How Wildtype grows salmon from cells.

CAMERON WIESE: Thank you again, all of you, for coming out. I know a lot of you. I'm glad to have such supportive friends who are like, yeah, you're doing what?

Sounds amazing. But if you don't know me, my name is Cameron, and I run an organization called the World’s Fair Co. And the entire goal is to inspire and enable people to go build the future.

And there's a lot of incredible working done in around San Francisco, in the Bay Area, from people who are working really, really hard to solve some of the world's most pressing problems and doing things that are beyond our wildest imagination. And one of those companies is run by my friend Aryé here. And I will tell you about Wildtype in a second, and we'll get all into it.

CAMERON WIESE: But I want to go back to you guys' little story. I grew up in and around Seattle. And one of the things that we did every 4th of July that we've done, as long as I can remember, is we'd cook salmon.

And so every 4th of July, we'd go down to the docks, get some fresh salmon, then we'd grill it. It's become like a really lovely tradition. And for the longest time growing up, it was something that my grandfather did.

So he went and got the salmon, prepped it, he grilled it, and he cooked it for us. And then when he passed a few years ago, someone had to take over that tradition. And I stepped up.

And so I'd become like the salmon arbiter in the Wisi household.

CAMERON WIESE: And I really like... Salmon holds us like a really special place in my heart. And when I look at sort of the...

some of the challenges around sort of the oceans and pollution and plastics, it sort of like made me a little sad in our ecosystems, and like not thriving the way that they could be. And so when I discovered Wildtype, I was overjoyed. So I'm like, someone is actually working really hard to try and solve this problem and like bring us fish that's sustainable and clean and delicious.

And so we've become friends and I asked him, hey, do you wanna share the work you're doing with a bunch of incredible people? And he graciously said yes. So let's give Ari a round of applause for being here.

CAMERON WIESE: And let's say hi to you. I think the best place for us to start is can you introduce yourself? And for many of the people here, they saw the event invite and they're like, growing salmon?

What? So tell us about like, what is Wildtype doing?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah. So I moved to San Francisco about 10 years ago. And I think that nobody on the team right now who spends their days growing cells and big steel tanks would have ever thought this is what we would be doing.

And that was certainly the case for me. I'd finished my training in internal medicine and also in cardiology. So I moved out here of fresh young cardiologist and started to work just a few blocks from here on heart regeneration.

And it was working with human stem cells and there's this really magical thing about human stem cells, IPS cells, where if you give all the right nutrients at a very special sequence for 10 days and make sure that everything is done perfectly right, at the end of that 10th day or 9th or 10th day, you can see the cells start to beat on their own.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Without any nerves, and this is a fascinating thing because even when our hearts are taken out of our bodies, maybe if they're taken out of our bodies.

CAMERON WIESE: It's a better way to put it.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: They still have this intrinsic pacemaker ability and this is something that's in the DNA of all of our cells and it's something that all cells are at least theoretically capable of doing. But this was during the height of the drought and there was so much around that it was my first time really living in California and all of these little rivers and streams nearby in Muir Woods and so forth that used to have a lot of salmon don't now. And I started to just sort of think about why do we only use these technologies and our understanding of how cells talk to each other and become these incredibly complex structures?

Why do we only use that for the biomedical sciences? And it was just that curiosity that led me to wonder, are there other things that we could do?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: One of the first things that we did was actually make foie gras. Because if you think about cost on one axis and controversy on the other, foie gras is all that. I mean, you don't get more upper right quadrant than that.

But I didn't think that eventually that that would be as impactful. And ultimately sort of, it became about fish. And so today now, about 10 years later, what you've just tried, actually all comes from this one little fish that I remember in 2018.

And those cells are still going really strong, but we'll get to that one.

UNCLEAR SPEAKER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

CAMERON WIESE: Yeah. I think it's also very, very beautiful to me that you have continued your cardiology work. So you moonlighten the ICU to this day, which is...

It's a fun hobby.

UNCLEAR SPEAKER: It's...

