 Good morning. Welcome to this webinar on chemistry and food, safety, authenticity and other challenges. My name is Ayanna Lynch and I'm a research assistant with the Chemical Sciences Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Roundtable provides a neutral form to advance the understanding of issues of importance to chemical sciences and engineering and promotes the exchange of information among government, industry, and academic sectors. This is the second webinar of 2023 and a series of webinars on emerging topics. We launched our series of webinars in early 2020 and all of the recordings are available on the CSR website. Today we'll examine the current landscape of synthetic food and cellular agriculture and explore how the chemical sciences can provide insights into the modern food industry. The format will consist of three presentations. There will be time for one or two clarifying questions after each presentation, but all other questions will be addressed in our discussion time after the presentations conclude. Dr. Carlos Gonzalez and Dr. Nicola Pol will be our moderators for this webinar. In addition to being members of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable, Dr. Gonzalez is the chief of the Chemical Sciences Division of the National Institute of Sciences of Standards and Technology, and Dr. Pol is a professor of chemistry, the Joan and Marvin Carmack Chair in Bio-Organic Chemistry, and the Associate Dean of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and Research for the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University of Bloomington. They'll be asking questions on behalf of the audience during the discussion time. Questions can be submitted via the Q&A button on Zoom, located in the bottom control panel. Note that the chat feature has been disabled on Zoom for audience members. Finally, I would like to invite everyone to our upcoming events, including a webinar workshop series on publications in the future. This workshop will be held both online and in person at the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, D.C. To find out more about our upcoming events or to suggest topics for future events, please see the CSR website. With that, I would like to pass the mic to Dr. Pol and Dr. Gonzalez for their point-counterpoint discussion. Well, Carlos, I'm so excited about this. I got into chemistry for a love of food, I have to admit. And so the fact that we're coming out with all sorts of new ways of making food is just fantastic. Yeah, so I agree with you. This is going to be a very interesting seminar and webinar. And I think I eat a lot too. So I mean, everybody eats. So I think these issues are important. So it is true that there are a lot of, you know, excited about this new way of making food and so forth and people are waiting the pros and cons. But there are actually issues that people are really concerned about. Some of those are related to, for instance, you know, the use of genetic engineering and recombinants and some of these foods. And people don't seem to understand what's behind what people are actually doing when they make these foods and use these kind of technologies. And there is a lot of concerned people that are actually very health aware. And the use of non-chemicals, you know, one of the issues that some of the people actually have is, well, you know, some of these chemicals have been added to these new foods, lab-grown food, are not really made available to the public. So they don't have an independent way of, you know, check what the producers actually claim they have there. So there is a lack of transparency. Those are concerns that I've heard about lack of comprehensive analysis, you know. How do we know that the nutrition that actually the producers actually claim these foods have is actually real? So some of these concerns are actually something that hopefully will be able to clarify today this round of our webinars. Totally true, Carlos. I mean, there are definitely still technological issues and cultural and ethical issues we discuss, all of which are around food. But when you think about it, there's a possibility, for example, having cheese or ice cream without ever having a cow. Since my grandfather was a dairy farmer, that's a bit mind blowing that I could perhaps have the proteins and the components produced in a different way, starting with corn or whatever it might be and turning it into something that I can then turn into culture cheeses so we can maintain all those rich traditions of cheese making that's in my family lineage without actually having some of the environmental consequences of large-scale dairy farming, for example, and let alone, you know, I'm vegetarian, but there's meat too, right? That has environmental consequences. So there's a lot of promise here, in my opinion, in doing making foods in different ways. Absolutely, I think the fact that you could probably replace trying to actually minimize the use of carbon and fuels, fossil fuels, right, and emissions and so on so forth, that seems to be pretty attractive. However, again, there are issues related to the safety and process foods, right? Processing foods is actually complicated because what we define by process, everything is process. I think what we're talking about here is that the way this processing actually happens in these new areas, right, in food and new technologies. For instance, there are potential people actually concerned with potential contamination and different antibiotics. Well, actually, you have some of these meats actually coming from cell from animals, right? They might actually have some contamination because I have not been treated by antibiotics and then if you put those in the reactors, the reactors might be contaminated. So I know that some of the producers, people that make these foods are claimed that they don't need to actually use antibiotics, but there is a group of people that are actually highly concerned with that. And I really appreciate your point about culture. Culture is one of those that is very important. So as we move forward to this new era when we have this new kind of foods, what do we do with the people that actually the farmers, for instance, some people that depend in some other houses and things like that? Right, as Wendell Berry says, agriculture, it's culture. And so as we start culturing cells or culturing biofermentation bats, that's a very different kind of culture than what certainly my grandfather could relate to, hand-milking cows every twice a day, right? So there's so many interesting issues that come up with food that we really, I'm really looking forward to this fantastic group of people we've brought together to help us think about some of these issues. And with the group that we've assembled here online to start having real discussions about this, what technology do we still need to develop and how do we think about these kinds of foods in the development of culture? Absolutely. And the other issues that are actually more mundane but still very relevant is actually the cost, you know, the scalability of the product and the cost, right? So at the moment some of these foods are still pretty expensive and people call it beauty kind of food, you know. And so what are we going with that? And hopefully the three speakers today will be able to clarify some of these issues that people actually think about it. But I think this is going to be very, very exciting. And, you know, if we can keep talking about this, and I, you know, I just forget that we had a webinar to run. So we'll just go back to the webinar and let's introduce our speakers. So it is a pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Mr. Nick Hala. Mr. Hala joined Impossible Foods, that's his first employee actually, and helped build the company from the ground up during the last 11 years. And he's been actually the chief strategy officer and SVP of Retail International. He also sat on the board of a tight heel, makes yogurt and cheese from almonds, Mickey. So and currently I think Mr. Hala is working on new climate ideas. He's very passionate about climate issues with the mission of rapidly decrease and very concentrations of methane, which is actually highly relevant to what we're talking about today. And also, of course, carbon dioxide. So essentially to change the trajectory of climate change, which is highly needed in our days. In addition, I think he's an independent board director of inner plant, where they are actually transforming farming by enabling crops to communicate with growers. This is actually very fascinating. One of my kids is actually a molecular engineer. And I was actually telling him about this conversation that we have with Nick about it, that he was very, very excited. Because he thinks it's a way for the future. This is actually very cool. So Mr. Hala holds a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota, an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and also an MS in environmental resources from the Stanford School of Earth Sciences. If I further ado, I'll just pass it over to Nick. Thank you. I appreciate that. And Nicola, I'm wearing this for you for Kite Hill for cultured cultured cheese, where we use natural cultures to take nuts and make them taste like delicious cheese. So lots of fun stuff going on in that area of the world. So let me do this. I'm going to share my screen. So give me one second and put in presentation. All right, are we good to everyone? See this? Yes. Perfect. All right. So thank you for the overview and introducing me. You know, I've spent my career in food and ag. So I grew up on the dairy farms. That wasn't kind of part of the intro. So I've been doing food production most of my life. I'm a chemical engineer, worked at General Mills. And then the last 15 years moving out to California, I've been working on kind of starting new businesses and trying to revolutionize categories to make a much more sustainable world, whether that be solar energy, food production, agricultural production. And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to give everyone a bit of an overview of where we are in climate. I think that's one of the biggest challenges, in my opinion, the biggest challenge we have right now. And then link that to the food system, the challenges we have there, and then look at opportunities. And hopefully after this, everyone will get a little bit of inspiration, some ideas of what we can do. Sorry, let's start jumping into climate data. So for climate overview, why does this matter? Why are we really, as everyone talking about climate change and the impacts that could have? So if we