New Harvest takes a crack at chicken-free eggs.

Chicken-Free Eggs In The Works / Meet the Community / Upcoming Events

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Arturo is a recent Harvard grad working with David to make chicken-free egg whites as Clara Foods, the pair’s new San Francisco start-up.

He grew up a meat-eater in Texas – an unapologetically carnivorous state – but a series of critical engagements with food including an internship with the USDA and a research project in Geneva, Switzerland prompted a shift to a plant-based diet.

Arturo interned with the investment bank Credit Suisse, the U.S. Supreme Court and even the White House during the first term of the Obama administration before deciding to seriously pursue his passion for food tech as a way to create sustainable, animal-free foods.

New Harvest: Hey Arturo! I’m excited to talk with you. Out of curiosity, did you get to hang out with the president when you interned at the White House? What was he like?

Arturo: No, I wish. I only met him once, at the very end of my internship. We talked a little bit about school and Texas, but that was pretty much it. There are 150 interns every term—it’s a huge class – and every intern in amazing.

New Harvest: That’s understandable. The president’s pretty busy. Anyway, how did you get involved with a biotechnology start-up with your more political background?

Arturo: Well, I met Isha and Dave at a food tech conference in San Francisco. I was fascinated by what they were doing. Isha knew I was interested in getting involved in this space and introduced me to David. David is the lead scientist of this venture, and I’m doing more of the business side of things. Basically, anything that’s not science: business plans, contracts, establishing relationships and pitching to investors.

New Harvest: Was that your first time hearing about cultured meat research?

Arturo: I was actually familiar with New Harvest because I spent a semester in Geneva doing a research project on China’s growing meat consumption and its growing geopolitical, public health, environmental and economic liabilities. Given this huge problem, I couldn’t think of an effective way to circumvent these impending crises; everything seemed so dire, and I didn’t know what to propose as a solution for China. Then I read about cultured meat, and then later seeing Isha’s TEDx talk. New Harvest is the first thing that pops up when you google cultured meat. I reached out to Jason Matheny who was director of New Harvest at the time to interview him. It blew my mind. Ultimately, my paper argued that China should invest in cultured meat (just as it invested in solar energy) as a win-win solution to meet our current demand and take animals out of the equation. I couldn’t take my mind off it—I became a vegetarian right after, and a vegan a few months later.

New Harvest: Wow! And now you’re part of the New Harvest team in a way, coming full circle. Is this what you imagined yourself doing “when you grew up?”

Arturo: No it’s not at all. It was a dream that felt so far removed. I graduated in May and was in DC for several months after interning for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But I was so into food tech, and I knew DC wasn’t the place for that, so I figured I should probably be in San Francisco to pursue my passion. A week later, I booked a one-way ticket, no job, no place to stay. After a month and a half in San Francisco, I met Isha, David, and the guys from Muufri at a conference. They gave me a ride into the city, we had lunch together, and started chatting. A week later, Isha approached me asking if I wanted to join her and David in getting this egg project started. It was surreal.

New Harvest: That’s incredibly gutsy.

Arturo: Yeah, I actually turned down a couple of job offers because I really wanted to pursue something in this particular space. Thank God it happened right when I met David and Isha and the Muufri guys. I’ve never been so personally invested in work, like there’s a fire burning inside of me. I was so excited about the original pitch—I was researching the market for egg whites and found myself reading articles for fun at 3am. I didn’t think this was possible.

New Harvest: I feel like that’s the Millennial American Dream right there. And now you and David are teamed up making chicken-free egg whites. How did you guys come up with the name for your start-up, Clara Foods?

Arturo: Well I’m Mexican, and when we were thinking about potential names, we wanted something homey and folksy that resonated with people on a basic level and that didn’t allude to biotech or a Silicon Valley startup. “Clara” actually means egg white in Spanish. It also means clear. Weirdly, I ran it past Dave and it happened to be his dog’s name too. It was a funny coincidence and we decided to run with it. The “Foods” part was because we wanted to make it relatable—something anybody in the grocery store wouldn’t think twice about buying.

New Harvest: A lot of the criticisms of veganism or a plant-based diet center around the idea that it’s not relatable—that it’s accessible only to people of a certain privilege or financial means. How do you see biotech foods intersecting with food insecurity?

