Michael: My guest today is Daan Luining, the co-founder of a company in Holland called Meatable that’s working to produce a meat substitute — which is actually real meat in the sense that it’s almost indistinguishable from the meat you would get from a cow, except that that cow doesn’t have to be grown and butchered. It’s all produced in the lab, to produce as, basically, identical of a product as possible in terms of texture and taste and aroma and Maillard browning reactions when you cook it and stuff like that. So, thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys reaching out to me and I’m really excited to talk to you about this today it’s a really fascinating field.

Daan: Thank you, thank you really looking forward to the conversation. We had already great introduction before and really got me excited to talk to you, so I’m really looking forward to telling you more about the crazy stuff that we’re doing.

Michael: Yeah; so why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about your background. I know you worked for a nonprofit for a little while… and kind-of what let you here to co-found this company.

Daan: It has been quite of a long journey to end up in this field because it didn’t exist uh 10 years ago it’s very new very ear early um so all the experiences that I had is always a proxy of something because I studied molecular biology learning about cells how cells work and usually the application for that is medicine you know what can we do with cells in the body to make it healthier or to change stuff or what are the effects of diet or other stuff on our bodies and those are in the realm of molecular biology through that I became passionate about a field in cell biological tissue engineering so understand ing how we can make complex stuff that you’re made of like skin or liver or what have you inside of your body and then figuring out if we can replace some of that if it gets diseased or damaged uh that we can take some of your own cells grow them outside of your body and then giving them back to you in a more healthier state or supporting the the damage that it had occurred in that Consortium I became aware of a of an idea that was arising which was us using animal cells but not for creating tissues for medicine but for consumption so we we we came to a point in time where we can take cells from an animal grow them and then make muscle tissue from it and we can make fat from it and that’s food that literally is food that’s the stuff that we take from an animal and I was looking at that proposal like that is pretty wild and that’s going to change the world if it succeeds I want to participate in that that resulted eventually in this this first Burger that was made without you know killing animals I reached out to a nonprofit organization in New York asking them hey I want to grow this field that you’re the only organization in the world right now that is funding academic research or any type of research in this field let me help so moved to New York did that for a while and then through that connection came into contact with my other co-founders a neurosurgeon at the University of Cambridge that created a braid food technology again in the medical space but then applying that for our cause was the thing that I convinced him of and then from that started the company about seven years ago called meable and and that’s basically what we do we we take a cell from an animal this can be a pig a cow that’s the things that we’re mainly focused on you know we can also do chicken and fish but it’s a bit more difficult take those cells the animal goes on living is life no harm done and then we can use the quality of those cells which is you know growing and that’s what you’re doing right now I’m growing cells right now cells multiply all the time it’s like every month for a new skin uh week for your intestines you are continuously growing and that’s a characteristics of cells that’s fantastic we can use that so we we make use of those characteristics of cell growth put it into a brewing cattle like brewing beer and then feeding it the nutrients that cow cells require instead of a yeast they multiply and once we have enough of them we make muscle and fat from them and that’s what we can eat and that’s just I think there just a delightful thought that you can literally eat a steak from an animal that is sitting right next to you living his happy life and that that’s one of the biggest drivers I have like wow that that would be really cool if you can just feed people the stuff that they really like but then not killing the animals for it would be would I think would a big benefit besides and of course the the climate impact that it has I assume you’re starting with stem cells and then allowing natural metabolic processes basically to grow this and differentiate them so you’re creating you know proteins fats collagen other connective tissues and so forth how do you end up with a structure of a particular cut of meat uh from that there there’s a lot of question questions in there and it’s pretty complex right I just explain it to a nutshell but there’s so many things involved uh because only the word stem cell that already has a lot of content to it because not all stem cells are the same you have different types of stemness and different types of stem cells and already thinking about how the characteristics of each of these stem cells would work on a very large scale is important so we use a cell which is very early in development it’s called a plur potent stem cell and this means that this cell can become anything muscle fat connective tissue even skin if we would want to but of course that’s not of interest to us Mo mainly the muscle and the fat is interesting to us and then microbes are used but not in the way maybe that you think about it because microbes can