Jeff “Trip” Tripician of Meatable
On the Cultured Meat and Future Food Show, Alex welcomes Jeff “Trip” Tripician, CEO of Meatable, a cultured meat company based in the Netherlands. Trip shares insights into his 40-year career in agriculture, focusing on premium meat and sustainable practices. He highlights the shift towards consumer demand for environmentally and ethically responsible products. Tripp discusses Meatable’s approach to cultivated meat, which uses advanced science to produce meat without harming animals. He also touches on the challenges of global food security and the potential of cultivated meat to address these issues.
Auto-generated Transcript:
Thanks for joining us on the Cultured Meat and Future Food Show. I’m really excited to be here on the show with Jeff Tripician, or as we’ll say, Trip. Trip, welcome to the show. Alex, thank you very much. Glad to be here. Trip, before we jump into your background we skipped a formal intro.
So tell us very shortly what your current role is. So I’m fortunate enough to be CEO of Meatable that’s located in the Netherlands, right outside of Amsterdam. Great. And I’m excited to jump into Meatable and kind of the 2024 story and beyond of Meatable. As we’ve had Don on the show, actually he was the.
The first episode we had ever recorded, this was even before Meatable was was established, I believe. So we’ll dig into history lane a little bit, but I want to ask about you. Tell us about your background. Before, before I do that. So Don is, had his second child last week. So exciting moment for him and he is a great partner.
I, I’m always in awe of those people that have that ability to create the way founders do, I am not a founder. I’m an operator. And so I just thought you, since Don, you might like to hear that but so my background, very simple. I’ve been for about coming on 40 years.
I have dedicated myself to agriculture, and that’s working with producers, people that actually do the hard work of things on the land and being a processor, someone that takes it and turns it into food. I’ve done that primarily in meat, but the very premium end of meat, the claims that people want, sustainable, regenerative.
humane how you treat things in a way that they actually improve and make things better, not worse. I also was in the dairy industry for some period of time both traditional dairy as well as soy milk and the milk industry with a milk mustache. So long career, 40 years. The last 20 plus have been taking small, very special premium companies and ideas from regional to to marketplace success.
Awesome. And you mentioned you’re based in Colorado. Is that where you, is that where you’re originally from? No. I was born in Italy and moved around the United States quite some time growing up went to school on the East coast, up in Boston. And found our way, our family found our way out here in the late 90s to, to the front range of Colorado, the boulder area.
And now we continue to move farther north into more agricultural area. And that’s been a. Been a 25 or more year journey. Wow. And I guess this is going to be a tough question, but, generally speaking, how have you seen things change in this, 40 year career, I’m sure it’s been a lot, but is there a couple of things that really stand out where, this is something we no longer do, or this is something that has become the norm, anything like that?
Yeah, look I’ll answer that in two ways. One as a. As a a leader of meat companies. So ag, and then second from a consumer standpoint. And first as a business leader inside of agriculture I think that we have science becoming a bigger part of the solution how you treat the land, how you treat animals, how you feed, how you move things around, all of that is, is just becoming.
A little bit more science oriented, technology oriented. And that helps with efficiency. It helps mitigate some risk for them. And so I think that’s healthy, as long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on the land, which, which of course now we’re seeing. We’re seeing that the more we do and the more interventions that we put in place they have an impact.
Some are better and some and many are worse. We see that with. Pandemic livestock disease, swine and avian flu, and we see that with soil erosion, top soil loss. We see, and we try desperately to use science and technology to fix those things. And to date, they have largely not worked. We see that with climate change, greenhouse gas, all of that.
We see an industry, which is massive. Globally trying to lessen its impact. But still feed people. That’s the challenge there. From a consumer standpoint, what we see is a radical departure from when I got into this industry. It used to be volume of protein meat at a price. That’s it. That was the discussion today.
That is not the discussion. There is a younger audience, which gets older every day. That says the things they eat and the things they purchase have to be more than practical. They have to be helpful. They want claims that make things better, either themselves, the planet, the way animals and land are treated.
They care about that and increasingly large percent of them care about that. They’re willing to pay for it and we don’t have to just call think about me. You can think about lots of consumables. Milk 40 years ago was relatively conventional. Today, look at a meat case, a dairy case. And soy, almond, rice, oat milk, flavor proliferation, claim proliferation, organic is this huge piece of that, page free range, all of these things did not exist when I started this in this industry.