Arturo: To be inclusive it has to be accessible, affordable and convenient. It is expensive to eat a plant-based diet in a country where a subsidy regime makes it more costly to eat a salad than a burger. There was a time in history when eating only plant foods was for the poor—they couldn’t afford to eat meat—but the government has changed economics to the extent that prices don’t reflect the true cost of the product. My number one priority is getting the price of our egg whites competitive with the market, so anyone can afford it.

New Harvest: How do you see the cost of biotech foods going down to a competitive level without the government subsidy help given to Big Ag food on the shelves?

Arturo: Well the cost of production for meat producers right now isn’t getting any lower. Prices are continuing to rise in large part because of increased regulations and strained natural resources. The California regulation on battery-caged hens is just one example. All of those factors are raising the cost of production of the status quo. With the price of traditional animal products only on the rise, and the price of these technologies only on the decline, it will reach a point where these new technologies will be commercially viable.

New Harvest: Do you have a timeline for when you think biotech foods will saturate the market, be mainstream?

Arturo: I could totally see this within the next decade. Ultimately, I think people want to do the right thing. When sustainable, ethical products that are just better for people are affordable, you don’t have to use complicated arguments. The “invisible hand” will take care of that.

New Harvest: Will your egg whites be marketed as “vegan” or do you think you’ll take the Hampton Creek route and steer clear of that label?

Arturo: I don’t believe that we will be successful if we market or see ourselves as a company addressing a niche. Yes, vegans will probably be most inclined to try our products at first but hopefully they just start the trend and spread the word. For the lasting future of this type of food, we have to see this as something any mom would buy for her kids.

New Harvest: Do you think we’ll need new terminology to describe these new animal-free, “vegan,” animal products?

Arturo: Well, I think all animal-free products are vegan, and some of those are “plant-based”. We want to emphasize that this is the exact same product, it’s not an alternative, it’s not a different version, it’s just made in a different way. We want to emphasize the product is appealing beyond just being chicken-free—it makes more economic sense, it’s better for the environment—it’s really just amazing.

New Harvest: A lot of vegans are also pretty vehemently anti-GMO—are you worried about biotech, vegan foods getting any backlash or being the subject of the same sorts of vitriol as GMO foods right now?

Arturo: That’s a question we’re definitely trying to answer—how to market to consumers who in theory would be in your camp if it weren’t for that one thing. A lot of the most environmentally conscious people are oftentimes the ones most against these biotech products, and I think that’s a huge loss for the movement. I’m not sure how to bridge that consciousness… yet.

New Harvest: These biotech foods are so promising to me, at least, because I feel like so many people recognize the advantages of a plant-based diet, but the process of actually giving up their favorite foods can be unbearably difficult.

Arturo: Until I cut out meat for a New Years Resolution in 2012, I had always wanted to go vegetarian. I had the intention but never acted on it. I tried to be vegetarian in high school, but I failed miserably. The summer before college I interned for the USDA in a sub-agency that oversaw every single slaughterhouse in the country at a time when they were under investigation for inhumane handling violations. Part of my job was to watch all the videos. That was incredibly eye opening. I could no longer subscribe to the “ignorance is bliss” mentality. Ultimately, I went to college and started eating meat again until giving it up three years ago. I actually set the resolution together with my younger brother.

New Harvest: Is he still vegetarian?

Arturo: Yeah, and now my youngest brother is vegan. And my dad was most mostly against y decision, is cutting our red meat after a health scare. I have a running tally of people who I haven’t necessarily “converted” but that I’ve shared this idea or lifestyle with and now they’ve sort of taken it up on their own. People are curious and I pretty much always get positive feedback.

New Harvest: What’s your favorite vegan food?

Arturo: Probably cashew cheese. I love the creaminess. No no no, actually, it’s hummus. I don’t know if that counts but I’m in love with hummus. I ate it pretty much every single day for two weeks when I moved to San Francisco and I didn’t know how to cook. It was so good and filled me up.

New Harvest: Any final thoughts? Or suggestions for people inspired by your story?

Arturo: I think more than anything is to just be proactive. If I hadn’t shown up at the conference, communicated my passion to Isha, none of this would have been possible. Ultimately, share your dream with others. You never know what can happen. If you don’t say anything, people don’t know that you’re looking. I think we underestimate the power that small interactions can have that can potentially be life changing – as they were for me.

Feel free to get in touch with Arturo at elizondo.ar@gmail.com

David is a PhD cell biologist from Toronto who first started thinking about animal-free meat in 2000, when discussing “meat trees” with his father on a camping trip. An animal lover, he knew that animal farming could never have ideal welfare standards, and that producing meat without the animal was the best solution to that problem.

