Ed Steele of Hoxton Farms
In this podcast episode, Ed Steele, co-founder of Hoxton Farms, discusses the journey of starting the company with his co-founder Max, focusing on their innovative approach to creating cultivated animal fat without animals. Steele shares his background in mathematics and machine learning, their collaborative process of combining skills in biotech and software, and how their work addresses the challenges of improving plant-based meat products by adding authentic animal fat for better flavor and texture. The episode emphasizes Hoxton Farms’ interdisciplinary approach and their B2B business model.
[00:00:00] Thanks for joining us on the Cultured Meat and Future Food Show. We’re really excited to have Ed Steele from Hoxton Farms on the show. Ed, welcome to the show. Thank you. It’s great to be here. Ed, I’m really excited to dive in to learn more about Hoxton Farms, what you guys are doing and the growth that you’ve had, especially.
But first I want to ask you about your background. Tell us about your, academic history and maybe you when you first heard about cultured meat. Yeah, for sure My history I think is quite different to a lot of people in the space. I’m a mathematician by background So I studied for a little while as at oxford and then at imperial college And then I went and worked in startups as a machine learning researcher at a FinTech startup in London for a little while help them grow from about 20 people to 150 people, [00:01:00] which is a really cool experience seeing a startup grow very quickly.
I then left that startup and joined up with an Oxford maths professor of mine and helped him start a new company, essentially solving maths problems in a bunch of different industries. So we were working in sport, in genetics, in legal tech and finance, all really cool different domains. But I was always obsessed with food.
Food’s always been a huge passion of mine. And I was talking a lot with an old elementary school friend of mine, Max. And he is a, he’s a biologist. Did you say elementary? Yes. We go back a really long way. That’s way back. Okay. Exactly. So we grew up together, spent our time at school together and went to different universities, studied different things.
He became a synthetic biologist and he was at Cambridge for his undergrad [00:02:00] and master’s and then did his PhD at Oxford, but the whole time we kept in touch and really were bonding around food in particular thinking about. food systems, food security, how we could make a difference using this combination of our different worlds, my background in maths and his in synthetic biology.
And it was actually through him that I heard about cultivated meat. Cool. Okay. And that makes sense with his synthetic biology background. Now when you two were talking about this, Were you both at different roles at different companies at the time? Yeah. So I was at this company with this professor of mine.
I was, I think at the time I was working on a trading floor working on commodities trading, so pretty far away from what we do now. Max was much, much closer to the space. So he was working in a couple of different food related startups. [00:03:00] He was at a company called Jelly Drops in London for a little bit, and then he was working at Formo in Berlin, actually.
This was around COVID time, so he was in London. The team there was based in Berlin, but he was much closer to this world of future food that we’re in now. Okay, cool. Yeah. And. You mentioned a couple food companies that I think have pretty good branding. And I want to eventually touch on the Hawks and farms branding as well.
And I also want to say, FinTech in London is like saying filmmaking in Hollywood. So that’s pretty cool. I do. You said trading floors. That all seems like really the place to be. Now. Hoxton. So tell me about Hoxton because Hoxton is also a city or a region, right?
Yeah. So Hoxton is an area of London. And actually when we first decided that we were going to start the company, we were sitting in a pub, a great pub called the Georgian Vulture, which is [00:04:00] in Hoxton. And that’s where the name came from. That was the moment that we thought, okay, we’ve been talking about this for a while, but let’s actually go and do it.
We later found out, this is some great trivia that we found out after we’d named the company, found out that the name Hoxton comes from the old Anglo Saxon Hogstown, because it’s where they used to keep the pigs just outside of the city of London back in the day. Wow. That’s really cool. That is really cool.
That’s yeah, definitely reaffirms like, okay, that’s the name. And is any good idea actually a good idea if it doesn’t start at like on a napkin in a pub? So exactly. Okay, cool. So when did Hoxton Farms officially start? You guys are both in your individual roles. Max in food companies, you have startup experience.
50 to a hundred fifties is actually very huge growth. When did you guys think, Hey, we are going to, we’re going to start a new company, [00:05:00] and this is the idea that we’re going to move forward with. This was middle of the pandemic that we decided that we’re really going to go ahead and start this company.