look at the last roughly 2000 years, you can see there's, it was relatively flat. And then we had a mini ISH driven by some volcanic activity. And then in the last couple hundred years, you know, queued off by the Industrial Revolution, we've been adding a lot of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, mostly methane, CO2 and nitrous oxide that has really started to spike the global temperatures. And you can see this and obviously it looks pretty stark. But if we then fast-forward some projections of where we're going, it looks even more stark. So this is a handful of projections to the right side, which I'll blow up on where we might end up at 2100. And the biggest point to take away from here is if we hit these temperatures, it's the highest sustained global temperature on earth in three million years. And the impacts of that are massive. And so what I've dedicated my life and my work to is finding ways to mitigate that and pull that back down, which has led me to helping start and build impossible foods, which our agriculture and food system is actually one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest opportunities we have for tackling climate change. And I'll show some data on that in a minute. So now if we zoom in on the current area and you look at some of these forecasts, you can see several different forecasts. So the yellow line here with error bars is if we go more as business as usual, so emissions continue to increase globally. We're on path for four to five degrees Celsius temperature rise by 2100. And then you can start seeing these step down as we hit different policies and action. So we hit net zero. So you'd have net zero. So carbon going into the atmosphere, methane going into the atmosphere and methane and carbon coming out ends up being zero by 2100. We're on path for about 2.5 to three Celsius. And then if we hit net zero by 2050, which you hear a lot of in the media, we're on path for high 1.7 to 2.2 Celsius. Now there's some very high level frames, what's it going to take to get there? So where are we in all this? And so if we then look at what the global policies are and where we are right now, you can see on the left side of this chart is a global greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 equivalents per year. And so the black line here on the left side is a historical and we're over 50 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. So more than 50 billion tons of CO2 equivalents each year. You can see the dip kind of right at the end of the black there from COVID and it's come back and it's as high as it's ever been. And then you kind of fast forward forward to 2100. The blue bar that's in there is like that's if we hit the policies and we act on them that exists today. And the challenge is the good thing is that we are putting policies in place because if we went back to 2015 before the Paris Accord, it looked like global policies were on path closer to probably three to four Celsius. If we hit the policies that are in place. And so now we actually have policies that are starting to bring that down. The challenge is it takes a lot to hit those and so far we're not hitting those policies. There's lots where the action comes into or we need to hit the policies in order to hit that. But it's still at 2.6 to 2.9 Celsius rise where the Paris Accord was to keep us under 1.5 Celsius. And that was largely driven by many countries and even many lowline islands that if we go above 1.5 for a sustained amount of time, a lot of shoreline and a lot of islands are going to be gone as oceans rise as one of the big drivers of climate, one of the big effects of climate change. So then you kind of look at some of these other things and then if you look at it, we hit the pledges and targets in place on top of that we can hit about two Celsius. And then if you look at these orange bars on the graph and that's like looking as like what it would it take to get to 1.5 Celsius. And that's the gap that we have. So if we look at 2030, we need to be essentially cutting emissions globally in half. And that's in the next six, seven years. And so far every year we're still going up. And so it's a big challenge of how we're going to get there and we need to be looking at everything across the system and I'll start linking this to Food and App. And so the main drivers here, so you can see that this is another way to look at the data. The green is from carbon dioxide, red is from our dark orange is methane, yellow is from nitrous oxide and those are the three big drivers. And you can just see all of them are continuing to increase and have increased substantially since past that since 2015. And you look at this globally and Deloitte did a study and said if we do hit these commitments and policies in place, we're on path for about almost $180 trillion of global economic loss by 2070. And to put that in the perspective, we have about $100 trillion of global economy each year. And this is just the economic side, the social impacts of this, I think are much, much, much bigger, you know, if we continue to go down this path. So that's the frame where we are in climate. So now let's look at the food system and what does the food system have to do with this? And I grew up in beef and dairy farming growing up, I worked in food production and until I met Pat Brown, the founder for Impossible Food, I had no idea the link between the food system and climate change and the opportunity until we started looking at a lot of this data. And I had been like, I came out to California to work in renewable energy. So everything I was doing in solar and biofuels and things like this. But I quickly realized that the food system is by far the biggest opportunity that we have. So if we look at the starting point, so what is the food system's impact today? More than 45% of the world's land surface is dedicated to it, more than 25% of all the freshwater used is used in agriculture, which is by far the biggest use of freshwater. And in the western states of the US, a lot of that is more than 70, 80% of the water used in a lot of states are from freshwater, which then we hear about the droughts out here and the challenges with that that continue to get challenging. Luckily in California, we had a large snowfall last year, which that'll help for this year and maybe next year. But the water pattern seemed to continue to change with climate change, which is going to put more pressure on the land and the water use greenhouse gas emissions. So directly for greenhouse gas emissions and warming the earth, agriculture is more than the entire transportation industry. And this is planes, trains, automobiles. And we really talk about transportation decarbonizing electrifying all the time you hear much, much less about food and agriculture. But food and agriculture for greenhouse gas emissions is much bigger. Not much bigger, but is bigger. And the other part of this is nitrous oxide and CO2 are much more potent. And then nitrous oxide and methane are much more potent than CO2. So that also links to the opportunity we have to curb that. And then the last one, which is very hard to reverse is we've taken out almost, it's almost now two-thirds of all species in the last 50 years have gone away from the population. And that's driven a lot by our use of the land. As we continue to push land use out for our use for agriculture, we push a lot of these wild populations out. And as we overfish the oceans and a lot of these freshwater reserves, you know, we're taking down those populations. And so we are mining the earth a lot the way we do agriculture now and we have to change that and make it much more sustainable. So a couple other graphics to kind of highlight this. This one is, I always found this fascinating kind of really stark. So if you take all the land vertebrates left on earth, it's about 90 million tons of weight biomass. Humans are about 420 million tons and cattle is a billion tons, just the cattle on earth. So that means there's more than 10 times the weight of cattle on earth today than all land vertebrates left. And so essentially we're pushing out all the land, like wild vertebrates and other species for our hunger for beef and dairy. And that's what we looked at. And then we looked at this as a resource use perspective. And that system produces about 12% of the protein needs for humans. And the challenge is it's a very inefficient system. And that's why we need so many. And I'll kind of get into some of those numbers and that links to the opportunity and the chemistry biochemistry side of how we could really change the system. You look at the land use side. And so if you back up way back to 10,000 years ago, the land surface is about 57% forest, 42% grasslands. And now, you know, you fast forward, you've taken a lot of those forests and we went from 57% to 38% to add then crops and grazing, you know, same for grasslands where now we're essentially about a third of the grasslands that we had pre sort of taken a lot of this land that used to be wild and converted them into human use. And the vast majority of that land is going directly to animal agriculture. And this is also a big part of the opportunity as we'll get to. So, all right, so let's get to the opportunities. Now, how do we think, how do we use the food and agriculture system to change this? And how do we use biotechnology and chemistry to reach the goals? Well, you start with the overall framing. So I was in, when I came out to California, I was in solar energy. And we were looking at this, and you look at a solar panel back in like 2009, 2010, and like a 10, 15% efficient solar panel was a pretty good solar panel. But I was like, wow, only 10 to 15% efficient. What industries would we ever be happy with a 10 to 15% efficient technology? Like almost none. And then we got to food and it was like, a beef cow is a 3% efficient system, inverting plants and protein and calories over to meat. 3% efficient. So every, for every 33 grams of protein a cow eats and every 33 calories a cow eats, we consume one out as beef. And like, whoa, that's stark. That also links to the opportunity. So now if we instead of build a food system to be a food system that grows plants, feeds to animals, and then we consume the animals, we grow plants and we convert those directly to food. We could have a much, much more efficient food system and use a lot less resources. Now, as you look at the other categories on here, pork is about 9%, chickens, you know, 13 to 21% for calories and protein, and milk is right in between 14 to 17% efficient. Even at the peak here, it's like a 20% efficient conversion technology of taking