Four years later he found himself reading an instrumental publication on cultured meat in the journal Tissue Engineering, co-authored by New Harvest founder Jason Matheny. It inspired him to pursue biology after a BSc. in Mathematics and a MSc in Biochemistry. David has since used his molecular biology skills to help animals in his work with Fur Bearer Defenders (an anti-fur activist group based in British Columbia, Canada) to identify the origin species of fur and feather samples.

Today, David is trying to make chicken-free egg whites with a fresh New Harvest start-up in San Francisco. He is new to the start-up scene after spending a long time in academia, and is excited to see that it is a place where ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be taken seriously by granting agencies can get off the ground.

New Harvest: Hi David! Thanks for talking with us! Why don’t you start by explaining what you’re working on?

David: We’re aiming to produce an animal-free egg white product—one that’s made up of the same components as the real thing.

New Harvest: Why egg whites?

David: Any animal-derived food is subject to animal welfare issues, no matter how good the welfare policies are. So aside from thinking about cultured meat, I’ve been thinking about what other animal products could be made animal-free. Egg whites have been kicking around in my head for a while. It’s sort of difficult to culture hen oviduct cells—cells of the oviduct tract of the hen—and they’re the ones that secrete egg whites around the yolk of the egg to form what you eat. My initial idea was to isolate and establish a long-term culture of those. Nobody in the literature has really been able to establish an oviduct cell line that continuously secretes egg white proteins, so that was a bit of a roadblock. But then I went and met the Muufri guys in San Francisco and something clicked. That’s where the inspiration was.

New Harvest: When do you anticipate having a viable product? What’s the timeline for when people might actually be able to eat your egg whites?

David: To market is different than having an edible product. For what we’re working on in particular—optimistically we would like to have an edible thing by the end of the summer, and to market soon after that. But the real problem is bringing down cost.

New Harvest: How do you see the price going down enough to make it an affordable competitor with eggs in the grocery store right now?

David: That’s what makes it an interesting engineering problem. That’s what’s going to be the focus of my research in the next few months. The bottleneck is purification. When you have industrial food product, you have to separate the thing you want to eat from the other things that get made in the process. That’s where a lot of the costs come. There are some new technologies with people we’re talking with that have a lot to offer.

New Harvest: Do you think it will be a challenge convincing consumers to eat in-vitro meat or eggs or milk instead of the “real thing?”

David: Yes, I think there will be some skittishness about that in the beginning. But I also think there will be awareness that the ick factor of real meat and eggs far outweighs that of their cultured counterparts. I think that education will happen not from our marketing but from awareness of the meat industry.

New Harvest: What drew you to this field of research—cultured foods?

David: I was on a camping trip with my dad and I said “Hey we should grow meat trees,” and he said “That’s ridiculous.” The idea even of cows without brains—we’ve all had these ideas and they’ve been swimming around for a while. Winston Churchill even talked about it. (In a 1931 essay called “Fifty Years Hence,” Churchill said, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”)

I was always an animal guy, and in my research I saw that there was no cold, hard fact that made culturing animal products impossible. Cultured meat was the reason why I got into biology, even if my work in biology and what I did for my degree has been somewhat unrelated. I always had to work on peripherally related projects because cultured meat was not seen as a real scientific pursuit.

It’s a regret of mine that I did not stick my neck out earlier and say that this is the research I wanted to do. But I felt quite alone and unsupported. It’s great now that New Harvest has allowed people like me to work on what they are passionate about, instead of taking a circuitous route, looking at peripheral problems instead – ones that are going to be funded by (relatively conservative) grants. New Harvest is a real breath of fresh air in that sense.

New Harvest: How did you get involved with New Harvest?

David: Well I’ve been following New Harvest for a long time, basically since it was founded, after I read the 2004 paper in Tissue Engineering. I got in touch with Isha a few years ago, just after she joined, to find out if there were any labs working on cultured meat that I could do research with. She’s been really great at establishing New Harvest’s place and allowing researchers to come out of the woodwork and let in-vitro meat and animal products become a serious scientific pursuit.

New Harvest: What excites you most about the future of this research?

David: Like everybody, I think, what excites me is the end of it—the possibility that we don’t have to do the ridiculous thing of farming whole animals. The environmental implications are encouraging, but that’s not what originally excited me about it. I’m coming from an animal welfare point of view.

