S9 Ep10: Rebel & Revolutionize: Tech-Driven Solutions to Affordable Plant-Based Meat Alternatives with Christie Lagally
“What a lot of people don't quite understand about plant-based meat is that you have to understand the industry that you are replacing.” —Christie Lagally
The plant-based meat industry is at a pivotal moment, with innovative companies harnessing the power of technology to transform the way we think about sustainable protein. By seamlessly combining cutting-edge manufacturing processes and high-quality products, these visionaries are paving the way for a future where plant-based alternatives are not just viable, but the preferred choice for consumers, institutions, and the planet.
At the forefront of this revolution is Christie Lagally, the CEO and Founder of Rebellyous Foods. A mechanical engineer by trade, Lagally has leveraged her expertise to develop game-changing technology that makes plant-based meat production faster, better, and more affordable than ever before.
In this episode, Justine and Christie dive into the challenges of building a business around plant-based alternatives, developing the technology and market strategy to succeed, the impact of the hype cycle, funding challenges, addressing health concerns, and more.
Episode Highlights:
05:01 Rebellyous Foods: Challenges and Early Development
13:05 The Hype Cycle and Its Impact
23:55 Health Concerns and Future Plans
35:06 Collaborations, Partnerships, and Exit Strategies
40:00 Future Opportunities
Tweets:
Meat the future! Led by CEO Christie Lagally, Rebellyous Foods is cooking up a plant-based revolution with its innovative tech. Tune in as @jreichman and Christie discuss real solutions to feed the planet sustainably. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #RebellyousFoods #PlantbasedMeat #FoodTech #FoodInnovation #AnimalWelfare #SchoolLunchPrograms #ClimateChange
Inspirational Quotes:
05:45 “To address global climate change, human health, and animal welfare, we needed to start moving the needle when it comes to meat.” —Christie Lagally
07:49 “Not only did we realize that we had to build the equipment to change the process, but we had to use the equipment to make a product because the food industry is hard to change… We are not just the developers of new technology, but the users of new technology.” —Christie Lagally
09:07 “Sometimes, you have to take responsibility for the problem in order to be the person or the company that actually solves it.” —Christie Lagally
13:09 “You got to figure out one thing and get that perfect before you add a different component to it.” —Justine Reichman
17:00 “A lot of companies went out of business because they couldn't get funding again, because maybe what they were doing just wasn't understood outside of the hype cycle.” —Christie Lagally
22:55 “The venture capital world can sometimes be very distant from the actual world of problems. So figuring out how to educate people on that point was important.” —Christie Lagally
28:15 “Some of the plant-based meats, traditionally or in the past, have had some fillers and some other things that weren't necessarily healthy.” —Justine Reichman
36:48 “Focus is important otherwise, you can get distracted by the hype cycle.” —Christie Lagally
41:02 “What a lot of people don't quite understand about plant-based meat is that you have to understand the industry that you are replacing.” —Christie Lagally
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Christie Lagally. She is the CEO and Founder of Rebellyous Foods.
Welcome Christie.
Christie Lagally: Thank you so much for having me.
Justine Reichman: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's been a long time waiting. I know that we got your product a long time ago, and I remember trying it and etcetera, and I'm excited to now have you on the podcast. So for those listening and tuning in today, before we dig deeper and have a more in depth conversation about you and your journey with Rebellyous, would you just let the community know what Rebellyous Foods is?
Christie Lagally: Sure. Rebellyous Foods is a manufacturing technology company working to make plant based meat available and affordable for everyone. And the way we do that is we develop new cross food processing equipment, and we deploy it in order to make our products at price parity and quality parity with animal meat counterparts.
Justine Reichman: Wow. That's super interesting. So tell me, what inspired you to create this company?
Christie Lagally: I started the company in 2017. I had been a vegan for a long time, and I actually had my career in the aerospace industry. So I'm a mechanical engineer by training. And while I care about animals and human health, and climate change, I personally was vegan. And so as a result, I lived those values in my personal life. But as a professional, I was working at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, ATK Space Systems. I even worked on the early version of the James Webb Space Telescope. I loved doing that work. But eventually, after about almost 20 years in the aerospace industry, I really wanted to combine my personal values with my work time, and decided that there must be an opportunity out there where I could make a difference in all of the ways that industrial animal agriculture is harming our society.
