very good. I was a little bit worried for a minute, but now you’ve been nailed it. I didn’t even think about it, so Yeah. Cause that’s perfect. Actually, it’s pronounced in finish. They pronounce every letter, so yes, of course. Sometimes people do say one go bioo, but, you know that’s fine to me too, but Onego Bioo is the correct pronunciation. Yeah. And it doesn’t, and it doesn’t actually mean anything. It was just a nice word that was created cuz it sounds nice and it has a, a nice designer feature to it. It looks nice and it has these os on the end, so you could maybe think that might have something to do with eggs. <Laugh>,

Alex Shirazi (07:25):

I, I totally think eggs when I, when I see it, I, it’s, you know, sometimes, you know, the, the letters are just enough to, to make you think something. So,

Chris Landowski (07:35):

Yeah. So, but Onego that this, well, I’ll tell you shortly about Onego. A lot of this has to do with why it has become, well, when I was working in VTT, as I said, for industrial biotechnology, I have been doing that for a long time at VT t for 15 years. And what I was doing here is at V D T I, I focused a lot on this industrial enzyme industry. And then that has been going on for decades. For instance, to produce enzymes for food processing enzymes, for washing powder enzymes, for all lots of industrial applications. And after I’ve been in that really long time I started thinking that where else could this be used? Because this is such a great technology that we had, and I described the technology in a bit later, but the technology we had microbial technology was being used for these things already for industrial enzymes.

Chris Landowski (08:30):

I started thinking kind of being inspired, but why don’t we do this for food and for pharmaceuticals because, you know, the, the features of the technology we have make kind of large amounts of large amounts of product at a really low price. And I thought, well, if you wanna have impact in these other fields, why, why couldn’t we also apply this technology to doing pharmaceuticals, for instance? And I had thought about that, for instance being that pharma pharmaceutical products would be a very high cost item. Why not also apply this technology to that? So although we didn’t do that in the end we, we are, no, we didn’t start working on pharma, but instead we focused our attention on food because there, at that point in time, there was a lot of more interest into let’s say producing animal free ingredients.

Chris Landowski (09:24):

And if you start, there was a bit more attention on sustainability. So we wanted to be able to produce an animal free product that was kind of independent from, from animal agriculture. So Onego Bio is a spinoff from VTT that we started already only in 2022. And that we created this to be a food biotech company focused on producing animal free ingredients with precision fermentation. And that’s one of the main things that we are now focused on. So that is sort of the root of that has all begun from VTT, but we just now basically applied all that to food industry.

Alex Shirazi (10:07):

Excellent. Okay. And so what are maybe some of the first products that your team will be working on?

Chris Landowski (10:14):

Yeah, so what we have been now developing is a animal free bio albumin, which is a chicken egg white protein. And this product is bioidentical or the same as the chicken ovalbumin protein. So in egg white there are lots of different proteins. There’s maybe maybe 100 of them actually. And whoever some of the, the main ones one of them is ovalbumin, so it’s a specific protein there. But the important part about this bio albumin product that we make, it has the, also the same taste, the same texture, the same functionality as the natural product from from a chicken. So the nutrition is you know, the same. So we have the same high quality complete protein profile. It has all the essential amino acids. And we can also, then, the important thing here is that we are able to make this product at a fraction of the environmental footprint of conventional egg white.

Chris Landowski (11:16):

So that just means that the, the way you produce egg protein in, of course, in the natural way from producing it in nature with chickens, like in a farm scenario that is actually generating quite a lot of CO2 emissions. So we’ve been calculating the difference. And so our product has lower emissions of CO2 and less land use and some other benefits. And then your bio albumin process is basically like when we make bio albumin, we’re using a precision fermentation process. And that actually is basically similar to brewing in a way. So we have a a industrial microbe that we put in the bioreactor, a big tank, and it’s able to secrete and produce our product into the liquid that it’s growing in. So there’s a liquid media that is growing in, is basically sugar, and it’s living off of sugar and growing in and producing this bio albumin product. So we basically just separate the, the living part filter away this, this microbial cells, and then we have a liquid fraction that we wash and concentrate and dry it and make powder out of it. So that’s sort of the whole process in a nutshell.