the plants over to human nutrition. We can do much, much better than that. I think that's the opportunity that we have as a group of how to use biotechnology and chemistry to convert the plants into products that people like and actually prefer over these products. And then we can use a tiny fraction of the land surface that we have for agriculture. But do we have, can we do that? It's like, okay, so let even look at today. So right now, if you take the forming food crops, soy, corn, wheat, and rice, and you look at calories, protein, essential amino acids, just those crops, which are not crops that are dedicated to human nutrition or necessarily even the right crops for human nutrition. But you take those and you look at the human nutrition qualities of them, like just those four crops have all the essential amino acids, all the calories, all the protein that we would need today. Now they're not in forms that people enjoy and like, they're not in the chlorically dense, nutritious, delicious like form is meat. And so that's what we set out for impossible is like, okay, all the nutrients are already there. And you know, we believe essentially that we can take these nutrients and find ways that we can outcompete the animal and create a better product. And by doing that, this links back to the greenhouse gas and climate side. And so for impossible foods, we're always a climate first company. That's why we exist. As we want to produce delicious food for people affordably. And at the end of the day, we want to a century reverse climate change by transforming the agricultural system to a much more sustainable system. And so this chart shows in the premises, if you take the food system and on the next 15 years, you go from the really meat heavy system and dairy heavy system we have today, where globally we consume about 750 billion pounds of meat, your lead. Now we take them we convert that all to a plant-based ecosystem. You have, you know, two main effects. One is you drastically reduce the impact of the agriculture and the food system directly. And so this is mostly pulling out methane and nitrous oxide emissions. And so that's the purple and the orange bar here. And then two is you take that land now that we now don't just don't need as much land for agriculture. And we use that for biomass recovery. And this would be a chart showing that if you just let biomass grow back up versus also we can go further and do planting and management essentially to increase biomass recovery in these places. But just go with the premise that you let biomass recover in these places. You take that line and that black line, which is the business as usual, radiative forcing, which is another climate term. And now you flatline it. And so you can essentially flatline and get to that net zero for 30 years for the next 30 years starting essentially today. As you start pulling this pulling the consumption down and freeing up the land and really buying ourselves 30 years time to solve everything else. That's super powerful. And then really, there's no other system that we can do to really help us reach that 1.5 degrees Celsius or less besides this. And so that's really what we've been focused on. I think that's really the opportunity that we have within this group. But how do you do it? Well, the first part is I think a lot of people realize this that meat, fish, dairy foods are absolutely delicious. They have high nutritional density. They're very distributed or they're very dynamic. You can cook like a medium burger versus a well done burger is a very different application. You can use it in so many different types of food. It's an amazing product and so versatile. And it's so dynamic. And so what we set out to do was create products that can outcompete that first on a flavor performance basis. And then you get to nutrition, health, cost sustainability and really create a product that is more utility to the consumer globally. And at the end of the day, you know, make it more aspirational. And so we looked at this and said, All right, so what we need to do is like look in the plant based world, find the ingredients in the plant based world that are needed to create the most delicious meat, fish and dairy foods and then find ways to do this. And that led to, you know, many different innovations. And the first product that we launched here was the impossible burger. So meat made from plants, really to compete head on head with, you know, meat from an animal. And so the product here, this is the raw form, you can see it on the top right picture. You can really cook it in anything from burgers to meatballs, kebabs, maputofu, you know, for a while I ran old international businesses, which was extremely fun with a product this dynamic, because in the US, like ground beef is a category is very burger heavy internationally, it's using everything. So it's kind of fun to see what chefs would create because it is a new tool just like ground beef is a tool essentially for chefs and consumers and make a lot of just delicious food. And then we make food that has no cholesterol, no hormones, no antibiotics, we can you'll build it so it has just as much protein, just as much balance of essential amino acids. The iron source is heme, which is very bioavailable in the body and heme has been a protein that's consumed in really a human diet forever between animals, which are very rich in heme to clients, which also has heme proteins, and where that heme is the same. So heme has been ubiquitous everywhere. And what we learned is that it drives the flavor chemistry of meat as you cook. And then we created all kinds of different products. So burger, sausage or chicken meatballs and many of these products in blind taste tests now versus the animal counterpart are preferred. And so we've passed in the sensory perspective and now getting the rest of utility to the point and the distribution everything to consumers is the path. Sorry, so I'll wrap up with kind of looking at so how do we make food in some comparison between the systems. So the first one is animals, you know, animals are scaled, we produce 750 billion pounds of meat every year. The challenge that is the environmental impact. There's of course other challenges that we have on this too. We've scaled it past really the limits, I think where the system can go to feed the human population, we need to find better systems. So you look there and then what impossible is really focused on in Cite Hill as plants like let's use plants most scalable, and we have all the nutrients we already need, but can we convert them into products that people love and the desire and they crave, you know, with the simple, simple solutions, simple processes that are explainable and create products that can outcompete the animal and 100% possible to do. And you know, we've proved that within possible and I think that industry is just getting started. Look at fermentation, that's another tool. So fermentation using yeast, fungus, bacteria to produce proteins, fats, things like this. This industry has been running for, you know, 40, 50 plus years at this point. And it's really starting to be applied and food at a mass scale as a system, as we learn how to scale it's and get the cost down to be able to do more than just like really, really fine specialty products. But it is more expensive than using plants and just base agriculture. So it is going to be really mostly useful for specialty ingredient opportunities like Joheem for impossible to use yeast fermentation. And then I know we're going to hear more about this too on the cellular ag side, it's much newer and using cellular technology to reproduce animals or animal meat essentially without the animal, but cost and scalability of that system is tough. It's very similar to fermentation in many ways. But you have to get the cost even much, much slower if you start using it this any sort of scale more than a specialty ingredient. The third one being like chemical synthesis. And this happens in some of the food and some of the flavor fragrance type work. But it's like you could do chemical synthesis for proteins and fats and things of that nature. Then there's a question on consumer adoption and where that can go. So let me pause there. That's kind of the wrap. And if there are any questions, if we have time, I can take them, otherwise we can hit them later. All right. Thank you so much, Nick. In the interest of time, I do not see any questions online. And let me remind the online people that you can submit your questions to the Q&A, press in the Q&A button on your Zoom session. And I do have a couple of questions. I'm actually getting hungry just looking at your and I'm really looking forward to see impossible fish in the future. And so thank you so much, Nick, for that very, very enlightening talk. And with that, I'll pass it over to Nicky. So Nicky can introduce the next speaker. Thank you. I'm also starting to get hungry. It's starting to be having lunchtime on some of the East Coast. Thanks so much. It's my pleasure now to introduce our next speaker, Florian Schateman. And given the time, I think I will just let him go ahead with the presentation on the next topic, and then we will come together as a panel group at the end. So Florian, the floor is yours. Great. Terrific. Let me just share my screen. And Nicky, if you don't mind and let me know if you see that in presentation mode. That looks great. Thank you. Perfect. Let me just get ready here. Okay. Florian Schateman, I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Cargo. And Cargo is an interesting company. It is privately owned, so not a lot of people know a lot about it. But we are actually quite large, 160,000 employees, 158 years old. And we really cover this entire spectrum of food. We're the largest food and ag company on the planet. The discussion that Nicky and Carlos had up front was actually quite interesting, because that sounded like an internal discussion, a little bit of point counterpoint inside of the world of Cargo. Because we are, and also what Nick said at the stage four, we're a large trader of plant-based commodities. We have the ingredient, a huge business around ingredients from plants. But at the same time, we also have a meat business. So we see both sides. And I think that helps us a little bit to really weigh what might work and what might not work and how it really can play out. So that's sort of the 30 seconds on Cargo. Maybe just a 30 seconds on myself. I see you can probably hear I'm originally from Germany. I'm an inorganic chemist by training. I got my PhD at MIT in Organometallic Chemistry and spent the first 20 years really on the