So I spent a lot of years looking into that, probably as many as 10 years, thinking about that particular question. And to kind of make a long story short, I decided that probably one of the best ways for me to make a difference in replacing meat was not just doing meatless Mondays or advocating for more vegan meals. But essentially figuring out how to make plant based meat, that direct meat replacement is more available and affordable to everyone. As a Mechanical Engineer, as an Equipment Engineer, I saw a real opportunity in the manufacturing space to use that skill set to develop equipment, and fundamentally started a company around that. That core idea of making the right processing equipment to make plant based meat faster, better and cheaper.
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. Your journey is amazing. How you utilize those skills with your interest in connecting the two to build something that was really meaningful and impactful is just everybody's inspiration for how to do what they love and throw their passion behind what they want to do to make a difference, make a living and create a better world. So thank you. I'm always inspired by people that are able to take their passion, take their fundamental values, and incorporate that to not only just make money, but to have a big difference,
Christie Lagally: Yeah, exactly. That's what I really love about what I do now. I actually really loved being an aerospace engineer too. I found it interesting contributing to the wealth of human knowledge, understanding our solar system, and understanding how we can be better citizens of Earth. But by intensifying that passion into my work, it was a real opportunity to kind of, sometimes they say not to have two jobs, like a volunteer job and also a regular job. But honestly, I work probably more hours now than I did ever.
Justine Reichman: Challenge of being an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, I don't think anybody's more motivated than the founders.
Christie Lagally: I think so too. I would have to say that I have an amazing team that was also really interested in replacing meat on a large scale. Serving schools, hospitals, universities, people that may not necessarily have gotten access to meat replacements, but very much wanted. And so I feel like we have a dedicated team all around. But there is always that issue that at the end of the day, the buck stops with me.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, of course. So when you originally started this company and you were talking about actual chicken and protein rich plants, how did you build out what you wanted to be able to achieve what you were looking to create?
Christie Lagally: Yeah, that's a great question because it's kind of a non linear path. At the time, we were seeing a lot of movement in the plant based meat space. There was Impossible and Beyond, and MorningStar and a lot of companies like that that were doing really good work.
Justine Reichman: Let's just go back a minute and say, when you started this company, what was your plan?
“To address global climate change, human health, and animal welfare, we needed to start moving the needle when it comes to meat.” —Christie Lagally
Christie Lagally: The overarching plan was that I could see a lot of movement in the plant based meat space. Plant based meat at the time was just a fraction of a 10th of a percent of the meat industry. So we weren't exactly using meat replacements to replace meat on a large scale. And yet to address global climate change, human health and animal welfare, we really need to start moving the needle when it comes to meat. What I saw as the opportunity is that we were essentially making plant based meat in like the oldest, most archaic way possible. We might have some new products and really good new products, and products were getting better every day, but we were still making them in a way that was just so archaic, and that was fundamentally my skill set that I could bring to the table. So as a manufacturing and tooling engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and previously at ATK and at other companies that I had worked at, I was developing tools, developing designs, things like that to figure out how to make things faster, better and cheaper.
I really started to think about, okay, is it possible to start a company to develop the tools to make plant based meat faster, better and less expensively through automation technology, through continuous production technology, things like that. And it was like trying to match a skill to a problem and feeling like they should fit, but not exactly sure how. And I think that's often like the journey of an entrepreneur. Maybe you have an idea for a good product, but how to make that into a business is a really big question. And that was the question that I was grappling with. So I started the company as Seattle Food Tech, which is still our corporate name, Seattle Food Tech. It existed to develop the equipment to make plant based meat faster, better and cheaper, and to solve a lot of the fundamental quality problems that we see in the volume, availability problems and certainly the price problems. So plant based meat is typically three times the cost of animal meat.