produce for example vitamins on the larger scale that we can find in nature and you know the cells need everything that a normal cow would also eat but then broken down in the smallest pieces that the cell can readily absorb because it doesn’t have a a gut anymore right so it cannot break food down for itself so you need to find glucose and amino acids and vitamins and there is where the realm of fermentation comes into place we feed microbes glucose and they make products that we finally feed to the animal cells uh not necessarily in combination because the cells don’t have also don’t have an immune system anymore so they’re fragile so we keep them in this close environment same what you do with beer right you don’t want to have an a different microbe and yeast in beer because they will spoil the beer same for us but we can feed the stuff that this C what the bacteria made indirectly to the uh to the uh to the culture then the final question you had is that how do you distinguish between different cuts we’re not making cut whole whole Cuts right now that is very challenging the previous research what I did in tissue engineering called endogenesis in a very fancy word it’s basically the formation of blood vessels through your through your body making sure that if you make a thick cut at all cells will be delivered in nutrients and oxygen and and all the things that it needs to thrive is complete is absolutely not realistic right now so we’re doing it in a unique way where we are putting cells it’s literally more like beer brewing where the cells float into this nutrient broth like with the vitamins and the glucose and stuff and then we make little spheres out of them and little I mean like 300 micrometers to 400 micrometers and then like you said we differentiate them and then for maybe people that don’t know what differentiation means is it’s the transformation of one cell state to the other so you have a stem cell that it doesn’t have a function and when it differentiates into a muscle cell then what that’s what we call differentiation so suddenly it has a function which is Contracting or in the case of fat cells it’s energy storage that’s a process that we do there so growing little spheres of the stem cells and then instructing them to become either muscle or fat and that’s when what we collect we blend we make a batter you know you can make the British Banger or chupala or a hot dog or anything that the country or the jurisdiction where we are at would resonate with and that’s then what we sell so it’s always going to be a one-step process for making a a dumpling or a sausage or a nugget or something like that it’s not whole Cuts you’re also creating collagen and I assume I mean you’re get going to need all of the volto molecules that are fat soluble that give the the taste of that particular protein and sugars and acids you know like isic acids and other um things that are so important part of the the aroma and the taste of that particular meat but then you also need like I mentioned the collagen so that you can when you cook the meat depending on what kind of meat you’re you’re kind of going for which I guess is the next question are you trying to to replicate a particular one type of cut right now and so breaking that down into gelatin or you know like we mentioned the myard reaction so you have particular amino acids which are going to break down differently into different compounds depending on and what they are in the sugars and so forth yeah yeah no it’s it’s a it’s a no but it’s a very good question because I I did a since I’m a molecular biologist I’m not a phon scientist I had to venture out in this field and try to unite these two ideas because food scientists are molecular biologist but more applied because they work in the realm of amino acids and collagen and that stuff but we’re working with cells that produce these type of things so there there’s a lot of overlap but there are two separate World words and what I found is that uh you don’t necessarily need the entire spectrum of compounds to Do complete biomimicry for example the collagen collagen is made by a different cell than a muscle or fat cell they’re made by fibroblasts which is a connective tissue cell and if you want to make hot dogs or nuggets or a a dumpling collagen doesn’t play a huge role in the development of flavor usually this is a functional protein if we would say it in the in the uh the food scientific terms that it either binds water or gelates or gives this breakdown profile that is unique if you have high connective tissue uh products meat products and those are usually not the highest valued um pieces when it comes from the animal usually you want either very fatty or V very high in proteins or very high muscular no you know if you have a lot of connective tissue in there you need to either do a broil or like take a long time because collagen breaks down over time 70 something degrees Celsius and then it turns into gelatin so it loses its Tet structure so which is this fiberous structure falls apart in a very specific way and then you make like gelatin which is great for its functionality but if you want to make nuggets gelatin is not necessarily what you want but what you do want is the specific profile of proteins that if it would break apart it would create the precursors that are available in the Mayar reaction to bind to sugars and also the oxidation of the lipids that it will create this unique profile and there I think we have a huge advantage over for example plant-based Alternatives which you know have been great the development there has been pretty staggering like w we we’ve come a long way there but you’ll always create a proxy of an animal flavor and since the cells are animal cells they will recreate the exact same stuff that they would do in animals so we’re making actual