Alex Shirazi (12:35):

Very cool. And you, you did speak to some of the benefits of, of using this technology. And I’ll ask a little bit more about that in in a second. You know, looking at the cellular agriculture, or in this case acellular agriculture industry, there are some companies that are kind of like big pillars in the space, you know, perfect day or, or Clara Foods. Now, every company, we often hear about the every company working on egg white proteins. Do you know if that’s a similar type of protein or is, or is that a different protein they’re focused on? Yeah. Any, any kind of thoughts about that?

Chris Landowski (13:10):

Yeah, I mean, we’re basically making the same types of protein. So we’re all making egg wide proteins from chicken and they have focused on something called oval mucoid, for instance. It’s one specific egg protein, and they think they’re also making old albumin. So the same, same molecule that we are also making. And that’s, as far as I know, I’m sure that they might have other things brewing as many of us do. But those are the two products that I’m aware of.

Alex Shirazi (13:40):

I see. Okay. Okay, cool. And so, you know, earlier we were talking about, you know, the, the benefits in terms of land use and environmental impact, but I wanted to ask you, when it comes to kind of consumers purchasing products that maybe have this type of protein in it how do we actually convince them, maybe not that this is a better way to make protein, but that this is a good way to kind of replace existing types of products? Like for example, you know, egg white,

Chris Landowski (14:10):

One of the things a lot of people will see are, are, are paying more attention to, is the need for making sustainable animal free ingredients. If the population is increasing and increasing, you can’t it isn’t very sustainable to keep adding animals to that equation, right? So it’s not something you’d say, well, let’s just make more chickens. Well, that also has a consequence for doing that. So I think the, the new knowledge and new wisdom is that you should try, we should try to do this in a more sustainable way. So producing them in an animal free way, but also the product also solves other issues. So around egg whites, there has been a shortage of egg white due to, let’s say there has been bird flu in many countries. So a lot of these birds are, are chickens are dying.

Chris Landowski (14:56):

Actually hundreds of millions of birds un unfortunately have been sick and been dying from this bird flu. So there has been a big then shortage of that protein that’s very important for people’s diets and for health and for all for nutrition. So there needs to be another way to produce it. So I think it’s, it is a better way in that we don’t, our, the po we do it doesn’t, doesn’t is independent from animals that may get sick. So that’s one, one way to people would understand that this is maybe a more suitable method for the future. Also, the important thing that we’re doing is that you can’t really replace egg white that comes from the chicken with other things because it has a very unique functional property. So the egg white is difficult to replace with, let’s say plant-based ingredients or something like that.

Chris Landowski (15:52):

So we have been able to make bio album, we can make it possible to manufacture the same great delicious food ingredients, entirely animal free and bio album and provides the nutrition and the functional properties of the egg white without the environmental or ethical safety concerns. So I think these sort of things will resonate with consumer, although just pointing out that we’re doing this through precision fermentation. So consumers shouldn’t be, they shouldn’t be, actually, it is not anything new. This technology is very similar, as I said, to, to brewing and for many years has been already been used for, let’s say, making enzymes for cheese processing. It was one case where they used to take the linings of the cow intestine and using that for the, to make to extract an enzyme that would be used for cheese making.

