92. Replay: From Fungi to Fun-guy: Eben Bayer Scales Mycelium Again with Bacon at My Forest Foods

[00:00:00] Erum: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the grow everything podcast, where we introduce you to how biology is transforming every industry as we make the shift away from petrochemical dependence.

[00:00:13] Erum: last week, Carl and I had a great discussion on how corporates specifically, we're talking about consumer package goods companies can biologize their efforts at scale.

[00:00:24] Erum: this week, Carl and I are out because we need to enjoy time with our friends and family. It is the liberty holiday weekend.

[00:00:31] Erum: So today we're going to replay an episode of front of the pod and a wise down to earth entrepreneur who is scaling up mycelium production for packaging foods and all sorts of amazing things. His name is Eben Beyer and his companies are Ecovative and MyForest Foods. And there have been a lot of developments since we published this episode, but we will have Eben back on soon to talk about all the great things that he's been working on.

[00:00:59] Erum: Until then, enjoy our conversation with Eben Beyer.

[00:01:07] Eben: Biology is molecular nanotechnology. It's self assembling, it's self repairing and we're biological and we're blind to it. You start out as a kid, you get the thing, you pull it and the cow goes moo. And it's like, yeah, cows exist. They're just here. The magic chicken for me is this idea. If you just could disassociate everything, you know, about a chicken and someone could describe to you what it does, like maybe it's a household appliance and it's like, Hey, I got this box for you, 19 bucks.

[00:01:28] Eben: It's cardboard. It's got two blinking LEDs in it. All I need you to do is put a little feet in top. every day and a little water in it and you won't believe it an egg will come out the bottom in the morning you'll be like what that's unbelievable my Keurig machine was on 80 bucks and it takes these crappy pods and you'll be like yeah the end of its useful life you could compost it outside you never told them there was a chicken in there like just blow their mind.

[00:01:50] Karl: Hey Irem, I know you're on the road right now so you're missing a lot of what's going on in New York City. Right now,

[00:01:56] Erum: what has been happening, Carl? Tell me.

[00:01:58] Karl: So I went to the New York, I think it's chemical society ingredients day, which is basically a trade show for companies that provide ingredients to the beauty industry.

[00:02:09] Karl: It was basically half of the Javits center. And some of our friends are there. Our friends at Archaea were there. gel tour, who we're going to be interviewing the CEO founder in a couple of episodes was there. And some new companies that we've met and talked to a company called Ruby bio, which has a surfactant that they have isolated from a strain of yeast.

[00:02:30] Karl: And then a company called Cambrian that also has a college and product. So these people were all there as was our friend, Sheriff's company, C 16. They were showing samples of palmless their Palm oil alternative. And it was really just surprising to see how many people are showing products that are produced through chemistry.

[00:02:48] Karl: The rest are using products produced through fermentation and some products are being produced through biotech. I think for sure they're in the minority. And I did talk to a few people who are focused on microbiome products. So that was very exciting. And then after that, I went to a biotech business mixer at Genspace hosted by our friend, Beth Tuck, who we had interviewed in an early episode.

[00:03:10] Karl: And that was just a gathering of a lot of early stage companies. Now I know you're on the other side of the world and what you've been doing is probably a lot more exciting than what I've been doing.

[00:03:18] Erum: No, I love New York and I love pliers. They sound like it's amazing event. And then of course, Genspace it's dear to my heart that I miss that.

[00:03:27] Erum: But yeah, I am in Copenhagen, which I love. It's great time here. I am here on a family vacation, but coincidentally, some people that we've been wanting to meet up with are based here. One of them is Novo Holdings. They are the holding company of Novo Nordisk, I discovered. They're not a corporate venture arm, but they have Novo Nordisk as a company in their portfolio.

[00:03:50] Erum: And they also manage the Novo foundation, which has the largest endowment. I met with the. Novo seeds team, and they are very focused on biopharma investing at the early stage. And it's just really exciting to hear what they're up to. And I shared a little bit about what we do at messaging lab, and it was great.

[00:04:07] Erum: I also had an amazing opportunity to see another big company here in Copenhagen, the derivative of a larger company. And that company is Carlsberg, but the company that I'm speaking about specifically is Tritonic. And what they're doing is creating a platform for people that are growing plants or food products.

[00:04:24] Erum: to be able to discover new traits in the foods that they grow or in the plants that they grow. And besides doing very fascinating things, it was great to hear of their story of developing this company out of a legacy that is Carlsberg. They are a brewer. They were brewing beer since they I don't even know where they started, but I'll find out and let you guys know in the show notes, the founders, JC Jacobson, when he was making beer, he realized that there is some science behind that.

[00:04:52] Erum: And this was in the 1800s and wanted to learn more about how fermentation happens and what is the science behind it. So he created an R and D facility, which was. pretty innovative back in the day, in the 1800s. And they created a chemistry wing and a biology wing because they did have those two disciplines that they knew were responsible for making a lot of things.

[00:05:12] Erum: It was great that Tratomic, who I visited, they do occupy the biology wing of that R& D facility on the Carlsberg campus. I guess you can call it a campus. And it was just fascinating to be in there, just like all that history. And so I'm really excited for them. I think. They're doing really well. They've been meeting with a lot of companies and it's just great to meet people that are working with these larger companies, but doing something new, right?

[00:05:35] Erum: They take what the learnings are from these like multi billion dollar industries that are doing something right. They're doing one thing for Carlsberg. It's making beer, but they learned so much and then they can now apply it to different industries. And that's what we're talking about when we're saying we're building the bio economy, right?

[00:05:52] Erum: We're using this. Platform. And again, fermentation is the biggest one. And now Tratomic is being grown out of Carlsberg.

[00:05:59] Karl: That's amazing. I love that story. Denmark is super interesting because it is a small country. I think the population is smaller than New York city and Copenhagen must be a lovely city because it's also, I think of it as being like maybe half a million, 600, 000 people, not a big city, but I'm sure it's beautiful.