On the meat side, same way. You never talked about things like regenerative or sustainable or antibiotic free or no added hormones. Humane animal care, all of those things were not on the radar. And today there are in the lexicon of the consumer that has created venues that didn’t exist 40 years ago.
There wasn’t a whole foods. There wasn’t a Panera or a Chipotle. There wasn’t a Shake Shack. These places have come up because consumers said the status quo was unacceptable. And so being capitalists, people said, I’ll make things that you want. And they’re dominated by claims that speak to a better society, a better planet, better treatment of its inhabitants, both people and livestock.
There was a, I think you might’ve used the term, um, like high end or a high quality sure. Premium. Yeah. Pre premium. And and I saw in your bio references of Neiman Ranch being in California, we see Neiman Ranch, har Harris Ranch, quite a bit.
Can you tell us a little bit about what Neiman Ranch is? When we see that label, maybe on, the, sometimes I see it like on the menu at a steakhouse. Where, sure. I think they’re. Their stakes are sourced. Tell us a little bit about Neiman ranch. Sure.
Alex, I think that what we were able to do with them when we purchased it from bill nine and back in, in 20, in 2006 was bill was a visioner. He saw something no one else saw. He put the pieces together in a brilliant fashion and then was challenged with the ability to expand that geographically different channels where people buy product, all those business things.
And so what we took was the core of his ideas and didn’t really change them to any material extent. What we did is we put it inside of a business model and his the tenets of what he was building was that animal care and land treatment and fair and reasonable compensation for family farmers all fit together.
If you pay people. Appropriately for the hard work they do, then they’ll treat the land better. They’ll treat the animals better. And those create that creates a better product for consumers that are willing to buy it. And that’s what Niman ranch was. It was beef, pork, and lamb. It was processed products.
And as a result across about 10 years maybe a little bit more, we were able to go from coast to have the company grow about 12 X it’s original size. To support over 800 family farmers and ranchers, all of those signs of success got on many thousands of menus across the country, both kind of fast casual as well as fine dining, get into all of the very premium grocery store chains from natural to just very premium and on college campuses, on business campuses, it permeated that part of the society that valued it.
We sold that to Purdue which a wonderful company back in Maryland. And they took it and we’ve continued to expand. We did that with Coleman, which was a Colorado based company. We did it with Petaluma. So this has happened over and over. It’s. It’s these companies that you want to believe in because they’re doing the right thing.
And then you find the people that value that and you align them. Meatables in the same exact spot, except the stakes are higher. Very cool. And here I am pronouncing it wrong, knowing not much about it, but then when I do see that logo on the menu, I think, okay, this is going to be good quality.
You trust them. I trust them. Awesome. Okay so let’s dive into cultured meat. Cultivated meat. When did you first hear about cultured meat? I’ve been in this industry a long time and this was sadly not on my radar this time last year, and I’ve spent my time on the fringes of the industry with.
Grass fed, all of those things, all of those boutique type of activity as we try to take them more mainstream. What happened was I was putting together some grass fed beef companies because I think that’s helpful, especially from a regenerative ag standpoint. And these folks called me, Meatable call.
We had a conversation. I said, I really don’t understand this. I’m no scientist. And they said a few things that changed the way I think about an industry I spent 40 years in. They said, okay, but if the industry grows 70%, which are the global projections over the next 25 years, how are we going to feed your grandkids?
And I stopped and I said, I’ve never thought about that. I never I’ve thought about land and farmers and ranchers and food. But I never thought about the globe’s ability to feed 2 billion more people between now and 25 and 2050, 2 billion more people and developing countries increasing appetite for protein.
And that’s 70 percent growth over 25 years. How do you do that when we’re not going to have any more land, we’re not going to have any more water. We’re already destroying or undermining soil and freshwater today. We have things like the dead spot, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We already have topsoil degrading.
So about a third of the topsoil in the Midwest in this country is no longer productive. We’ve already stressed animal feeding to grow them as fast as possible, to make it as densely within humane standards, as densely concentrated as possible. We have climate impact. We have greenhouse gas. All of those things today don’t reflect 70 percent growth.
In 25 years, what is that going to look like? When they said that to me, I said, okay, I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I’ll invest my time to try to see if there’s an answer here. Now I’m talking to you. And that’s an amazing stat to look at. And okay. So you learn about the industry, media pool approaches you, what were your thoughts about, I’m going to, I’m going to start working with this company that’s based in the Netherlands.