Except if you buy Rebellyous, we tend to be much closer to the price of chicken because we can make it so much more efficiently. But the benefit that we had to put into that to make that happen was to completely redesign the production system, and that's what we did. So like I said, I started Seattle Food Tech in 2017. In late 2019, we added the brand Rebellyous Foods. Because not only did we realize that we had to build the equipment to change the process, but we had to actually use the equipment to make products because the food industry is hard to change. And so as a result, being the change you want to see in the world is one of our mantras. Building the change you want to see in the world is one of our mantras. And so it was really, really important to us that we not just be the developers of new technology, but the users of new technology.
Justine Reichman: That makes sense, especially if you're advocating that this is a more efficient solution, better for the environment, better for the product, and makes it more accessible. It seems like it only makes sense. I'm curious, because you may own a technology company. Is there a point where you will be a supplier, like a manufacturer rather than other companies building plant based products? I was wondering if that was part of what you were building out. So when you were building this company, were you doing that to facilitate your product, or was it part and parcel with providing a resource for other companies?
“Sometimes, you have to take responsibility for the problem in order to be the person or the company that actually solves it.” —Christie Lagally
Christie Lagally: It's kind of somewhere in between. It was really more about solving the problem that had never been solved before. So sometimes, you have to take responsibility for the problem in order to be the person that actually solves it, or the company that actually solves it. I often think about it akin to other climate change companies or climate mitigation companies like, say a solar or wind power kind of situation. If you're not in the wind power industry, you kind of look at and be like, well, how is my new design going to make a difference? Then you better get into the wind power industry and then deploy your design, and then figure out how to sell your energy. And that was the same kind of thing.
You can't really do it from the outside. And so the initial idea was we'll develop the equipment and then somehow we'll figure out how to use it. And that's when we added Rebellyous Foods. So it's almost like two sides of the company that are synergistic, because you can't make plant based meat at price parity with animal meat without the technology to do it in an automated fashion. And you can't really do anything with the automated equipment without some place to apply it. So it was really important that they kind of go hand in hand. We've had the question for years like, are they two companies, or one? Well, we really are just one company, but they are dependent on each other. Can't really sell power without generating power, and you want to generate it better with wind turbines. You got to build the wind turbines too.
Justine Reichman: I was looking at it from the perspective that I see potential for two revenue streams, potentially. So I was kind of curious if that's what your motivation was when you're building it, as to think about this. As a founder, you're thinking about solving the problem, and then you're thinking about how you're going to solve this problem. How is it going to generate revenue? How are you going to build out the business? And will you ultimately sell or merge, etcetera. So I think that's where my question comes from.
Christie Lagally: Yeah. There is an opportunity there for two revenue streams, kind of in an ideal situation. The food industry is far from ideal. Let's just put it that way. I had somebody universally just tell me, well, it's clear that the food system is broken and I invest, or I get involved in the food system at a small level, but it's just so broken. I don't think I'll ever make a difference. And that was a sad realization for that person, especially saying it to me. But I think there's a certain truth to it, which is that the food industry is massive. The food industry has a lot of issues. And how can it not? We're trying to feed everybody on the planet, but it is very malleable. It's just really, really, really hard to move the status quo.
Say in the United States alone, we produced over 108 billion pounds of animal meat. The momentum of that industry, even just to shift it a little bit is a massive undertaking. It's a multi billion pound per year industry just to try to replace meat and say, even 1% or even 0.7%. You can't universally write it off as we can't fix anything, but we can start to fix things with the right tools, the right growth and the right mindset. But we didn't start the company necessarily saying, okay, we're just going to throw this equipment onto the food industry and think people will just adopt it and then start making plant based meat faster, better and cheaper because that is just not the truth. Operators run at very low margins in the meat industry, even lower in the chicken industry, and probably even lower in the fish industry. And we're talking like 5 to 3%. Sometimes, 1% whereas most food companies live and die on 30 to 50% margins. And so as a result, getting those industries to change or try something new is not easy, and that's why we had to, again, build the change we want to see in the world. So it is an opportunity for another revenue stream, but maybe not until after we've proven it to the industry.
Justine Reichman: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. You gotta sometimes figure out one thing and get that perfect before you add a different component to it.
Christie Lagally: Or to try to let somebody else use it. They may not have as much commitment to getting it right.
