Ep. 60 | Marrying Cultivated Meat & Plant-Based Meat for the Best of Both Worlds: Brian Spears Shares New Age Meats’ Gameplan

Business for Good Podcast

Founded in 2017, New New Age Meats is practically old school when it comes to cultivated meat companies.

In mid-2018, the nascent startup debuted its first sausage made with cells from a living pig who the company biopsied at a nearby farm. Rather than being made entirely of animal cells, that historic sausage was part animal and part plant, and that’s the point, according to co-founder and CEO Brian Spears.

In this episode, Brian argues that you don’t need to make cultivated meat products entirely from animal cells. He argues instead that you can not only control costs by combining plant proteins with animal cells, but you can actually create novel and superior culinary experiences when you’re not simply relying solely on animal cells to do the job alone.

In 2021, having already raised $7 million, New Age Meats is opening a Series A round to help it build a pilot plant and ready its hybrid meat products for actual commercialization.

In this episode we hear about Brian’s journey from leaving another startup he founded and ran for eight years to enter the alternative protein space instead. We also discuss why Brian uses the term “cultivated meat” to describe his products, and when we can expect to see more of New Age Meats’ products.

And yes, we even talk about Brian’s passion outside of the clean room: on the ballroom dance floor.

Discussed in this episode:

• New Age Meats’ 2018 sausage debut
• Indiebio accelerator program that incubated New Age Meats
• Sam Harris’ episode with Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats was influential in Brian’s decision to start New Age Meats
• Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
• New Harvest and the Good Food Institute
• Brian recommends reading Thinking Fast and Slow
• Paul recommends reading Shoe Dog
• Paul’s book Clean Meat

More about Brian Spears:

Brian Spears is the founder and CEO of New Age Meats -- making meat from animal cells instead of animal slaughter. Previously, he spent eight years as co-founder of Sixclear, creating software and products to automate the research labs and production environments of customers such as NASA, Cisco Systems, Sandia National Labs, and GE Healthcare. He is a chemical engineer with 12 years of industry experience in laboratory and industrial automation.