uh pig fat we’re actually making Pig protein and when we age the meat and in the Dutch we have a word for that which is basically dying because you cannot eat fresh meat from a cow or a pig there’s always a process in between where the muscle tissue would undergo oxidative stress which uh increases the lactate content inside of the muscle and breaks down the proteins in a very specific way there’s been amazing studies and I found out about this entire process when I ordered very old books because this research has been done for decades so if you are molecular biologist you go online and you start looking for the latest of the latest but that’s not that’s it’s not where it’s at in food science sometimes things have been done in the 20s to 30s and those things are still true so I was reading through these old books and then actually realize that you need to hang meat for at least three days in a refrigerated environment and this creates this stretching of muscles because else you get Rig or Morse you don’t want that it’s very tough right then your meat gets very tough so you want to stretch it in a way that allows for a controlled breakdown process of your um of your muscle fibers in a very specific pattern if your pH is too high it will lose too much water and then you will create oh no you will retain too much water and you will create something called dfp so um yeah so it’s soft pale soft exodite so it’s this very mushy types of water content it’s like basically biting to a washcloth disgusting and if it loses too much water with a high pH then it becomes like beef jerky so it’s very tough so this is very narrow band with in between where you create this unique environment where it softens up the meat will will break down enough of the proteins that release enough water and will establish the precursors that upon cooking will react with the Mayar reaction and oxidizes enough so that you can create this plethora of flavors that you would experience upon eating and that’s going to be very important and there’s another thing that I found my our reaction is the reaction between proteins and sugars but then I was looking at this books and I I felt like okay so where does the sugar come from the backbone of DNA is a ribos yes and that’s where the sugar comes from and then I realize oh my God DNA is yummy you need to have DNA to help proteins bind to glucose and that’s where the ribos of the DNA backbone comes into place and I thought it was just fascinating just fascinating to realize that all these components have a role to play in this in the experience of eating food and then you’re using proteases that are naturally in the meats to basically mimic or not mimicking but you’re actually doing the aging process much in the same way that you would with the real animal once you’ve basically unplugged it when we spin it down right we use a cent Refuge to remove the the the the liquid where it’s residing in because cells like to live in a very like in water like substances but then with all the nutrients in it but then we remove that by centrifugation um and then the cells will just undergo similar oxidated stress we don’t you know they cannot extract air from the oxygen so they will uh start using the remaining glucose inside of their cells which will not be into the electron Transportation chain which you know is very complex but basically same thing when you’re go to the gym if you not producing enough oxygen to your muscles they will sour and it produces lactate same for our cells they start producing lactate and this is then what activates certain proteases or breaks down certain molecules so this is a very similar but slightly different because we’re not you know cutting off oxygen supply the same way if you would do from a from a cow that’s where we’re investigating what does that mean exactly there’s no blood involved there’s no lungs involved that you know hearts that pump out oxygen but still we need to make sure that the breakdown profiles are similar because that what gives unique flavor what people are looking for so this is an ongoing investigation and and and it’s fascinating to unite these two fields that how we treat cells and then how it translates into taste and texture and flavor is I think only this this decade that we have starting to think about it in like in those senses you mentioned lactate you know which is what is produced in animals because of you know we have a p well humans well most animals have a pH around 7.4 right so it’s it’s going to produce lactate as opposed to lactic acid which would be produced by bacteria in more acidic right are you manipulating the pH specifically or is that again just a natural part of the process only during the alive phase when the cells are alive and eating they also are producing lactate and there’s where we are controlling the environment since if you have a too high dra or too low PH all the cells die it’s simple as that they don’t have kidneys they don’t have livers they don’t have uh ways to get rid of the uh the metabolites so we do it for them and this also creates an opportunity for us since we want to produce as much cells as possible in the shortest amount of POS as possible and we can the amount of time that we use to create our product is around 12 days for a full cycle while a pig is three years and we do this by removing the waste so we have a filter inside of the fermentor where we keep the cells inside of the fermentor remove the lactate and and the other stuff that they are producing that we don’t want to have and add it in new food and they call this perfusion in a very fancy word and this way you can actually concentrate the amount of cells that you can eventually produce many folds over from a batch process that is comparable to for example beer making beer it’s food in yeast in it eats the food when