CAMERON WIESE: We were, it's probably like six weeks ago, you're like, hey, how you doing? You came in here, we were hanging out. And you're like, I'm so tired.

I'm like, what were you, just up late working? He's like, oh no, I was, that was in the ICU all night. I'm like, oh my God, what happened?

He's like, oh no, you're helping the ICU. So anyway, it's fun, it's fun, it's fun. Thank you.

Give us some more color on like why salmon of all fish. And then why, like why now the droughts are, the droughts were in the streams. Like give us a little bit more of a picture of like what's going with salmon in particular that really resonated with you.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot, first of all, why fish or why seafood to work on something like this. I think that as a cardiologist, I don't know if I believe that more ground beef is something we need in the world today.

And so there's something just intrinsically far more nutritive about salmon and for all of the healthy fats and so forth. But from here to Alaska is salmon country is the other aspect of this. And so, I didn't really appreciate that.

I didn't actually even know much of the difference between Atlantic and Pacific salmon. I know that's like a horrible thing to say.

CAMERON WIESE: Very East Coast thing for you to say. Kind of offended.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I'm embarrassed.

CAMERON WIESE: Did you know there were orca whales when you were on East Coast? You know those are native out here?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I did. We're gonna move on. And I didn't know, for example, that rainbow trout are closer cousins to Pacific salmon than Pacific salmon are to Atlantic salmon.

And so this is all very arbitrary in terms of how we name things. But certainly didn't appreciate that salmon is this incredible animal is also the way in which nutrients from the oceans make it to the forest and things that West Coasters, I guess, just know. And so just thinking about the impact that we could have for something like this.

First of all, salmon from a culinary perspective is a far more versatile fish than many others. You don't really think about sashimi or smoked salmon like we had here or salmon fillets like most Americans typically consume salmon.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: That versatility is something you don't see with something like mackerel. Right? And so that is something that also is immediately recognizable as salmon.

Which when I think about the frontiers, the absolute like crazy things in science that who knows if we'll ever understand, there's things like consciousness and life on Mars and things like that. Beyond all of that is the flavor profile of raw salmon. It is just like this absolutely exquisite degree of complexity that I don't know what kind of LLM brain or anything is gonna ever be able to make sense of.

And so in retrospect, it was probably one of the most difficult things to work on, but also one of the most fulfilling in that it's just such an incredible, incredible product.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And then in the United States, 80 to 90% of our seafood is imported. And so we see market forces at play in ways that we don't for chicken or beef. I mean land, labor, water, feed, now I guess tariffs, all of these things are the reasons why this incredible source of nutrition is becoming also increasingly inaccessible.

CAMERON WIESE: What exactly did everybody just try? And then let's sort of break down the process. I mean go like high level and then we can get into some of the details on like flavor and texture and all that.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it starts with the cell. And when we had a cell, it was kind of, it was like a dog chasing a car. Like we didn't really know what to do with it.

It was there and didn't appreciate what sort of environment it would require. Everything from like what is the right temperature for it to grow these cells in. There had been some studies on this, but the standard, and this is from like the 1970s, was, and this is gross, so I apologize in advance, but it basically required 20% of the nutrient mix that you would feed these cells to come from the blood of unborn baby cows.

So it was fetal bovine serum. And that was kind of just like what was known about how you grow salmon cells outside of the animal.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: So it was one thing to have the right conditions to figure out the right temperature, to basically be able to find these self-renewing populations of cells, and then it was a whole other thing to really understand the nutrition in ways that these cells required, that they would be getting inside of the fish ordinarily and how to replace all of the animal components with ones that are not. So today, it is an entirely animal component free process. It's essentially these cells that reluctantly were placed on a vegan diet.

They hated it for a very long time, but we got there. And understanding what enables them to thrive. But that's just the first step, because if you imagine these cells in these huge steel tanks, and by the way, it's just a few blocks from here.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I would love for you to come visit at some point. Yeah. These cells in large steel tanks don't know how to just organize themselves and become sashimi.