Chris Landowski (16:48):

So this is the precision fermentation though from the site of industrial enzymes and production has already been used for a half a century to make different ingredients that’s already being used in the food manufacturing. So, you know, people just don’t think about it. But we’ve been doing that for 50 years already, so I wouldn’t say that this is anything new we’re just trying to do to try to do it more so that from that point of view it’s important that the consumers are aware of the health and environmental benefits of this approach. And also to understand that the performance of the product isn’t any, is indifferent. It’s the same exact thing. We’re just trying to do it in a, in a better way. And I think we just need to make sure that we have transparent communication so that we will bring out the key benefits to consumers to feel comfortable with these new food technologies and to build trust. So I think part of our job as the startup companies around this area is to try to communicate the benefits to the consumer.

Alex Shirazi (17:51):

That’s great. And I, I recently heard in addition to, you know, the cheese making example, I recently heard that vanilla or vanilla extracts are also have been made through this process for, for quite some time as well.

Chris Landowski (18:04):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s I’m mean all kinds of, especially flavors and colors dyes you know, there are so many things that you just don’t realize. There is prob or juice clarification all kinds of things that you just don’t think about. But they’re using enzymes and those processes to, you know, make it a quality product. So this has been going on and all all of these products, of course, are approved by the F FDA or the s a or in Europe. So very, there’s a very high quality standard and standard on it. So this is what we’re, we’re doing is in the same line. It’s, as I said, we are following just industrial enzyme technology and processes to, to make food manufacture, to manufacture food products. So everything is basically the same <laugh>, which I often said in the past. It’s really kind of well from one point of view, very good that we use something very established, but it, it’s a little bit like as a scientist or a science person, there isn’t so many new things that we’re doing. And, and I think that’s good from some point of view because we are just now just trying to make the product for people and, and the marketplace. So we’re just focusing on doing the commercialization part which is hard enough, but we don’t have to invent anything new here. Actually,

Alex Shirazi (19:27):

Our team is gearing up for the upcoming future food tech event in New York City focused on alternative proteins. I know that you will be, I believe on a panel there, but I, I first wanna mention that, you know, last year at the New Harvest conference I met some of your team members. Were you there in New York City? You were, I indeed.

Chris Landowski (19:47):

I was also there. So we probably have met each other. We,

Alex Shirazi (19:50):

We probably have met. Yeah. And I, I remember you guys had a pretty cool, like setup with some sort of cards and, and something like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah,

Chris Landowski (19:57):

We had a, we had a booth right next to the door that <laugh>, so we had a lot of right to the doorway to the seminar room. And I think just about everybody who’s at that, cuz it was a bit smaller or maybe a few hundred people in the, in the meeting. So I think everybody has probably come by our booth. Of course, we were demonstrating the egg white protein that we have, you know, making foam and we had some small like confectionary treats there. Some yeah, meringues and other small things that we could make from our product, for instance, well noted in people’s minds that what we have made in the past <laugh>. Yep,

Alex Shirazi (20:35):

Yep. And, and yeah, I remember it was a booth that you, you do remember because, you know, you see the foam and, and, and that was cool. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So you’ll be back in New York City. Can you tell us a little bit about the panel that you’ll be on at Future Food Tech?

Chris Landowski (20:49):

Yeah, I think that it’s of course around precision fermentation and it’s sort of an interesting topic of course. And there’s a lot of discussion, especially now around scaling and capacity. That’s one thing that really hasn’t been fully covered in public conversation. And one of the things that I’m really interested to, to discuss there and the conference is more about is the equation of when you need to get to scale. So of course, all this technology we talk about, it’s great to do small things in the lab or whatever, but that’s not in the end. We have to manufacture this. So we have to scale up. And considering the huge need for the products made by precision fermentations, you know, companies should make sure that they have the right technology and manufacturing approach for, for their products to meet the demands of the market and consumer.

Chris Landowski (21:44):

Cuz it starts to be, you know, in the end one needs to make, you know, thousands and thousands of tons of, of product. And that’s actually it’s, it’s a very important task that we will take on and it’s kind of a uphill battle in order to get everything in place, but we can do it of course. But again, one should think that also the product that we make should also be made in a way that can be cost effective, right? So I mean, if, if you can’t afford to buy the, the product and it won’t have any impact. So one of the things that we want to make try to focus on is to try to meet price parody with the animal-based products that they’re replacing. So I think that actually takes a little bit of thought and in, in developing your technology manufacturing approach.