[00:06:16] Karl: And this time of the year, it's got to be gorgeous.

[00:06:18] Erum: It is absolutely gorgeous. It's nice and cool here. I will say that compared to living in Brooklyn, Copenhagen is more sparse. There's definitely not a lot of people walking on the streets. A lot of people biking though, a lot of bike traffic.

[00:06:30] Karl: I

[00:06:31] Erum: haven't biked yet with my two year old and my husband yet, but we will soon.

[00:06:35] Erum: And it's great. It's super clean here. I'm staying at Airbnb and they have six different receptacles for just disposing of thing. So. You have your compost, your trash, your plastic, metal, paper, and one other thing I'm missing, but that's fine. That is fine. That's great. I love that they think about the circular economy here.

[00:06:56] Erum: I think that adds to the Higa or happiness, unless pronouncing that right, Higa.

[00:07:01] Karl: I thought it was Hugi, like huggy, like the diapers. No, I'm totally kidding. I think it is. I think it is Hyugi.

[00:07:10] Erum: Hyugi. Oh my god, it's so funny. But yeah, that is definitely the vibe here. Everything is super cozy and like clean.

[00:07:18] Erum: And again, I mentioned they do take a lot. They, meaning Denmark, but also Europe, they take a lot of time and consideration and regulation on how to take care of. The environment. That's actually similar to what our next guest believes. Our friend, Eben, actually someone, you know, for a really long time.

[00:07:34] Karl: Yeah.

[00:07:34] Karl: So Eben Bear is the co founder of Ecovative and Ecovative started off as being a company producing products using mycelium, which is the extended roots that you don't see of a mushroom. And, uh, fungus are amazing multicellular organisms. There's also single celled fungus, I believe. And Evan and his team start off by making packaging to replace the popcorn or the styrofoam that you would find in, used to get in packages a lot.

[00:08:05] Karl: And they've been very successful in that. And then they started doing building materials using mycelium. They're located just outside of the Tri City area of New York. So near Albany, just north of Albany. I usually drive through there because my wife, Kristen is from that part of New York. And fun fact, one of Kristen's best friends, sister works for Evan, which is something we just found out a couple months ago, shout out to her.

[00:08:26] Karl: And as long as I've known Evan, I've never been too incubated though. He has in this podcast episode, he's like, well, now there's no excuse. And it's true. There is no excuse. And Evan lives off the grid. He's like a, I'm not going to say a back to nature guy because he's very focused on technology and very focused on biotech.

[00:08:44] Karl: He's an interesting guy. And I think we're going to have a great conversation with him.

[00:08:47] Erum: Awesome. Yes, we will. So let's get started.

[00:08:53] Erum: Hi, Evan. How are you doing?

[00:08:55] Karl: Good. How are you today?

[00:08:56] Erum: Welcome to the podcast.

[00:08:57] Karl: Thank you. We're excited to have you on Evan. We've known each other for a while and we're basically neighbors. And I hate to say that I've never come by, given that you're on the way from Brooklyn heading upstate, which is something that I do fairly frequently.

[00:09:11] Karl: So I am ashamed of the fact that I've never come by ecovative and visited you better after this recording. Yeah, the audience is going to shame me for not doing it.

[00:09:20] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. It would be great as if you can just tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to start ecovative.

[00:09:27] Eben: Sure.

[00:09:28] Eben: You zoom the clock way back in time. I was born on a little working farm in central Vermont. So born on the floor, got ready to work and couldn't wait to get off the farm. I wanted to be connected to technology, innovation, invention. I had a computer early on there. And so that was my vision of what the future was and went to a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.

[00:09:45] Eben: And when I got there, it changed from technology is the computer, it's the satellite, it's the iPhone. I was like, oh, biology is actually kind of like the future. And all that stuff I left on the farm is actually where I want to work. And so slowly worked my way back into biology, eventually starting incubative when I graduated.

[00:10:00] Erum: Awesome. And then what was that aha moment that you had to start incubative or what was that?

[00:10:05] Eben: That was a human being. That was a gentleman by the name of Bert Swersey, who is my dear friend and mentor, taught a class at RPI called Inventor Studio. And the purpose was to help young students invent technologies that could benefit the world, patent them and start a business.

[00:10:20] Eben: And he taught this class for 20 students and created lots of startups. And he helped really push me to connect some very disparate fields, the art of growing mushrooms or mycelium. In fact, kind of how mycelium grows in the forest with industrial fields. Like building insulation or plastic packaging. And the aha moment was really him forcing me into a corner.

[00:10:38] Eben: My senior year where I'd submitted my final thesis early. I was like, cool. I'm done two weeks early. It's a wind turbine, no moving parts. It resonates at middle C the Hills are going to be alive with the sound of music works. It's cool. This is stupid. This isn't world changing innovation. This is just a minor improvement on wind turbines.

[00:10:55] Eben: And I was like, gosh, what else do I have for this guy? And I. Made some samples of a mycelium material a year earlier. And I was like, I'll submit this. It's crazy. Everyone's going to think I'm crazy. And he loved it. And that was the start of everything. So you had

[00:11:06] Karl: that aha moment with mycelium, but like you said, you had created something from it.

[00:11:12] Karl: Take us through the path of what that thing you had created was to starting incubated.

[00:11:17] Eben: So while I was studying mechanical engineering at RPI, I was doing a dual degree. Here are all the courses you take and you go through. And I started in my dorm room learning about biology. And so I was reading Massilium Running by Paul Stamets.

[00:11:27] Eben: All the different like mushroom cultivation books from the 80s about how to grow mushrooms. You know, like a good college student started growing mushrooms in my dorm room. I ordered some mushrooms. Bores off the internet. I wasn't interested in the mushroom part, which is what the books were all about.