We’d been spending time together, thinking about the different opportunities and different ways that we could use this combination of our skills. But decided to go ahead in the pandemic. And what really happened, the big trigger for us was we were each respectively sitting at home, play around, playing around with food as a lot of people were doing in the pandemic.
We were both making our own plant based meat, our own meat alternatives, and we. We really felt like fat was this missing component. We were talking a lot about how we needed real animal fat in these products. We actually both independently because we couldn’t be together at this point. We independently went to the butcher.
We got some traditional fat. And we put that into [00:06:00] plant based meat alternative to see if this hypothesis that would make a real difference was actually valid. And those experiments, which we ended up running and I guess coercing our partners to be involved in at the time. And anyone really we could find who was locked down in a bubble with us.
They really helped us understand that. We wanted to build a company in this space and that this was the right target to go after. Wow. Okay, cool. And the plant based, product that you would add fat to, you guys made that yourself. Like it was like a homemade plant based patty.
Exactly. We had a few different versions some completely from scratch, some where we were taking apart plant based sausages that we were buying from the butcher and adding fat into them in different ways and at different proportions. But yeah, these were kind of plant based protein and a few other ingredients and then traditional animal fats.
And are you or [00:07:00] Max, plant based from a diet standpoint? Or is this something you just thought, Hey, this is an interesting direction. Neither of us are totally plant based. We both eat a lot of plant based meat, but we both also eat meat. We think that this solution really is a solution for people like us, people who are obsessed with food, want to carry on eating the products that they’ve been eating.
I think of food as a very kind of. Cultural thing, it gets, recipes get passed down through generations. I think of that as a big part of my identity and my history. And I want to be able to make the same recipes that my, my mom, my grandma makes. But I want to do that in a way that’s sustainable way.
That’s ethical and so on. So those things are really important to me, but that cultural identity is really important to me too. Yeah. It’s really baked into a cultural identity is definitely the right way to say [00:08:00] it. Like we were discussing before, it’s even baked into the name of the area of London, right?
Hogstown, right? It’s just, it’s, it is, and there’s examples like that all over the world. So it, and there could be an entire podcast series just on culture and food. And I think I, as a foodie myself, I get excited about that too. Okay. Okay. So you guys are like, okay, let’s do this thing.
It’s the middle of the pandemic. Tell us maybe kind of elevator pitch style, what is Hoxton farm? And I’ll add like a kicker on that. How does it differentiate from maybe other companies also making fat or other cultured meat products? Yeah, I still remember pretty much the word for word that the whole pitch that we used to say back in the day because you get these things ingrained in your head.
For us, the way that we’ve always talked about it is that the traditional meat industry is broken. It’s killing us and it’s killing the planet. On the other side, we’ve seen demand for plant based meat has been following [00:09:00] this really interesting trajectory. When we started the company back in 2020, we used to talk about how the plant based, how demand was soaring in plant based meat.
Now we’ve seen it stagnating. But I think that’s fair. The reason that The products just aren’t good enough yet, and we believe that’s because they’re missing this really special key ingredient, which is fat. It’s fat that makes meat sizzle in the pan the way that you want it to. It’s fat that makes it brown.
It’s fat that makes it smell the way that it does. All of the flavor in meat comes from the fat. So at Hoxton Farms, we grow real animal fat without the animals. We’re doing so to make an ingredient that we can sell B2B to producers of meat alternatives or other products. We can talk a little bit about how this fits into the wider food industry later.
But to try to make products that really have that umami the kind of the smell [00:10:00] and the taste that you want it from traditional meat. And in terms of where we think that we differentiate ourselves from other companies in the space. Originally, a lot of that came from the combination of the different skill sets that Max and I bring to the table.
I don’t think there’s another cultivated meat company that has been started by a mathematician or software engineer. And I think that there’s a lot of value that we create at Hoxton Farms from bringing together different disciplines. I’m one example of that, but I think across the team, we’ve now done that extremely successfully.
And what that ultimately means for us is we build systems using software and mathematical modeling to try to solve problems that are inherent across the industry, particularly related to cost and scale. And we’ve done that in all sorts of different ways, from enabling our research to happen much [00:11:00] faster in the lab to developing better cell lines and better media to now as well building our own hardware that we use to grow cells, our own bioreactors.