petrochemical side of life. So maybe a little bit like Nick, I just made a switch at some point. And so I worked for Dow and other companies before. And then since almost four years, five years ago, I joined Cargo as the Chief Technology Officer. So now in the food and ag and chemistry is chemistry. It's actually an advantage to come from the outside and ask questions and look around. So I would like to highlight a little bit about the maybe interesting bumpy road of alternative proteins ahead. And when I talk about alternative protein today, we'd like to go into a little bit more of technical challenges in what it takes. And I also would like to really focus on the plant based on the cellular based side. Our dairy is a whole, the dairy without the cows, a whole other area that's really interesting because of lactase intolerance and other sort of allergenic reactions. It actually is quite ahead in terms of acceptance. But today it's all about meat and these substitutes for meat here. Maybe four or five years ago, there was an incredible euphoria around it. And I think we got a bump early in COVID. And since then, and we're invested for the last five years into entire value chain. And the nice thing about Cargillus is we play along that entire value chain ingredients as well as the finished product. So we can really see that and how it all fits together. But the wheels have come off a little bit as exciting. Some of the progress has been, the consumer has kind of taken a backseat. Europe is still solid. But the rest of the world, especially North America, and you see some of the big publications and the press has soured a little bit. But we see that that's not necessarily terminal. It's just new technologies, new categories take time. And that's kind of the area we're in right now. And we see actually still a consistent growth of the category as we go forward. So let me level set, because not everyone on the phone might or on the call might know exactly how the process works. This is a highly oversimplified process, but it gives you a little bit of a sense of what's going on. In the end of the day, to get to plant-based meat alternatives, it's somewhat of a material science and formulation problem. You basically put a lot of the ingredients that are necessary, the macronutrients, the micronutrients into a mix. You bring that into sort of mix that into a sort of like alternative meat dough if you want. But then you have to get to this unique structure. There is something about the animal muscle that gives us that unique texture that we like Nick said before, that we all love. And it's very fibrillous. And so it's heat, it's pressure, it's a couple of other options, but it's trying to get that texture. And then of course, how do you formulate that into an end product? This is a burger, I think I saw some pictures from the previous presentation into chicken nugget and what have you. And then the downstream distribution is actually pretty much analogous to the meat business. When you look at these alternative protein targets, it's been really a focus on the process portion. So if you look at the $1.4 trillion meat market, about $400 million are around the process. So think burgers, think sausages, pizza toppings, that kind of stuff. That's the easiest to mimic. It's extremely difficult to take a plant-based dough and try to get a T-bone steak. There's no technical pathway today to get to that. And so that process part, which is really only a portion, $400 million out of $1.4 trillion, that really is easily accessible. There's more, of course, on some of the full muffed chicken and so on, but that's where the biggest impact is to be expected. There are some great products out there, but the consumer, as I said, has taken a bit of a step back. We all have experienced this and it comes really down to four blocks. In the end of the day, the meat-eating experience is still ultimately unparalleled in the big scheme of things and I think Better Products was on a list of plant-based and that's really absolutely true. In order to get the eating experience very close, you have to add quite a bit of cost in there. So in average, it's bouncing around a little bit, but there's a 30 to 40% cost premium on the plant-based versus the meat. For a small section of very targeted early adopters, that's not a big deal. To make it beyond boutique, it is a big deal. You have to get to cost parity. And then there are some nutritional concerns or some side effects that have crept in. So when you look at the label, all of a sudden, do you really need 25 or 30 or so ingredients and so on? Some of them are basically micronutrients that are necessary. There's not a lot of concern and so on, but it looks like a long ingredient deck and so on. So there is a lot of work in front of us that has to happen. And I would like to focus a little bit on the eating experience and the cost in a little bit more detail in the next few slides. Start with taste and flavor. You are building a formulation. That formulation gets processed sort of into a material and that has a certain texture, will cover texture in a second. But it also has, of course, has to have superior flavor. These ingredients come with their own flavor profile. So if you think about a pea protein versus a soy protein version, any of them, they bring their own notes to the table. Some of them are pleasant. Some of them are not so pleasant. Sometimes in the formulation, they add or then or they don't add. So there's a lot of work still to be done to optimize this, which is great for us scientists in the world. There's challenges ahead of us and we love that in the end of the day. But there may be some far-reaching solutions like breeding new crops. We have cross-breeding technologies. It doesn't have to be GMO. But to get into that area and also do the processing, the crop processing a little bit different to make sure that you can bring the right flavor out of the ingredient. Again, any of those things cannot add a lot of cost. You're already on the dark side there. So that's one thing. The other part is, of course, when we talk about flavor, we always think intuitively, at least that's what happened to me in terms of adding a flavor. But a lot of what flavoring actually is about masking and blocking off notes and those kind of things. So new technology needed there and all of this together hopefully will bring more clarity around this. Texture. Texture is going to be important. Meat is very, very unique in texture. As an inorganic chemist, I didn't know a whole lot about meat. Actually, I didn't even know meat science. It kind of existed, but it is a true science. Meat has this unique frivolous texture that likes to bind the fats. When you eat it, when you cook and then eat it, it releases in your mouth at the right time, seeing the salts and so on. So it serves a bunch of purposes in all of this. On the right side, you see two different plant-based proteins in a formulation. Everything else being held constantly, the same extruder, the same conditions, the same temperature, everything is the same. Yet you see quite different texture building based on the amino sequence of the protein that's in there, the secondary tertiary structure, all of this kind of stuff. So it's really an interesting science and processing challenge to make sure that you get to that texture. That's so unique, really cool. So that not only requires processing techniques, although processing is where I personally believe effective, benign, cost-effective processing is where a lot of the unlock will happen. But it also potentially needs new ingredients that have unique functionality that do not add a lot of cost. And the next one is appearance. There's been a lot of talk about the color. I think that's been covered sort of, you know, it has to look good before it's getting cooked. In the raw state, it has to look good when it's cooked. It has to be realistic and all those kind of things. But it's more than that, the fagrilla structure, the texture, the way the fiber are aligned and how it looks like, that has to look realistic too. If that looks funny, people will just have, that doesn't look like I want to eat this. In a restaurant and so on, you can overcome this because you only get the cooked form. But if you also want to be, you know, grilling it at home, those kind of things, the smell, when you take it out of packs, all of this has to be addressed. Otherwise, people will try it once and they say like, you know, I got it off my bucket list, but I'm going to go back to the real thing. And then finally cost. I mean, I think abroad cost up a couple of times, so that should not be a surprise right now. The entire supply chain is entirely different. It is a much more complex supply chain, right? I mean, in the end of the day, the current animal protein supply chain is quite optimized. We've been doing it for thousands and certainly in a more industrialized way for hundreds of years. And so this is all kind of new. There's lots of different ingredients. They're comfortable out of different places. They all have to be trucked and shipped and so on. It's complex. It's not cheap. And it has to be streamlined. And it has to be scaled, right? There's lots of challenges in front of us. That need, those challenges need a lot of capital. That capital has to, you know, cost of capital is quite high. The payback time has to be reasonable for investors to really invest into this. Those are all challenges that we have to overcome. And I will bring that topic up again. We're not making iPhones here. We're making commodities. We're making burgers. We're making chicken wings. Those are fundamentally food commodities. So if you have a very complex, if you add a lot of complexity in terms of equipment and supply chain complexity, the payback time will make it very difficult for investors to really go for it. Now let's switch gear and go from the plant-based side to the cultivated meat. Here, we're actually making bona fide meat. It's just not made in an animal. It's made in a bioreactor. That's really the biggest difference. And again, super simplified and oversimplified, that's kind of the process chart how this works. You basically do a biopsy and get some cells, muscle cells, blood cells, fat cells, and so on. You isolate that. You grow these cells with the right media. These cells have to be fed to have to divide and grow and so on. And eventually, you get some sort of dispersion of a meat cell, this dispersion if you want. And then you have to do some structuring to actually make it a meat product. And that is actually always where a lot of the challenge will come in. Or you formulate them