Is there a plan to have a heavy U. S. focus? Is, where is Meatable at now? So the home will always be in Leiden, Netherlands, right outside of Amsterdam, about 30 minutes. And that’s because that’s where the epicenter of the organization is. The company is a brilliant team of PhDs and scientists that have figured out how to take a cell from an animal, not hurt the animal, put it in a medium.
So for you and I, food, feed it for 12 days. At the end of 12 days, you have the meat that you could use to make hamburgers and hot dogs and burritos and tacos and all of those things. Or you could say, nope, I’d like the cells to become, different cells, become a steak or a pork chop or something else.
They that’s the science. It’s going to be in the Netherlands because that’s where those people are. And I’m not silly enough to change that. The practical part after that is you go what countries are friendly to the idea, what companies, meat companies want to do this, because the thing that makes meatable different is the science and our approach to the marketplace, because the science has to work.
It has to taste great. It has to be cost from a cost standpoint, be approachable for a meat company. Otherwise, why would they do it? The role of meatable is fundamentally different than other cultivated meat companies. I don’t expect us to own a plant. So we’ll be asset light. I don’t expect us to compete with meat companies in the marketplace.
We’re going to be a vendor to the meat industry. Helping them generate more raw material so they don’t ruin the rest of the planet. So what that means is a meat company of size that today runs plants, harvests animals, makes food and sells it will continue to do but they’ll do it with a license from us, almost think like a franchise, a license from us.
Where we transfer the technology. And instead of the meat. Walking into the plant on two or four legs, it is made inside their plant with equipment that in 12 days produces the amount exactly what they want in the exact quantity they want it in 12 days, not seven or eight months for a pig or two or three years for cattle 12 days.
To arm the industry with that so that they can, when they plan their future, they can use CapEx or investment money for plant and equipment. They can invest in that infrastructure just for them at the scale they want in the location they want. And as they look into the future, that growth cultivated meat can pick up a good portion of that growth need that a meat company has and meatable is The best choice and I’m biased, but it’s the best choice one, because we embrace that concept of being a supplier to the meat industry, but to taste, we looked Alex at the taste from a sensory standpoint, the taste of pork by all of its attributes, 12 different attributes and said, how does meatable pork equate, there was a 90 percent duplicative taste.
The rest of cultivated meat, as best we can replicate, was only a 50 percent match to pork. At the end of the day, when consumers try something, do you want it to taste half as good as pork, or almost the same? And you’d like it to be the same, we’re going to continue to work on that. Taste wise, We’re light years ahead of people.
The fact that we want to work with the industry instead of blame them or compete with them is fundamentally different. I want to be their partner.
Great. And about last year, this time I was able to tour the Meatable office and labs. And it was really amazing. The equipment had not been put in yet, but it really felt like you’re in the future. It was amazing. Yeah, it is. It’s, it is a comedy. I describe it to people, it’s, it, We’ve had some very large meat companies visit us.
And we walk around and at the end, cause we dominate, we’re on the largest bioscience campus in the world is located in Leiden, Netherlands. And it is, so it has everyone from Johnson and Johnson to Bayer and Bristol Myers and all those. So it’s a science, it’s a technology campus. And they visited and they stopped me at Either walking the hall or sitting in a conference room.
And they said, you have more R and D people than we do. And we being a company that is billions or tens of billions. In annual revenue, we have more thought power on this topic than anybody. I find that to be encouraging. And at the same time, a little disappointed in the rest of the industry, the meat industry, that they’re not spending the time on this but that’s why we’re in business.
We can do the technology and transfer it to them. We’re testing that transfer as we speak today. Amazing. And it, when a big company says something like that, it sounds a little bit scary, but also a little bit delicious about our future being focused and have R and D to lead the way.
Alex, what’s interesting is, I always look The cup is half empty because I was raised that way, but that’s probably a okay way to do this. If a meat company today is saying, look, we’re busy trying to run our company and we invest a little time in the future, fine, I think you would embrace that then you’d say what about these big changes you go?
Isn’t that the domain of pioneers of the first guy that developed map packaging, modified atmosphere packaging. The first time they did that, people had to scratch their head and go, I don’t know how to do that. Someone did or soothe the product. How do you cook it in a bag? Retain all the, how do you do that?
