Meaty business: Interview with Patricia Bubner, CEO Orbillion
Food systems are one of the critical pieces in fighting climate change. In particular, the production and consumption of meat contributes to over 9% of carbon emissions and is one of the largest drivers of biodiversity loss. With the urgent need to design a system for sustainable food production, scientists and innovators are revolutionizing the way we produce and consume meat. The team at Orbillion Bio is building the platform to bring delicious premium-quality meat to the market and at scale. We are fortunate to have joined Orbillion Bio’s journey early on and to witness their progress ever since. It’s fascinating to talk to them about their vision for their product and their views of the sector over the next 10 years. It’s clear they embody conscious leadership that transpires across the company they are building, from product design to stakeholder management to team building. Now let’s talk about the future of meat.
Patricia Bubner, PhD is CEO and Co-Founder of Orbillion Bio. Orbillion offers scalable, premium cultivated beef that is delicious and ultra-sustainable. As experts in high-density cell cultivation and scale up, the company is focused on unlocking the lowest unit economics in the industry with their breakthrough technology and full stack production pathway.
1/ Let’s take a step back with a macro lens: how is the meat system broken and which pain points are you trying to address?
Humans must eat food to live. There’s no way around it. And I give credit to the millions of people in the past and of today who have brought ingenuity and problem solving to the massive challenge of feeding billions of us, multiple times a day, every day. That said, as the world shifts, we must recognize the changes that threaten our food system, and bring about new approaches to feeding the world.
Climate change and food are connected in multiple ways - our food system contributes to climate change, and it constitutes a whopping 34% of all human caused emissions. We know that meat, and beef in particular, is the biggest offender causing nearly 9% of emissions. Meanwhile, climate change is impacting food production as it shifts temperature, rainfall, biodiversity, resources and land availability, insect populations, and more. This creates great vulnerability for a system that’s already seeing rising demand and costs. More sustainable meat production, like cultivated meat, offers a path to reducing this vulnerability.
Food security and access also stand as major pain points in the meat system. The nature of global geography means that some areas are incompatible with growing their own meat and don’t have the land, water, and other resources to support livestock, feedstocks, and so on. As a result, many nations (including those in MENA) rely on other countries around the globe for full sustenance, making them quite vulnerable to global economic and political shocks. (The GCC is particularly vulnerable as it imports over 80% of its food requirements every year.) This has led governments around the world to seek out ways to enhance food independence by bringing meat production onshore. More efficient, decentralized meat production, like cultivated meat, seeks to reduce this vulnerability.
These are the two greatest pain points that cultivated meat can address; however, having a real meat alternative to conventional farmed meat has other benefits as well. The way animals are raised for food brings up many ethical questions and is directly connected to health issues, from food contamination to antibiotic resistance to increases in zoonotic diseases. Cultivated meat bypasses these issues altogether.
All of these challenges exist of course against the background of a growing global population and appetite for meat. It is clear that as humans, we need more options for alternative meats. At Orbillion, we take our responsibility very seriously to produce products that address these issues and help us all carry on the food traditions that are so central to cultures around the world.
2/ You have been connected to animals throughout your life, how did you end up founding Orbillion, and finding your co-founders?
Samet, Gabriel and I started Orbillion because we believe making meat more sustainable and ethical also provides a way to make it more delicious, more interesting, and more exciting.
Coming from Austria, from a community surrounded by farmland, from a country that takes pride in how animals are raised for food, I have always thought about how food is made. In Austria, we have a hyperlocal food system, and when I came to the US I learned about the issues with large scale food production. Then, as a scientist, my questionsstarted taking new forms. I met Gabe when we were postdocs at UC Berkeley, and we quickly became friends, connecting over both our love of food and how conflicted we felt given the food system’s impact on the environment, people, and animals. Fast forward a few years, Samet and I were working together, talking about food production, about how biotech approaches could be used to address some of the worlds’ most intractable problems. Moreover, Samet and I were working together on the very bioprocesses that could unlock one of the biggest issues with cultivated meat - scalability. Samet, Gabriel, and I got to talking and we knew we were uniquely well-positioned to help the cause.