And a whole new system for doing that. So I think really the way that we differentiate ourselves is by creating this really interdisciplinary team to solve a very interdisciplinary challenge. And it seems like these solutions will not only be helping your team create, cultivated fat or cell cultured fat, but it could also be applied maybe down the road to other types of biotech as well.
Is that right? Exactly. We’re super excited about using what we’ve built internally so far to benefit the wider cultivated meat industry firstly, but then also outside of cultivated meat, really anyone who’s growing cells in the lab. There’s very [00:12:00] general applications for the tools that we’ve built so far.
Okay, cool. So I’ve got, I want to talk to you about the species that you’re working on, the types of fat that you’re making. Then I want to go into a buzzword and talk about AI because of your background but, I don’t want to stray away from the different types of product lines.
Is your team just focused on, pork, you said hog earlier, is it just pork or I think they call it porcine the technical term or also other species. Right now we’re focused on pork. We have focused on beef before actually the first cells that we grew in the lab were beef cells.
But now we’re focused on pork. We think that pork is from a sensory point of view, super exciting. When you look at cuts of pork, most of the cuts that you look at and what you kind of pride pork on is it’s fattiness, the cuts are really fatty and have a really species specific flavor.
So we’re focused on pork. Now we will work on other species [00:13:00] again in the future. So pork. beef. We’ll work on chicken and we’ll work on fish, I think too. But for now we’re pretty focused. You mentioned flavor and I think, a topic in private discussions that I get a lot is and, the, I guess the hypothesis or the discussion or theory is that if you take a fat cell and, reproduce that fat cell, it will taste like, let’s say you, you take a chunk of fat out of a pork steak, let’s say something like that.
Is that the case, or is there a lot of other things that need to be done to make sure that flavor profile comes through? Yeah, it’s surprisingly, in some ways surprisingly, is the case. I think people look at it probably in different ways. You’ll get people who look at it and say, Oh, you’re making pork cells, pork fat cells.
Of course they’re going to taste like pork fat. There’s other people who look at under a microscope pork fat, and you see so many other things in there. It’s not [00:14:00] just cells. Whereas the majority of what we produce is just the cells. We do produce some extracellular matrix as well, and that adds a little bit, some proteins add a little bit to the flavor but really the majority of what we’re making is pork fat.
I think one difference that we’ve seen in the industry is. There are some companies that are making cell biomass, so they are growing stem cells and not necessarily differentiating them into a specific cell type. And there are other companies, like us, who have a slightly more complicated process, but we end up with this Terminal cell.
So in our case, that’s fat cells, and that’s a, it’s a harder problem to tackle. You have to go through two stages, a growth stage and then a differentiation stage where you’re turning these stem cells into fat cells. But when you go through that cell, that [00:15:00] stage, What happens is the cells start getting bigger and juicier, and they fill with these little fat droplets, which is amazing to see.
It’s like artwork that we actually haven’t done this too much yet, but I think we’re going to put microscope images on the walls because it is really beautiful seeing these cells that filled with these tiny fat droplets that get bigger and bigger over time. But that’s what creates flavor there.
The facts encapsulated inside of cells that really gets our team excited and you can actually measure that as well. So we have a trained sensory panel on the team now, and they are tasting the product. testing between different runs that we do to make sure that we have consistency.
They’re tasting after we changed the media recipe to see how the products are changing over time. All of that kind of thing to [00:16:00] try to make sure that we get the best flavor out of our fat. Amazing. We have usually some sort of art gallery at the, at CMS, the cultured meat symposium. And now I’m starting to think maybe this fat cell artwork could be the 2025 gallery.
So we’ll talk more about that later. Yeah. So What types of products is your team focused on and are you a a B2C model where you might be selling things like bacon and sausage, or are you going to be an ingredient model where you’re selling just the fat technology partner? What’s your business model?
We’re a B2B company. We’re looking to grow cultivated fat and sell that as an ingredient to food companies so that they can use it to make much better products. That said, we have a really awesome chef on the team. He used to run a Michelin star kitchen in London, which I think is now the 14th best restaurant in the world.