[00:11:39] Eben: But I was really interested in the physical properties of the substrate, which I'd been reminded of from my experience as a farmer, where I'd see wood chips stuck together on the farm. And so I made little square tiles and I tried burning them and doing fire testing, but it was like too wild an idea I felt to bring into the RPI ecosystem.

[00:11:55] Eben: And it was a really wild individual, Bert Swersey, who was totally nuts. Who was like, no, this is really good. We should do this. And

[00:12:01] Karl: what were the first products that you guys made or commercialized at Ecovative? I seem to remember that you guys had said that one of your goals was to replace a certain kind of packaging.

[00:12:11] Eben: It's funny. Cause like this podcast, it gets to the title, like grow everything. Right. One of the things Burr was excited about, it's a whole new way to. To make materials, not making materials, you're growing fully formed objects. This is a new manufacturing paradigm. And so then it's like this classic problem, which is like a technology looking for a problem, which is interesting because inventor studio is all about find problems like clean water.

[00:12:29] Eben: People need clean water. They need clean air. They need devices when they fall. And so I came in out of left field of a new fundamental technology. And so a lot of incubators life has been figuring out. What can this do better than anything else? And we started with solving a problem in insulation, actually, like rigid board, plastic insulation and moved quickly to packaging where the same sort of plastic material styrofoam was a much bigger issue as a waste problem, like in the oceans or the forest.

[00:12:53] Erum: Wow. That's awesome. So you did insulation and then packaging, but now you have expanded. You're in a variety of different markets. Can you tell us a little bit about the decision making to expand into this market?

[00:13:04] Eben: Yeah. So I just say I fundamentally have a belief that biology and biology as technology is how we can hack capitalism to live in harmony on spaceship Earth.

[00:13:13] Eben: And what I mean by that is like you can make really profitable businesses that for the first time rather than emitting pollution as they scale. We'll actually start to do regenerative things to our planet and we'll make money for capitalists. And that's really important because the whole world runs on that kind of philosophy and biology enabled this incredible margin growth over the past 20 years in biotech.

[00:13:30] Eben: We have the opportunity to see the same thing with positive externalities, the markets we've selected now, which are packaging with a really strong focus on food and leather are where we see both the biggest possible impact, whether it's CO2 or waste on spaceship earth. So where we can have the biggest possible positive impact and where we can build the best businesses.

[00:13:47] Eben: So mycelium can do something better than regular pork bacon or regular leather, better than any other technology in the world. And so we focused all of our efforts on those channels and bringing those to maximum scale. That's amazing. We redid our kitchen last

[00:13:59] Karl: year and we ordered from a lighting company that's based in the Hudson Valley.

[00:14:04] Karl: And the lights came beautifully packaged in your mycelium packaging. Yeah, I don't know who they are, but it was very cool. I think Kristen saved the packaging and took it to school to show the kids what's possible with biology.

[00:14:18] Eben: Awesome. And probably different than what you bought, but like at scale and Walmart led lights, you can go buy with that in it.

[00:14:23] Eben: And that's the goal, which is before we were shipping a pollutant to a home, right? Styrofoam. And now if you throw it in the garbage, that's fine. If you put in your garden, it's a nutrient, like you can't go wrong. And that's where biology is powerful. And. We sell in that industry at those molded shapes that cost parity.

[00:14:37] Eben: So there's not a premium that the customers are paying. We're like the best choice. And that's what I say, hat capitalism means just like rational business plus biology. So

[00:14:44] Erum: is packaging the biggest market you serve right now? Since it was your first

[00:14:48] Eben: packaging is the most mature technology. We do produce it in the U S there's millions of units produced worldwide.

[00:14:54] Eben: We've mostly licensed it though, to focus entirely on the food market. Uh, so whole cut muscle meats and the leather market with forager, producing leather, like hides and soft foam, mycelium, like plastics. The reason for that is impact again. So the TAM for food is like 600 billion. The TAM for like leather materials is on the order of a couple hundred billion.

[00:15:13] Eben: The TAM and packaging where we can make a 40 percent margin, sell it, cost parity, solve all the things that customer wants. And be better for the environment is on the order of hundreds of millions. It's still interesting, but not in comparison to these other ones. And we're a 15 year old business. And so mycelium packaging, mycelium composites, building construction, all things were from our first seven years.

[00:15:32] Eben: And that the sort of second generation stuff is where we're really putting a lot of the effort. And you

[00:15:35] Karl: guys being based North of Albany. A very positive economic driver for that part of the state. What kind of reaction have you gotten from the community, from people that surround you, what do they make of Ecovative?

[00:15:48] Eben: First of all, I just, I'm really grateful to be in this community. Albany is the capital region, as we like to call it. Like got like a million plus people. We got like Regeneron, we got a bunch of universities, we got global foundries. So there's a fair amount of heavyweights in the area here that folks forget about.

[00:16:01] Eben: I will say we've certainly pushed 200 million of. Capital into the area over the past 10 years, which is a pretty powerful conduit. And we're starting to build like a network of folks, even alumni's in the area who've worked at Ecovative and are starting to work and inform other companies. My personal dream for how we're remembered in the area is a hundred years ago.

[00:16:17] Eben: Now the industrial revolution was being birthed in upstate New York, like Ford and Edison used to camp where Ecovative's building is now in the corner of green Island and all the railroads ran through there. And they discussed building a large hydro plant. Which was built and powers our factory now.

[00:16:29] Eben: And I hope to help recatalyze the birth of like the next generation of biological innovation in the Hudson Valley. And I see that flowing right down to New York city. That's awesome.

[00:16:38] Karl: I just think about when you're driving West out of the capital district and you see the signs that say shirt maker or leather or collars, all that was yeah, exactly.

[00:16:48] Karl: That was all a big, a big part of that. So that's amazing.

