Why We Invested in Mission Barns
Two years ago I went out of my little SaaS box and embarked on a journey to explore the cultivated meat landscape. Armed with no knowledge of biology, but a lot of curiosity and passion, and a Venture Partner (Nathan Benaich) who has a PhD in biology and experience working with stem cells and cell culture, I took a deep dive into the fascinating technologies behind the future of meat. A few months later, we co-led Mission Barns’ seed round alongside Air Street Capital (Nathan’s new fund), Purple Orange Ventures, and Better Ventures.
At Point Nine, we’re pretty adamant about our strong focus on early-stage B2B SaaS and B2B marketplace investments. We’re convinced that in order to be good at what we’re doing, we have to say “no” to lots of interesting opportunities — whether that’s raising a growth fund, hiring a lot of new people, or investing in areas that we don’t understand.
Once in a while, however, we do venture out of our core focus areas. It usually happens when one of us (or some of us) becomes extremely passionate about a new idea or technology. For example, Pawel became a b̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶a̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ super interested in crypto in 2013, which led to our investment in Bitbond in 2013 and paved the way for our investments in Chainalysis in 2015 and Kaiko in 2019. Similarly, my passion for clean meat led to our investment in Mission Barns in 2018.
To explain why a SaaS dude suddenly invests in a cellular agriculture startup, let me share a brief personal story. My wife and I became vegetarians about ten years ago. Several years earlier, we had begun to doubt whether it’s morally justifiable to kill animals for their meat. Having read about the atrocities that are standard practice in factory farming we reduced our meat consumption and bought only “organic” meat from smaller farms. Giving up on eating meat entirely wasn’t something we could bring ourselves to do overnight because we had always liked eating meat. But the more we learned about animal ethics and the ability of animals to perceive pain, and the more we listened to our conscience, the more it became obvious to us that we were doing something deeply immoral. ⁽¹⁾
Our concerns about eating meat were driven by our worry about animal welfare, but animal welfare is only one of several problematic issues with meat consumption. As you probably know, meat production is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. According to the FAO, 14.5% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions are due to livestock. Meat production is also the top driver of deforestation in the world’s tropical forests. The process consumes enormous amounts of water and land and hugely contributes to water pollution, various other environmental problems, and human health hazards, including zoonotic diseases.⁽²⁾
“COVID-19 is one of the worst zoonotic diseases, but it is not the first. Ebola, SARS, MERS, HIV, Lyme disease, Rift Valley fever and Lassa fever preceded it. In the last century we have seen at least six major outbreaks of novel coronaviruses. Sixty per cent of known infectious diseases and 75 per cent of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. Over the last two decades and before COVID-19, zoonotic diseases caused economic damage of USD 100 billion.”
— Inger Andersen, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme
Producing meat by raising and slaughtering animals is also absurdly energy-inefficient. It takes about 50 calories of input (as feed) to create one calorie of beef. Pork and poultry production is significantly more energy-efficient, but still extremely wasteful in comparison to growing vegetables.
Another huge issue is the growing number of multidrug-resistant pathogens, such as bacteria that have become resistant to multiple antibiotics. According to the WHO, “antimicrobial resistance threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections caused by bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi”, and “without effective antibiotics, the success of major surgery and cancer chemotherapy would be compromised”. The CDC reports that “more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result”. The UN warns that “drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050” (!). What does this have to do with meat-eating? A lot, because meat production accounts for a shockingly large portion of antibiotic usage. According to a Science article, “almost 80% of all antibiotics in the United States aren’t taken by people. They’re given to cows, pigs, and chickens to make them grow more quickly or as a cheap alternative to keeping them healthy.”
So even if you don’t care about animals at all, there are plenty of other reasons why you should be very worried about meat consumption. If I may borrow a phrase from Greta Thunberg: I want you to panic.
Back to my personal story. One day, we decided to try a vegetarian diet for a month to see how difficult it would be. That was the last day my wife or I ate any meat. It wasn’t that difficult, but if you grow up eating meat it is definitely a big change. In the beginning, I did miss my hamburger, steak, sausage, chicken, etc. (I told you, I loved meat!), especially in situations when everyone around me was eating meat and the vegetarian alternatives weren’t that good.
The good news for vegetarians (or anybody who wants to reduce their meat consumption) is that in the last few years there’s been an explosion of new plant-based meat alternatives that taste much better than the products that were on the market a few years ago. You’ve probably heard of (and maybe tasted) the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger, two of the most successful plant-based meat alternatives. I love both of them.
However, it’s one thing to convince a vegetarian to buy a veggie burger, and it’s another thing to convince people who care less about animals, let alone die-hard meat eaters, to go for a plant-based meat alternative. Here’s where Mission Barns and other startups that are trying to create meat from animal cells come into play. In contrast to plant-based meat, which uses various plant-based ingredients to mimic the taste and texture of meat, the idea behind cell-based meat is to create a product that has all the same characteristics of conventional meat because it essentially is meat.
Amazingly, Winston Churchill imagined cultivated meat almost 100 years ago:
“With a greater knowledge of what are called hormones, i.e. the chemical messengers in our blood, it will be possible to control growth. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
In case you’re not familiar with the concept, here’s how it works in a p̵e̵t̵r̵i̵ ̵d̵i̵s̵h̵ nutshell:
- Isolate a small number of cells from an animal.
- Culture them in a bioreactor so that they divide and grow in numbers.
- Harvest these cultured cells and process them to create a meat product.
If this sounds like a gross oversimplification, that’s because it is. Creating any amount of cell-based meat requires deep knowledge in cell biology and bioprocess engineering. You have to find the right “starter cells” (e.g. stem cells of some description); adapt them to grow in a chemically defined media (which doesn’t contain animal products like fetal bovine serum); prompt them to differentiate into cells that constitute your meat product of choice (e.g. muscle or fat cells); devise a culture system with a high cell density so that you don’t need several soccer fields’ worth of physical space to grow a burger patty, and much more. Creating a tasty meat product with a great look and (mouth) feel that consumers love, devising a scalable production process, and ultimately producing meat at costs that are in the neighborhood of traditional meat production costs is an even bigger challenge.
Considering all these difficulties, Mission Barns’ progress in the last two years has been truly spectacular. Since our investment, they have developed a scalable production system, optimized a low-cost, animal-free feedstock, and demonstrated cell growth up to very high densities. Last month, the company held tastings in San Francisco where people had a chance to try Mission Barns’ bacon.
Of course, Mission Barns still has to figure out several challenges until they are able to cultivate meat at industrial scale and at or near cost parity with “traditional” meat. But if Mission Barns continues on its trajectory, it will be one of the very first companies to bring cultivated meat products to the market — and contribute to the beginning of the end of factory farming as we know it.
The future that Churchill imagined almost 100 years ago is coming closer to the present. Stay tuned.
Big thanks to Nathan Benaich, Eitan Fischer (founder & CEO of Mission Barns), Seth Bannon, Paul Shapiro, Liz Specht, and everyone else who helped me learn more about cultivated meat. And thank you, Nathan and Eitan, for reviewing a draft of this post.
(1) I’m aware that most readers will disagree with this statement. Some might find it presumptuous that I’m calling eating meat immoral. It’s not my intention to offend anyone. I ate meat for more than 30 years, so I won’t condemn anyone who’s doing the same.
(2) Zoonotic diseases are diseases that are caused by a pathogen that has jumped from a non-human animal to a human. Industrial farming of animals, specifically pigs and chickens, is one of the primary risks for the spillover of zoonotic diseases.