it’s done beer is made and in our case the beer is not the product it’s the cells it’s the yeast but in our case and it’s animal cells therefore we can remove the excess stuff that we don’t want to have and add in new food for the cells to intensify the culture are you eventually trying to get to a particular textures of real cuts of meat or you really trying to do like sausages and your nuggets and foods like that that are more processed foods that are easier because in in terms of the the process that you guys are doing rather than creating whole cuts which I understand would be enormously complicated it’s enormously complicated I think it’s a gliding skill with enough time and enough success we want to move into a more diverse portfolio of products we can make but it’s it’s quite this is very difficult it’s very Hightech so we want to do the less hard thing first because it’s pretty hard but let’s do sausage first because that that seem to be the lwh hanging fruit uh and then move on to the more complex things and it will be dependent on the market we can launch in there’s an entire Reg atory area that man is so complex food is not to be messed with people take food very seriously because everybody eats especially in Europe apparently that there’s a huge regulatory burden on proving that you’re what you are putting into the market is safe for consumption uh so it’s it’s for it’s to us the burden to prove that right we can say like yeah no it’s just animal cells but it’s like okay prove it and then since it’s very new product it’s very hard to do that CU okay so what do you want cuz comparing us to normal meat seems strange because there’s no slaughtering process so the regulations around slaughtering and and waste removal and that type of stuff it’s a sterile process it’s completely closed environment so there’s no Eola leria salmonella it doesn’t exist so why do you want us to test for that that seems strange so we we’re we’re working this out and depending on a jurisdiction that where we can launch in will determine what type of products we bring to Market yeah it seems like thinly sliced beef use for a stirfry or something wouldn’t be too hard there there there’s another company doing that in Israel they’re doing beef uh but then trying to do like bigger chunks uh which is is great you know I think there is enough space in this huge market for everybody because and food is is like I told you before food is crazy especially if you think about the numbers in the Netherlands alone and we’re 17 million right like 17 we eat about 2 and a half million kilog of meat every day yeah I mean the consumption of beef you know cows outweigh humans on Earth yeah there’s this this cool diagram right where you can see that there’s 4% wild animals 60 something per uh domesticated animals and then 36 something per there’s humans and the 60 something perc disappears every year into the 30 6% when it comes to vertebrates so this is land terrestrial animals so there’s no fish or bacteria but that that just I think it’s about 40 billion animals that we Slaughter every year and to think that yeah and then then to think that there’s more mouth to feed every day we have to do something I think this is going to be for me it’s always an ant solution I’m not here in telling people what to eat what to think what to feel I’m just trying to create something delicious so that if they would have a choice that they have an alternative option besides an animal or a plant but something that is a bit more sustainable but still delicious because I think what we’ve seen from the from the data is that that’s the number one priority you can create a product that is better for the environment better for who knows what but if it doesn’t taste good people won’t buy it or eat it and there’s the philosophy of the discussion that we’re having today make the stuff that people love to eat which is animal fat with this animal protein and then make it sure that it can cook it easily and I put it in a product that they actually enjoy eating that’s where my conviction comes from that makes stuff that is delicious there’s all kinds of sustainability issues with raising animals there’s Health ramifications of eating animal fats which is something I like to ask you specifically about are you replicating the exact fats or is there a way that you can manipulate it so that especially if you’re producing a produ like a sausage or a nugget whatever seems like there’s an opportunity there to put in Macho mono or polyunsaturated fats make a three fats things like that that are going to make the product a lot more healthful as well and then also there is so so many we’ll say calories used to produce like a gram of meat I don’t remember what the the number is off the top of my head but in terms of the the 27 for 27 for a cow 17 for it’s crazy compared to other protein sources that you know are closer to or are plants so there’s that whole aspect as well and then the last part of the question is uh the cost of producing it and the scale of producing it is just something that can be scaled up to really make an impact on how much meat from animals we eat globally right this is this is is I think a a topic where a modesty should come from this field since we’re not there yet we are not producing millions of kilograms we’re not um having factories all over the world to produce this this is early Beginnings but it is it’s about to start to get really big when you said in the beginning the production of uh the fats that we make and how healthy they are right now we’re making the exact same thing so if you would ask is is healthier it’s as healthy as eating the the animal component so don’t eat 120 kg per person per year and those are the numbers that we get from the US those are consumption rates that’s too much don’t eat 120 kilograms per person