Justine Reichman: Yeah. So this is your first time as a founder. Is that correct?
Christie Lagally: Yeah. It feels like I'm doing it for a long time, but it was my first time as a founder.
Justine Reichman: And this is a difficult space, and it's a unique space. I'm wondering, what are some of the unique challenges of operating and being in a plant based business?
Christie Lagally: That's a loaded question. And not saying that your question isn't good, it's a loaded question for me because I have a lot of strong feelings about hype. And if you could think about hype as being kind of the energy in which we put into certain industries at certain times via venture capital or media attention, or even entrepreneurial intention, or people kind of speaking up about it maybe as being better than actually people think, hype is one of those things that industries can live and die unless they become somehow sustainable to actually make the impact that they're intended to make.
Let's take AI right now. Even six months ago, we thought AI was going to be so dangerous. Maybe it still will be that there were AI leaders basically saying it should be slowed down, or even stopped for a while. The hype around AI, the venture capital going into AI is massive. Maybe rightfully so, maybe not rightfully so. But we've seen this cycle so many times in various different industries, particularly in the investment community. Starting a company often includes investment, but not always. Obviously, there's people who figure out other ways to do it. The plant based meat industry had, and they say the alternative meat industry had a huge hype cycle. It was at its peak in probably 2020 when the pandemic hit. And continued for a little while until it didn't until it had a pretty hard crash, and it's still kind of crashing. But in those early days, in 2015, 2016, the money flowing from venture capital to companies, the number of entrepreneurs, people who want to get involved, the people who wanted to get hired by these companies was massive. And honestly, given the need in the industry to replace meat on a large scale,probably justified.
But one of the challenges that we found about being in the plant based meat space is that there were a lot of decisions and a lot of understanding of the industry that kind of just didn't fully blossom as a result of that hype. And in the year or two after, maybe the year of 2022, I think, is when we really started to see things go down. I wrote an article called how happy I was to see the end of the hype cycle for plant based meat. Because now, we can really get to work. It could really solve the problems because hype doesn't make meat, doesn't replace meat. Hype doesn't feed people. Hype does not make sure the school lunch programs have low sodium, low saturated fat meat replacements to replace their high saturated fat chicken nuggets so I really found that to be one of the most challenging things. And also this belief that somehow we could make a company overnight, and it would be instantaneously successful in less than three years was part of that hype cycle that made it such that there was just this huge disappointment within the industry when the hype dissipated in those companies.
A lot of companies went out of business because they couldn't get funding again, because maybe what they were doing just wasn't understood outside of the hype cycle. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really believe in tangible reasons to be a sustainable company. I really believe that you have to be obviously making money, you have to be able to meet the needs of your customers. You have to be good at it. Your product has to be good every single time. And those are things that if you put it into your latest ChatGPT, that's probably what it would say to you. Start a hype cycle to make everybody think this is instantaneous success because that doesn't really work. It just works when people think it's working. And so I'm really, really glad that we are kind of post post-hype cycle, and that we're really looking at these companies, our company, as well as other companies in these industries, as leaders in sustainable growth towards a better future, rather than a flash in the pan that could end tomorrow.
“You got to figure out one thing and get that perfect before you add a different component to it.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: So there's a couple of things that you've touched on that I just want to explore a little bit further. One is funding. So I'm going to imagine your company, because you're building the machinery and all the different things and you need to put that together. Took a lot to get off the ground. That'd be a correct statement. So when you did that as a founder, were you like, okay, I'm going to fund this myself. I can't get this done without funding. What was that process like? And how did you make the decision for your next steps?
Christie Lagally: Yeah, that's a great point. I have met many, many founders who started their companies, especially in the early days or even the first few years. That for whatever reason, they were able to bootstrap it, because maybe the type of company it was, or maybe they were just better at it than me. But they were just able to bootstrap it. I ran into a lot of events in Silicon Valley when I went through the Y Combinator program. There are a lot of founders that were founders because they made a lot of money in their earlier days in their career, and just had the money to kind of invest into their own venture. That was definitely not me.