[00:16:51] Erum: I talked about some startups and some of your alumni have. Creative companies, we meet several startups in the material space. And one company that we spoke with recently, that was also on this podcast as Holly Bion, so Axel and Alexis, and they told us on that podcast that they reached out to you in the early days to collaborate.

[00:17:10] Erum: And you said, no, because you were just too busy. It was also early for you. And they were working on mycelium back in the day, and now they moved to bacterial cellulose. And one of the things they said is that mycelium is. Challenging because it can get easily contaminated. Have you ever experienced widespread contamination and how did you mitigate it?

[00:17:31] Erum: What impact did it have on the business? Share that story.

[00:17:34] Eben: Yeah, it's really all, personally, just like I said, it's awesome. And Alex are working on awesome stuff there and the level of scale they've achieved in the IBCs is like really spot on, it's like 20 in that direction. Yeah, I would say, first of all, just on the like mausoleum composite side, it's true.

[00:17:48] Eben: When we started, we were 10 people. We were trying to figure out like, what's our competitive niche here. How are we going to scale this? How are we going to track capital? And we started out very proprietary in that platform. And over the past decade, we've moved to be quite open. So like grow. bio is a website we created with lots of educational resources.

[00:18:02] Eben: We sell a dehydrator, raw material, and I'm still moving on that. I'm hoping to fully open source, like sort of our IP and the coming year across that platform. Also in response to. What I described earlier, which is we see incubators biggest potential impact in these other fields on the contamination story.

[00:18:16] Eben: Mycelium is not necessarily easier to contaminate than say like liquid culture, but it's certainly easier to get started with, which means a lot more people can fool around like myself included and make mess ups at very large scales. I remember early on in growing packaging, for instance, for steel case, like we took an order to start supplying packaging.

[00:18:31] Eben: And we had like six weeks to make a thousand corner blocks. And every Thursday, Gavin and I would fill all the tools ourselves. We have these tools that would go on racks, little molds. And then on Saturday I'd be coming into my iPhone flashlight and like climbing up racks high into the air to look at them and they'd all be turning green, which means they're growing trichoderma and they should turn white.

[00:18:47] Eben: And I'd call Gavin and he'd come in and we'd spend all day emptying out the trays and like a kitchen and washing them and trying again. And so our yields were low, like 20%, 30 percent in the early days. We learned a lot. We have to control your environment. You have to control the air, you have to control the quality of the incoming substrate.

[00:19:03] Eben: And today our, we have 240, 000 square feet, positively pressurized. There's different sign in zones, HVAC zones, and our yields are 95, 98 percent at millions of pounds of product. It is challenging, but in the end, it's more about running a solid business and understanding your process parameters more than anything.

[00:19:19] Eben: That's amazing. We were talking about

[00:19:21] Karl: packaging and you said you out licensed or you've licensed out that mycelium packaging product. Why did you guys decide to do that instead of just continuing to grow that part of your business?

[00:19:29] Eben: In the U. S. we still do. So we manufacture in the U. S. and continue to do that.

[00:19:33] Eben: The reason we outlicensed it is what Polybin brought up. Someone emails us from another country and they're like, we want to do this. And we're like, we're not really set up to build this in Bulgaria. We're limited in resources and tension. And we're trying to move to an enabling model as much as possible.

[00:19:46] Eben: And many of the investments we've made over the past two years move from an enabling model that's yes, we'll give you a license and training to, and by the way, we'll sell you raw material at high quality in Europe. Or in the U S at the lowest possible cost, because we've invested in infrastructure that specifically supports this new ecosystem of miscellaneum.

[00:20:03] Eben: And so that is sort of how we're moving in our role in the ecosystem there. There's a thousand and one things you can do with miscellaneum composites. We have a licensee loop in the Netherlands. They grow coffins, like never would have gone into the death care industry. As someone pointed out to me recently, the TAMS a hundred percent, because everyone participates.

[00:20:18] Eben: And they're doing really great. There's demand for like natural coffins, natural burials, and like they're growing quickly. And we have licensees doing acoustical tiles and other things. And our goal is to support that and then give them more picks and better shovels, like better raw materials and focus our efforts on where we think we could build one to two to three, like multi billion dollar businesses.

[00:20:36] Karl: Is anybody doing coffin manufacturing here in the U S with, uh, you're my

[00:20:40] Eben: Salem tools.

[00:20:41] Karl: Uh, not yet. So maybe a listener, there's an opportunity for you. It's a huge one.

[00:20:45] Eben: Yeah. Call up. We got a bunch of raw materials

[00:20:47] Karl: available. Training manuals. Amazing. And then how much of your focus these days is on materials versus food?

[00:20:53] Karl: You ended up starting My Forest Food a couple of years ago. I remember, and my kids will never forget that I was an early tester. I got a box of FedEx that had Very early. Yeah, a couple of strips of bacon in it. They were like, what's this huge box? And why is there this weird bacon in it? So we'd love to hear that story and talk about the pivot or the expansion into that space.

[00:21:14] Eben: Yeah, you were getting samples and that was still 10, 000 a pound. So you're only getting two strips. It were, yeah. Yeah. So let's see, three years ago, four years ago, started working on the food space with the insight that whole cut muscle meat is most of the market and most of the value and that the current generation, which was then the big fads like beyond meat of ground products really weren't.

[00:21:33] Eben: That great. And if you want it to address a big environmental issue, you need to do whole cuts. If you wanted to build a super profitable business, you should do whole cuts. Cause that's where the best business is. And then that mushrooms, cause we're weird mushroom people have these like unique meat, like properties happen to grow in weird shapes in the woods that aren't very like a whole cup.

[00:21:49] Eben: And we happened to have developed this technology for leather to grow really large slabs of that same tissue. So I was like, Oh yeah, let's make meat. I spent about 60 or 70 percent of my time at the food co I'm also CEO there. And the last three years have all about, about zero to one. So we've built out a awesome executive bench folks from Cargill, Stonyfield, Hershey's, Butterball, built a giant factory.