And so, just like, it's funny the things that we didn't know, that we didn't know, like of course, it's like, oh, we'll figure that stuff out, right? We just gotta get these cells growing. And then, it's just like-

CAMERON WIESE: Then poof salmon comes out. Yeah, it's just like-

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Sashimi, omakase. Brains the sushi bar. Like, looking back, I don't think I would do it.

Like, it's just insane. Anyway. So, we have to provide a structure for them.

We call it a scaffold, and it's just like in construction. We sort of provide that scaffolding, and these cells then know how to organize themselves better. And so, if you take these cells, and you grow them in a very soft and high-fat environment, they start to behave more like fat cells.

If you have them on these nanometer-sized fibers that are parallel, then they will also elongate. We've also made true muscle cells that we've been able to get them to exercise. I mean, that's the thing about making them for food, is that we don't need them to lift weights.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: We actually just need them to bring the same nutritional components, and the same aspects that we would expect. And so, that has been also just a fascinating part of the journey, and understanding how much and how little translates from what we know about mammalian cell culture, and how just wonderful these cells are. That's the kind of overall process.

CAMERON WIESE: So, okay, so we have cells in a converted brewery in this giant metal tanks, and then what happens out there, they come out of the tank, and then you walk us through how the scaffolding works, cells attach to the scaffolding, and then how do we go from that to, again, what everybody saw, it looks?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: For us, when I look back at some of the first versions of this, I mean, it's not appetizing. Just understanding how to create that beautiful micro-architecture was something that we really just needed to become obsessed with. And a big part of that, a really important part of it in fish is, first of all, the fats, and second of all, the fibrousness.

So even the white striations that you see between these areas of musculature, those are a special structure that don't exist in our bodies. They're called myocomma, and they're kind of like the commas between, they're like the breaks between these muscle fibers. And in some ways, they're kind of like, for terrestrial species like us, we have muscle that attaches to bone, and that's kind of how we get around.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And for fish, they have muscle that attach to other muscle, and that's kind of how they're able to swim through the water. And what's fascinating about that is it's like, okay, so that's kind of like connective tissue, and it's true, but also, fish are able to store their fats outside of their cells, which is something that we can't do. And so they also store their fat in there.

And so this is, when we think about, how do we recreate this? And the deeper we go, we realize that there's more complexity to this. This has all been part, I know this sounds like a lot, but this has been part of the process.

And so we essentially realize that in order to have a meaningful impact, we would have to scale this up at some point, and a lot of people, especially at that time, we're talking about 3D printing, which I think eventually will become a scalable technology.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I just don't think that that time is any time soon. And we actually looked to the textile industry instead, and how are huge amounts of fibers created? How's this carpet made?

And so there was a lot in the fiber spinning technologies that we were interested to adapt for food purposes. And this is really what changed in terms of being able to unlock some of the textural attributes, to take these cells and to actually create with them the basis for what the fibers would be, have them also do some of the work as well, and recreate the architecture in that way. Yeah.

CAMERON WIESE: What was the first sample that you tried? Tell us about the first run where you and the team, or maybe you and your co-founder Justin were like, I guess we're gonna eat this now. What was that like?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: So first of all, it wasn't for a couple of years until after we started the thing, which was a whole set of other, I remember this one meeting we had about a year in, and some people had moved their families out from the East Coast, and we're here, and we're trying to make this work, and we sat around this table, and somebody said, so our cells, they divide once or twice, and that's it. And I think we all know that, and nobody's talking about the fact that we're not able to produce anything. And it was like a super uncomfortable truth.

Oh, it's science, it takes a long time. You just need to stick with it. Shut up, man.

We're gonna be fine. And it was...

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: It was...

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: You know, it's, and everybody's like, so what are we gonna do? And I was like, I don't know, we're gonna keep doing it. There's no plan in a situation like that, right?

It hasn't been working for nine months. And so little by little though, like I'll say, we were able to get our minds into the lives of these cells, and start to understand when they seemed, and I don't mean to anthropomorphize, but happier or less healthy, and it was just that tenacity. There's like, Silicon Valley loves to talk about how'd you crack the code?