New Harvest: What has been the experience transitioning from an academic world to being involved in a start-up?

David: I don’t think I’ve entirely left the academic world—it’s still a scientific problem, an engineering problem—but I didn’t know before this that there was a hybrid too. It’s a great motivator because in academia, often, there is no heavy pressure on your timeline. That can slow or leave a research project unfocused, so I think it’s a good mash. It’s a research product, so you’re still free to explore various options, but they’re always on course with the goal of importing something to market.

New Harvest: Do you have any suggestions or advice for people interested in doing what you’re doing?

David: Do not be ashamed to approach people. A lot of people in grad school sort of go into graduate school to look for a lab with a big name and have a research project imposed on them. For incoming grad students, I would suggest having the balls to say, “This is what I’m going to work on.” Make sure that you’re working on a specific problem if you want to.

New Harvest: Thanks for that insight! Now for some silly questions: do you have any secret talents?

David: I’m very good at recognizing minor celebrities—I once recognized the bad guy from Billy Madison at a basketball tournament.

New Harvest: Favorite Band?

David: Tom Waits—I don’t know, what do the kids like these days? The Beatles, I guess, like everyone else.

New Harvest: What’s your biggest dream?

David: That this stuff will have a real impact on consumer choices in the near future. That people will eat this instead of what comes from factory farming. I think we all have the same dream.

Feel free to reach out to David at davidanchel@gmail.com

Still from Derek Lau’s latest video on cultured chicken.

Israeli Cultured Chicken Study / Cultured vs. Meat in Derek Lau’s New Animation / Upcoming Events / Job Openings

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New Harvest Board Member Dr. Uma Valeti, MD, FACC is creating a center for cultured meat research at the University of Minnesota Faculty of Medicine.

We are seeking a research associate who will be responsible for coordinating the scientific endeavors of the laboratory – overseeing and providing technical guidance for all investigations in the laboratory as well as their own individual projects and experiments. They will be also expected to collaborate with scientific partners, organize research symposia and present at scientific meetings. View the detailed job description here.
To apply: Candidates can go to here to submit their application to Requisition #196325. The posting will only be up for a limited time; please submit your application as soon as possible.

New Harvest has been given a generous donation to hire a development director!

The Development Director will focus on fundraising efforts while Isha Datar, our Executive Director, will focus on using these funds as effectively as possible to advance technologies to sustainably & affordably feed a growing global population. View the detailed job description here.

To apply: please send a cover letter & resume to info@new-harvest.org with the subject heading – Development Director Application.

Thank you, donors, for helping to build a new model.

Fundraising Success / Plans for 2015 / Hiring

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Thank you to supporters: stay tuned in 2015 to see the impact of your donations!

The best way to keep up with New Harvest and our activities, meet our community, and see how you can get involved is to subscribe to our newsletter.

Derek Lau is a motion graphics designer from Australia, who recently graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communications. He wants to use his talents to improve society one step at a time by effectively explaining and communicating ideas. He decided to start with cultured meat, because he sees it as the best way to be able to eat the meat he loves and sidestep the guilt associated with the moral and ethical issues regarding it.

Derek is the creator of Meat/Culture, the animated film which produced much media attention for New Harvest. He is currently in the process of developing the next animation for New Harvest.

New Harvest: Hey Derek! Tell us how you first discovered cultured meat & New Harvest.

Derek Lau: I had discussed the idea of cultured meat with a friend of mine before I even started my degree, so its been on the back of my mind for years. I never knew it was actually in development. But when Dr. Mark Post unveiled his hamburger in London I realized it was a real thing. I was developing a video about cultured meat for a graduate project, and we were encouraged to work with other people. I saw Isha’s involvement so I reached out to New Harvest just to ask a couple questions. I chatted with Isha and she ended up being really helpful. She didn’t feel a need to control it in any way but she gave me perspective on the real ongoing science and development. I was surprised to learn it was a collaboration of scientists across the world as people seem to think of the food industry as this monolithic conglomerate of money; really big companies with large amounts of control. To hear that this was more of a proper community was great. I’m glad New Harvest was able to lend their name to my video.

What elements served as inspiration for Meat/Culture?

I knew the media tends to take this stupid, sensationalist view of cultured meat- calling it frankenmeat and concerned about the cost but never addressing the proper issues that everyone else seems to be on the same wavelength about. They don’t seem to appreciate the forward thinking behind it. I wanted to bring that into my video. And there seems to be a deep seated fear of it that I wanted to address. Cultured meat is not really a intuitive thing to tell people, meat has always come from animals. People often don’t even think it’s possible.