Meat companies go, I don’t know how to do that. Somebody had a pioneer. So there’s examples. Of how pioneering, HPP, those are technologies that are largely sitting in the meat industry. That’s someone from outside the meat industry said, we have pioneered something that will fundamentally help your business and consumers.
You’ll get a premium for it. So you’ll make more money. You should do it. We’ll coach you. We’ll help you every step of the way. And meat companies said, okay. Cultivated meat should be identical to that where we’ve identified seven global hubs of commerce. We’re populating it with staff so that a meat company anywhere in the globe could say here’s where I am.
Can you help me? And we not only have our headquarters in Leiden, we have people within their geography that can provide them with regular support so that they can do it every day once they start and make that commitment. And so the thought is really global, not just, US and Europe focused.
It’s a global problem. Yeah. The, if you’re, if you are, if we are looking, at the U S folks in the meat industry, what are they thinking about this cultured meat technology? And what do you think about the, the statewide bans? I think Illinois might be the next one to follow suit.
What, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Look, I’ll answer that in a couple of ways. As just And I’ll, I’m not sure I’m speaking for a lot of people. I hope I am, but just as an American, I find it to be off putting to have a government tell us what we can and cannot buy.
That’s not their job. Their job is to make sure things are safe and that’s the FDA’s job and they’re working with us. So that works. And then to make sure USDA makes sure that it’s safe. And we’re working with them. So that mechanism is in place when government overreaches and says, no, we’re going to tell you what you can and cannot buy.
Doesn’t sound like the United States. It sounds like other places. And as an American, I bristle at that. I’ll decide what’s right for me and my family. And I think every American should have that same right. Cause what if they pick something else? What if they pick everything else? I think that’s one of the founding principles of this country is we pick, they don’t.
Having said that now to the business side, we have mechanisms with FDA and USDA to make sure it’s safe. So it’s not a safety issue. The other part is what it really is there’s a constituent for politicians that says, I’m worried that this could undermine agriculture, farmers and ranchers, that’s a fair thing.
That’s a government’s job is to protect their constituents. So if they bothered to sit and talk and I would meet with any one of them anywhere, whenever they’d like. If they’d like to sit and talk about. What have we already done to destroy the land, the water, the air, to already stress these farmers and ranchers and already pay them precious little?
What does cultivated meat do? Cultivated meat should handle some of the growth that we talked about. It shouldn’t have one farmer or rancher raise one head of livestock less than they’re doing today. So it doesn’t threaten them. Anybody that looks at growth of 70 percent would say the current people are not threatened, nor their livestock.
But it’s more than that. It’s, you can now also go to the same group of people and say, the cultivated meat industry has to feed these cells when it produces. So now farmers and ranchers could, mainly farmers, could raise crops. that the cultivated meat industry needs as part of their feed regimen for this.
And the price they would get from the cultivated meat industry is higher than anybody else that’s going to pay them because they’re pharma thinkers and pharma costs more. So if Illinois or any other state that was reacting or overreacting would look at this, I think they would say long term this helps feed the globe.
It helps mitigate some global issues that are significant. It helps those farmers and ranchers. If they want to be helped, but it does no harm and it’s America and we’re supposed to pick what we eat, not a politician.
Well said. And I I think it’s really important. And I think the way you said it is I felt that right. And that was, yeah. Alex, I’m going to give you the last thought on that. Yeah. I think if we could get them to be a person and not with the lights on, not with a microphone and just sit with them and go, Ron DeSantis or governors from Arkansas or Illinois or whatever, and say, look, you have a family, you have children, you have grandchildren, or you’re gonna some.
You have a state with them, how are they gonna, what are they gonna eat? How much is it gonna cost? In 25 years, and I know they won’t be in office, which is maybe the point. In 25 years, when they go to a grocery store, Or they go to a restaurant. If the demand is up 70 percent and the supply doesn’t keep up, prices are going to rise.
How were they going to pay for that food? If you inhibit a low cost way of getting that food between now and then. That’s the question. If they have a better answer, that’s fantastic. But if they don’t, then how can they stand in the way of technology providing an answer here? They embraced it on automobiles.
Although initially everybody said it would put car companies out of business, that hasn’t happened. So there’s a lot of technology that scares people. And once they calm down, it’s some of it isn’t very helpful and some of it isn’t. Why not let the marketplace decide what that is for cultivated? Is it very helpful or not, but it’s safe.