[00:22:08] Eben: This farm produced about 3 million pounds of mycelium a year. Um, and we turned it on in January. And so that's been sort of my obsession, my focus area. And then Ecovative, I just have an awesome team there that I've worked with for a long time. And they seem okay with me not being around as much.

[00:22:22] Erum: Have you distributed the bacon now, or are you still like working on expanding it?

[00:22:26] Eben: We were in one store this time last year, which was totally supply constrained. So we were selling 15 cases a week, which is like seven times the market leader in that store. We are now in 60 stores, being 120 at the end of the quarter and over 400 at the end of the year. And we just remained supply constrained.

[00:22:42] Eben: So we turned the farm on in January. Every week we add another. Ramping it by room and shelf effectively. And yeah, every week we're adding capacity and routing stores. So this is like really a exciting time and had a year in a single store with a cult, like following, like people coming in, buying the bacon, shipping it out and stay like great testing results, but like still one store in our backyard.

[00:23:00] Eben: And we're all over Manhattan. We're all over Western, Western mass now. And same thing, two or three times the velocity of the market leader. We're twice the price, like people writing fan mail. And it just feels good. Like we've found a sweet spot.

[00:23:11] Erum: Which stores are you in? Are you in Lyman's or Whole Foods?

[00:23:14] Erum: So we're,

[00:23:15] Eben: we made a decision. I grew up as a kid, uh, on a farm and we stocked two local co ops in Hanover, New Hampshire. And so every Saturday morning I would go into the back room as like a seven year old and drive a little cart out and put it on the shelves. And so I have a real soft spot for natural markets.

[00:23:29] Eben: And as it turns out, Our consumer, our demographic, which is interested in healthy, but also delicious, like food might buy organic pork bacon at the farmer's market. Shops at natural grocers like co ops and there's no slotting fees. So there's none of this like trade spend stuff going on. So we've expanded through all the natural grocers.

[00:23:43] Eben: So honestly, at food co op in Albany. Through all the natural grocers in New York city, Guido's market, and similar stores in the Berkshires. If you go to mybacon. com, there's a store locator map and put in your address. It'll show you the nearest store. Iran is a Park Slope co op food member. We're there.

[00:23:59] Eben: We're at Park

[00:23:59] Karl: Slope. Yeah. So you'll have to look for it because I'm

[00:24:03] Erum: not anymore because I didn't do my shifts and it got suspended.

[00:24:09] Karl: Yeah. Those of you who listen and have no idea. Park Slope Food Co op is a very famous food co op in Brooklyn, and you do have to put in your time. Every three weeks, you have to put in three hours worth of work, and that helps keep the prices low.

[00:24:23] Karl: But if you miss your shift as Iram has done, and as I have done in the past, then you lose your shopping privileges. So then you have to make up your time.

[00:24:30] Erum: It's so many crazy characters at the food co op, by the way, it's just waiting for sitcom to be made about it. Like starting Fred Armisen and all the people like there, there needs to be a food cop sitcom.

[00:24:42] Erum: So let's work on that.

[00:24:45] Karl: Yeah. I've been talking about, like you said, you guys are getting fan mail. I'd love to hear. What's the reaction? I remember tasting it early on. I was like, this is interesting. This is going to have a lot of potential. Can't wait to see how this is iterated. I have not tasted the latest versions of this.

[00:24:59] Karl: I'd love to hear what are people

[00:25:00] Eben: saying? So my favorite type of fan mail is the kind of message we got an email a couple, like last week, which is from a gentleman who wrote in and said, I'm a diehard meat eater. I've been eating meat all my life. A few years ago, I had a stroke. Wasn't supposed to survive it.

[00:25:12] Eben: I did. Kept right on eating me and he's like, today I ventured into the plant based aisle accidentally at the Honest Weight Food Co op. And I tried your product and I couldn't believe how good it was. It was so good. I actually fried up, I can't remember what it was, Brussels sprouts or something in the coconut fat afterwards.

[00:25:27] Eben: And it turns out he's like a chef in the area. He's on WAMC, the big radio station next week. He's I'll be talking about it on the air. And I was like, yeah, that's who I want. I want the person who has eaten bacon, loves bacon, maybe try some of the other products, but gets into it because it's tasty. And then he's like, Yeah, I like this.

[00:25:41] Eben: That's our favorite. And we have lots of videos. Now we do demos and Park Slope and other stores around New York and lots of happy people. Sometimes they sing us little songs. It's fun.

[00:25:49] Erum: Yeah. I'm not surprised.

[00:25:52] Eben: That's awesome. I will say we actually haven't done much. The crazy thing for me is we formulated bacon 1.

[00:25:58] Eben: 0. And we're like, good, lock it in. That's what we've been making just more of since then. And sometime this summer we'll release 2. 0, which is awesome. I just picked up a pack at work again today, but has a bunch of stuff we've done over the past few years that yeah,

[00:26:09] Karl: finally gets into the wild. You guys are focused right now on bacon.

[00:26:13] Karl: You said cuts are one of the most popular, and I should know better because my dad was a meat cutter. But do you see expanding into bigger pieces of, I

[00:26:21] Eben: guess we would say meat? Absolutely. The, I think this is where it gets into like rational business building aligned with like mission building. Bacon.

[00:26:28] Eben: There's an important ethical reason too, which are pigs are the smartest animal. And I think like probably one of the worst ones to raise. It's also the highest value meat as we talked about. And the market is pretty big. Six, $7 billion in the US alone. Our goal is to build a differentiated market leading position in this category over the coming year and a half.

[00:26:44] Eben: And candidly, if you were to evaluate this compared to steak or chicken, like we should only sell bacon until we've supersaturated the market of people who love my bacon, right? It's like that good in terms of the profitability, competitiveness profile for us. But let's call that millions of dollars, 5 million, $10 million of bacon, somewhere in that range.