Chris Landowski (22:35):

So looking in the future we should also think about, let’s say, what is the most efficient way to employ the capital that we raise to bring the products to the market in a way they will have impact. I mean, there’s no it needs to be able to, you have to, as a company, we have to be able to produce enough of the products so that they can be used and that big, let’s say food manufacturing company. So Onego is planning to first sell our product b2b. So we’re planning to sell this to large food manufacturing companies. So for us, yes, it’s very important to be able to provide enough product for, for that manufacturer, for instance. And then in order to do this many companies, especially even Olga, we’re planning to build large manufacturing plants to make sure that we are able to produce the amount of product because there really isn’t existing capacity that is needed.

Chris Landowski (23:31):

There’s not existing capacity that is sufficient for all the required amounts of product that we need. So we have to kind of put in also the hard work to start designing and, and building a factory. And it does make a huge difference on where you start in this process. As I said we have already a technology that is proven and that is been already used in the enzyme industry to make products. So for us it’s sort of a little bit easier, but it’s still like a big task to start building factories. So these are some kind of topics that we hope to discuss inside of the future food tech meeting. It’s very kind of important because in the end, we’re everybody’s gonna be putting a lot of money into this field and we have to be able to, let’s say do this in a way that will have impact and that the consumers were also kind of accepted and to, to see the, the need and the enjoyment for buying these products that we plan to make.

Alex Shirazi (24:35):

We often hear about not having enough, you know, I guess, you know, for mentor or bioreactor capacity mm-hmm. <Affirmative> is, is the solution to that just to invest more dollars and, and build out these facilities? Like, is is, is that I guess for lack of a better phrase, gonna be enough?

Chris Landowski (24:54):

Well, no, you’re, I’m glad you asked this question. I sort of <laugh> I’m sort of getting passionate about this topic because yeah, there definitely is a, as I said, an uphill let’s, I think the statistic was like that one article I read was that we would need a thousand times more capacity in the future to meet the needs of the cellular agriculture products. So that was of course a very large, a large swath of different products from that definition. But what I would, of course, I’m mostly focused on the in precision fermentation ingredient side, but it isn’t, well of course we need, definitely do need more factories for, for these products. It is definitely obvious that it needs to happen. But again, there are lots of technical things that can be done in order to make it more efficient, right?

Chris Landowski (25:47):

So I also say that we shouldn’t just build a lot of factories, <laugh>, you should also work on making the technology we have and the factories that we will build more effective. And a lot of that now since I’m actually, I have to say I’m the chief technology officer for, for Onego bio. So I will answer this also on a, from a tech side that we want to make sure that our technology, the microbial technology that we use is the most efficient as possible so that when we, we feed, as I said, we feed them sugar and so we wanna make sure that sugar that we give them is converted into the protein product. Okay? So that is a kind of efficiency issue that we wanna make sure that all the carbon feed that we add to them gets converted to the product.

Chris Landowski (26:35):

So that’s one of the things that we focus on. How can that be as efficient as possible? And of course we want to have, let’s say high production levels of course, but also it’s very important to think about how many tons of material can you harvest from your tank, right? I think there should be a bit more focus on that is how do you get the biggest yield of product from your cultivation? Cuz if you’re gonna build a factory, every tank that you run whether or not you make one ton, two tons, three tons, you know, still need to have the same equipment. So you might as well make sure your technology that you have inside will yield the highest amount of of product. So of course you know, we are aiming to, you know, make 10 to 15 tons every cultivation round, for instance in the tank.