So he’s got [00:17:00] a pretty good pedigree. He takes our cultivated fat. And he puts it into final products that he develops so that we can demonstrate what we can actually do with it. And products that we’d be working on range from things like sausages, which are in a lot of ways, a lot easier to make to structured products like pork belly which is really exciting.
We. As a company fundamentally believe that to make a really good structured product like a pork belly you only need plant protein plus cultivated fat and with those two ingredients and really it really is just those two ingredients you can make these delicious meat alternatives that actually look and cook and taste like the real thing.
I’m going to, I’m going to promote your shop because if you go to the Hoxton Farms website, we’ll put the link in the bio and [00:18:00] you scroll down or maybe it’s at the top and you click on fatty merch. You’ll see some awesome t shirts, a lot of prints. The one that has like bacon on it looks super cool.
Okay, that’s very awesome. And and so tell us about I want to talk to you about AI. Have a background in machine learning and mathematics. Right now AI is a huge buzz with all the generative AI stuff going on. A lot of. Okay. Every industry is thinking, how do I incorporate AI?
But especially in laboratory research, a lot of people are thinking like, okay, how do I incorporate AI? What is the true answer to that? Because we’ve been using different types of mathematical algorithms, software to make things move along faster. But if somebody was about to come up to you and say, Hey, how do I use AI to speed up my laboratory process?
How would you approach that question? I think it’s very hard to start from the question of how do I [00:19:00] incorporate AI specifically? I think where we started and where I’d encourage people to start is thinking about how to use data that they’re generating in the lab in a much better way. So traditional labs will, maybe they’ll use an electronic lab notebook.
Maybe they’ll use paper, but in either case, they’re using it. A notebook, they’re filling in entries per experiment, and they’re generating some data that tests a specific hypothesis that they have at the start of that experiment. They then learn from that and move on to the next experiment. What we do is a little bit different.
We set up these kind of flywheels where we have experiments that we’re running over and over again to try to optimize some process. So to give you an example we take this approach to media optimization. We have lots of different media components that we could use, [00:20:00] different concentrations that all of those media components could be in.
And that’s a huge kind of search space of different possibilities. And that we have to look through to find the best media to grow and then differentiate our cells. We think of that as this kind of flywheel where we’ll run an experiment in the lab. We’ll collect data from that experiment. We’ll then use that experiment in a model or an algorithm to try to help us to understand what the space looks like and help us to decide what experiments to run next in the lab.
We run those new experiments in the lab, and then we have even more data that feeds into our models. And we keep going round and round, generating more data each time. And the key thing there is, we aren’t just running one experiment with some data that comes out at the end. We’re using that data over and over.
And we have lots of software tooling, [00:21:00] so not necessarily fancy AI and modeling. We have lots of software tooling that allows us to collect that data in a really structured way and then use it to optimize processes. Okay. Great. Yeah. No, thank you for that, for breaking it down and. That translated to me that, it’s the same kind of software approach that we would take before all this AI buzz and I think that makes sense.
Just on the AI side, I think it’s really interesting given the buzz that we’re seeing at the moment. I think there’s a lot that is applicable to the work that we do and is useful, but I don’t think large language models are the silver bullet for lab work.
I think there’s a lot of fundamental mathematical modeling statistics and more traditional machine learning that are really the tools that are going to help us improve. They just haven’t been integrated enough into lab environments and biotechs. So I think [00:22:00] that’s what we’re trying to do differently here.
And now we have a team of about five people working on software and modeling to try to accelerate that development in house. Very cool. How big is the team now? And how much have you raised to date publicly announced? We’re about 45 people now on the team publicly announced. We last raised around about two years ago and that was a 22 million series a we’ve raised a little bit more money since then, but it hasn’t been publicly announced yet.
Okay, great. And the company officially started in 2020. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Wow. That’s really nice growth. That’s the kind of growth you want startups to see. So that’s very awesome. Okay. So we discussed like a little bit about your process. Your team is growing, whether it’s related to the process or culture or even [00:23:00] commuting to work, whatever it’s related to, what are some of the challenges that you personally face?