[00:27:00] Eben: We can expand laterally into things like beef. And we can capture new mushrooms like chicken of the woods and make some really delicious new chicken cutlets. The plan is to do that over time, but there's lots of players in this space. And we just want to really stay obsessed with delivering on this first value proposition.

[00:27:14] Eben: There's history of people building billion dollar bacon businesses. Steven McDonald founded Applegate. I believe it was sold to Hormel for a billion dollars. First investor in my bacon, uh, sits on our board. We might take it all the way, but in terms of mission, our goal will be to touch all the categories over time and have that like leading position of cleanest label, something you understand, just a few ingredients, basically like a piece of meat.

[00:27:34] Eben: Yeah. I'm glad you say that about

[00:27:35] Karl: pig, pigs and or pork, because it is something we talk about and it's something that I noticed and having grown up in a family where we had meat very frequently because my dad was a butcher, just seeing the way that. The pork has changed over the years. Like it's not this red meat, like they made a concerted effort to turn it into this much more white, easy to grow meat, not necessarily have the kinds of flavors that it used to have.

[00:27:58] Karl: And I think that's one of those things that a lot of people miss. And I think bacon is an easy one because bacon is cured. It's very salty. You completely disassociate it from

[00:28:06] Eben: the animal. Absolutely true. And having raised pigs, they're beautiful animals. They're like dogs. And unfortunately they're just really delicious.

[00:28:15] Karl: Yeah, it reminds me of Homer Simpson, like dreaming of these pigs that he can just pull the ribs off of or something like that. Yeah.

[00:28:21] Eben: I remember

[00:28:23] Karl: that season when, when John Cumbers and I wrote, what's your bio strategy? You had a very famous quote that I've used many times, which is a chicken is more complicated than an iPhone.

[00:28:33] Karl: And I was curious if you could explain to an audience what you meant by that. Yeah. And why it might

[00:28:38] Eben: still be relevant today. What I've been trying to capture in that quote is this experience I had when I left the farm and I went to RPI. They have like a little atomic reactor there. There's a jet turbine that we got to play with.

[00:28:48] Eben: And I was dying as a 17 year old to get out. I'm up to my knees in manure, shoveling chicken shit. Like, I wanted to get away from this stuff. Squishy, nasty stuff. And I started studying all this technology and I started reading these biology books in my free time. And I'm like, Oh, biology is molecular nanotechnology.

[00:29:03] Eben: It's self assembling, it's self repairing and we're biological and we're blind to it. You start out as a kid, you get the thing, you pull it and the cow goes moo. And it's yeah, cows exist. They're just here. The magic chicken for me is this idea. If you just could disassociate everything, you know, about a chicken.

[00:29:17] Eben: And someone's going to describe to you what it does. Like maybe it's a household appliance and it's like, Hey, I got this box for you. 19 bucks. It's cardboard. It's got two blinking LEDs in it. All I need you to do is put a little feed in top every day and a little water in it. And you won't believe it. An egg will come out the bottom in the morning.

[00:29:31] Eben: You'll be like, what? That's unbelievable. My Keurig machine was at 80 bucks and it takes these crappy pods. You'd be like, yeah, at the end of its useful life, you could compost it outside. You never told him there was a chicken in there. Like. Just blow their mind. And so for me, when I got to school is that, that like connection of, Oh, I'm advanced nanotechnology and everything I left behind on the farm is just like beautiful advanced technology.

[00:29:48] Eben: Like I don't want to make a better jet turbine. I want humanity to jump to you working with biology. Cause that's how our whole planet has always run. It's a big idea. I'm trying to fit in the magic chicken.

[00:29:57] Erum: I read on your LinkedIn that You're aiming to live off grid. Have you accomplished that?

[00:30:03] Eben: Yes. Yes.

[00:30:04] Eben: I've been actually living off grid for 11 years now. So I started in a tent.

[00:30:07] Erum: So where are you living? Like, how is it set up?

[00:30:09] Eben: I'm right now in the basement, actually, of my home, which I built, which is a timber frame. So cut, got the timbers from a local sawmill, cut the timbers myself, erected the timber frame, designed the house, did most of the electrical, plumbing, almost all of it.

[00:30:21] Eben: And behind me is a bunch of solar controllers. So these are on the top, midnight solar, high voltage controllers. So 250 volt impulse East bottom on here is actually a new experimental one from them called the Barcelona. That's 600 volts. I'm a beta tester. This caught on fire last week. This is a new one.

[00:30:35] Eben: And then sort of off the state here is a bunch of Tesla batteries. So there's two model S's worth of Tesla batteries in this fire cabinet from a salvage yard in Western New York, alpha auto. Anyone wants to buy some. And so I disassembled the whole pack and rebuilt it into a hundred kilowatt, 48 volt pack.

[00:30:49] Eben: And then these guys here are inverters, which make AC power. And so this is like version six of a system that started as a car battery, like one solar panel and next to my tent, but it works. We have AC here, heat pumps, wood stove for heat as well. And yeah, and a small hydro. I also built a small hydro plant.

[00:31:04] Erum: Oh, wow. And do you have a farm now? Or

[00:31:07] Eben: I grew up in Vermont and we in farming and my dad's still there with the farm. I'm home to help a fair amount here. We have more, I would call it like forest farm. It's mostly trees, but we do have chickens. Yeah. And I'm working on goats.

[00:31:18] Erum: Full circle.

[00:31:19] Eben: I got to get rid of one of my two CEO roles before I add any more like animals.

[00:31:24] Erum: Yeah. I also saw on LinkedIn that you said your passions are flying boats and electric tractors. Have you come across any companies working on those?

[00:31:33] Eben: Yeah. So my favorite electric tractor is made by GE. It was produced in 1969. That's 1973. I've got a bunch of them, converted them to lithium ion batteries are real.