I was a work a day engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. I maybe had a little salary just saved up in case of a rainy day, but that was it. I absolutely needed venture capital in order to start the company, but more so I really do believe that venture capital for technology development is a good use of venture capital. I'm less convinced. Not entirely unconvinced, but I'm less convinced that it is the best used venture capital is best used by a really intensive marketing effort for an unproven brand. And that seems obvious now after the hype cycle dies. But everybody thought that in the earlier days of plant based meat. Grow at all costs, invest in marketing, that top line sales tells everything even if you're not profitable, even if you don't make margin, even if you're burning cash. What I truly believe is that by investing in the technology to actually make products that have high margin, or make problems that have margin at all, or that are addressing other social justice harms like replacing meat on a large scale and are fundamentally creating a flywheel model for a company that it can reinvest in itself is a good use of venture capital money.
Like I said. I started the company as Seattle Food Tech based on the technology idea, and we didn't add the brand till later when we knew that we could start to really create a runway or a running start in the market. So that when that technology is ready, which it is now deployed, we can use it to bring that margin to fruition and, to build on that flywheel of a better and stronger group company that can then reinvest in itself. Now, that doesn't mean we can create such a high margin company, especially in this industry in chicken replacement that we can necessarily invest in another whole technology cycle. So there's real value in having more venture capital for the next stage of our efforts, which is the next level of technology development. But at least we've proven ourselves. Once we've got it out there, it's in a commercial facility, and it's working.
Justine Reichman: What were some of the biggest challenges around raising money for you, because this is your first time doing it too, and your first time as a founder.
Christie Lagally: I would say that it was a bat shit crazy idea. I remember in the early days, because I actually went through Y Combinator after I raised a million dollars on my own for the company. I knew people from my network that were interested in meat replacement on a large scale and that is what we do at Rebellyous. We serve large customers with large processing technology at the lowest price possible so that we can make margin, etcetera. But in those early days, the idea that plant based meat wasn't made efficiently, and that's why it costs so much, and people just weren't buying that much of it was a real ingrained belief. So really addressing that belief was probably one of my biggest challenges in raising money, that it was a problem in the first place. And I think a lot of founders have that issue.
But some problems are much more obvious than others. How more efficient the meat industry, that is the plant based meat industry, is not obvious to the vast, vast, vast majority of investors. Unless you're the person who has tried to make plant based meat in your facility, you don't really know how hard it is. So that was really hard to get across. I actually had one investor literally say, I can't invest in you because all you're doing is figuring out a better way to mix things. Any cement plant person, any pharmaceutical person would have been like, are you kidding? Mixing things well is one of the hardest things we do. The venture capital world can sometimes be very distant from the actual world of problems. So figuring out how to educate people on that point was important.
And just to add to that, one of the things that I learned at Y Combinator is you had to have an elevator pitch. And for years, like every other founder worked on that elevator pitch, belly is food, makes plant based meat faster, better and cheaper through automated technology. I could do it now, but that elevator pitch at that time wasn't always sufficient. I really had to realize that sometimes, I had to break the rules and really explain the nitty gritty stuff, and that was okay too. Those are usually the investors that they stuck around long enough to hear that part. They are usually the ones that invested. They're curious.
Justine Reichman: They wanted to know more. The elevator pitch did its business by getting them in treatment. That's the way I think it is successful for you because you got to continue the conversation. So this is a personal question. It's personal for me because I'm curious. I don't know if it sounds like, not like a smart question. We talk about plant based meats, right? Why do we call them plant based meats as opposed to creating their own unique identifier?
Christie Lagally: That's a really good question. It's historical. Actually, humans have been making plant based meat for over 2000 years, and it has kind of always been this way. So in the food industry, there are really just a few foods that we replicate, and humans have been replicating them for a long time. So even as long as thousand years ago, humans have written history of taking things like wheat, soy and things like that, and forming them into meat products. And while it feels like such a recent thing for us, the history of plant based meat, like I said, goes back thousands of years. 2000 years written history, 1000 years of plant based meat written history where people have been doing this. Why is it the way it is today? Well, it's because it was the way it was yesterday, and it was the way it was in the 1970's, and it was the way it was in the 1930's. In 1899 was the first time that we made commercialized plant based meat, which was not just commercializing plant based meat.