Are facing when it comes to the startup, Thankfully, my commute is a five minute cycle. So it’s not my commute to work. There are a ton of different challenges and I think the industry is in a really interesting place at the moment because we’re seeing a particular challenge around the sentiment.
shifting towards meat alternatives more broadly. I think in the cultivated meat space, there is still some buzz, still some excitement. But in the plant based meat space, we’ve definitely seen a shift in particularly an investor sentiment, but also probably in consumer sentiment. And I think that Really tallies with what we’re expecting at Hoxton Farms to see, because we don’t think the products are there yet to to have the kind of growth that we were seeing [00:24:00] previously.
But that shift does mean that Fewer people are investing in meat alternatives right now. Meat alternatives companies have less to spend on R and D, which makes our work with them a little bit more difficult too. And I think that the whole environment is feeling different to how it was back in 2021, 2022.
I think, this is a nice segue into branding because, part of it is also that education piece to get the public excited about this technology. And then the investors will say, Hey, you know what, let’s get back into it. Or let me look into this if I haven’t before. And I do feel like, the, there is like this with recent closures and mergers, there is that feeling, but I think. As time goes on and more people say, Hey, this is a really good solution. Let me learn about this. It could turn things around. Now you guys did a very good job with it, with [00:25:00] a rebrand. I, it was, I wouldn’t even say it was a rebrand. It was just like a logo refresh and you did a very good job in terms of saying, Hey, this is here for people to know about, to learn about And that’s important.
And when you’re a B2B, you don’t really need like a flashy brand. So I feel your thesis was to say, okay, let’s have a good brand, but let’s also educate that education piece is also there for the public. So tell us about when you guys did the, the branding refresh and also, what that process was like.
And if you were, how involved you were as part of that. Yeah, we did that about 18 months ago, and we were, Max and I in particular were very involved. We think of our brand, although we’re a B2B company, we think of it as extremely important. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we are still selling to people and people care about us.
Brand, whether it’s potential customers, potential employees, [00:26:00] investors people who are interested in the space, people who aren’t interested in the space that we’re trying to educate. I think brand is extremely important. And the way that we thought about what we’re doing was, slightly confrontational.
We know that we’re in a space that is, is very interesting in itself, but also we’re working on fat. And when you say that to people, a lot of people respond by saying something like I, I don’t like fat. I cut the fat off the side of my bacon. And that’s because They have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the fat has created how the fat has created flavor in that piece of bacon that they’re eating.
And we want it to be a bit playful about that. So we have this tagline proudly fatty that we use alongside our brand. And that really encapsulates what we were trying to do. The logo is very fatty. Everything that we talk about is. really talking about the power of [00:27:00] fat and how it can make these products much, much better than they are today.
So it was a really fun process to go through. We worked with a team in Amsterdam called four people and they were brilliant to work with and came up with some really awesome ideas and science. It definitely looks good. And, you look at the logo, you might not even know what Hoxton farms is at first but you’ll know it’s fatty.
So that’s pretty cool. Now, I want to track back to this because, a lot of people, when they do think about fat. You make a really good point that it’s all about the flavor and, even if you cut that fat off that piece of bacon, it has already contributed so much to the taste and enjoyment of that piece of meat.
But, how do you respond to somebody says fat is not necessarily, super healthy. And I know you have a few different ways to approach this, but, does anybody ask that actually, does anybody ask that or do, All the time, people ask us about the [00:28:00] health properties of fat, specifically of pork fat, of our cultivated fat and how it differs.
And there’s lots of different answers. Ultimately, I think that fat is, And in particular, animal fat is healthy as part of a good diet. You don’t want to only be eating animal fat, but actually animal fat is a pretty good fat to be eating. There’s been a lot of talk recently about.
Seed oils and the effects of seed oils on health. And if you’re eating traditional pork fat or beef fat actually you’re not having any of the negative effects that you might have from seed oils, but also there’s a lot that we can do from a nutritional point of view with our fat. And that’s what we’re really excited about.
We can change the fatty acid profile. We can change the saturated to unsaturated fatty acid ratio. We can do things like that. We can introduce omega threes and omega sixes, [00:29:00] which we’ve played around with a little bit into our pork fat, which are traditionally only found in algae and fish, so we can.