[00:31:43] Eben: They're big, heavy tractors, like 1200 pounds and snowblowers and tillers and mower decks and sickle mowers. And also we have a hundred attachments for these things during the oil crisis. So those are great. If you can find one on eBay, I highly encourage buying them. The current electric tractors aren't real tractors that you can get for home now, but there are some really cool ones coming.

[00:31:59] Eben: There are awesome flying boat companies out there that are starting to develop like high speed transport methods. I'm trying to recall the name of the one that's on the tip of my tongue right now, but the value proposition is look at Albany, New York to New York city. There's no speed limit on the Hudson river.

[00:32:13] Eben: And like, there's people are developing these boats that started a hydrofoil. It's just above the water and 120 miles per hour. You could do the trip in an hour when suddenly like Albany is a suburb of the city. And so I'm very interested in sort of new modes of transportation that use old ways of right away, because the history of Albany and New York was steamboats going up and down the river, having speed competitions, which were eventually served by railroads.

[00:32:35] Eben: Which we now use, and I think it'd be really cool to have boats take the mantle back the century.

[00:32:38] Karl: Yeah. I think you and I like had gone back and forth on Twitter talking about how would we propel a boat, like a big slingshot facility on both sides of the Hudson, could we get enough momentum to get from New York city to Albany?

[00:32:50] Eben: Yeah. It's huge opportunity for that.

[00:32:52] Karl: I think that's one of those things that people don't realize how close Albany actually is. And once you're up there, you're a step from the Adirondacks, and it's just so beautiful. I love going up there all the time. I can't get enough of it.

[00:33:04] Erum: We often ask our guests if they have a favorite book, movie, or show that they would recommend to the audience about biotech specifically.

[00:33:11] Eben: A book I would recommend, which may be hard to find, is a book called Energy and the Earth Machine, which was written in the 1970s and was a book I read a long time ago that Just really got me fascinated again on this idea of zoom out and think of our planet, it's like a big living, in this case, thermodynamic system and start to think about the flows of energy like that.

[00:33:27] Eben: I still think it's a great read. If you want to just get oriented on like our planet.

[00:33:31] Erum: It's a good one. Also, I wanted to ask, have you seen Fantastic Fungi on Netflix?

[00:33:35] Eben: Yeah. Awesome. We did an awesome job on that. Yeah.

[00:33:39] Erum: Your boy, Paul Scammons is like amazing. He's actually going to be at Symbiobeta this year.

[00:33:44] Karl: I And then you wrote an op ed for Vegconomist where you talk about the hype suck for innovations and this idea that plant based meat is a fad. How do you address that? And going back to the my bacon, how's that different than first generation plant based meats?

[00:33:58] Eben: Yes, the kind of core idea there is Technologies tend to move in predictable cycles.

[00:34:02] Eben: And I think if you look at a theme, this interview is I'm a fan of the echoes of history, whether it's like a hundred years, looking back to Henry Ford and Edison camping, where I now have my factory or steamboats racing trains. And then thinking maybe we'll have flying boats again in the future. These things go in circles.

[00:34:17] Eben: New technologies do the same thing. So there's usually a period of hype and excitement where early adopters talk about how this will be the greatest thing in the world. We'll change everything. And that's what we saw with beyond impossible. And these other ground meets over the past few years in the sector.

[00:34:29] Eben: And then invariably, whether it's a new phone AI VR technology, there's this wave of disappointment. Where people like the stuff wasn't that good. It didn't taste that great. What the heck is methyl cellulose? Is this actually worse for me? And then there's this, it's all sucks. The whole thing sucks. It sucks, sucks, sucks.

[00:34:45] Eben: And so then we're in this, what's called the trough of disillusionment. I call it the trough of despair and that's very normal. And we founded the company on the thesis that this would occur. And the winners are typically the second generation companies that answer the problems the first one had. So what is my bacon minimally processed?

[00:35:00] Eben: It's like a slab of mushroom meat. You cut up, you salt it, you add sugar, you smoke it. It's like bacon. How's it taste? It tastes fricking great. How's bacon taste? It tastes great. It's really good. Did we formulate it to be healthier for you? No. Is it, yeah, it is healthier for you, but you'll find that out later.

[00:35:13] Eben: And that's how you then win people over. And the value proposition really is about, Hey, this is a great, delicious food. And by the way, you didn't kill a pig. Oh, you like that too? Cool. I'll see you next week. And that is where we're at now in the cycle. And so what it looks like from the outside is just everything sucks and it's collapsing.

[00:35:28] Eben: And from the inside, for me, it's like lots of green shoots are coming up. And I've historically always been first to markets. And so I'm, I was very excited to finally get to be late to one. That's awesome. Was there anything you wish that we would have asked you or, you know, Anything that you think people should be asking you that they don't?

[00:35:42] Eben: The only topic we didn't spend a huge amount of time on is just scale. And just to stress that we have this obsession around scale for a bunch of reasons, and I think it's an imperative that everyone in our industry has this, because it gets back to the book recommendation, energy in the earth machine.

[00:35:55] Eben: The material flows on spaceship earth are absolutely enormous, and you need to be thinking about how you move that kind of material around, which also means billions of dollars of sales, to have any chance of having the work we're doing have any real material impact on the planet. And. We've invested in that, had some go go juice going in the markets the past three years.

[00:36:12] Eben: A lot of people raised a lot of money, spent a lot of money. We spent more than half of it on concrete and steel. I think we've built the largest raw material facility in the world for the type of soil we produce. And we're really betting it all on the ability to take these products to scale in a way that's extremely economically attractive.

[00:36:27] Eben: And I think that'll benefit. Our company, I think it'll benefit our shareholders and most importantly, our friends, Spaceship Earth. That's awesome. Thank you so much, Evan, for saying that. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. This was a blast. Yeah. Thank you. We appreciate it.