Chris Landowski (27:29):

So that is sort of our, our perspective on that situation. So looking overall though, I’m just saying if you want to take this a thousand fold capacity need down, you would say, well, let’s just use the most efficient technology and if we do that, maybe only need 100 times more capacity. So that sounds to sound you know, more reasonable to only build a hundred times more capacity <laugh>. So I think that is sort of something that needs to be discussed in these meetings, let’s say future food tech and in other forums. Like how, how should this be thought about? It shouldn’t just be that we need to build more factories we have to just build them maybe in other ways too. Maybe there’s new product manufacturing technologies that can be developed, of course. And I’m willing, I’m interested to hear about these topics and the, and the conferences and the future. So I think there’s no absolute one answer for all this, but yeah, it’s definitely something we all need to think about how to best like employ the capital that we have to make these products successful.

Alex Shirazi (28:40):

Yeah, absolutely. And I, I think it goes to say, you know, bigger is not necessarily better, right? You, it’s, it’s not just having a, a bigger, for example, tank, it’s, it’s about making and having the most efficient process.

Chris Landowski (28:52):

Yeah. And I think that I, I just say that what I always think about in terms of tanks, you know, we’re producing these in really large tanks like us 150,000 liters. So it’s a massive, massive tank and you know, if you’re running that tank cultivating something inside of it, you wanna make sure that when you do that you get the maximum kind of output. Otherwise, you know, you’re sort of not taking the full potential of all of the manufacturing facility that you have. So I think there should be a bit of focus on, on trying to maximize that and really spending the time to developing the technology to utilize the capacity that already exists. So I think that is sort of the, to me, the first priority just to make sure that we get the most out of what we already have.

Alex Shirazi (29:43):

As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask you what advice you have for those interested in getting into cellular agriculture.

Chris Landowski (29:51):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah, that’s good point. And I, I can probably then I’ll just break this a little bit into different persons. Let’s say for example, a future entrepreneur or somebody who wants to study start a company I’ll start from that aspect because that’s sort of where I have where I have come from as well. So I mean, really I would focus on the food ingredients and precision fermentation for this answer, cuz that’s sort of what I know right now. But if you’re planning to produce a new product, I’d be really advisable to look into several production platforms. So whether or not you’re using a yeast or a fungus or a bacteria or plant cell line try many different platforms and these are kind of proof of concept studies to make sure that you pick the right technology and so you have the best chance to succeed.

Chris Landowski (30:45):

I wouldn’t just take the first thing you find or bump into just because somebody’s an expert on bacteria or e coli shouldn’t mean that you automatically just make a, a techno only focus on that technology for your company. I would obviously seems, seems obvious, but I think one should actually go out and do multiple platforms just to make sure that you have the right thing. Cuz there is not one platform that is best for everything. So I think it is very advisable just to check because this would save you a lot of time if you just eventually go, oh wow, well this other thing, I tried this fungus and actually it works really well. So I think you should know that as soon as possible cuz there are pluses and minuses to each. And one of the other big advice is to, once you establish which technology you wanna use you know, please do the technical economic analysis for the technology and for the process because you do wanna make sure that you will be able to be profitable someday.

Chris Landowski (31:48):

And it’s just not you know, you don’t just hang everything on hope and say, well, maybe someday we’ll be able to figure it out. But you should actually do the calculations and say, well, you know, we’re, we’re close and maybe we can do it with technical improvements to make the cost the cost target that one wants to get to. So I think these are sort of from that point of view good advice. And also just of course, and I can’t say it’s not maybe in everybody’s case, but we are working with a, well Onego works with a very well-established technology and production process. So with the proven track record, and this is coming from industrial enzyme industry where as like, for example, people are making, let’s say cheese processing enzymes or enzymes for washing powder. So this as a well understood technology and process, and so that way the costs are already pretty well known.