Do all of these different things to actually end up with a much healthier fat than a traditional pork fat you might find from a pig. Maybe a cleaner fat as well. Definitely a cleaner fat. Yeah. And maybe if we, now would be a good time to cut in that carnivore MD guy. I don’t know if you’ve seen him, but I wonder what his take is on cultivated meat, but yeah we’ve spoken to, we’ve spoken to a few of those sorts of people and a lot of them are super excited about, eating a whole load more pork fat.
And in particular, excited about this idea of customizing the fat, customizing nutritional profile and other properties. So yeah, maybe he’ll be in the next rebrand. It’s definitely an exciting future to think about that. So as we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask you, for those that are listening, what [00:30:00] can they do to help move the industry forward?
We talked earlier about education. I think education is critical here. This industry will only move forward with the right policy and the right policy will only come from people being excited about the industry and pushing for it to keep progressing. That will happen by people talking about what we do.
I think that the more people that are talking about cultivated meat, the better. We, over the last few years, this industry has called itself a lot of different things. And I know that it’s a particular bugbear of a lot of people in the industry when people use words like lab grown meats to describe what we do, because it’s, It’s not lab grown any more than beer is, but I personally don’t really care how people are talking about what we do, as long as they’re talking [00:31:00] about it and that they’re excited.
I think it’s just important to get people understanding what we do as much as possible and talking about it. And Alex, I know you’ve done a really good job here. I’ve got your children’s book. In the office, which is a very good example of ways that we can talk about this industry and share that knowledge with people.
Awesome. Yeah. And thanks for being a reader of the book. And I think, you make a really good point because in the early days, I would talk about cultured meat, self cultured meat, cultivated meat, whatever you want to call it. And people would be like, Oh yeah, I’ve tried a lot of that.
I love impossible. And it’s okay, that’s the wrong thing. But nowadays people are like, Oh, aren’t there a couple of companies that are doing that? And so that already is a huge shift in terms of mindset, education and understanding, which I think is huge. Exactly. Dr.
Vitor Santo will be speaking at the Cultured Meat Symposium in Sunnyvale on September 12th and 13th, 2024. That’s just a couple of weeks away. So we’re really excited. [00:32:00] He’s going to be on a panel and how long has Dr. Vitor Santo been on the Hoxton team? Thank you. Nearly a year now, which is flown by he’s a, he’s an awesome member of the team.
He was the director of cellular agriculture at good meat before he joined us and now leads all of our cell biology work and is a, an awesome person to have on the team. Cool. We’re very excited to welcome him to California in just a couple of weeks and we’ll put details about CMS in the show notes as well, along with Hoxton farms and other links.
Ed, as we start to wrap up I want to ask you, do you have any last insights for our listeners today? Any additional call to actions or thoughts that maybe the industry is not approaching that maybe we should, anything like that? I think for the industry, we’re at this really exciting point.
Although I think that there is some negativity around [00:33:00] alternative protein more broadly, I think looking at where we are in cultivated meat now is super exciting. What I think that we need to be doing as a kind of group of companies in the space is starting to work together a little bit more.
There, over the last four years, I’ve seen lots of companies. Talk about working together and talk about sharing ideas and research, but I’ve seen not that much of it actually happening on the ground. Now I’m going to conferences where people are actually talking about results and talking about science a bit more deeply and.
We’re part of a couple of groups that are talking about developing facilities together and sharing spaces and things like that. And I think that’s going to be really important. I think we can’t get disheartened when companies fail because that will happen along the journey, but we need to make sure that we come together as a group of companies [00:34:00] trying to push forward this space and make that happen.
So that’s my big call to action. No, I love that. And it also makes me think about the recent Bezos Center for Alternative Protein. I think that was at Imperial College, London. Is that right? And you also have some academic history there. Exactly. It’s close to home. And that’s a really awesome example of this starting to really happen now.
Do you think that will directly impact what your team is doing? I think all of these initiatives will directly impact what we’re doing. And there’s the Bezos Center, there’s Google. karma as well in the UK, which was funded by the UK government. That’s Bath university and a couple of others.
There’s a few of these different initiatives and we’re seeing really good progress in the UK in particular but I’m seeing similar things happening across the EU in the U S and it’s great to see. Awesome. Ed, thank you so much for [00:35:00] joining us on the cultured meat and future food podcast.
Thanks very much, Alex. This is your host, Alex, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.