per year worth of meat that that’s a lot a little bit moderation would be would be wise for health reasons um eventually when we got that process under control and we can produce enough so that people just have normal diets uh worth of consumption then we can start thinking about all right how can we maybe adjust the feed because you know you are what you eat and the same goes for cells so what we feed the cells and how we treat them will eventually uh come back in nutrient profile that these cells have but then we have to do the research on if we adjust the feet if we adjust the growth if we adjust anything from the surroundings of the aors because we want to empower the cells to do their own thing we don’t want to to intervene a lot to say Oh no just make these types of fat or what because the cells knows best cells know best on how to be a cell and how to be a fat cell or how to be a muscle cell so let them do the job but just provide them with the nutrients to do their thing but then how that translates to flavor or or health benefits no idea but so interesting and I think that’s a unique moment in time that we have to start thinking about these type of issues it will be a gradual process over time and it’s the same thing with scaling so you mentioned also scaling this is this is not a a software product you know this has to come from from uh from factories you know right now everybody says well it comes from a lab right but that won’t be in the end this won’t come from a lab in the end the same way that your corn flakes doesn’t come from a lab it comes from a factory and you know cornflakes were once developed in the lab but not anymore it’s just the environment that we’re working in right now and building factories and scaling up takes time this will be a gradual process where people will be introduced and have the opportunity to interact with the product mainly first in a restaurant because I think there is the opportunity for us to create a pleasant experience because if you just dump a product in the market and say well here you go good luck with it usually people don’t have the best experience with that because they don’t know what it is or how to cook it or how to pair it or you know it’s a strange new thing so first you want to go to a restaurant and say We’ll create some unique experience for you and understand also the uniqueness of the product and restaurants are this great place to do it when you’re somebody at your table saying today we’re serving you this unique product and it’s paired and the chef has made this special thing for you realize that what you’re eating right now is revolutionary you don’t have that in the supermarket you don’t have that interaction with consumers so that’s why I think restaurants is such a great place to get started and then when people are getting more accustoms you know they go back to their families and say you know I went to this restaurant and I I tried this cultivated meat it’s pretty great that’s the moment where people are like the majority so not the early adep but the majority thinking oh okay if if Uncle Dan over there has has tried it and he say it’s all right maybe I should give it a go and they will try it and I say okay well a pretty great experience all right um apparently there are now scaling up and there’s more produce and suddenly I see it in a supermarket oh I remember when I ate it into the in the restaurant it was you’re right let me try it if I can make something for my family or my guests cuz food is such an emotional emotional Topic in people’s lives some people identify with what they uh how and what they eat you know you got vegetarian vegans pescatarians what have utaran all these variations of how people Express who they are with what they eat and I think this is definitely one of those products that fall into that like how you do you feel about this product and how what type of thing does it say about you when you buy it or consume it or make it so when we’re scaling up those that gradual process is making people aware and accustomed it’s not it’s not going to be a revolution it’s not even though I want it to be you know I wish we could go faster and bigger you know that everybody had this on this PL tomorrow we also understand the sensitivity and also understand the limitations of uh this entire food process and how complex it is so there’s why that’s why I started off with the conversation with humbleness humbleness and appreciation of what we have that we can go to a supermarket and there’s food for us that we can feed our families and then when you want to create something new you have to do that with respect and that I think that’s what we’re all about in in the company yeah I think starting with restaurants makes sense I remember in the guess in the late 80s I think I went to a highend restaurant and had suid meet for the first time and they were talking about oh this is this new thing and blah blah blah blah and you know and now you can for $100 you can buy a home SUV machine I wanted to to go back for a minute though and ask you about fats because you mentioned how fats carry I mean obviously fats carry flavor in terms of you know fat soluble volatiles but the fat molecules themselves and I know that there’s research being you know we’ve identified fat uh receptors on the tongue that are you know some consider like a sixth taste um but I don’t really know too much about where that research is at and how we interpret those tastes if it’s if it’s more of a um you know an unctuousness kind of or if there’s actually a a taste more like a numi kind of taste that we associate with fats based on those receptors in the tongue what we have found from the research that we have done so far is that fat in case of for por creates a animalic signature the way and what I mean with that is that the fats