through a hybrid, but then you're going to have some of the problems we just discussed around that. And then you have the downstream production distribution and all that kind of stuff. Again, that's identical. The meat industry has figured this out. No problem there. All right. Let me walk you just very briefly. So where are some of the pain points here? This is much earlier. This right now, no real large scale plant on the planet. There's been some announcement, but there's no real large scale plant. There's several companies, the leading companies have put some pilot plants out there, but they're still sort of in the pharma type of scale. They're not food scale. So this is very, very early here in that respect. The big challenges, and I think it was already highlighted is cost. Cost is enormous and in order to get to just 1% of today's animal production, you have to build an enormous amount of bioreactors that doesn't come without cost and it doesn't come without energy and wastewater and all that kind of stuff. So cost is a big deal. The industry has done phenomenal progress. It's very impressive, but there's still a lot of fundamental technologies to have to be developed and further. Manufacturing capabilities, I kind of highlighted this already. Again, this is where payback times for that investment really comes in very critical. This is going to be a big deal in SBC. Any of you on the phone have a capital project running right now. It's not fun right now. It's basically blow by 50% or more. So it's getting tougher by the minute. And then there's still some concerns around consumer acceptance. These are meat cells. It is bonafide meat, but how does the consumer view that? And I think that's maybe the key message I want to leave everyone. The consumer ultimately dictates a lot of those things. And if the consumer doesn't go along, you can't force people to do certain things. You can entice them, but you can't really force them. And then, of course, regulatory side. Regulatory has made a lot of progress, really impressive. A lot of countries have actually instated to accelerate their regulatory process for cultivated meat. In the U.S., we have seen upside for one specific cell line has gotten the approval from the FDA. And I'm waiting for you to stay from the public announcements that I've seen. But it's moving in the right direction. And the last two minutes or so, I'll let me just highlight on the biggest cost drivers and also the one that the chemist in media is excited about is the growth media. So how to feed the cells? So the cells can do their thing and divide and grow. And in the end of the day, they have the same nutritional profile in there that we all eat by our cow or chicken or anything. It has to have the 20 amino acids in there. It has to have the vitamins in there, sugars and growth factors and so on. So it's a cocktail of 70-plus ingredients that really have to be fed to those cells. The amino acids are a huge cost driver. And what's interesting is that for, ironically, for animal production, several, a few of those amino acids have been scaled to become really cost-effective processes via fermentation. So you make the amino acids via very efficient fermentation process. But the bulk of the amino acids, that's not true. And those processes have to be developed because each amino acid needs its own distinct chemical pathway to get there. So that's an enormous amount of scaling that's in front of us and actually invention and innovation both. And so that's going to be exciting. So I just covered some of those things already. Maybe one more talk about the capital side of things. That's where you're running these processes, how you scale. You cannot go from an incubated or an inoculated cell directly to the full scale. You have to actually, the cell has to go through a series of scale-up steps. And you have to run processes that have been, the pharma industry knows how to run those processes in a sterile environment today. But they only have to run it in a few thousand liters. Here, when you scale, there's a factor of two orders of magnitudes that becomes a whole different problem. So lots of challenges in front of us, but also very exciting. And Nikki and Carlos, that's kind of what I had for the day. So just wanted to get sort of a little bit of a sense of the technology challenges and opportunities behind us. A lot of work in front of us, but very exciting. I can tell you that much. Never boring. Thanks so much, Florian. So you generated a lot of, there are a lot of questions from the audience. One quick clarifying question. Can you explain what disconnected value chain means? Well, in a way is that you basically, you have the different ingredient suppliers and you have the different, if you take a formulation, you have, the value chain today is you have a meat processing plant and there's a farmer and that brings an animal. And it's like, it's a transaction of one thing to the other. And the feed is a very simple kind of things to the farmer. So it's a pretty simple. Here you have 28 ingredients. And so now you have all this there, all scale different. So it's, it's a really kind of tricky. And if you scale 26 of them, but not the other two, you're still going to, I mean, the bottleneck is like your chain link, right? It was the weakest link is ultimately what's, so now comes my biggest challenge, stop sharing. I think I made it happen. All right. Yeah. So thanks so much. So to clarify, Dr. Shadenman is Cargill's chief technology officer and vice president for innovation and research and development. And he also leads the strategic growth business accelerator, which is designed to accelerate and scale cross Cargill innovation and science driven strategic growth businesses. And they're currently focused on alternative protein and human health technologies, as you heard from his talk today. Before he was at Cargill, since November 2018, he spent eight years at the Dow chemical company. So he also has a rich background in traditional chemistry. And his most recent role was vice president for performance materials and coatings R&B. So this is quite a switch from coatings R&B to food. And he's also held leadership roles at soulful company incorporated and G buyer silicones. So with that, I think we have a quick poll question for everyone. And before Carlos will introduce that professor. And this is for all of you. Do you think alternative meat, for example, lab grown culture meat, plant-based meat is safe to consume? As participants fill that out, Carlos, would you like to go ahead and start introducing Dr. Wu? Indeed. Thank you. So it is my pleasure to introduce our last speaker of this webinar, so Felicia Wu. Dr. Wu is actually the John, the John and a Hannah distinguished professor of food safety, toxicology and risk assessment at Michigan State University, and is president-elect of the Society for Risk Analysis. She works at the nexus of agriculture, food and nutrition, and public health to improve global human health outcomes. Currently, she leads and co-leads nine external grants and one World Health Organization contract. Wow. With topics ranging from assessing the impact of climate change on aflatoxin risk in corn, improving resilience of food systems against shocks, reducing pressures of mycotoxins, heavy metals and pathogens in food crops, and assessing effects of daily consumption of aflatoxin M1 on Ethiopian children's health. She's also an expert advisor to the joint FAO, WHO expert committed on food additives and is an elected fellow for the Society of Risk Analysis. She was appointed by Michigan governor to become a commissioner of agriculture and rural development for the state of Michigan. She earned her PhD in engineering and public policy and Carnegie Mellon University, so maybe I saw you because I did my post-doctoral work in Carnegie Mellon. Maybe I saw you when maybe it's glad to see you again, probably. And so she has an A, B, and SM in applied mathematics and medical sciences at Harvard University. With that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Wu. Thank you very much, Dr. Gonzales, for that introduction. I'm actually here at my 25th college reunion right now, so it's nice to have the chance to take this break and to talk with you all. So it was very interesting to hear what my colleagues have had to say about climate change and about cellular agriculture and lab-based meat as well as plant-based meat. Now I'll be talking about some of the food safety benefits and risks which you all had the chance to vote about recently with future agricultural and food production technologies. So although this is a chemical sciences roundtable and I was specifically asked to talk about chemicals and toxins in food, of course, when we're talking about these new agricultural and food production methods, we also need to very carefully consider the risks and the benefits with respect to the presence of microbial pathogens in our current food supply. So I'll be covering a little bit of both of these, but with more of a focus on chemicals. And I'll be sharing the current global picture with regard to food safety and foodborne disease from the global perspective, including a recent World Health Organization report on the global burden of foodborne disease, as well as a perspective from the U.S., with some case studies specifically in foodborne chemicals of aflatoxin and touching on climate change, as Nick had done previously, as well as heavy metals in our food supply. Then we'll be looking at some of the benefits as far as the new technologies such as meat substitutes, lab-based meat indoor agriculture, and various biotechnologies, the food safety benefits that they could bring on board, as well as some remaining food safety risks that we really need to consider. So first, what do we think about when we think about food contaminants? You probably all have a picture in your mind of what you might be concerned about that might be in your food every time you sit down to eat a meal, whether it's at home, you're preparing it at home from various packaged foods or just raw ingredients, or whether you go out to a restaurant. Here are some of the common ones that are of concern from a public health standpoint. These include pesticide residues, and pesticides include insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides, also rodenticides. Mycotoxins and phycotoxins, these are toxins that are produced by fungi and algae that end up in our food supply in food crops, in seafood, et cetera. Heavy metals that might show up in our produce and in our cereal grains, including arsenic, cadmium, and lead, PFAS, the perfluorinated alcohol