Adam Torres and Jeff “Trip” Tripician discuss Meatable.
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Show Notes:
Meatable’s innovations can address some of the most pressing global challenges, such as climate change, food security, and sustainable animal care, by providing a more sustainable and humane solution for protein production. In this episode, Adam Torres and Jeff “Trip” Tripician, CEO of Meatable, explore cultivated meet and the partnership between the traditional and cultivated meat industry.
About Jeff “Trip” Tripician,
Bold leader of change with over 39 years of relentlessly driving growth of branded businesses and the superior profit margins that they deliver. His ongoing effort to affect positive change in the food system, He decided to join Meatable as their new CEO. Meatable’s leadership in the science and technology behind Cultivated Meats will allow the meat industry to be a driving force in the paradigm shift required to address multiple issues impacting Climate Change, Food Insecurity and Animal Care on a global level. This challenge impacts the planet and all its 8 billion people. Big challenges require big solutions regarding – water use, soil quality, air quality, protein supply, and animal care.
The last two years he spend forming GFF – the merger of two regenerative ag companies (Teton Waters Ranch & Sun Fed Ranch) have been very successful – the highlight being the development and launch of Teton Taste Buds, a line of child focused blended grass fed beef and veggies designed to combat childhood obesity (his motivation was his four grandchildren and everyone else’s children and grandchildren).
Prior – He lead the acquisition, consolidation and growth of multiple businesses in the natural foods sector; first with private equity partners, followed by Perdue Farms. He created the Perdue Premium Meat Company (PPMC) platform; comprised of five vertically-integrated businesses. These businesses include Niman Ranch, Coleman Natural Meats, Panorama Organic Grassfed Meats, Alexander and Hornung, and Sioux-Preme Pork. The initiative of this platform was to deliver a “one-stop-shop” concept nationally, via an integrated system–three brands supported by a vertically engineered supply-chain,
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today is a very special episode. We have on the line Jeff Trippishen, also known as Tripp, and he is the CEO over at Meatable.
Tripp, welcome to the show. Adam, thank you for having me, man. I’ve been waiting to get somebody from your industry on the line for a long time here. This is going to be fun. I’ve been wanting to explore this whole landscape of, of of meat and how it relates to the future because there’s a lot of stuff in the media, like either that can go either way, talking about, you know, traditional sources, whether it’s cultivated and otherwise I guess just to get us kicked off here, I’m curious from your perspective.
from your point of view, like when did you first get into interested or even introduced to this other side of the meat industry, the cultivated meat industry, like how’d that happen? Yeah, that’s, you know, it’s an interesting thing. I started out heck 35 years ago in the conventional side of the business and have been moving more towards the premium kind of It’s a new thought, especially for younger generation, all these claims, organic and sustainable and cage free and grass fed.
All those claims seem to be relatively new last, you know, 20 years, and I’ve been spending most of my time in that area. So this is a progression for me as far as, you know, cultivated meats only been around for under a decade, even in a lab. So wow, it’s only 10 years and that’s a new idea. Yeah. I feel like it’s been here longer for some reason, like in my recollection.
I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been eating it for a long time. I can tell you that. I don’t know why. Plant based, sure. Oh, yeah. Plant based, those things. I’m talking about being able to take real meat from a cell of an animal. So you don’t, you know, harm any animals, a cell of an animal, and what takes years to develop, to grow.
And it takes a pig seven or eight months. It takes cattle two to three years. This takes 12 days. And in a world that’s getting so much bigger, eight billion people on its way to ten. Yeah. Developing countries, more demand. It creates just a, you know, a terrible moment where how do you feed that many people and not screw up the planet?
Climate, soil, water, animals. How do you do that? Yeah. That’s why this product exists to help try to solve that. How do you see this ecosystem or this partnership? I don’t know if that’s the right word. How do you see this ecosystem between, you know, traditional raising even, even cultivate it.
And I don’t know if you want to. Sprinkle in the, the plant based side of things like, how do you see all these things coexisting? Cause I find it fascinating. Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question and I, you know, it seems to me like a very obvious answer. I try to, I’m a practical guy, I run businesses, I try to run them in a practical way and, so you have an industry about 1.
7 trillion a year. That’s the meat industry and they’re pretty darn efficient. Yeah, and so they have a way of doing something. So why would you not take an approach that says work with them? Not against them. Don’t blame them, empower them. And so, my idea and Yeah, when you say it like that, it sounds pretty obvious.