It's like, the only reason if you think it tastes good, it's because of our sweat and tears. There's no cracking the code for something like this. But that was really the, what was your question?

CAMERON WIESE: It was the first tasting, but I think this is a beautiful example of how, part of the idea is these things take a long time, and they're not, I mean, 10, was it nine years? To get to what people tried today, and it's really, it's a marathon.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah, but I wanna tell you what it tasted like. So, and this is a very East Coast thing. So if anyone's spent much time, especially in the Northeast, all right.

You know those really, really cold days? They're so cold that you don't know why your nose is running, but your nose is running, and it's so cold that you don't actually feel that your nose is running. But all of a sudden, you kinda taste that your nose was running.

You know what I mean? That's what it tasted like when we first tasted it. I don't usually say that in public, but that's what it tasted like.

And thank you for understanding, by the way. I hope that's understandable. It's all sort of fish, then other things you can taste earlier.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Thank you. I agree. And so the reason is we really didn't understand how we could keep these cells alive at that point.

But there's, again, in that complexity, why does a coho salmon taste different from a sockeye? What are all of these kinds of different, but it was really like two years in, we were able to get this tiny, tiny amount of the, it's like, oh, we're gonna have the big tasting. And people were like, what did it taste like?

Because that took like four freaking months to make. And it's like, this is, and I couldn't taste anything beyond a little bit of that sort of feeling. So that's what it was.

And yeah, it only got better from there.

CAMERON WIESE: How many people were at that initial tasting? Who was there? And then like, what did you guys learn from that?

And like, I mean, obviously a jillion things.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I mean, I think it was probably like six or seven of us that was the whole team. It was like a big deal. We were gonna do the tasting.

I think we learned that this might never work. And that-

CAMERON WIESE: What was this, like, what kept you guys going at that point?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I just, I don't know. I mean, there's like some amount of stubbornness. I mean, that's a great question.

And it's one that I think is, it's probably the curiosity about what we were missing or what else could be there, what secrets these cells were carrying that maybe they would let us in on. And that was something that I feel like every day was this fascination. I started by talking about those beating heart cells and how every time I'd see that after 10 days, it felt like an absolute miracle that these cells had it within them to do that.

And I know this sounds very sort of, like looking back, it's easy to sort of tell the story this way when really I just didn't know if I had, honestly, just felt a lot of guilt and shame around the fact that I had maybe convinced people to move out here for this and that this just wasn't going to work.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And everyone was just like, come on, what are the answers? Like, how are you? I thought you had a plan.

And that's actually what it felt like. And I'd say that it was probably fear more than anything else that was the sort of day-to-day motivator. But on top of that was just this level of curiosity and sharing that with the people who were there at the time.

CAMERON WIESE: What was sort of the next sort of big moment after that? You decided to keep going out of fear and curiosity. And then when did you know, okay, this actually might work?

What was that moment? Because at that point in time... I didn't happen yet.

No.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: We decided to do our first kind of semi-public tasting. We had made enough and decided to do it at this restaurant in Portland, Oregon and invited a reporter to come try this, which in retrospect was very brave. And the reporter was very gracious.

But that was this moment where we would see chefs actually working with it and commenting on it and saying, oh, you know, it's like missing this, but I'm noticing this. And when it started to become less of a science project and more like food, that was the moment where the conviction really started to become more meaningful.

CAMERON WIESE: So where's... There's a lot of questions we can sort of dive into, but I'm just like, where's Wild Type today? So you had that restaurant tasting.

How long ago was that?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I think it was 2019.

CAMERON WIESE: Where some of the big moments since 2019, the team has persisted, guys kept going, more some of the next sort of major steps.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah, I mean, when it comes to such a new and honestly strange sounding type of food, I think that earning the trust of the public was a really important aspect of this. And we started a process with FDA, which technically is a voluntary process, although it's strongly recommended. And it was something that, I don't know, this is another level of naivete that just like in retrospect, it's sort of beautiful to think about, but like, God, I was so stupid.