substances, and other emerging chemicals of concern that might, for example, be in our food packaging, or might be introduced through irrigation water. And then as well, some food additives such as colors, flavorings, non-nutritive sweeteners, preservatives, et cetera. Those are concerns on the chemical side, and then from the perspective of microbial pathogens, we need to be concerned about viruses such as norovirus and hepatitis A virus. You hear about these quite frequently in the news. Bacteria, including some of your favorites that you might have heard about, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria, and many others. And protozoan parasites such as taniasolium in insufficiently cooked pork, poxoplasma, cryptosporidium, giardia, et cetera. Now, I had the privilege to participate in the first World Health Organization Food-Born Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group. We had published a report in 2015 and had been working for the decade before that on trying to understand the burden of human disease that's caused by food contaminants. The way that we measured disease burden is not just in terms of, for example, people encountered this in their food, they got very sick and then they died, but also a measure of disability. How much did they suffer? How many days or how many years, depending whether it's on acute gastroenteritis or even cancer caused by particular food contaminants? What is the burden of disease associated with multiple different contaminants? And we published this paper in 2015 and you can see just looking on the bottom axis, what some of the large range of some of the different types of chemicals, protozoan parasites, bacteria, and viruses that we assessed. And the largest offender, so to speak, in terms of the burden of disease in terms of years of life lost and years lived with disability was non-typhoidal salminella enterica, second was salminella typhi. You can see aflatoxin on there, cassava cyanide, dioxins, etc. Now to go into a little bit more detail of some of the basic results, and by the way, WHO is doing a second iteration of this report and I'll be working with him on this as well. In our first report what we had found, and now it's quite likely that these may be underestimates, is that every year all around the world, 1 in 10 people fall ill from foodborne disease. There are roughly 33 million disability adjusted life years, or that is healthy years of life lost because people got sick even if it did not necessarily lead to death. And there's about 420,000 deaths per year, roughly sadly, about a third of which are in children under the age of five and largely these children are dying from diarrheal disease from dehydration. Now a similar study was conducted in the United States, this was published, an effort led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in 2011 that showed that here in the United States on average about 48 million people suffer food poisoning events every year, so that's over 10% of the US population, 128,000 are hospitalized as a result of food poisoning and about 3,000 every year die. Now Nick had been talking earlier about some of the risks associated with climate change and one of the largest ones is that climate change may in fact exacerbate food safety risks. Now I'll give you a brief case study of aflatoxin in US corn which is an interesting one because it crosses to both the microbes and the chemicals, namely aflatoxin is a mycotoxin or a toxin that's produced by a particular group of fungi that do colonize our food crops and so climate absolutely has an impact. So aflatoxin is produced primarily by the fungi aspergillus laevis and aspergillus parasiticus, primarily in the crops of corn, peanuts, tree nuts such as almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, walnuts, macadamia nuts, etc. and a variety of different spices. Now these particular fungi that produce aflatoxin are warm weather fungi, many microbes tend to thrive in warm environments. So up until now, aflatoxin has primarily been a problem in food in sub-Saharan Africa, South Southeast and East Asia, Central America, and here in the United States is aflatoxin has perennially been a problem in corn and peanuts that are grown in the southern states from Texas say ranging till like the Carolinas and down to Florida. Now aflatoxin was actually the chemical that was found to have the greatest human burden of disease by the World Health Organization. In fact, aflatoxin has been known for over 60 years to cause liver cancer. There are well over 100,000 cases of liver cancer caused by aflatoxin per year around the world. And in particular, if your liver is already compromised, for example, if you're chronically infected with hepatitis B or hepatitis C, and you consume enough aflatoxin in your diet through corn, various nuts, such that it becomes detectable in your blood, then your lifetime risk of developing liver cancer is 60 times higher than if your liver is otherwise healthy, it's not infected with one of the hepatitis viruses. And if you consume lower levels of aflatoxin in your diet, it causes a number of other harmful health effects including acute aflatoxicosis or liver failure at very high doses. Aflatoxin has been implicated in child stunting as well as immune system dysfunction. Now here in the United States, fortunately, we don't have to worry too much about these health effects from the peanut butter and the corn chips and the packaged almonds that we eat, for example. Here, in the US, the aflatoxin losses are primarily economic and primarily to corn growers in the US. Now, we've done a study in 2016 that was looking at three consecutive years of the aflatoxin related economic damage to corn growers in the United States. Now, what's of interest in this particular table is that 2011 and 2013 were fairly, quote, unquote, standard years as far as climate, particularly in the Midwest where a lot of the corn in the field corn in the US has grown. 2011 and 2013 didn't stand out as being particularly hot or particularly dry. 2012, as some of you who live in the Midwest may remember, was an unusually hot, had unusually hot and dry summers. And what happened was that aspergillus flavus, which is normally confined to the US South, then spread northward to the corn belt. And that meant that there was over a billion dollars worth of economic loss to corn growers that year, because aflatoxin in the United States is regulated at the level of action levels by our US Food and Drug Administration. And many, many corn growers had aflatoxin levels that exceeded the US FDA action levels, including in the Midwest, where usually there isn't an aflatoxin problem at all. So you can see how climate change begins to become some of a concern. So I'll try to skip over this part fairly quickly, but we had done a modeling study of where aflatoxin was likely to spread in the United States in the next decade from 2031 to 2040 as a result of projected climate patterns, maximum and minimum daily temperature and precipitation across multiple different US counties all over the United States. And we did this using some various different climate projection models that were available on the NASA website. And basically what we did was to create a model from past data looking at aflatoxin related insurance claims collected on the USDA risk management agency. And then we projected into the future based on maximum and minimum daily temperatures and precipitation. Where is aflatoxin likely to be a problem in the future? I'm going to skip over some of these. We had to account for different corn planting dates as well as particular stages in which the fungus actually infects the corn after silking and after dent and how that changes. The main figure I wanted to share with you is this one. What we found was we looked at where aflatoxin insurance claims were made in the years 2011 to 2020. This means that the aflatoxin levels were so high that a corn grower had to file an insurance claim. And then using that data we said, well, who's going to be filing these aflatoxin related insurance claims in the very near future? I mean, even just eight years from now. It turns out that aflatoxin risk is going to be spreading northward. The particular states that are going to be the most hard hit in terms of economic damage are Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, which on a regular basis right now don't usually have aflatoxin problems. And you can see that the problem will even be increasing in major corn producing states such as Iowa and also, of course, Illinois and Nebraska. Now, this has really important implications because first of all, this is occurring so near in the future from projections of climate, temperature and precipitation. We see that aflatoxin problems are going to be spreading to the corn belt area where we're producing much of the corn that not only sources the United States but the entire world because we're by far the largest exporter around the world. We can see that there are some global food safety and security issues because we just don't want aflatoxin in our food. We know it causes liver damage and livestock and poultry health could likewise be compromised. This is one particular risk. Another one that has recently emerged from the chemicals and toxins side in the United States has to do with heavy metals. This was really highlighted in a congressional report published two years ago in which there was a survey done but pulling infant food off of grocery shelves and finding unusually high levels of arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. And so then this was also a great source of concern. How did these heavy metals end up in this infant food? What are the health effects and what can we do? And this congressional report recommended, among other things, the mandatory testing, labeling and importantly that the Food and Drug Administration should set action levels for these heavy metals in our food supply. So FDA has promptly set about with their closer to zero action plan that is evaluating the science in terms of the dose response assessment, exposure assessment, how much of these heavy metals is actually in our food supply and thereby what are reasonable actions to take including the setting of action levels. What this means, of course, as with the case of Avlatoxin, is that farmers need to be thinking, a few steps down the line, thinking well if these action levels are going to be in place, that means that we need to start thinking about what kinds of mediation strategies and what kinds of economic losses or gains might be incurred in the future from the control of heavy metals in