And with greater awareness of the climate impacts of animal agriculture (particularly beef), with changing consumer preferences, with younger people more open to new foods, the time was right for the three of us to start Orbillion.
3/ What distinguishes cell-cultured meat from other sustainable meat alternatives and why is this important to address?
Most importantly - cultivated meat is real meat, and that offers a new and distinct option for people looking for conventional meat alternatives. It provides flavor and nutrition like that of conventional animal meat. Plant based meats are using plant proteins only to mimic animal meats, while we produce meat from actual cells. So it is not an alternative, it is the real thing. And we’re on track to produce cultivated meat that is more healthy (more of the good stuff like omega-3s, less of the bad stuff like certain cholesterol). We believe this is important because people want to continue eating meat. Cultivated meat allows people to eat the meat they love, while leaving the environmental, social, health and animal welfare issues behind.
Regarding what distinguishes Orbillion from others, to move forward quickly on cultivated meat, we’ve developed a unique high-density bioprocessing platform and cost-effective media formulations, which translate to excellent unit economics. And our experienced and motivated team is driving breakthroughs on the technology (and IP) side and strong partnerships on the business side.
4/ The perception of “lab grown meat” has sparked different reactions in the public eye. How does Orbillion plan to convince more people to accept and consume cell-cultured meat?
By tasting it! We believe that people will love it when they taste it. From there, we’ll also support adoption with familiar preparations, sharing information that people are looking for around nutrition, and ultimately showing up where people are used to seeing and buying meat - at restaurants and in grocery stores. Right now, we’re not surprised that there is curiosity and a range of reactions. To us this is ok and will start to change as soon as more people can experience it for themselves. In the meantime, it’s up to us to raise awareness, provide information, and address the misinformation out there.
5/ We see cultured meat as a key solution for a fairer, more inclusive food system. How are you engaging with the rest of the stakeholders in the space?
We couldn’t agree more. And the term you chose to use “system” is so important for us, because it’s all interconnected. We take a different approach than other cultivated meat companies, in that we don’t want to disrupt food, we want to integrate and evolve the best of the food system. For us this means building upon elements that are sustainable, healthy, and just. So working with farmers to obtain cells from animals that are farmed in a regenerative way, partnering with food distributors who already work hard to get food to the masses, collaborating with food and ingredient companies who are on the pulse of dietary preferences around the world and are similarly looking to introduce more sustainable options.
From a price standpoint, we imagine that these products will be more expensive at first, just like many new products when they first hit the market. Overtime, as production scales and the ecosystem to support cultivated meat expands, we’ll introduce a full range of products across price points. This is an important and exciting goal for us. It’s like Tesla, they started out very high end and seemingly limited, but now some Tesla models are more affordable than the average price of their combustion-engine counterparts.
6/ What vision do you have for the future of this sector and what meaningful change are you looking to encourage our readers to reflect on
I see a future where cultivated meat can make meat more healthy and safe in a multitude of ways. In conventional animal ag, animals are exposed to a wide-range of pathogens - with fecal contamination, confined lots, diseases from other animals - that can then contaminate meat. This just isn’t the case with cultivated meat. We’re able to make cultivated meat microorganism free without using antibiotics, which can bring a reduction in dangerous foodborne illness. This can help bring down the risk of other types of illnesses like zoonotic diseases that mutate and spread rapidly in high density livestock production, and require huge amounts of antibiotics to contain.
I see a future where cultivated meat can make meat more healthy and safe in a multitude of ways.
At a large scale, I believe that this sector is a central part of a more resilient, delicious, just and healthy food system. And we believe that it will be. I see cultivated meat becoming so widespread as to be unremarkable. We believe that the challenges of a changing climate, food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and more are so massive and so urgent that food has to change bigger, faster. It has to. For your readers, I’m sure most are already focused on how to use their capital and creativity to make an impact. My goal would be how do we collaborate creatively to cast a wider net and move faster, together.