Like I thought that there was just be some checklist that they would, I don't know, fax over to us or something. And like, we would just be like, parasites, nope. I got like, microplastics, nope.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, we would just be done. So seven years later, seven years of my life that I'll never get back, we realized that FDA was learning about this as well.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And on that first call, they said like, well, how would you think about food safety? And I didn't understand what a food safety plan was, what critical control points were any of these things. And I said, you know, I would be testing for the same kind of things that we would, that are common in seafood, like, you know, heavy metals, arsenic, mercury, and so forth, they're like, do you think that it's gonna be arsenic or mercury?

And I was like, no, of course not. Have you seen how quick? And I'm like, well, then why are you talking about it?

And I realized in that moment, like, yeah, this is a completely different thing. This actually, it's seafood, but it's not in the way that FDA thinks about it and the way that other people think about it.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And so like, whenever people would say, oh, do you think you can make like, you know, dinosaur burgers or like, you know, clone like Leonardo DiCaprio's themselves and make a Leo burgers, like, like, like, yeah, I guess, you know, but the thing is that this is such a strange thing to begin with, that you'd want to start from something that's immediately recognizable, something that actually inspires trust, something that actually brings the traceability and transparency that's missing in our seafood system. And so that process of seven years, it's all publicly available now. Those years of my life are all out there.

And, you know, the FDA, like, they were slow, but wow, I have such an enormous amount of respect for every question that was asked because these were not dumb questions.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: They're really, like, I, anyway, so having just completed FDA approval last year

CAMERON WIESE: that was last year, right? That's kind of what I was warming you up to is like, you guys did all of this work, toiling, toiling, toiling, like, then you have to go through the FDA to get it approved. Yeah.

Before you put in restaurants, right?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Right. And we'd had all of these chefs actually along the way that had agreed to have it in their restaurants and every month or so be like, no, we still think that it's going to happen, you know, and then these offices in the FDA, just because they were underfunded and understaffed, just, you know, it just dragged on and on and on. A lot of companies didn't make it through that actually.

And then when it happened last year, I mean, we found ourselves in a very different world where sustainable foods now is not really as cool as it was a while ago to invest in. And people kind of just, I don't know, it's a very different place. So we are in restaurants, it's actually the only cultivated food that's for sale every day in the US is what you just heard.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: But even, thank you, it's very kind, but it still feels like not enough where it's still a small facility here in an old converted brewery in San Francisco, like that will never be enough to change what needs to be changed. This constant tension of like, kind of feeling good about finally, this has happened, but also like, why is this so slow? There's so much more that we want to be doing.

CAMERON WIESE: So you're in the restaurants. What are the, what are sort of the bottlenecks to scaling up? So the factory and dog patch, which is super cool.

The fishery, as you guys call it, right?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah, you know, I'd say, if I had imagined 10 years ago, I wouldn't say like, oh, what would be the bottlenecks? I would imagine they would all be technical. And I don't, I just don't think that that's the case.

You know, we have these like 3000 liter tanks right now, things work fine, it can always be improved. I don't even think it's cost, the input costs for what you just had. So if you forget the fact that we're in San Francisco, paying San Francisco taxes and rent and utilities and other taxes on seven years where our revenue was zero.

If you just forget all of that, the input costs, just what it costs to, you know, or somewhere between nine and $10 a pound. And when we started, it was about $400,000 a pound.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And that's expensive even for San Francisco. And so, you know, I'm like very proud, like that means that we can compete on cost, not in this place where we are a couple of blocks from here, but at the next scale up. And so ordinarily, this is an opportunity for either banks to come in with project financing, because it's been de-risked, or, you know, for example, we got pretty far with the Department of Energy that was gonna give a loan.

We don't want handouts at this point, it works. Like we just need a loan to get to the next scale up. And so that, you know, with the change in presidency, that's no longer there.