We were commercializing all foods. We were packaging them for the first time. It wasn't just women cooking in the kitchen and men hunting. People were buying things at grocery stores, but it was obviously in the 1800's too. But that is because that's just in the category all along, and not everybody eats meat replacements because they're replacing meat, obviously. But it is the most applicable way of thinking about it and making sense of it for this type of product. And one of the things I often like to do is kind of compare plant based meat, probably unfairly to things like fruit roll ups. Why do we think fruit roll ups is food? We don't have anything like that in nature. It's not necessarily replacing anything, but it also doesn't make a lot of sense. Pop
Tarts is another one that is a really interesting history in the Pillsbury patent portfolio, because it's also another one where it's like, we don't really have anything like this. People didn't really want it, but somehow it landed with them because it served a purpose. And that's really where things like plant based meat really serve a purpose. They provide a really good protein source, healthier protein source. They're fundamentally taking the place of something that maybe their doctor said that you have to eat less meat, but you can eat plant based meat. And it satiates them in a way that obviously meets their protein needs. So I think, why make another category? Well, it's really hard to change the food industry, but there's so much history behind it that I think it's just been that way, because it's always been that way.
Justine Reichman: I appreciate your thoughts on that, because I really have been curious about it. I'm like, why don't we just make another category? Then you're going to hit people that are just interested in it, whether they're interested in plant based or not, they're just going to be interested in this category. And we're not pigeonholing it or creating a stereotype around it. So those people that are like vegan, or this, or that where there's a light over where people are like, there are people that just are not interested in it. But if there's a new category, would you potentially get those vegan and vegetarians, but also the others that are food curious?
Christie Lagally: Yeah, exactly. And I think there's a real argument for that. And there have definitely been companies who tried and were successful in building that category. They're still attached to the plant based meat space. Field Roast is a fantastic example of that. They have never tried to make their products taste like meat. They just made really good protein products and have a very loyal following, including me. But again, they don't necessarily purport to be a meat replacement. They just make sausages, they just don't have to be made of animals.
Justine Reichman: So the other question that I have for you, as you were talking about health, I've had this conversation with a variety of people whether it was an Impossible Burger or just different things is that some of the plant based meats, traditionally or in the past, have had some fillers. Some other things that weren't necessarily healthy for them. So how do you combat that with your product, those questions and concerns, because I think that it is a real concern. You want something that's healthy, and just because it's plant based does not mean it's healthy.
Christie Lagally: I think that in the better for you category of food, we've always known that we're not necessarily saying this is the healthiest thing you can eat, but it's better for you than the thing that you were going to eat. In this case, processed chicken products. So for example, our products have a very minimal ingredient profile. We don't have any artificial flavors. We use yeast based flavoring. The one thing that some people bring up is the issue of using methyl cellulose as a binder, but that's literally the only thing in our product that some people have an issue with. And methyl cellulose is a very, very old food industry ingredient. I think it's been around for over 100 years. It is primarily used in baking crackers, cookies, things like that. And is primarily used in salad dressings, soups and things like that just to make them thicker. That's a thickening agent like starch. Other than that, our products don't have those types of issues.
In fact, we almost never, if ever get those kinds of complaints. But I do understand that there are more people who are just looking really stringently at some of the older meat replacements. Impossible obviously created this bioengineered heme that people did have some concerns about. I'm not personally aware of the health impacts or anything around that, but people had concerns about that. But I think that's where you're seeing an incredible movement towards products like ours that are just what you need in order to make it the best product possible. But nothing more. Nothing that's going to really concern people, especially once they look into the methyl cellulose. It is just starch. And then what I'm really interested in is to see the evolution that Beyond Meat has made, which I really applaud for their efforts to continue to refine their products to be more and more heart healthy. They have already gotten the seal of approval from the American Heart Association. They work closely with them. But those heart healthy options really address that market that is going to eat meat anyway.
