Business for Good Podcast (Bio)engineering Better Beef: Josh March and SciFi Foods' Quest to Cultivate Meat
In 2021, a lengthy analysis was published by a now-defunct online news outlet concluding that cultivating animal cells at commercial meat industry scale was simply a pipedream. Josh March didn't really disagree. But he thought if you could bioengineer the animal cells to get more comfortable at production scale, and add those finished cells into otherwise plant-based meats, you could both commercialize meat cultivation and make animal-free burgers taste even better.
Not only did March persuade himself of it, but he persuaded investors, too. In 2022—a very difficult time for startups to raise VC cash—March's startup, SciFi Foods, raised $22 million to bioengineer better animal-free beef.
Of course, many in the cultivated meat world shy away from talking about or practicing bioengineering for fear that it will turn consumers off. But not March. He's betting big that technologies like bioengineering and CRISPR are actually the only path to success in this field, so he's going all in.
In this interview, we talk all about Josh's story, including two previous startup acquisitions, his motivations for doing this work, and what he sees as the future of meat.
Discussed in this episode
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Josh became interested in cultivated meat after reading The Singularity is Near and Player of Games
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We discuss the 2021 Counter story on cultivated meat's prospects
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Josh recommends reading How to Get Rich
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Paul recommends reading Tender is the Flesh
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Josh is currently reading Mythos
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Paul references Circe as a female-centered retelling of Greek mythology
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BTW, Josh is the author of Message Me: The Future of Customer Service in the Era of Social Messaging and Artificial Intelligence
More about Josh March
Joshua March is the co-founder & CEO of SCiFi Foods, on a mission to disrupt the $1.2T meat market by leveraging the power of genetic engineering to make cultivated meat (real meat grown from cells) a commercial reality. He was previously the Co-founder & CEO of Conversocial, a digital care platform for messaging that works with many of the biggest brands in the world (acquired by Verint).