Go ahead, I’m sorry. Yeah, why wouldn’t you start with that? Yeah, of course. Why don’t you start with that one? And that doesn’t usually happen though in the real world, right? Like Well, you know, you’re right. But the last 25 years, I’ve done this four times. So this is the one and they all go the same route at the beginning.
When people feel threatened in anything, they move away. They reject it. You see that some states are rejecting this. Some countries are while some are saying, My gosh, I have food insecurity or we have water problems. We have soil problems. We’ve got to think of something else. So the idea is to work with the meat industry.
We’re a vendor to them. We provide a technology that solves a lot of their problems as an industry. So, lead time for animals to, grow them out. The feed for them still takes land and water to, to grow crops to feed the animals. You know, there’s disease, global disease today on swine flu and avian flu that can just devastate livestock supply.
And how do you feed people if that happens? And how do you afford to feed people if that happens? So there’s a lot of issues the meat industry grapples with that cultivated meat can help them with. Four out of the five big issues, this can help. The second thing is you’re not really changing anything they do.
So they today source meat and turn it into food. So it goes through a plant, they put it in a package, they deliver it to a restaurant or grocery store. Very simple. Yeah. And all cultivated meat does is say, well, there’s another way to get the meat. Instead of waiting years and stressing the land, the water, you know, the air, instead of doing that, why don’t you just build a different kind of plant because they have plants today that harvest animals and turn it into food.
And make the meat. And supply it yourself. That’s what they’re accustomed to doing. We’ve had 10 conversations with meat companies on a global level, big companies. Nine out of the 10 have said, well, this makes a heck of a lot of sense. How does it work? And then they want to get into the science, which is fair.
They want to understand cost. They want to understand scalability. All fair. All fair. All things that people that the consumers care about. For sure. Can I get it? Can I afford it? And does it taste good? Thank God, our program, we have IP, you know, we own the IP for globally, for a way to do it faster, and a way to do it, make it taste better.
So we’re working with the industry to try to solve just a huge problem feeding people. What are some of the obstacles that you, run into on the, on this journey of educating , the industry and then possibly even if we want to take that from the industry standpoint. And then that same question, if you wanna maybe comment on the same time, but on the, the consumer side of things, right?
Like the end user. Absolutely. And the governments, too. I mean, there’s three speed bumps. Throw that in the mix, man. We’re throwing all that in there. And there’s three legitimate speed bumps. And they’re true of almost any industry. Think about anything that was new. The cell phone, the computer, electric car.
You name it. Initially, when people heard about it, they went, Oh, I don’t know about that. Industries that were established said, I don’t want to do that because it sounds threatening. Government said I have to protect these industries, protect my state’s economy, or my country’s economy. And consumers scratch their head and say, I don’t know if that works.
All fair. And all of them have been overcome. It takes a little time. So in this case, you have to start with the meat industry and say, if this is beneficial to you, it’s faster, it solves your problems, you make some more money. Because younger consumers, instead of saying, I don’t want this, will say, gee, technology is a big part of my life.
It solves a lot of problems. I like technology and food too. I think that’s a younger consumer’s domain. So, you talk to the meat industry, I think politicians, little different. They have other issues. They, from very sobering, where you have to feed people, to, you know, they have to protect their economy.
You have to show them where not one farmer or rancher will be hurt by the introduction of cultivated meat. Not one. And the reason I say that one, I’ve been in the industry for 35 years, but two, it’s the industry is supposed to grow 70 percent over the next 25 years. So how would a farmer that has a finite amount of land and water grow 70 percent or raise 70 percent more livestock?
The only thing the industry knows how to do is stress the land, stress the water, , add something to it to make you grow faster. And you go, 70 percent more for the same land and water? We’re already depleting aquifers, we’re already ruining the topsoil. So, we’re not going to take one bit of business from a normal farmer, traditional farmer, or rancher.
This is all about growth. How do you feed the next 2 billion people? Developing countries, how do you make things more affordable? If they don’t add more supply, if the industry doesn’t have more supply, the cost will go up and the average consumer, if they think prices are high today, wait till that happens.
Yeah, so oh yeah, I think you just go through that process. The last one I think is the easiest. You look at a younger consumer, you look at their life, you look how unbelievably Penetrated technology is and you say this is like a brewery because that’s what it’s like if you looked at it You go, there’s big stainless steel vessels with liquid in them And the liquid is a food, it feeds the cells, the cells grow in 12 days and at the end you have what would look like ground beef, ground pork, that kind of thing.