And so that is the bottleneck is that we're, you know, we love this place, but we're kind of stuck there.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And when we talk to banks about, so this works, and Project Planning saying, the one thing that is needed is a good, strong record of revenue. And they're like, what's your revenue? It's like, oh, well, you know, we've been in like five restaurants now for like, you know, a good like nine, 10 months.

And they're like, that's cute, like get out of here. And so that's the bottleneck. You know, I would have thought like people, when you read the papers of what was written about why this field will never work and never scale, never hit price parity, all the things that would keep me up.

And like, none of that is what keeps me up at night right now. Like it is, it's completely unrelated.

CAMERON WIESE: Well, it's the famous in the New York Times said that planes will never fly, right? And, you know, many, many such cases. What's before we open up to Q&A, two last things for you.

One, what's been sort of delightful for you about seeing wild type in restaurants and being experienced by people who are not friends of the company?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: It's an emotional thing. Like it's meeting people who I guess knew about this and who for whatever reason, and there's so many different things that bring people to this strange idea, right? For some people it's the environment, some people it's health, some people it's just like, you know, weird and creepy.

Whatever it is, it's that. It's actually connecting with the people who are delighted by this thing. And it feels like maybe actually this might turn into something that could take some of the pressure off the ocean someday, could help out those poor salmon that have been really been struggling in prior decades.

And it's really that.

CAMERON WIESE: I kind of find it like this is like fulfillment of a promise that was made a long time ago. It's like, we can do like science and technology, can like unlock incredible things. And a lot of the headlines were like, oh, this stuff will never scale, it'll never work.

And you all just tried it. Like almost a decade of hard work and effort and research went into creating something that like all now can try. And I think it's fair to say it's like pretty damn good.

Thank you. I'd love to open it up to, we're tracking on time a little bit. Let's do a couple of questions.

Try it for it.

AUDIENCE QUESTION 1: What are the product improvements you'd like to make over what we just tried? Like what are the next, what else would you do to it?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Probably I'll never be completely satisfied with flavor. I feel like it is just that level of complexity. I mean, every bite is actually a different set of, you know, 10,000 different aromatic compounds that get released and with the temperature as a world.

And so like, you know, approaching that level of complexity is part of it. I don't know if that makes as much of a difference when it comes to smoked salmon, certainly for the raw salmon. I think that a big part of our mission is accessibility.

And even smoked salmon is a value added product that's more expensive. And so the way that most Americans consume salmon is as a filet. And it's really kind of less probably at this point about the product improvements and more about how do we actually just produce more of the filet and have that be just another option that is available to people that should never replace conventional fishing or even fish farming and just another one of these things.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: But in terms of product improvements, like I actually for the first time, think it's okay.

AUDIENCE QUESTION 2: I'm really excited to hear that like, why not just follow that? Now I'm curious how you got over like the technical issues over like, oh, it's hard to make a really big bioreactor or to stir it or to keep it sterile on, yeah. Yeah.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And the drop in was on. You know, when reporters would, I remember this one time that a reporter kind of wanted to blow up the industry, like one of many times blow up the industry and got us on the phone and was like, hey, like I've heard that things don't work the way that you're describing or that other companies describe. And there's one other company in particular.

And I said, oh, well, can I tell you about this stuff that doesn't work at our place? Because just last weekend, there was some schmuck working on the roof and knocked out this valve in our glycol chiller loop and completely overheated and we lost $20,000 of cell culture. Now, does that mean that this whole industry isn't gonna work or is it just that there's this like jerk on the roof that, you know, ruined it for everything?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And like this, these are the kinds of things. Like we're in a hundred year old building that was a former tin can factory. It's not one of these South San Francisco pharmaceutical facilities.

And the way that we kind of, you know, got through it was just the sort of like first principles like where the hell is it going wrong? I mean, I'll say that this is not to disparage the company that produced our off the shelf bioreactors, but you know, about six to nine months in with like contamination after contamination and us questioning our own sterile technique. Will this ever work in this old facility?