food. And here are some of the different types of strategies that can help to reduce heavy metals in the food supply. But then we need to be concerned about well these could be costly to farmers and are there any sort of win-win strategies in terms of improving production while reducing the risk of these heavy metals in food. So these are some of the common concerns. But now to turn to the general topic of these future agriculture and food production technologies that have been mentioned over the last hour, these have some potential to improve food safety. And I want to share with you some of these ideas that if we are producing plant-based meat or cellular meat, there will be less environmental pathogen exposure because the lab-based meat and meat alternatives can bypass some of the production risks that we currently incur from infected livestock and poultry, including on the surfaces. For example, why we are concerned now about not cooking our hamburgers sufficiently because the surface may have been contaminated with salmonella, with E. coli, etc., and then it gets ground into the rest of the burger. That's not something we typically need to be thinking about with lab-based meat and meat alternatives. There are secondary benefits as well from crop production because there's less risk of pathogen and heavy metal exposure from nearby animal operations from the shedding of various pathogens in animal feces, for example, or that it could be dust-borne and then land in nearby crop fields, and also the risk of contaminated water being used for irrigation. In addition, there could be less environmental chemical exposure, fewer pesticide residues, for example, if indoor agriculture is another hot burgeoning field in food production, and if it's a controlled environment that keeps out the pests, then you need fewer pesticide applications. Biotechnologies can help to resist these pests as well. If we can control the soil or the water, then there might be less crop uptake of PFAS and heavy metals and other chemicals. There would be fewer mycotoxins, including aflatoxin, because the fungi would not be in these indoor environments, and then there's also less vulnerability to climate change. There's also less animal antibiotic use in lab-based meat and meat alternatives, but there are still some remaining food safety risks. Food processing plants. These processing plants can harbor bacteria and other pathogens. In fact, it was from a food processing plant that there was a recent concern about chronobacter in infant formula, for example. There's still the risk that you often hear about in the news of foods being recalled because of the presence of glass metal or wood shards and chips. Those are from food processing plants. We need to be very careful of the integrity of the ingredients used in meat substitutes and animal cells for lab-grown meat, that they're tested for the presence of pathogens, chemicals, and toxins. When my colleague, Florian, was talking about the importance of lab-based meat textures, they're often based on scaffolds. Scaffolds can be made from fungi, and a particular combination of fungi or other types of materials, if you have one type of scaffold that might make your meat resemble steak, another one like hamburger, we need to make sure that whatever materials we're using for scaffolds such as fungi are also free of toxins and other risky agents. Now, food packaging may still contain PFAS and other chemicals, and these would end up in our food regardless of whether we use traditional agriculture or new ag food production technologies. And really importantly, CDC just came out with report very recently that showed that 40% of U.S. food poisoning outbreaks with a known cause are linked to sick restaurant workers, and there isn't really anything we can do about that. The human behavior aspect is really important as well. So in summary, foodborne disease causes millions of illnesses annually, both in the United States and worldwide, so food safety is absolutely at risk, and climate change could be exacerbating these food safety risks. These new ag food production technologies we've talked about today could improve food safety in a variety of ways, but there are still some remaining food safety risks related to our processing plants, the safety of our ingredients, and most importantly, human behaviors. Thank you. Thank you so much, Felicia, for a very, very nice presentation. I don't know, you, Nick, but I think I'm actually have more questions and answers to the, you know, and this is very, very interesting. I think it's fascinating set of topics. I think, yeah, so that would be great. So I think we're ready to move to the questions and answers session. And so we have collected some of the questions that have been sent to you by the audience. And I think, yeah, before we do that, we're going to have another poll question here. Processed food. How often do you incorporate processed foods into your lifestyle? It's a multiple choice, and there is no wrong or right answer. So you don't get penalized for that. Okay, so please go ahead and answer. And then we'll move on to the question and answers session. I guess, I guess in the interest of time, we should probably move into that. And Nick, I know that you have other commitments. Do you want to go ahead and go first? Yeah, we have the results. There you go. Right. All right, so there was a question addressed to you. And I think, so, and I'm going to, I'm going to read the question because I would like your answer, but I would actually like to hear from the other, the rest of the panel. The question was, do you believe we need to advance the research tools, methods, data mechanisms that will be needed to engineer consumer accepted taste and sensorial products, or do you believe that the research tools exist? And that question was posed by Gerard Bailey. Yeah, and I can touch on this and others definitely feel free to jump in. I wouldn't say I'm the most up to date on the most advanced research tools. I was highly involved in the research early on and impossible and in the last 70 years, much more on the commercial side. But I know we had to develop a ton of methodologies, a ton of tools internally. And so I'll use a couple of examples. A lot of the research we did was trying to understand what actually makes meat, fish, and dairy food so good and so delicious and so craveable. And then we did a lot of that work with GCMSs, LCMSs, and all the tools and the software for it were for completely the other uses. It's not the way the food industry really looked at systems like this. And so we spent a ton of time developing the software and analysis tools for trying to understand the data that we could get from the data that comes out of the mass specs to the data like for like the GCMS that goes your nose and trying to link it all together. And so I don't know if that's advanced, how to assume it's advanced some, but my guess is it's still not nearly where it needs to go. Then you get to like texture properties and sensory properties and things like this when consumers are eating and consuming the foods, which is very complex because everybody's palate and everyone's like preferences are different. And so we definitely had research trying to find ways to make that really scalable and fast moving and stuff like that. It's tough. It's so hard to do it. And so there's so much opportunity in sensory science and make it a stronger science and tie that to the foods that people want and making foods that are way, way, way better than what we have today. So I would say there's certainly massive opportunities in that is my guess. Like I said, I'm not the most up to date the last five years, but it's a very good question. I can chime in a little bit and it's a very thoughtful question and great to hear from your Gerard. I would say that it's certainly on the, there's some breakthroughs needed on the cultivated side, right? I think there's no doubt in getting that really into the right cost effective state where I feel like what's going to be super interesting to see over the next few years is how ingredient informatics and so you can screen a lot more. You can really understand the structure, you know, the structure property relationships of these complex formulation. I always thought formulating in the chemical industry with very discrete polymers and that I have a very unique, a very, very regular sequence of monomers in the polymer is complicated here. We have natural polymers and natural ingredients and how they interact. I think there will be, and ultimately that's going to be one of the prime cases for generative AI. And I think what we're going to see over the next five years will be exciting and mildly frightening, but I think it'll be interesting how that's going to play and how you can predict some of those kind of interactions and how you ultimately correlate, let's say, a structure with a mouthfeel. I think there's a lot of work to be done still, and I think that when that hits the full tilt, I think that that could be exciting, just a couple of perspectives. No idea if it's going to happen exactly that way. So Florian, you bring up the risks. We hadn't even thought, I mean, Felicia gave a fantastic summary of risks from the pathogen standpoint, but you're also, it sounds like you're alluding to other risks that we should think about and thinking about these kinds of foods. Yeah, and I was more concerned about like how do you get to overcome some of those challenges better, but now generative AI can bring all kinds of risks, because maybe you're going to come with a solution that a machine developed that is based on some proprietary information from somebody else. And it can get very interesting, very critical over the next few years. And I think it's just at the pace of how this is developing is really interesting. But the other thing that is, I think the processing techniques, so processing and advances in processing is where I feel like a lot of it unlock comes. Processing is not always the most sexy part. I'm a chemist and I have to say that. However, when you think about how to make this all work economically, how do you get the payback times, the cost of capital to a level that you can build all these new supply chains, right? I mean, there's a lot of installed capital in the world right now that does exactly what we do today. And so how do you move that? Processing will do everything in it. And all the glory goes to new protein forms and new functionalities and new formulations and so on, but finding mild natural processing ways that get you in a very effective way is where a lot of the future was. If not, we