And you sit there and go to that consumer and go, if I could get you that product for a hamburger or a breakfast sausage or a burrito, and do it where we don’t harm one animal, don’t ruin the land. 99 percent less land use, but you have to have a plant, so a little bit, 95 percent water use and zero animals impacted.
I think a younger consumer that shops at a Whole Foods or a Sprouts or one of those natural food stores or goes to one of the more progressive restaurants is going to go, I believe in that. But we just have to tell them about it, it takes a little time. Yeah. What about the government side of things? If you maybe I like, how’s that been working out just to go a , a little bit into that one.
And I know, you know, political year, all that good stuff, but not even talking about that, but just in general, trying to get an idea, trying to get something through. So first, you know, here’s what I’ll and I, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m old. Yeah. So, the government has done a great job in the U.
S. about making a safe food system. When we hear things in the news, we hear about them largely finding something that doesn’t get into the food supply. And they find it. You say, oh my gosh, that could have been a problem. Right. It could have been, but it wasn’t there’s an occasional things, but we’ve got 330 million people.
It’s, it’s not very often. And so they do a great job. FDA, USDA, those regulators, they take their time and I fully support them. I always would wish they’d go quicker, but they have to do it right. So they do that, but there are some governments that do it so much kind of more streamlined, so much more helpful for a business.
And I’ll give you an example. I’ve worked with the authorities in Singapore. They have 1 percent of all their food is raised in the country or made in the country during COVID. It scared the hell out of them because they had to get 99 percent of the food brought into the country. They launched a program called 30 by 30.
It was 30 percent of their food by 2030 and organized government to help companies do it. So they lined up their version of FDA, their version of USDA and economic investment to make companies like mine, look at Singapore and go. So I can work with you to do this quickly, to de risk it and get it to your consumers because that’s what the government wants.
It’s a brilliant strategy. Others are copying that. UK, Germany, other, the Netherlands, other countries are going, this makes a lot of sense, and they’re modeling it that way. That’ll help companies like mine get to market faster with a little less risk, little more surety.
What do you hope to accomplish? Let’s just say in the next, I don’t know, five years or so, like, if you have the crystal ball and you know, things are going in the right direction, like, well, what do you hope to accomplish? So we’re working right now with the industry and with government. So the science will take care of itself.
We have, for example, we have 68 scientists out of 86 employees. We’re fine with the science and a lot of people, there’s some smart people working on it. Yeah, the governments will fall in line just because they’re going to see that they’ve got to be able to provide food and jobs for employees in the future or citizens in the future.
And this is a viable source. Meat companies will see it, too. So over the next five years, I think we’ll see. Globally, more and more countries saying these products are fine, they’re safe, and meat companies saying this is a way to help me be in business, not just five years from now, 25 years from now, 100 years from now.
So we’ll see that we’ll be able to do what you said at the beginning, which is you’ll be able to go into a restaurant and a grocery store and for a reasonable price, have this product, whether it’s blended with some other product you buy today from brands you trust, which is the way we’re doing it.
and that way, I think people will start to say, This product safe and we’re not doing any any damage. So that’s what I see longer term, 25 years from now, you won’t be able to interview me cause I won’t be around, but my grandkids will. And that’s what motivates me. I want that next generation or two to be able to say, this is a smarter way to have done something.
Solve a real problem. Don’t create one. Great. Well, Tripp, man, I was excited about the interview today and you delivered. I’m telling you, I’ve been curious about this because I hear things, you know, you read things and you kind of know, but like, this is one of my favorite parts about being a podcaster.
And what I get to do is I get to. Talk directly to the people that are making the news and are in the space of innovation and also bring that to our audience so that they can hear right from the source and make their own decisions. So, and really appreciate you coming on. Of course that being said, if somebody’s listening to this and they want to follow the Meatable journey, I mean, how do they do that and learn more?
Sure. You can just go on Meatable. com and all the information’s there. There’s ways to get , in touch with, with any of the, the kind of leaders, myself included. Just shoot us a note. We’re happy to, to work with anybody that wants to learn more. That’s awesome. And for the audience, just so you know, we’ll, we’ll definitely put the Meatable.
com link to the website, all that good stuff in the show notes. So you can just click on it and head right on over and connect and follow. And I know they have some social media and other things out there too. I see a bunch of links. So definitely check that out and to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters.
And you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet. We welcome you hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, new food for thought. Can that be the pun for the day? I don’t know, but I agree. Also so again, hit that subscriber follow and trip, man.
Really appreciate you coming on and all you do. So thank you. Thanks, Adam. Appreciate it.