Tell us a bit about the design process.

Originally the way I designed it in the early stages, I was adamant that you would see just random images with cows and then cells growing, in a way that’s not disturbing but definitely confronting. I didn’t want text at all, I was thinking that people would just see all this imagery and be inspired and it could reach across all these different language barriers. But I realized it’s a very complex idea to try and sell with just images so the language part became important.

What feedback have you received about the animation?

The feedback has all been positive. I at first was afraid I would get a flood of angry emails. There is an anger directed towards vegetarians that is unwarranted. People get really defensive about their meat; they take it really personally. Vegetarians tend to tell people how awful and unethical eating meat is, telling people to stop and making them feel guilty. So that directed me to take a different route than the traditional vegetarian route. I tried to make it as positive and forward thinking as possible, saying this won’t be the one solution to everything but it is a great solution and it will solve many problems.

Did you notice common reactions among people who watched Meat/Culture?

Some people seemed to be appalled as they watched. My video glossed over much of the reality of factory farming, I would say my version was highly sensitive about the subject relative to many others. People still were shaking their heads at the animated animals being killed. Some environmental science people came up to me and said yes, the world really needs this. The video actually blew up on Reddit a couple months ago, it hit like 20,000 views in one day. It started a lot of discussion about cultured meat and its implications. It was great to see people debating about how we got to this point. And then you get the people concerned about costs again, and you draw yourself back and think as long as people are talking about it then good.

Did people have a lot of questions?

One issue was: What is going to happen to the cows? They are all going to go extinct! Of course cows will still exist, just not in the billions! Then people would ask what about the jobs for farmers? Look at past examples, margarine didn’t completely phase out butter. And farmers aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago. Are we still looking for blacksmiths? This is just an inevitability of discovering new things. The picture painted in marketing doesn’t exist. There are no chickens running around in a nicely spaced paddock. Actually, chickens come from the indian jungle fowl which is a jungle bird. So they would be more comfortable hiding in trees rather than out in the open, that would probably be terrifying for them. The whole natural chickens in their natural habitat idea is obscured.

What is the attitude towards cultured meat in Australia?

I think the problem with Australia is that because of its geographic isolation it has a certain view of itself, similar to America maybe. When it comes to Australia, they are proud of their farming heritage, farming is quite a big deal in this country. We don’t have many factory farms here, especially for beef, so many of our cows are truly raised on large amounts of land. People in the media take it like the Americans; they see a novelty aspect of it. They don’t see it as being a completely game-changing product like the Europeans who more see it as an inevitability. I find it an inevitability – it’s just going to happen at some point.

What do you think of Australian agriculture?

Unfortunately I think there’s a conservative culture of agriculture here. The only progressive sort of agriculture is that they are looking at phasing out battery cages and cage eggs. Free-range animals and cage-free eggs. In terms of viable alternatives; it’s not really big here. We have Quorn, that exists. It’s difficult to understand where we sit, we only have 30 million in our country although we have the same land mass as the US. The view of alternative agriculture starts in urban areas where there is not much space but everyone is keen on looking at new ideas. The only urban centers are the capitals of each state and they are all on the fringes of the coast, so only hotspots of forward thinking are really Sydney and Melbourne.

What can you tell us about your second animation?

It is about chickens. In the first video we tried to tackle the ethical and environmental issues and this one is more about the logic. It’s trying to relate that when you get the meat from chicken, you get a single product but you invest all this time, energy and money into creating this complex animal with beaks, eyes, feathers and bones. All these things that we end up stripping away to get the muscle tissue so why waste all the time, energy and life just to get a tissue we could grow? i’m trying to diverge away from the first one, figuring out where to draw the line between consistency and new material. I’m considering the slogan- single process for a single product. I might add in the jungle fowl aspect as well.

I can’t wait to see it! Is there anything else you are working on that you’d like to talk about?

I’m currently working for an number of non for profits, the last project was for one of my old tutors from university. Her new business is to get philanthropic investments as she provides design solutions. It’s called design to change behavior, designing and shaping the environment in order to improve behavior. It creates a proper sense of community and involves strategic thinking. Basically her business assesses communities that are in need for a design solution, and they source money from investors to avoid needing money from the government.

Thanks Derek, you contribute something unique to New Harvest & we are grateful!

As a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, all donations to New Harvest are fully tax deductible.