But if there are definitely a whole category of Americans, and probably millions of Americans who eat meat on a Sunday afternoon, it may not mean they're not here on Monday morning. And so having these options out there for that person to enjoy the barbecue without actually eating meat so that they are here on Monday morning is absolutely critical. Those are much more high cost products than our products. But I really applaud Beyond for continuing to do that recipe refinement to the point where they have the seal of approval from the American Heart Association. In our case, we have a very minimal ingredient list, because we primarily serve the National School Lunch Program. In fact, methyl cellulose is the only concern that we hear about sometimes. It's also in chicken products, the ones that we're replacing. So we're doing our best, but there's also no health effects of methyl cellulose.
Like I said, it's been used in the food industry for over 100 years. So that's usually where I go with it. If there are concerns about the ingredients that you have in a plant based meat besides what I've already talked about, definitely contact the company. And I think more, and more, and more companies understand that that minimal ingredient option is really, really the way to go.
Justine Reichman: You have a few years behind you now, and you've built the technology, and you've created Rebellyous, what are your plans for the future?
Christie Lagally: The goal for Seattle Food Tech, which, again, was like the corporate name of the company I first started and Rebellyous Foods. Rebellyous Foods exist so that we can make plant based to get plant based meat out to everyone who would not otherwise be able to afford these products had they not been made more efficiently, more effectively and high quality. So schools, hospitals, universities. We serve largely the National School Lunch Program, and we're very proud of that. But there are over 14,600 school districts in the United States. We currently serve 275 of them, and that reaches about 4 million kids. But there's a lot more kids in the United States than that, so we have a long way to go. And so what we believe the best opportunity is to take our new technology, our new processing technology that we call the Mock Two, which is just food processing equipment that we recently deployed in July, and getting it out to more places so that we can produce price parity, quality parity, plant based chicken for even more locations.
Because the problem right now is, as we grow as a company, we're going to need more facilities to make our product, and our Mock Two only exists in one place right now. So as it's getting up and running, we're going to see the value there. But when it's time to move to a new facility, we're going to build another one, and another one, and another one. And so this is what gets back to our original vision for the company, which is that having the right technology to make plant based meat not only enables a company to grow with products at the right price, but also it creates a pathway for food processors to become plant based meat producers. So if you are running a chicken facility in Georgia or in New Jersey, you might have an opportunity if you work with us, and we put our technology in your facility to make plant based meat profitably and at high scale, and be able to contribute to that future economy.
As Kamala Harris says, the opportunity economy where we can all benefit by replacing meat on a large scale. And I think that I really believe that that transition in the meat industry, rather than disruption in the meat industry, is where our economy can go in the future, and is particularly where the meat industry is headed. Because the meat industry is limited anyway. We have limited water, we have limited space. According to most scientists addressing the Paris climate initiatives, we need to bring meat emissions down by 61% in less than 12 years. So we have a long way to go. That's why the Mock Two really creates a path forward for processors to become plant based meat processors.
Justine Reichman: Thank you for sharing that. I think that that's a huge endeavor, and I think while you have a significant piece of that pie, it's still a little piece of that pie. It's significant what you're able to achieve and what you're doing, but it just shows us how much more there is to do. As you move forward, are you looking to collaborate with anybody or partner up? Or is there an exit strategy at any point that you're looking for?
“Focus is important otherwise, you can get distracted by the hype cycle.” —Christie Lagally
Christie Lagally: Right now, we're kind of basking in the joy of this all actually working. Is never a given, but we've somehow made it to the other side. We are always working on collaborations. So whether we're collaborating with small scale or large scale food processing facilities, talking with other brands about the opportunity to work with our equipment, talking even with other companies that want to make their products on our facility, on our equipment. And potentially, one day, opening up a facility that has multiple Mock Two production systems, and it would be amazing. We could make plant based meat on an even larger scale, even more effectively than before. So I think there are a lot of paths forward for us right now. And the more effective we are at hyper focusing on our mission, which is a relatively small number of SKUs for a very targeted large scale market, and making sure that they always have access to that market both in terms of availability, certainly price and certainly quality, focusing on that makes such a difference. An early mentor of mine once said, success takes focus, and that focus is really, really important. Because otherwise, you can get distracted by things like the hype cycle.