Chris Landowski (32:46):

So from that point of view, I think it’s something definitely you should think about as a starting a company, pay a lot of, obviously pay a lot of attention to the costs of what you’re trying to make. And then I would just comment one thing advice for an investor, I think and now that there’s so many companies in the, in the area, I mean, if there’s always, for instance in milk area, there was maybe, you know, 10, 20, 30, maybe even companies in the world that are working around milk production for precision fermentation. So just to an investor, I mean, you definitely need to start the important to do proper due diligence in this and seek out all the right experts. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there, as I say, industrial enzyme industry or in the food making industry, manufacturing industry who are familiar with these things and just do the due diligence because I think there’s always, I get the feeling there’s a lot of a lot of hype in the air, but a lot of, you know, of course everybody’s very enthusiastic about, you know, doing this and getting started.

Chris Landowski (33:49):

But I think the investors also sh which I think they do, but to make sure to do the due diligence for assessing the companies. Yeah, and I think as a future team member, if you’re working in a, in cellular agriculture, always look for the best technology out there and really look around for all the right experts that you really need to cover a lot of different topics in this food industry or biotech food industry. So it’s you have to reach far and wide define all of the expertise you need. So this is one thing that I’ve noticed that we have done pretty well, I think at Onego bio, but yeah, you definitely need a big network of, of people that you know in different industries.

Alex Shirazi (34:34):

Chris, I love the way you broke that down. I think that that might have been the, the best answer we’ve had on, on the podcast with the different sections. You broke it down to <laugh>.

Chris Landowski (34:44):

Yeah, well that’s my nature, right? I’m a I can’t go first, so maybe that’s my program, but yeah. Well thank you. Yeah, so that’s some advice of course. And if anybody ever, of course you feel free to contact me, I mean I’m really, I’m very excited, especially in the future food tech that’s coming up. I’ll be there and we can discuss more about how to do that. This is sort of the time to discuss all these things cause it is a really new field and I think we have a, everybody has a lot to share and to learn from each other. And since there are some now companies who are a little bit more established in this field, I think it’s great if they’re all able to share their wisdom and knowledge, hard-earned wisdom and knowledge over the years, what we have learned along the way to make this successful field.

Chris Landowski (35:32):

Because, you know, I do want everybody to succeed and I want the field to succeed and everybody has to do their best at helping each other to make sure that we all get forward with this because we, the, we need wins, right? You know, wins and that the consumers see that this is succeeding and that they can get the products that they like and that their investors are happy again and they will invest more money. So it all kind of snowballs into success. So I think we have to keep pushing that snowball down the hill. <Laugh>,

Alex Shirazi (36:05):

You can learn more about Onego bio at Onego.bio, that’s O N E G o.bio, and you could learn more about the Future Food Tech Alternative Proteins event taking place in New York this June at future food tech protein.com. Chris, I’d like to thank you for being a guest on the show.

Chris Landowski (36:27):

Yeah, well, thank you. That was very nice to, to be here and to discuss our, our field and what we’re doing at Onego bio. Yeah, please do check us in the conference or in the website. And I, and also I’ve just joined one more plug for Onego bio. We have been now we had actually won this award for the Fast Company 2023 World Changing Idea Awards in the food category. So just to show that and, and why I was very proud of this as well is that we are a small finished startup company and we were able to kind of compete into this jury of people selecting Onego Bio is is one of the leading companies in the area. And I was very proud because if you look at some of the other companies on the list, I mean, these were like massive companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Microsoft, all kinds of, you know, PPO companies with, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. And, and Onego Bioo has only had 10 million invested. So I think that we’re very proud of that, that we’re able to compete globally at least with our ideas and in soon with our technology. So from that point of view, yes, I’m very happy with our team, of course, who’s made that all happen.

Alex Shirazi (37:52):

Awesome. That is super exciting. And we’ll actually put a link to that in the show notes. And so you can check that out as well.

Chris Landowski (37:59):

Yeah, we’re very proud of that. So yeah, thank you for, for the interview today. Thank

Alex Shirazi (38:04):

You so much. This is your host, Alex, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

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