Technically Food: Insider Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Eat

The cofounder and CEO of Eat Just and Good Meat is embattled yet again. He’s got advice for his younger self—and everyone else in alternative proteins.

He’s certainly war-scarred from his efforts to mainstream first plant-based replacements for mayonnaise, then eggs, and more recently cultivated meat from chicken cells.

If you’re not olive oil in the kitchen, you’re nobody. But olive oil, which is healthy and delicious, is expensive, and it isn’t a workhorse. That award goes to canola, palm and soybean oil, of which Americans consume an estimated 11.56 million metric tons per year. And increasingly, they’re being scrutinized for their impact on our planet and health. 

You know things are hot when celebrities are signing term sheets. While helpful, it’s not their money that’s propping up the food-tech ecosystem. So the question here is this: Do VCs have the fortitude to continue supporting the more than 150 startups seeking to design a cell-cultured analogue to cheap meat? Perhaps the better question is: Should they?

Mycelium may not be popular enough to be considered a hot ingredient, but in the alternative protein space, it’s fire. The biggest name selling myco-protein foods is Quorn, which you can find in the frozen aisle, but Boulder-based Meati is launching its “chicken” jerky that will compete in a far more ambitious category: snacks.

Vegan cheese convinces no one. It doesn’t stretch, it hardly melts, and if you leave it out too long, it separates into an oily mess. Typically made from a blend of nuts, fats, gums and binders, it’s also usually unhealthy.  

But things may be looking up. Oliver Zahn, an astrophysicist turned data scientist and founder of Berkeley company Climax Foods, has discovered new combinations of plant proteins and fats that can do all the things vegan cheese historically couldn’t — including fool chefs.

Tissue engineering doesn’t sound very foodie, but turns out it’s the primo specialization needed for reimagining meat. Experts in the field aren’t easy to steal away from the medical world, but it’s happening. Sometimes they even launch their own company, like Ali Khademhosseini, who started Omeat.

Whether it’s food or medicine that’s more crucial to humanity is up for debate.

Cell-cultivated meat may appear to be proceeding ever closer to being on sale in the United States, but production, cost, and formulation issues are still bedeviling the one-time disruptors.

This month, the USDA approved labeling of the food once called lab-grown meat. In quick succession the regulatory agency granted Eat Just and then Upside Foods approval of what the startups could call their product. The verdict: cell-cultivated meat.

Eric Schulze helped Upside Foods score the first U.S. regulatory approval for its cultivated chicken, and he’s just getting started.

Eric Schulze likes to cook meat. Roasted, basted, smoked, rubbed, cured, pulled, even spatchcocked—you name the preparation, and he’s tried it. This makes Schulze a typical American carnivore, but his habits do set him apart at his day job.