will help you indentify the animal that you’re eating it from pork fat and cow fat taste very differently so if you add just only fat to your blend so no muscle but just fat people will able to tell it’s pork and how which molecules responsible for that we don’t know but usually what we see from from any flavor experiments that we do that’s always a composition people can taste uh some uh some compounds in parts per billion like very small fractions and the concentration of that molecule or fat is usually very important because uh for example flavors that our taste panel would describe as bore so very hay uh gy flavor those come from usually sulfuric compounds in your product but very low concentration Pati cuz you’re very humans are very sensitive to sare compound but if you have too much of it it will taste off but too little you will lose the flavor so it it’s a very complex system taste is one of the most complex things because it’s also hard to ask people what their experience is if you don’t provide them with the right vocabulary we internally have educated a tasting panel from the team members to be able to describe certain certain flavors and and then classify them so you can do comparative analysis so then you will create stuff that’s called a flavor wheel which then you have certain flavors on the outside which are basically the description of the of the stuff that you taste and by giving people these types of tools it it normalizes the experience a bit more but still for each person it’s quite unique uh we had to do some rigorous training we started with I think 40 people and only like 10 of them eventually ended up in the tasting panel because they could taste enough not everybody tastes the same there’s always this very fun experiment that people do for example the coriander thing right if you’re a super taster some people don’t like coriander some people do like coriander and that also translate into the stuff that you eat so how fats are evolved very much so but it’s only one part of the equation it’s proteins it’s sugars it’s lipids it’s thines all these things together creates a symphony of flavors that then we would recognize of a specific product because mushrooms have a lot of protein and fats in it but it don’t taste like pork why they’re made out of different variations of the proteins lipids and fats so it’s always this interplay one of the things that uh fat does have which the other compounds don’t have is what we call a coding effect if you take a sip off olive oil you’ll notice the coating effect right it will linger in your mouth it will bind it will create this film it’s the same with animal fat it will create a unique um physical condition in your mouth that allows for nut like Flavor compound to be transferred or not or be dissolved uh so it it’s it’s very complex complex interplay I I want to kind of dig in a little bit more if we can to this fats and fat receptors versus the flavors that are carried in fats because I know if you take you know pork fat and put into really lean beef for example and mix it together it’s going to taste like pork because of you know exactly what you’re describing um but I don’t know how much of it is is is it the actual fatty acids themselves or the triglycerides you know that are part of that taste or is it really just all the compounds that are dissolved into the fats that is what’s accounting for that taste and you mentioned I mean like for example um there’s a term that I coined osmosis which is what you were describing where you have um a little bit of a compound like you know isic acid for example or butyric acid are compounds you know like parmesan cheese has has isic acid and in very small amounts it’s really important part of of the flavor profile of that cheese but if you have a lot of it you know it smells like vomit it’s really you know horrible right so yeah so having this correct balance is really important to identifying and there’s a lot of yes uh compounds like that that in small amounts are really important part of the taste of you know meat in particular there’s some really horrible smelling things in meat but just in very small amounts that if they were missing it wouldn’t taste right that’s why I I make a plea for letting the cells do what they do CU we don’t know exactly which molecule in which concentration is responsible for that single experience it probably is not one it probably is a multitude of these things together because the the plant-based people what they are trying to do sometimes with glutamate they added to it because it gives omami flavor but by itself it’s only one aspect like MSG right you just put MSG so if you e raw MSG it’s not delicious it’s usually the accompanying flavors or where it’s carried in that creates the experience therefore you need to let cells what they do best because they will make that compound plus the other things that support that compound in the in overall experience I I I have a slide deck somewhere where you can see the the volatile compound uh uh amount of normal beef chicken and pork and what you see there that it’s like it’s not one thing it’s like 50 compounds with all different concentrations but if you remove one of them in that concentration suddenly this thing falls apart like a card of house a house of cars like falls falls into each other because it never stands by itself a flavor compound usually never stands by itself you it’s the accompanying thing that creates profile for you right so I guess what I’m getting to is more of is there a way to make these products more healthful without changing the flavor profile of them or at least not changing them to the point where they’re not no longer recognizable you know because if you’re making a sausage there’s all kinds of stuff you can add to it that will kind of hide you know certain misses here