Justine Reichman: I totally agree. So as you look forward, it's all about the partnerships, the collaborations and staying the course in your plan, is there any potential for an exit? Would that be something you consider? Because every founder is different. Some people are like, this is personal, and I don't want to sell. And other people are like, if I could, I would maybe. So I'm curious.
Christie Lagally: My goal is to do what is necessary to reach the mission. And the mission is to make sure that we create that path forward for the meat industry. That viable path forward for meat processors to be plant based meat producers. And for schools, hospitals and universities to have price parity plant based chicken products, whether that means we get bought, whether that means we do partial investment with a large strategy or hack away at this for a few more years and we do an IPO. All of those things are on the table, but all of them are going to change on a daily basis. I don't know if you've ever watched Indian television or Indian 24 hour news. They have like three or four people kind of talking all at the same time. It's kind of fun to watch sometimes because you get a bunch of news about different parts of the country all at once, and it's kind of crazy though. It's not quite like CNN where you've got panels of people. It's kind of like people half talking all at the same time.
I feel like that's what a startup is like, because the situation in one part of the country is changing in a different part of the country and different parts of the company all at the same time. So you're taking assessments almost every single day on the state of the company to determine, well, what is the best strategy? I'm not saying that we don't have that long term mission. Plant based meat is available and affordable to everyone, but how we go about doing that is definitely dependent on our reaching that mission. And you asked me, like it's a personal question in a lot of ways because I own the company. But so do all of our investors. I care a lot about them seeing the benefits of their investment, which is also usually mission focused. And so I think whether or not there's like a partial sale, a sale of the company, or even an IPO in the future in a lot of ways, some of those are even combinations of things. But I don't know right this very second which one it's gonna be.
Justine Reichman: An IPO could be interesting too because that would allow you to then raise more money. Because you come public, then your shares have value, then you can be able to raise more money that way and still maintain your role in the company while bringing in investments. I could see why that would be compelling.
Christie Lagally: Thank you. Yeah. I think that's extremely compelling. But there are a lot of options. Even emerging with another company might be an option, although that's not a huge priority for us right now. But if it was the right company, we, the whole bunch of volume that we could put to work on low cost productions, that's very interesting to me.
Justine Reichman: I know it's kind of time for us to wrap up a little bit, and we could go on for ages because I've got so many questions, why chicken, but not beef? And then they go on. That's an easy one. Okay, tell me.
Christie Lagally: It is the most consumed meat in the world. In the United States alone, we produce 108 billion pounds of meat. 52 billion of it is chicken. Roughly half of that chicken is processed chicken, chicken nuggets, tenders and patties. It is single handedly. The biggest segment of the food industry.
Justine Reichman: With that being said, would there ever be an opportunity or potential for you to then do beef or any other kind of meat?
Christie Lagally: Yeah. We can actually use our Mock Two technology to do beef. I think this is where success takes focus. A really important issue. If we were to do beef or produce beef, I would really like to partner with somebody who understood that industry. What a lot of people don't quite understand about plant based meat is that you really have to understand the industry that you are replacing. I don't understand the beef industry, but I do understand a lot about the chicken industry. I understand a lot about margins, their financials, what's going on in there, who's fired and hired at Tyson and Perdue and everybody else, because it matters how my customers buy our products based on how they would not buy their products. So the same is true for beef. If I'm going to learn about beef, fish or pork, those are very different industries, and I would want to work with an expert that knows those industries well.
Justine Reichman: Christie, thank you so much. This was so enlightening, so inspiring, and I feel like I got a whole wealth of knowledge here that I did not have before. So thanks for sharing that with our community. I'm so excited to see how you guys progress, both with the technology and in the space in producing products, and maybe there'll be some new things we can look forward to. Who knows?
Christie Lagally: Well, thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute joy to chat with you.
Justine Reichman: For those that are tuning in today, don't forget that you can hear our podcast weekly on any place you choose to listen to your podcast, whether that's iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, etcetera. So don't forget to tune in every new episode each week on Tuesday morning. You can tune into YouTube to watch the videocast of this episode.t