have seen some hydrocoa technologies and some interesting processing technologies that might get us there, but it's early stage. So Felicia, could you follow up on that in terms of, because you were talking about that even though these sort of lab grown meats will solve some of the food safety issues that we have currently, but they bring up a new set of issues, including in processing. So do you want to elaborate that on that, especially after what Florian just said? Definitely, the processing is going to, it could potentially introduce a number of risks because microbial pathogens, some chemicals could be present in the processing plants for these different types of the cellular meats, the plant based meats. And so we need to make sure that the conditions are always sanitary, that they're being inspected, et cetera. And that's on the processing side. There's also issues related to, as I mentioned, the scaffolding, the various different types of chemicals, or even if they are from a natural source, that we need to check the safety of those as well, the fungal scaffolds that are used in some of these cellular based meats, et cetera. I noticed that one person had raised the question in the Q&A of, well, how can we deal with this problem of sick restaurant workers that are making people sick, regardless of whether we're making plant based meat or cellular meat? And I think that that's a great question. And yes, absolutely, if we can have paid sick leave, better policies for restaurant workers in the US, I think that that would absolutely be a way that then they would not feel that there was any sort of economic loss if they could not, or that they had to come into work even if they were sick, and then potentially get many, many more people sick. I think that that is a really important point. And it's a different policy realm from what we're talking about, but I think it's absolutely important to consider. Part of culture. Another issue related to safety is actually food authenticity, especially concerns with lab-grown meat. People, the bad actors can actually get access to this technology and try to actually take some of these foods with low quality, possibly hurting people and also the industry. So can any one of you tell us a little bit more about your thoughts about that and how do you think this can actually be averted or ameliorated? What's the question for? Well, the question is for any of you. Let's start with you, Florian. What are your thoughts? About traceability? Yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah, it's, you know, we try to keep that in mind here. And it's not just the traceability within, it is also food security across, right? Are you going to be exposed to a specific ingredient that sits in a different country and all of a sudden, I mean, we saw that with sunflower oil, right? Seventy some percent of sunflower oil come from Ukraine and Russia. We all know what happened here. All of a sudden, we were reformulating like crazy everywhere around the world for baby food. I mean, it's just, it's a connected world that is becoming a little less connected politically. And so there's those kind of things. And I think, you know, traceability is another good point. Yeah, we can, that's a challenge to some degree today, right? I mean, when you're in our food system and the more complex you make it, the harder that gets. But I think that the food security and cross-border aspect is actually what's, at least for us, as a very globally connected company, cargo is the most scary part of that. And the more the more ingredient flows and the more challenging that gets. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Felicia. To add to Florian's points with regard to Carlos's question about traceability, FDA has recently made many strides with regard to traceability policies and understanding what the benefits of those are from a food safety standpoint. Namely, if you have traceability technologies in place, then you can very quickly isolate, you know, when there is any sort of risk, food safety risk, and then trace it back to, you know, maybe it would be an individual farm. Maybe it would be an individual processing plant. But the more quickly you can isolate where the problem is occurring, the more quickly you can deal with it. And then there isn't this economic loss to say everybody who might be producing romay lettuce, for example, and there isn't this constant consumer fear as well, that just stretches out and out because an outbreak is continuing and we don't really know the source. Traceability is all about, you know, getting to the source, isolating it, dealing with it. And it's really, really important from a food safety standpoint. It is more, sorry, it is more important. It is more complex in our industry, right, because it's a much more tentacle industry, but we can learn more from industries that have like automotive and aerospace that have done or were forced to do this, right? That's much more controlled and it's less complex, but I think a lot of work has to be done. Sorry, I wanted to... Yeah, so do you see any new technologies or new chemistry or chemical engineering techniques that need to be developed in this space, in the authenticity, new sensors, new new assays? Yeah, it's maybe a matter of priority right now. I feel like in order to get to the level, there's so many technical challenges. I just took up very few and give you like maybe a flavor of what's ahead of us, but I think it's maybe a good thought to... I don't necessarily have the answer, Nikki, but I feel like it could be some chemical handles that can be built in or so, but maybe it's a good way to... So as we solve challenges in this industry to build that in, right? And I think that's certainly... I mean, in terms of a smart manufacturing and digitized supply chain would help a lot. If you know this solve comes from this and it goes and it comes from that plant and it goes into this growth media and then it... Those kind of things are relatively easy, gets a little harder. I think it's actually doable if you really digitize the supply chain. And that is very tricky and it's not a super high-margin industry and smart manufacturing and digitizing all those kind of things will take time and cost. So that's where we're just in the middle of the transition. So you're suggesting something like a blockchain for food? Well, to some degree we tried it. So maybe three years ago we had a... So you could really... Like you buy a turkey for Thanksgiving and then you put the barcode in there and then you can see exactly where custody was held along and you could go all the way back to the farm where it was raised and so on. I don't consume a skid all that much, but I think it's more to Felicia's point. I think it's going to be important for nailing down if there's a safety issue somewhere quickly, right? And so on... So here was a problem. That's kind of what happened in industries like automotive or so where like hey, dis-valve made in Wisconsin at that time led to something in a different... To a failure of an engine later on or something. I'm making this up right now. Don't blame anybody in Wisconsin. But the idea is along those ways that you can get to the source of the problem quickly. I think that was a really thoughtful comment from Felicia to get to that point. So from a greenhouse gas point of view, Rich Heling was asking, what's the difference between plant-based and cultured meats? That's a really interesting question and I saw that and was trying to think about how to formulate an answer to it. I think that there's an answer for now and that there may be an answer in the future and just based on the costs of producing say one patty, my guess would be that the greenhouse gases are quite a bit... There's probably a lot more greenhouse gas emissions from producing the cell-based meat rather than the plant-based meat right now, just because of the difference in costs. So if you wanted to do what... There's a particular type of process called a life cycle impact assessment where you're looking at from the moment that you source the ingredients to make your food all the way through the production process, everything in the laboratory, making the scaffolding, the texture, formulating it according to taste. If you look to see how much energy, how much water, etc. was used in this entire process, then you get a sense of what the... Among other things, what the greenhouse gas emissions would be. Looking at costs right now, I would say probably it is... The greenhouse gas emissions are higher for animal-based, lab, for cellular meat, but that may change in the future with new technologies. This is a great question and we have thought a lot about this in doing LCA life cycle analyses across all these value chains. This is something we're really, really concerned about. Actually, they are very, very different than the animal side, right? You have beef versus pork versus chicken. Chicken is actually quite... It has a quite low sustainability footprint. When you compare that, the best case... You have to make assumptions through Felicia's point. Current, no chance. They're not efficient enough, but if you assume a bunch of efficiencies, these plant-based and as well as cultivated can maybe match chicken, but chicken is quite good. You also have quite some drivers of greenhouse gases in these alternate proteins. This jury is still out and it requires a bunch of process improvements in efficiency things. If you go to a very small green ingredient deck and you can mildly process that will help you a lot, we're not there yet. The best ones are not even close to chicken yet. Anyway, just those are a couple of high-level thoughts. That is a great way to end this. There's still a lot of science that we need to do as well as social sciences it sounds like. Thank you so much, Carlos. This was a great webinar. Yeah, I'm still hungry, but this is very good. It was very good. Very nice. Unfortunately, we didn't get to all the questions. This has raised so many interesting questions. I really want to thank everyone for tuning in and the three speakers, Mr. Halla, Dr. Shaktiman, and Dr. Wu. Thank you so much for your time. The three presentations and the recording of the webinar will be posted to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable website next week. If anyone has additional questions, comments, or concerns, please email csr at nas.edu. Once the webinar closes, attendees will be automatically directed to a survey to provide feedback on the webinar. Please do fill this out. We would love to get your feedback from this. 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