So that’s not an excuse. I want to switch gears a little bit and and I guess go to the table, so to speak when what are you most excited to cook with meatable cultivated pork? What would it be? Would it be barbecue? Would it be some other type of dish? Yeah.
So this is the disappointing part of this interview. I am a terrible cook and I am the product At my age, I am the product of a guy that travels a lot. and eats wherever he can. So I am a meat and potatoes, no, no pun intended there kind of guy. Whether it’s a hamburger or a sausage. Or a plate of pasta.
That’s what I am. So I view, especially the pork product, ground pork. It, so it is the foundation of burritos, tacos, sausages, blended into things like um, existing almost like an ingredient into existing basic dishes. The application though, that to me is the smart way to do this.
If I was running like, like I was in the past, the more traditional meat companies, I would do this in a blended fashion. I would take whatever percent of the current meat block is. So the form, how much meat and pull out 20, 25 percent put in the cultivated product. And that way you’ve diluted. Any cost increase, you spread it across the total cost of the product.
But you’re also introducing it into the diet in a percent instead of a hundred percent, it’s just 10, 20, 30, 40%. And you feather it in so that someone has it like for plant based products that, that are directionally, I think consumers wanted that to be successful, they didn’t really like the taste or they looked at it and said, there’s a lot of things in there.
They were surprised about. If you blend it in cultivated pork, it would taste, we tested this, would taste just like a pork product, not a plant based product. And this is blending into actual pork. Yeah. Yeah. If you put it in with actual pork, then what you get is the claims that you’re actually doing some good.
You’re pushing back climate change and greenhouse gas emission and animal care. You’re helping by blending it in. And that’s just a very practical way. Of introducing cultivated meats to people. I don’t think you start with a steak or a pork chop. You start with things that are far more common ground pork type items or ground beef type items are things that consumers have every day in their diet.
And at least with meatable, you wouldn’t taste a difference. And the cost would be negligible, especially given the benefit. So I’m a basic eater, sausages, meatballs, tacos, burritos, hamburgers. It’s around 8 AM where we’re both out. So breakfast burrito sounds pretty good right now. Yeah.
And I think that’s also how you solve these big problems. You don’t pick little narrow categories. Yeah. If you have a big problem you take a bite out of the big problem. The big problem is are big categories that are ubiquitous across the diet. It’s on most menus. It’s in most refrigerators.
That’s if you’re going to try to fix those big planetary issues. You have to have a product that’s big enough to do it. You don’t pick charcuterie.
As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask you, are there any last thoughts or any at last insights for our listeners today? Yeah as an American, I don’t think about what I’m about to say, but this is a global problem. I’ve spent. Time over the last month in, in Asia, in a couple of different countries, as well as in Europe.
And I’ve had people from those countries, both ministers of government, as well as meat companies. Say you’re an American you’re lucky. You don’t wake up each morning and worry about food security. And I never have. And hopefully your listeners haven’t either, but they do. And 10 percent of the global population goes to bed every night, hungry.
That’s 800 million people. And I was talking with the folks in Singapore, minister of agriculture. And he said, trip 1 percent of our food demand. We actually produce. Or make here in Singapore, 99 percent is imported. We learned through COVID that is a disastrous situation, potential. And so we have a program to fix that.
It’s called 30 by 30, what 30 percent of our food by 2030. And I listened to him and I said, so every day you worry about the ability to feed your people. I got back, I took, I pretended like this was news because it was to me, to the folks in the Netherlands at the, at our corporate office, and I said, And they said trip the UN has over 20 countries on their food scarcity list.
And those people are the same as Singapore, except they’re less affluent. Our product can help them. So Alex, you could see a moment where in a country that has terrible land, terrible water or lack of both, and so they can’t raise livestock, could build a building with a meat company in downtown, wherever it is.
Couple stories high that is of the size that could feed the inhabitants of that area and do no harm. I don’t see how we say, let’s not pursue that. I don’t understand how you don’t spend the time to figure that out. See if you can, whether you’re Illinois or Florida or Arkansas, I think you owe it to everyone else.
To seek, to determine if this can be a big part of the problem solution to the problem.
And I, I feel like that will be the future. Trip, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Alex, thank you. I appreciate the time. If anything I can do for you in the future, please ask. This is your host, Alex, and we look forward to seeing you on our next episode.