and there but if you can Market a product that is a sausage that tastes just like a pork sausage but it’s got you know healthier fats in it then I think there’s definitely a market for that you know I understand you’re you’re wanting to start with something simple and have Market success uh but eventually it would be nice to be able to get there to make those products I I’m right with you I’m right with you on that I just need to convince a team that that they will find the time to do their research right so it’s a stepwise process so if you check in with me in another couple of years I probably can tell you more about what we’ve done so far but unfortunately that’s the part that uh that we haven’t paid uh a lot of attention to yet since we are more on the mission getting Market success first and then look into those complex because there are complex questions complex questions later so what does your timeline look right right now and you know when can people outside of Holland try your stuff you know when do you think it’ll be available in some way and then I guess the next step would be to send it to certain restaurants and allow people to experience and then ultimately to get supermarkets right Singapore next year and that’s pretty soon you know it’s December already so we’re we’re quite excited by that we’re waiting to to enter that market it’s it’s going to be first test case right first get consumer feedback first know how to is how it is to go from a development company to a selling company right that’s pretty unique for us uh and then main Market Focus currently is going to be probably Asia they’re not so food secure as the rest of the world so they’re really looking for Alternatives in this manner probably then uh hopefully it’s United States currently with the uh with the political change you know we said well let’s let’s do Asia first and see how everything plays out the FDA is also working on creating guidelines on how to deal with this type of products so it’s also a little bit strategic to see like okay let’s wait for them to figure stuff out and then we can work together with them to to get this there to Market probably the last going to be Europe it’s it’s pretty sad to say but you know since you know it’s our it’s our backyard but getting on the market in Europe is a very lengthy process and as a company that is currently not making any money not making Revenue you know you have to find your Market fit first and that’s like Asia United States and then probably Europe well it’s super exciting I mean I can’t wait to get to the point where I can try one of your products and uh you know see what it’s like you’re always welcome to come to the Netherlands uh to the office space and uh we can cook you up something that’s for sure but then in a restaurant in the supermarket you’ll have to wait a little bit longer than that but always happy to to host you if you’re around I went to son Fort a few years ago for the Formula 1 races well I used to be involved in uh teaching people you know race car drivers and instructors and so forth and so I’ve been to a lot of tracks around the world so I was there at at that track great um and then uh and my son ended up meeting me went to amster Dam and then we kind of toured around a few countries so um yeah it was so you’re you’re familiar in the neighborhood so it’s it’s always 30-minute bike rider doesn’t matter where in the Netherlands you are 30 minute bike riding you’re you’re almost everywhere so please let me know yeah I tried to bring my bike on the plane and they wouldn’t let me no that’s well we we have plenty of them here so there’s always one for you you certainly do yeah we certainly do so um so is there anything else you want to tell me about the technology or kind of where you’re going with a company here I can always roll out the credit saying well you know it’s we we need we need less resources we have less greenhous uh gas emissions we have less you know there’s no disease involved in it all these things but I think what I the thing that I care about most is making sure that people will have enough to eat for the come coming centuries and that we’re not here to tell people what to do but really provide a delicious alternative for them and then what they care about most I think hopefully they can find it in the product that I I provide and I love to hear from people if if they think like hey I actually care about environment or I care about Animal Welfare or I care about family feeding my family you know making sure I have enough food on the table all those things also matter to me so that’s maybe this is more of of a of a reach out to anybody that has questions you’re always I’m always happy to answer any of them because I’m just the the reason why I wake up in the morning is just to try to do good just try to do a little bit better in the world and making sure that uh that we have something we can share a delicious meal with with friends and family so that’s uh maybe we can maybe that’s a good way to end off oh awesome I I so appreciate what you guys are doing on a number of levels it’s super interesting to me as a food scientist but also you know in terms of sustainability in terms of food security uh there’s so many areas where this is so important and so I really thank you you know for for starting this and and really putting your all into it thank you so much for having me I really enjoyed the food science questions I have very little opportunity to talk about that aspect of the of the business but uh truly truly uh a treat for me thank you for that all right well Don thank you so much again for all your time and and again for what you’re doing and I will definitely keep in touch and uh keep my eye on what you’re doing and look forward to being able to try it great see you see you in the nas then okay cheers!