People being like, yeah, of course. Like look at the ceilings. This isn't a clean room.

This is dirty. And this is, we had to do the bioreactor equivalent of a colonoscopy to realize that actually it was like horrible welding.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And that was the problem for this. And so like time after time, it would be these kinds of things that were the challenges to scale up. When it came to things like, oh, the nutrient media is too expensive.

It'll never, it never worked. It's because nobody ever had a reason to create a cheap version of it. And that is it.

That is truly, we were paying $400 a liter for off the shelf pharma grade stuff. And to be honest, like we were sourcing it from pharma companies. Today our cell culture media, which I still can't believe I'm gonna say this sentence, is made by Cargill.

And they came to us and were like, oh, oh, you need a cell culture. And then they're like, no, no, but we can make this the same thing.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And we're like, no, these aren't cows or feed it. You know, these are cell. And it's like, we can make it sterile.

Their cell culture media, using our formulation that we've developed over the years, is now better than what we were getting from front. And these are the types of things that, you know, in 2017 I never would have imagined. And so little by little, like it's just like having a reason to be able to sort of de-risk or figure it out.

And I know maybe that's not a satisfactory answer because it's not, like, but these are, that's the one consistent thing. Sorry, one more thing. Is that every major discovery that has enabled us to do this in the last 10 years has, I think, invariably been by somebody who that is not their field of expertise.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And so when we have the person running our bioprocess right now didn't know what a bioreactor was when he joined the company. It was just this curiosity and just needing to do this and applying those kinds of principles. And often when we've had the, like, you know, and I'm not disparaging experts, there's certainly an important place for that.

But that's been this thing that I've observed again and again and again. And I'd say like it's a combination of those things that kind of got us to be able to do what we can today.

CAMERON WIESE: All right, one more. Come on.

AUDIENCE QUESTION 3: I'm curious, I'm totally blown away by the flavor of that fish. Thank you. And so I'm curious about sort of the process of developing the flavor.

And I'm sort of adjacently also thinking about, like, the idea that we are what we eat. And so these cells must be what they're given. And they're obviously given very different nutrients.

Everything is totally different than in the wild. How do you think of the nutrients, how, like, where are we at with the nutrients and flavor? And how do you develop that to, like, be comparable to?

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Yeah. I want to answer that with a great story that I also couldn't have made up. There was, you know, we get a lot of weird emails.

And once everything from, you know, you guys are just absolutely disgusting. I hope you all die. To, you know, really like just wonderful things.

But one day we got an email from a fisherman in Idaho. Which I was like. First of all, let's just start there.

I was like, you know, I'm a fisherman in these, like, lakes and things like that, like fish. And we, I used to work at a biotech company. I have, like, centrifuges in my garage or something.

And like, do you need trout serum? And I was like, this is, you know. I'm going to talk to this guy.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: I'm going to take this call, you know. Like, this is an email I'm going to respond to. And so, like, you know, at that time, we were still trying to wean these cells off that, like, cow serum.

And it wasn't, this has a point. And they were growing slowly. And we just couldn't actually, anytime we would take them off it and put them on a vegan diet, they would survive.

But they just kind of hung out there. They just kind of stopped, they weren't, they were not happy. And, you know, couldn't figure it out.

And how are we going to, like, reduce cost but increase yield? These are two, obviously, diametrically opposed to, like, and investors are like, how's the yield looking these days? And so, that's what they sound like at board meetings.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And so, I talked to this guy and he's like, yeah, I can make some trout serum. And I was like, yeah, man, I'll buy some trout serum. And like, the next week, you know, a leader of this stuff showed up and I was like, it's like, I don't know, we tried it.

And I've never seen anything like this, these cells. And this is going to make complete sense, right? But these cells started like 20 Xing, their doubling rate, their, you know, like the genes that were being expressed were ones that didn't have like oxidative stress and all these other things.