[00:36:43] Karl: So what'd you think of that interview?

[00:36:44] Erum: It was awesome. Is Evan involved in any advocacy or politics? Cause if he's not, then he should be, he subscribes to this amazing philosophy. I loved when he said biology is technology and how it can hack capitalism and enable us to live. In harmony on spaceship earth.

[00:37:03] Erum: Oh my God. I was like, this guy is very poetic and I love it.

[00:37:08] Karl: Yeah. I love when he said that because I know that spaceship earth, I think that's a Buckminster Fuller concept and Buckminster Fuller was a pretty famous architect and thinker who I think had the heyday of this work was in the fifties and sixties, maybe seventies.

[00:37:24] Karl: But yeah, thinking about earth as a spaceship, I think is a really interesting concept. It forces us to be. More respecting of the planet than we tend to be consumerism makes us think that everything is disposable and that's just not the case. And so Evan is definitely an inspiration. And I'm glad that you honed in on that particular quote.

[00:37:43] Karl: I brought up the quote that I will never forget that he said, uh, chicken is more complicated than an iPhone, which I love. And it also reminds me of Jason Kelly of Ginkgo Bioworks used to use a slide that would show a computer, a smartphone, and then a plant. On a desktop. And he would ask people what's the most complicated technology on this slide.

[00:38:02] Karl: And people say, well, I don't know if it's the phone or the computer, but actually the most complicated technology in that picture is the plant. The plant not only takes sunlight and uses it as energy, but then it. It creates oxygen, it eats carbon dioxide, it reproduces itself, it heals itself, it does all these things that, as wonderful as computers and our phones are, they're just not able to do all the things that biology does.

[00:38:27] Karl: So, I love the way Eben thinks, and that was such a fantastic interview.

[00:38:31] Erum: Yeah, I couldn't resonate with that. Now that I'm here in Copenhagen, I just feel like that respect for Spaceship Earth is visible. There's a litter in the playground as one piece and I was just like, that's just one piece. I'm just going to pick it up and throw it out.

[00:38:44] Erum: That's not a hard thing to do. It's just like, it's not a big deal, but it totally made the environment so much more calm and serene. In full house, Bob Saget would say, a clean room is a happy room.

[00:38:54] Karl: Yeah. It's true, clutter, it is very stressful and it is sometimes surprising how we just ignore it living in a city like New York, where there can be places that are very dirty.

[00:39:05] Erum: Oh yeah. And that's just too overwhelming. There's like a hundred pieces of garbage, like my like visible area. I'm like, I can't do all that. Unfortunately. Now I feel bad, but one versus 300 pieces of garbage, two different things. But anyway, yeah. So you just need to get the type of mentality. Out there, you also say a lot of these Nordic countries are some of the happiest places on earth.

[00:39:26] Erum: And I do feel that vibe. I do think a lot of it has to do with, I don't know. This is like, it goes on both sides that they have that the longest days in summer, they have like sunset at midnight. And what would that be like to have daylight till midnight? It's just sun shining and it's 10 p. m. I know that can drive some people crazy depending on who they are, but I'm curious.

[00:39:44] Erum: It is getting sun setting at 8 45 here right now. And that is throwing us off with my son's bedtime, which is usually 7 30.

[00:39:52] Karl: We went to a wedding in Finland in August, a good friend of Kristen got married to a guy from Finland. And so we went to Helsinki in August. And then we, this is 20 years ago, and we did a driving tour for a couple of days.

[00:40:05] Karl: And it was amazing to see, to be in a place where the days were that long. I never felt tired because you still have the sunlight. And I never felt like it was hard to fall asleep because You were just tired. And maybe that was because I had a seven or eight month old at that point with me. But one thing I did notice about that was the further North we drove and it was, we're talking about August.

[00:40:24] Karl: But then, you know, the opposite of what you're talking about in terms of the summer is the winter when daylight is very short.

[00:40:29] Erum: Yeah. There is a movie about, I forget who's in it and someone's going to probably know I'm talking about right now is that there's a movie when it's just like 24 hours of darkness.

[00:40:38] Karl: Yeah. I don't know which one that is, but there is like a remake of a Swedish movie or it might be a Norwegian movie called insomnia. And I think Al Pacino stars in it. And it is about a murder that takes place in a place where the sun doesn't set, but 24 hours of darkness. Is a different kind of idea.

[00:40:54] Erum: I think it is that movie.

[00:40:56] Erum: Insomnia.

[00:40:57] Karl: No, I think it's a different one. I think we're confusing it because insomnia is, it's like, it doesn't, you can't sleep because the sun doesn't go down. But 24 hours of darkness, I think is a vampire movie that happens in Alaska. That's an intense movie.

[00:41:09] Erum: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That one's really intense.

[00:41:12] Erum: Oh my God. Yeah. But it doesn't seem to shake people here. They're the happiest people. I mean, if people are depressed, they're really depressed when it comes to being in darkness. All the time, but I'm sure there's little innovations around it. I know in the East coast, we have, I know I have, I can't say we, but the seasonal effectiveness order when it's like a winter time

[00:41:33] Karl: and just

[00:41:33] Erum: kind of a little bit bummed out.

[00:41:35] Karl: But we are lucky in New York city because the sun does shine a lot. The ocean moves the clouds away and we do get a lot of sunshine. Whereas if we were upstate or like in. Pittsburgh, not to draw any shade on those places, the clouds don't move as quickly. But anyway, now we've moved away from Eben and we're just talking about the weather.

[00:42:01] Erum: So sad. Anyone still listening?

[00:42:03] Karl: Yeah. Let us know what you thought about the interview with Eben. We thought it was epic. I hope you enjoyed it too. I think that should be the pod. Thank you so much for listening. Please tell your friends, ask us any questions and comment on what you've listened to.

[00:42:16] Erum: Okay, friends.

[00:42:16] Erum: We'll talk to you later.