And all of a sudden, just like things sort of made sense. And we realized like, it's not like trout serum was going to keep the company growing, but we could now have something to compare and realize like, this is what it was.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And what it was that we didn't appreciate that made all the difference was the fats, was the fats in this. And so like, we started to then really start, you know, work with these different fats. And not only did these cells grow better, they started tasting better.

And so I didn't know when we started the company that Omega-3s, Omega-6s and so forth, they're not made by fish. I was like, all this cod liver oil, how are cod so good at making cod liver oil? No, I mean like Omega-3s, right?

They don't, they just accumulate them. They're made by algae. And algae are consumed by the small thing, you know, and then the big thing, like it just accumulates in their liver.

And that's the same.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And so we started feeding these cells better fats and it made the biggest difference in all of those things. And so like, it's been things like that for the fats and checking which sugars are the right ones. And slowly, slowly, we're able to completely put, get them on that vegan diet and sort of actually improve the flavor, improve the Omega-3, Omega-6 content, all of these things, by doing it the way it happens in the ocean, by using these algae derived oils, which is part of what the process is right now.

And that has made the biggest difference for flavor, for the aromatic aspect of the profile. There's a lot more, but that's actually the most impactful thing that's happened.

CAMERON WIESE: To close this out, and we're chatting again, you know, 10 years from now, what is the world and everything's sort of worked well, the financing is unlocked and the banks are like, hey, this is sweet. This guy's got jokes. We haven't even done the fish ponds, you know, I haven't done the real unit too much.

You're all well. What is, sort of what's the impact? And sort of like, what does the world look like again, things go right, like what sort of world are we living in?

And why are you, like sort of what keeps you,

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: like why are you excited about that? You know, I feel like when you look at a nutrition label, at least I sometimes wonder, why is it so short? Like there's so many other things in our food.

Like why do we not know more about what's in that? And I hope that there's just more, like even if we don't change the eating habits of people, even if we're not able to change the enormous like fishing operations that are, you know, decimating the oceans, at least I think a greater appreciation of where food comes from, what's in it, what all of that sort of entails is the most, you know, baseline optimism that I think we can achieve. I think that having that traceability, I think having the options to have, you know, wild caught, to have farm raise, to have plant-based, to have something like what we had tonight, that to me, that variety and for it to not be to be obscured by just marketing and just like strangeness and the types of things that people talk about when they talk about nutrition today, that to me is the like actual, like the optimism that I think will be able to change things.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: And so for 10 years, I think that's achievable.

CAMERON WIESE: [Closing acknowledgment unclear.]

UNCLEAR SPEAKER: Thank you.

CAMERON WIESE: Boom. All right, thank you all for coming, being a part of this experiment to sort of highlight one of the, sort of some of the incredible innovation happening in San Francisco. We'd like to do more of these.

If you have feedback or ideas, please come talk to me. We'll hang out for a little bit, eat some more of our fish-themed snacks. We have maybe a little bit of wild type left and yeah, just hang out and then sort of mosey on out the next half hour or so, but.

Aria, how can we support you? Yes, thank you, Mike.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: Being here, listening to this, like is a lot. I mean that, especially today. There is something, like it's a tenuous time, even like now, this past year has just to be completely transparent, has been the worst of my entire career.

There have been moments where we have been a couple of weeks from just losing it all. The team is much smaller and that means less of the fun kind of discovery that we were talking about. So I don't know beyond that.

Like there's, I think the more this becomes a, not normalized as like a, oh, I tried this weird thing. But just like a discussion about it being a way to support the food system is the greatest thing. I know that's very vague.

I feel like if you know investors, that would be interesting, that's another thing.

ARYÉ ELFENBEIN: But that's not, certainly not the ask here. It's really just to sort of sit with me and you did and sort of see why we're doing this. And maybe it's a sad reflection of the world that a company like ours has a reason to exist and I kind of believe that.

But this is like we're doing it for the purpose of actually just trying to let it heal. And so I think that the more that that message gets spread, that's the best thing that could happen.

CAMERON WIESE: Awesome, thank you all very much.

UNCLEAR SPEAKER: Thank you.